Part Three

[ Acknowledgements | Introduction | Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Appendix ]

• Chapter 5: The Falsity of its Sceptical Conclusion.
• Chapter 6: The Falsity of its Deductivist Premiss.
• Chapter 7: The Truth and Importance of Its Fallibilist Consequence.
• Chapter 8: Our Historical Debts to Hume's Argument for Scepticism.
• Chapter 9: Concluding Remarks.

Glossary of Theses

It may be helpful to the reader to bring together here for reference, all the various theses to be discussed in Part Three.

The main ones are the following:

Hume's Inductive Scepticism (8): For all e and h such that the argument from e to h is inductive, P(h, e.t) = P(h, t).

Deductivism (6): For all e and h such that the argument from e to h is invalid, P(h, e.t) = P(h, t).

Inductive Fallibilism (9): For all e1, e2 and h such that the argument from e1 to h is inductive and e2 is observational, P(h, e1.t) < 1 and P(h, e1.e2.t) < 1.

These three theses are the subjects respectively of Chapters 5, 6, and 7.

Two other theses referred to fairly often in what follows are:

the Thesis of Regularity: For all contingent h, P(h, t) < 1.

the Fundamental Thesis of the Theory of Logical Probability: There exist e1, e2, h1, h2 such that P(h1, e1.t) < 1, P(h2, e2.t) < 1, and P(h1, e1.t) != P(h2, e2.t).

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