Skip to main content

Instructors: Ram Neta and John Roberts. This seminar meets on Wednesdays from 1:00 – 3:30 p.m. in Caldwell 213.

All the emeralds that you’ve seen have been green. But why should this make it reasonable for you to think that the next emerald you see will be green? More generally, why should observed instances make it reasonable for you to believe something about unobserved instances? This is a crude statement of what philosophers have called “the problem of induction”. In this course, we will examine various proposed solutions to this problem. We will read classic works on the topic by some twentieth-century philosophers, as well as some more recent works.

Ram Neta’s webpage

John Roberts’s webpage