Futures Are the New Pasts

So we wound up skipping this topic in class, but if you're interested in Hume's question of what could justify inductive reasoning, here's an article all about the problem of induction for you.

If you're tired of that one, there's also a new problem of induction. Or, you could watch this video of Lewis Black describing his failure to reason inductively every year around Halloween:


Hume argues that attempts to justify induction beg the question: we believe in inductive reasoning because we think the future will be like the past. But the only reason we believe that is because we trust inductive reasoning: we've seen past patterns continue before a lot, so assume it will keep going that way! That begs the question: it assumes the very thing we're trying to prove. Here's a dinosaur comic on question-begging.


Finally, here's a stick figure comic about scientists' efforts to confirm that the future will be like the past.