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What is the main contention that Hume and contemporary Humeans share about inductive inference? It is essentially that no conclusions about the future or unobserved follow with certainty from propositions about what we have experienced in the past. The non-demonstrative nature of induction, it seems, follows inevitably from the truism that induction cannot qualify as deductive inference. The assertion of C and not E is never self-contradictory; hence one cannot say that E must occur. Necessity is not ascribable to causal propositions, except (and here the divergence begins) in a psychological sense (Hume) or in a "nomological" sense (contemporary Humeans). There are, of course, other crucial differences among Humeans. For Hume, conclusions about the future do not even follow with any probability from propositions about past experience, a conclusion which Carnap, for example, tried to avoid by claiming that certain types of probability statements cannot be refuted by subsequent experience. But then the question arises of how such propositions can be construed as relevant in any sense to the future. In any case, we shall not pursue this question but will confine ourselves to the weaker and prima facie legitimate contention, shared by all Humeans, that there is no irreducible sense of natural necessity that is involved in causal judgments.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-3378-7_16

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