Abstract

Writing on the justification of certain inductive inferences, the author proposes that sometimes induction is justified and that arguments to prove otherwise are not cogent. In the first part he defends the argument of D.C. Williams' The Ground of Induction that induction is justified as a matter of logic by the proportional syllogism: "The vast majority of large samples match the population, therefore (probably) this sample matches the population"). In the second part he deals with such topics as deductive logic (arguing that deductive logic is not formal), the theory of logical probability, and probability and truth.