Reichenbach, Russell and the Metaphysics of Induction
Issue: Issue 08 • Author/s: Michael J. Shaffer
Topics: Epistemology, History of Analytic Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophical logic
Hans Reichenbach’s pragmatic treatment of the problem of induction in his later works on inductive inference was, and still is, of great interest. However, it has been dismissed as a pseudo-solution and it has been regarded as problematically obscure. This is, in large part, due to the difficulty in understanding exactly what Reichenbach’s solution is supposed to amount to, especially as it appears to offer no response to the inductive skeptic. For entirely different reasons, the significance of Bertrand Russell’s classic attempt to solve Hume’s problem is also both obscure…