The Validity of Inductive Reasoning Knowingly or not, just about all humans live their lives under the Inductivist presumption, using their past experiences and observations to navigate the future, assuming the regularities which have always held true will continue to do so. Skeptics of this are the Counter-inductivists, who point out that using the past to predict the future is not a logically sound method by offering an opposite conclusion. Counter-inductivism seems somewhat silly at first glance, after all, what reason do we have to believe things should radically change from this point forward? This viewpoint arises from an observation on how we construct theories from the data we have collected. Counter-inductivists choose to start from a different principle than most, believing that all of their past experiences are misleading as to what will occur in the future. Take, for instance, that the Sun has risen everyday of your life. Using this data, classic Inductivism would conclude that the sun will rise again tomorrow. A Counter-inductivist, however, would claim that Sun will not rise tomorrow, since everyday prior it had, and from their starting premise this trend must not …show more content…
This of course is true, but life would then adopt a new strategy in order to find success. Therefore the only change which could cause the adaptability of life to cease is the abolition of inductive reasoning, and that argument in itself admits inductive reasoning to be a feature of the universe. This is why I believe the evolution argument to be the argument, if any, that should convince the Counter-inductivists. Of course they can make any claims they wish about the nature of the universe changing, but if we want to have an argument strictly of the universe itself, there appears to be evidence that inductive reasoning is a feature of