Hume's Problem
Induction and the Justification of Belief
Howson, Colin Professor of Philosophy, London School of Economics
Print publication date: 2000 (this edition)
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-825037-1







doi:10.1093/0198250371.003.0004

Colin Howson
Abstract: Considers the increasingly popular, so-called ‘No-Miracles’ argument that we do have a valid inductive argument for supposing that our current theories, at any rate in physics, are substantially, if not wholly, true: it would be incredibly improbable that theories very far from the truth could make such extremely precise predictions, verified experimentally up to one part in a billion. Such ‘miracles’ of chance agreement can clearly be ruled out as themselves too improbable to be true. This apparently plausible argument is examined carefully and shown to consist in a number of separate steps, all of which are fallacious.

Keywords: chance, grue, Harvard Medical School Test, miracles, significance tests,

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