Governing Laws Do Help With Induction

Humeanism doesn't

Ah, yes. The problem of induction. Nightmare of philosophy undergrads and 18th-century philosophers alike. Well, it ends here! The answer has been staring us in the face this whole time: Be a non-Humean about laws, and it all goes away.

Okay, I exaggerate a little. Nevertheless, I do believe that non-Humeanism about laws of nature has a unique advantage over Humeanism in justifying why induction is reliable. Whether or not this is a reason to think that non-Humeanism is true is another, not-so-obvious question, despite what you might think—but in any case it’s a pretty interesting result.

Obviously I’m not the first person to get this idea, and the relation between Humeanism and induction is a well-trodden issue. Nevertheless I think my way of pushing the point is somewhat original.

What is Humeanism anyways? We could characterize the distinction in several ways, but this will be the most useful way of doing so:

• On Humeanism what happens in the world is more fundamental than the laws of nature.

• On non-Humeanism the laws are more fundamental than what happens in the world.

As always, there are qualifications, edge cases, and whatnot—but I think this captures the basic dispute. A more intuitive way of seeing the distinction is that for Humeans laws are simply useful descriptions or generalizations of particular facts; whereas for non-Humeans the particular facts are the way they are because of the laws.

From here the argument follows a few steps, which we will go through below.