Talk (Work in Progress): Casper Storm Hansen (Chinese Academy of Science / MCMP)

Title:

Turning the Tables on Hume

Abstract:

Certain prior credence distributions concerning the future lead to inductivism and other distributions lead to inductive skepticism. I argue that it is difficult to see how the latter can be considered reasonable. I do not prove that they are not, but at the end of the talk the tables will be turned: in line with pre-philosophical intuitions, inductivism will have retaken its position as the most reasonable default position while the skeptic is called on to supply a novel argument for his. The reason is as follows. There are certain possibilities concerning the functioning of the world that, if assigned positive credence, support inductivism. Prima facie, one might think that the alternatives to those possibilities, if assigned similar or more credence, cancel out that support. But, on the contrary, I argue that it is plausible that reasonable credence distributions are such that the alternatives instead cancel themselves out and thus leave the support for inductivism in place.