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Russell's New Riddle of Induction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Bredo Johnsen
Bredo Johnsen
Affiliation:
University of Houston Central Campus
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Extract

The most innovative and important parts of Bertrand Russell's Human Knowledge were the result of his first attempt in three decades to come to grips with the problem of induction, or, more generally, ‘non-demonstrative inference’. My purpose here is to argue that that work constituted giant progress on the problem; if I succeed, something will have been done to restore this work to its proper place in the history of philosophy and, correlatively, to rearrange that history.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 54 , Issue 207 , January 1979 , pp. 87 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1979

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References

1 Russell, Bertrand, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York, 1948)Google Scholar; all page numbers in parentheses refer to this volume.

2 I know of only two exceptions, both of whom recognize that Russell grappled with the new riddle of induction. Bruce Aune simply mentions this fact in Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism: an Introduction (New York, 1970), 181–182Google Scholar; and Wesley Salmon has a discussion of Russell's views which is examined below (see footnote 6).

3 Cf. Goodman, Nelson, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 68Google Scholar: ‘The problem of induction is not a problem of demonstration but a problem of defining the difference between valid and invalid predictions’.

4 Kyburg, Henry E. Jr, Probability and Inductive Logic (London, 1970), 129.Google Scholar

5 Goodman, Nelson, ‘A Query on Confirmation’, Journal of Philosophy, 43 (1946), 383–385CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘On Infirmities of Confirmation-theory’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 8 (1947), 149–151.Google Scholar

6 Salmon, Wesley, ‘Russell on Scientific Inference or Will the Real Deductivist Please Stand Up?’, in Nakhnikian, George (ed.), Bertrand Russell's Philosophy (London, 1974), 183–208, 189.Google Scholar

7 Loc. cit.

8 Loc. cit.

9 Loc. cit.

10 Russell does not actually formulate this postulate in the same clearly demarcated and italicized form in which he formulates the others, but there is no serious problem of interpretation involved in determining its content.

11 See McLendon, Hiram, ‘The Uses of Similarity of Structure in Contemporary Philosophy’, Mind, (01 1955), 91Google Scholar, where the critical points are attributed to Quine and D. C. Williams. (McLendon, 's ‘illustration’Google Scholar should be ignored, since it succeeds only in illustrating an irrelevant point.)

12 Quine, W. V. O., ‘Natural Kinds’, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969), 114–138, 121.Google Scholar

13 Quine, W. V. O., The Roots of Reference (La Salle, Illinois, 1973), 14.Google Scholar

14 Quine, W. V. O., Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 223Google Scholar

15 Goodman, , Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 45 n.Google Scholar

16 Quine, , The Roots of Reference, 14.Google Scholar

17 Goodman, , Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 64.Google Scholar

18 Ten years after the fact, I am still indebted to Roderick Firth for first suggesting that there was more than met the eye in Russell's ‘postulational theory’. For saving me from some fairly silly mistakes, I thank Howard Kahane, who commented on a version of this paper presented to the first annual meeting of the Bertrand Russell Society in New York in 12 1975.Google Scholar