Popper's Induction Thesis

"State and defend Popper's proposed solution to the Problem of Induction"

In the United States, there is a universal saying in the court system, "innocent until proven guilty". Essentially, every living person begins their life as innocent. They remain innocent until they are proven to have broken at least single law. Only at that point are they then classified as "guilty". However, what if it were instead that we accepted a person is "guilty until proven innocent". In this case, we would have to go through every applicable law in the United States and prove that a person has not broken a single one of those laws to be truly innocent. This isn't only unreasonable, but almost impossible to go through every condition necessary to verify that a person is innocent. And with this reasoning, every person in the United States would be classified as "guilty," and we would almost never be able to prove otherwise. This analysis is very similar to how Karl Popper proposes we solve the problem of induction.

The principle of induction uses the idea that there are certain statements that we accept as truth because they have been proven true time and time again, yet there has never been

31) says Popper. He claims that with every discovery made, there is some illogical way it is come up with. This is known as the context of discovery; it is the idea that when scientists come up with theories, they do not do it in a deliberate way. Popper claims, "Indeed, if there were such a thing as a purely logical principle of induction, there would be no problem of induction" (Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 28). People who question the validity of induction as a way to reason about our lives are justified in their thinking. There is nothing in our universe that can convince us to rely on