2025/09/17 by Chloé de Canson · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Intellectual Property Law
paper · doi:10.3998/phimp.7819
openalex publication_date 2025/09/17 · openalex created_date 2025/09/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
I examine Howson’s alluring suggestion that Bayesianism, by supplying a logic of inductive inference—conditionalisation—solves the problem of induction. I draw on his historical heritage, especially Hume, Peirce, and Ramsey, to reconstruct the interpretation of the problem of induction that his remarks intimates. Roughly, it is that of how to amend the system with which one meets the world, in the light of new particulars. Unfortunately, his claim that conditionalisation constitutes a solution to this problem, I argue, fails by his own lights, because it turns on the widely endorsed but nonetheless erroneous contention that a justification of conditionalisation qua rule of inference can be given independently from a justification of the priors.