Abstract
Wesley Salmon once argued that an important piece of “unfinished business” for contemporary philosophers is the task of responding successfully to the challenge Hume’s statement of the problem of induction poses.1 I agree. But there is a prior piece of business we need to attend to first. We need to figure out what Hume’s argument actually is.
My research was supported by a grant from the Taft Faculty Committee, University of Cincinnati, for which I am most grateful.
I have discussed these topics, always with profit, with John Biro, James Cargile, and John McEvoy. My views have improved as a result of the criticisms participants made in seminars I gave on Hume and Causation at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Virginia. Especially helpful were Robert Friedman, Jack Fuchs, Sally Haslanger, Eric Melvin, Lonnie Plecha, Charles Stephan, James L. White, and everyone who urged that, if I persisted in criticizing Mackie’s and Stove’s structure diagrams, I should at least be willing to provide one of my own. Christopher Gauker, Donald Gustafson, Larry Jost, and Miriam Solomon provided helpful comments on a final draft.
I am especially grateful to Robert Richardson, James H. Fetzer, and Linda Weiner for their extensive comments, helpful suggestions, and encouragement.
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Morris, W.E. (1988). Hume’s Refutation of Inductive Probabilism. In: Fetzer, J.H. (eds) Probability and Causality. Synthese Library, vol 192. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3997-4_2
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