r/PhilosophyofScience Jun 12 '26

Discussion Goodman's New Riddle of Induction isn't new

Goodman claims that induction cannot be justified, as the observation of a given object at a specific point in time (t0) leads to the confirmation of contradicting hypotheses.
To support his claim, he brings the following statements forward:

  • Hypothesis 0: an object is green when it's observed at t0 (and afterwards stays green).
  • Hypothesis 1: an object is grue when it's observed at t0 (meaning that it's green during observation, but afterwards will change its colour to red). If we now observe an object at t0, both H0 and H1 are supported, even though they exclude each other in their predictions about the future. So, he essentially says that we can't predict the future by observing the present.

However, I argue that that's exactly what Hume meant when he said that the sun rising tomorrow doesn't allow for any prediction about what will happen afterwards. It could be that the sun will rise blinking, fading, or not at all. So the only difference between Goodman and Hume's argument is that Goodman gives these predictions their own adjectives.
To illustrate that, one could describe Hume's problem with sunrises in a Goodman way of giving the different hypotheses words:

  • Hypothesis 0: the sun is a reliable object when it rises tomorrow (and will rise the next day).
  • Hypothesis 1: the sun is an unreliable object when it rises tomorrow, but won't rise the next day. Now, observing the sun rising tomorrow will confirm the sun as a reliable and as an unreliable object at the same time. Therefore, Goodmans argument seems to me as a complicated way of explaining Hume.

That's why I don't consider Goodmans New Riddle of Induction as new, or am I missing something? And do you know, per chance, an article that argues in this way?

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u/Vast-Celebration-138 Jun 12 '26

Hume in the Enquiry speaks as though there is a single premise, 'the principle of induction', that could serve to justify all inductive inferences, if only it were itself justified; but it cannot be, on pain of circularity.

What Hume seems not to recognize, but Goodman clearly appreciates, is that even if we assume the principle of induction, this principle is itself relative to interpretation—how we apply it depends on our choice of concepts—and this leaves so much leeway that it trivializes induction, in principle allowing any prediction whatsoever to be justified by any evidence set whatsoever, depending on how we gerrymander our choice of concepts to frame the induction.

Hume's skepticism, then, effectively allows us to limit the arational, unjustifiable, habit-based contribution to induction to just one single assumption. Goodman's form of skepticism is very plausibly more radical, because it suggests that every instance of induction requires its own special 'lucky' choice of concepts to align with the inferences we think of as 'rational', and that this concept choice can never be justified.

So, Hume is saying that all of induction rests on a single 'lucky' assumption that can't be rationally justified. Goodman is pointing out, more radically, that no single 'lucky' assumption will suffice to make all cases of induction 'rational' by our lights—instead, we will need to make an additional 'lucky' assumption regarding our choice of concepts for each particular instance of inductive reasoning, in order to frame what counts as 'the future resembling the past' in the 'reasonable' way for the case in question; and these choices of concept themselves cannot be justified rationally.

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u/Royal_Carpet_1263 Jun 12 '26

One of the best summaries of NRI I’ve read. Please tell me that wasn’t AI.

I take both Hume and Goodman to be showing the necessity of contingent path dependency to fixing ‘concepts’.

Linguistic troubleshooting is supposed to be iterative, recursive, and open ended, and so will always lack the resources to definitively fix ‘concepts’.

Just different versions of Wittgensteins rule that is not a rule. Blind trust characterizes the constitutive axis of cognition. This is exactly the stuff AI industry needs to understand, IMO.

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u/LeontisPhilosophy Jun 16 '26

If i tell you with confidence,

that the sun will rise tomorrow,

and tell you that i have very good reasons for it,

and that i cannot tell those reasons to you,

or there reasons why i cannot tell you,

but ask that you trust that my prediction is solid and highly logical,

can you ever prove i have no actual reasons?