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On The Possibility Of Inductive Knowledge, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

In this paper, we utilize a disjunction of familiar inductive beliefs—the disjunction being deductively valid—to show that we most likely have inductive knowledge, the likelihood depending on the usual inductive considerations like size and robustness of the sample, etc., i.e. on what it should depend on, not the usual 'philosophical' culprits like the old and new riddles of induction. While this is in itself philosophically significant, the implications of this for a justification of induction are also explored. Induction will be found to be supported but not justified by the proposed example. Lastly, to address this lacuna, and deriving support …