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The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense,〔Vickers, John, ("Can induction be justified?" ), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)〕 since it focuses on the alleged lack of justification for either: # Generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (for example, the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and, therefore, all swans are white", before the discovery of black swans) or # Presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (for example, that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold). Hume called this the principle of uniformity of nature.〔David Hume. ''An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding''. EBook #9662: Most recently updated in October 16, 2007. Footnote 19.〕 The problem calls into question all empirical claims made in everyday life or through the scientific method and for that reason the philosopher C. D. Broad said that "induction is the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy". Although the problem arguably dates back to the Pyrrhonism of ancient philosophy, as well as the Carvaka school of Indian philosophy, David Hume introduced it in the mid-18th century, with the most notable response provided by Karl Popper two centuries later. == Formulation of the problem == In inductive reasoning, one makes a series of observations and infers a new claim based on them. For instance, from a series of observations that a woman walks her dog by the market at 8am on Monday, it seems valid to infer that next Monday she will do the same, or that, in general, the woman walks her dog by the market every Monday. That next Monday the woman walks by the market merely adds to the series of observations, it does not prove she will walk by the market every Monday. First of all, it is not certain, regardless of the number of observations, that the woman always walks by the market at 8am on Monday. In fact, Hume would even argue that we cannot claim it is "more probable", since this still requires the assumption that the past predicts the future. Second, the observations themselves do not establish the validity of inductive reasoning, except inductively. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Problem of induction」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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