Black Swan & David Hume!!

Strategy of guessing based on past experience is known as "inductive reasoning." As we've seen, inductive reasoning makes us vastly better than computers in solving problems ...... But it also makes people like Descartes nervous, because it means that our beliefs are not necessarily true. Instead, they are "probabilistically" true. This point was made (and made famous) by David Hume en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume who was arguably the first thinker to fully grasp both the import and limitation of inductive reasoning. To borrow his much-cited example: How can I be sure that all swans are white if I myself have seen only a tiny fraction of all the swans that have existed? If the world were always uniform, consistent, and predictable, I could trust that I am right about this induction (and about all inductions). Unfortunately, as Hume noted, nothing in logic requires the world to be that way, and we know from experience that it isn't always so. I can keep my eyes open for more white swans, but no matter how many I spot, I'll be only adding to my body of evidence, rather than actually proving something about the necessary color scheme of swans. In other words, inductions are necessarily impossible to substantiate. We can know that they are wrong - as Hume's example turned out to be, when a species of black swan was discovered in Australia after his death - but we can't know that they are right. All we know is that they are at least somewhat more likely to be right and the next best guess we could make ~ Page 118