Хјумовиот проблем на индукцијата и развојот на филозофските концепции на научното заклучување

Апстракт

In the field of philosophy of science, Hume is one of the few philosophers that became much more influential with a formulation of a problem than with the solution he offers. The importance of Hume’s problem of induction for the philosophy of science comes from the skeptical implications that it produces regarding inductive inference, which is usually meant to be crucial for scientific inference in general. This essay attempts to show the great importance of this problem for the philosophy of science, by analyzing its influence on many different philosophical concepts of scientific inference, and by showing that many of these concepts are directly or indirectly inspired by it. In order to achieve that, the analysis in this essay is focused on the most significant attempts in the history of philosophy of science to justify inductive inference (Mill’s principle of the uniformity of nature, Kant’s aprioristic approach, Black’s self-supporting inductive arguments, and pragmatic justification), as well as attempts to solve the problem of induction by introducing alternative epistemological concepts of scientific inference (Popper’s deductivism, probabilism, Reichenbach’s pragmatic justification, and “inference to the best explanation”). The results of this analysis show that none of the given concepts of scientific inference entirely overcomes the Hume’s problem of induction, nor manages to prove its irrelevance in the process of scientific inference.