Induction before Hume

Abstract

Modern interpretations of David Hume as the first radical inductive skeptic overlook a long tradition of methodological anxiety and terminology that diverges from contemporary usage. Prior to the eighteenth century, philosophers from Aristotle to Leibniz engaged with the limitations of non-deductive inference, though often within different epistemic frameworks. Ancient epagoge functioned primarily as a tool for grasping first principles or rhetorical persuasion rather than empirical generalization, while subsequent debates between Epicureans, Stoics, and Empiricists highlighted the inherent insecurity of incomplete enumeration. Seventeenth-century thinkers generally accepted the fallibility of induction but distinguished between absolute and moral certainty to preserve the possibility of scientific knowledge. Prevailing accounts that attribute the emergence of the “problem of induction” to the seventeenth-century development of probability or the rejection of necessary connections are historically insufficient. The problem is more accurately understood as a consequence of the metaphysical shift from realism to nominalism. Under a realist framework, intuitive induction allows the mind to grasp universal forms; under nominalism, however, everything that exists is particular. If universals are merely collections of individuals, universal propositions can never be known with certainty through a limited survey. Thus, the modern skeptical impasse arises directly from the nominalist requirement that universal truths must correspond to an exhaustive, yet unattainable, enumeration of particulars. – AI-generated abstract.