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The reliability of inductive inferences and our innate capacities

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Summary

One of the important problems that have to be dealt with in the Philosophy of Science is to account for the high reliability of a very large part of our inductive inferences. This reliability is noteworthy because not only were many of these inferences made by ordinary people, even by children, but they were very often based on the observation of just a few positive instances. In the present paper, I deal with this problem by treating it as a normal empirical problem. This approach enables us to make an important step towards an explanation of the phenomenon and, consequently, towards the formulation of a general theory of scientific inquiry.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Nathan Stemmer

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  1. Nathan Stemmer
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This research has been sponsored in part byThe Israel Commission for Basic Research.

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Stemmer, N. The reliability of inductive inferences and our innate capacities. Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 9, 93–105 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01801943

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01801943

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