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Reply to Israel on the New Riddle of Induction

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Abstract

Israel 2004 claims that numerous philosophers have misinterpreted Goodman’s original ‘New Riddle of Induction’, and weakened it in the process, because they do not take the predicate ‘grue’ to refer to past observations. Both claims are false: Goodman very explicitly took his riddle to concern the maximally general problem of how to correctly “project” any type of characteristic from any given realm of objects into another, and this problem subsumes that of inferring from past examined cases to present and future ones.

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Notes

  1. Israel here restates a position already taken by Jackson 1975.

  2. Goodman 1954, 1983: 57; cf. Aristotle 1997: Book I, 12, 105a, and most reference works.

  3. Among which: Goodman 1960; Barker and Achinstein 1960; Ullian 1961a, b; Swinburne 1968; Hesse 1969; Blackburn 1969; Kripke 1982; Gärdenfors 1990; Harman 1994; Hacking 1994; Sober 1994; Stroud 2000; and many more.

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  1. Philosophy Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

    Robert Kowalenko

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  1. Robert Kowalenko
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Kowalenko, R. Reply to Israel on the New Riddle of Induction. Philosophia 40, 549–552 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9341-6

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