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S/P/19. How significant is Nelson Goodman's New Riddle of Induction as a challenge to the rationality of our scientific practices?

WORDS:

1400

DATE:

2004

PRICE:

19.99 GBP

The basic problem of inductive proof as exemplified by Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature has long been a thorn in the side of philosophers. How can we bear the assumption that the future will resemble the past and how can we have any grounds for generalising from the past to the future? Various philosophers have come up with differing views yet none of them seem to have adequately concluded the issue at hand. Popperian falsification dealt with induction from a completely different perspective but the problems raised by induction were far from being conclusively resolved. In 1954 with the publication of Fact, Fiction and Forecast, Nelson Goodman intensified the debate by demonstrating that Hume's basic problem of induction was only half the issue. Goodman's New Riddle of Induction, as it has come to be known, asks how we can move precisely from the past to the future. How much significance can this new theory be said to bear on scientific practices?

KEYWORDS: significant, nelson, goodman, riddle, induction, challenge, rationality, scientific, practices,