Alexander Pruss's Blog

Assume that in fact all ravens are black. Suppose you are sequentiallly observing ravens, and noting each one to be black. After observing n...

In an argument that David Lewis’s account of possible worlds leads to inductive skepticism, I used this premise: If knowing that x is F ...

Suppose we combine a Humean account of causation on which causation is a function of the pattern of intrinsically acausal events in reality ...

Say an object is grue if it is observed before the year 2100 and green, or it is blue but not observed before 2100. Then it is reasonable to...

I’m curious whether one can infer the causal principle C that everything that comes into existence has a cause inductively on the basis of ...

David Lewis’s notion of the naturalness of predicates may seem at first sight like just the thing to solve Goodman’s new puzzle of induction...

I have long thought that Humeanism leads to strong inductive scepticism about the future—the thesis that typical inductive generalizations a...

Nicod’s Principle says that the claim that all F s are G s is confirmed by each instance. Here’s yet another counterexample. Consider the c...

A tempting view of mathematics is that mathematicians are discovering not facts about what is true, but about what is provable from what. B...

Think about other plausibly fundamental qualities beyond location and extension: thought, charge, mass, etc. For each one of these, there ar...

Suppose that a lot of otherwise ordinary coins come into existence ex nihilo for no cause at all. Then whether a given coin lies heads or t...

Let's say I have some algorithm that generates the sequence of numbers, and I run ten iterations on the computer and get 1 1.5 1.4166...

Our backyard had been free of black cats for as long as we've lived in this house, well over 400 days, except that over the last two...

Suppose that we've observed a dozen randomly chosen ravens and they're all black. We (cautiously) make the obvious infer...

Something is grue provided that it is now before the year 3000 and it is green or it's the year 3000 or later and it's blu...

A followup on the previous post . Simple induction: F 1 is G , F 2 is G , ..., F n is G , so probably: F n +1 is G . Full induction:...

My colleague Trent Dougherty brought to me the very interesting question of how we inductively confirm that the sun will rise tomorrow g...

Prior's metric temporal logic comes with two sentential operators, P n and F n , which respectively mean something like " n a...

According to induction, the future is like the past and present. But the past and present contain real events. Hence, probably, so does th...

Here's an intuition I have. Suppose that I somehow knew that a dozen of boxes have appeared ex nihilo for no cause (not eve...