Ebook Hume's Problem: Induction and the Justification of Belief, by Colin Howson
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Hume's Problem: Induction and the Justification of Belief, by Colin Howson
Ebook Hume's Problem: Induction and the Justification of Belief, by Colin Howson
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In the mid-eighteenth century David Hume argued that successful prediction tells us nothing about the truth of the predicting theory. But physical theory routinely predicts the values of observable magnitudes within very small ranges of error. The chance of this sort of predictive success without a true theory suggests that Hume's argument is flawed. However, Colin Howson argues that there is no flaw and examines the implications of this disturbing conclusion; he also offers a solution to one of the central problems of Western philosophy, the problem of induction.
- Sales Rank: #2224562 in eBooks
- Published on: 2001-01-25
- Released on: 2001-01-25
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
Delivered with pace and consistent intelligence. The book covers a great deal of ground, including Hume's sceptical argument, the new riddle of induction, naturalised epistemology, reliabilism, scientific realism, deductivism, objective chances and Hume on miracles, all from a Bayesian perspective...often provocative and repeatedly enlightening. Peter Lipton British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
About the Author
Colin Howson is Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting but Hghly Technical
By R. Albin
The intended audience for this interesting book is clearly philosophers interested primarily in epistemology and with some background in the foundations of mathematics. It would also be relatively transparent to mathematicians and statisticians interested in the foundations of probability theory. Nonetheless, Howson addresses some issues of general interest and a good deal of the book is devoted to logical arguments that can be followed without a strong math background.
The first half of the book is a careful discussion of Hume's attack on the absolute reliability of induction. Howson provides a careful discussion of this critique, including modern versions such as Goodman's famous Grue paradox. Howson then deals with a variety of attempts to refute Hume and finds them unsuccessful. Among these attempts are Popper's assertion of a deductive version of falsification of hypotheses. In an interesting analysis, Howson points out that Popper's approach is paralleled by the great RA Fisher's treatment of statistical hypothesis testing. For much of the discussion, Howson uses a Bayesian framework and has a useful and generally understandable discussion of probability theory. Howson's defense of Hume is convincing and the difficulties with induction are simply something we have to live with.
In the second half of the book, Howson attempts to reduce some of the sting of Hume's critique by establishing a limited but solid reliability for induction in an explicitly Bayesian framework. His basic argument is that induction in a Bayesian model is reliable, that such reliability can be derived from basic axioms of probability, and given reasonable assumptions, such as likely prior probabilities, that induction yields real knowledge. His argument is essentially that this Bayesian model of induction is a logic analogous to deductive reasoning. He argues as well that this model realizes many aspects of scientific practice. The detailed arguments can be followed only by someone with expertise in the relevant math but this argument makes intuitive sense.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Howson's prosposed remedy to Hume's problem is to simply dismiss it.
By R. Jankowski
Howson's area of specialization is in probability, so it will come as no surprise that the best he is able to offer in trying to resolve Hume's devastation of induction is an appeal to probability. He concludes as follows:
"We have solved Hume's Problem in about the only way it could be solved, by divorcing the justification for inductive reasoning from a justification of its consequences."
That's a brutal admission that I would think would have very little appeal. In other words, he hasn't solved anything, he's just dismissed the problem. That's not going to appeal to many that don't already adopt his worldview (one of which precludes other possible solutions). Consider the following:
"The religious explanation quite properly no longer commands wide assent, and Darwinism supplies the explanatory deficit with the only account which it is scientifically respectable to accept."
That may be Howson's experience, but he'll have to do much better than two very broad allusions to the work of Swinburne and Putnam to give the impression he's done due diligence in understanding the 'religious explanation' (whatever he means by that as we're never quite told precisely).
He critiques Kant's transcendental argument for arbitrariness (and rightly so), but fails to apply the same measure to his own preferred manner of predication. Here's Howson's position on Kant (with which I agree):
"The problem with Kant’s theory is the undeniable fact that we can sensibly and consistently conceive alternatives to the principles Kant held to be ‘necessary’ conditions of cognizing—the ‘law’ of cause and effect, Newtonian gravitational theory, and Euclidean geometry as the only possible geometry for space—all of which, moreover, are now deemed false!"
But then adopting that reasoning would be problematic for Howson's own position when he presents the following:
"My own belief is that there is no fact of the matter about what entitles a theory of reasoning to logical status, and one has to proceed as one does in extending common law to new cases, by appeal to precedent and common sense. Here again, of course, one must be selective, but with modern deductive logic in mind I propose the following as necessary and sufficient conditions for a discipline to have the status of logic."
This is no less arbitrary than Kant, for clearly competing conceptions of what entails 'common law' differs in its application in codifying one theory of reasoning as logic over any other. As a former professor of Logic at the London School of Economics, surely he is acquainted with numerous, and often competing, paradigms of logic (anti-realist, fractal, deontic, dialethic, etc).
For this reason, I did not find Howson's work persuasive and would suspect many others wouldn't either.
There is some value in his survey of the history of failed attempts to offer a solution to Hume's problem, but for those already familiar with the history, this book offers nothing new to consider.
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