Every sunrise so far does not logically entail tomorrow’s. To get from “always so far” to “always”, we need the premise that nature is uniform. But that premise is itself supported only by past experience — an inductive argument used to justify induction.
David Hume‘s verdict: induction is not grounded in reason but in custom or habit. We could not live otherwise, but we cannot prove we are right.
Famous replies: Immanuel Kant (causality is a category the mind brings to experience); Bertrand Russell’s chicken, fed every day until the day the farmer wrings its neck; Karl Popper (science doesn’t use induction — it conjectures and refutes); Nelson Goodman’s “grue”, which makes the problem even worse.
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related by shared connectionsHume's Fork
Every meaningful claim is either a relation of ideas (certain but empty) or a matter of fact (informative but uncertain) — metaphysics is neither.
The Copernican Revolution
Kant’s reversal — instead of the mind conforming to objects, objects must conform to the mind’s forms of knowing.
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
The great quarrel of early modern philosophy — does knowledge come from reason or from experience? Kant tried to end it.
Al-Ghazālī
Theologian, jurist and mystic whose Incoherence of the Philosophers attacked Avicenna’s Aristotelianism, anticipated Hume on causation, and whose spiritual autobiography records a crisis of doubt.
The Enlightenment
The eighteenth-century movement that put reason, science, tolerance and individual liberty at the centre of human affairs — “Sapere aude!”
The Categorical Imperative
Kant’s supreme principle of morality — act only on maxims you could will as universal laws; treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.