Thanks for the interesting comments!

> Often Hume is mentioned as an empiricist (I just skimmed through the
> wikipedia article to look up his year of birth - 1711) while I would see
> his important characterization as the first *modern* skeptic and also
> one of the most radical skeptics ever. In his work "A Treatise of Human
> Nature"

I think I read this a long while ago.  At the time I remember being 
pretty underwhelmed by it, but perhaps I was just young and didn't fully 
appreciate it, so I'll put it on the queue for a reread.


> As an (absolutely incomplete) introduction what a friend of mine did
> call "Hume versus Holmes" (Doyle's Sherlock he did mean ;)):
> Given a series of observations that a lady walks her dog by the market
> at 8am on Monday, it seems valid to infer that next Monday she will do
> the same, or that, in general, the lady walks her dog by the market
> every Monday.
> That next Monday the lady walks by the market merely adds to the series
> of observations, it does not prove she will walk by the market every
> Monday.
> First it is not certain, regardless of the number of observations, that
> the lady always walks by the market at 8am on Monday.
> Second Hume argued that we cannot claim it is "more probable", since
> this still requires the assumption that the past predicts the future.
> Third, the observations themselves do not establish the validity of
> inductive reasoning, except inductively.

Not yet having reread Hume's texts on the matter myself, I have a few 
more questions/comments.  I think it's pretty obvious that you can't 
inductively deduce absolute truths, but only contingent theories. 
However, he also seems to reject inductively supporting inductive 
reasoning as "probably correct" as a case of circular reasoning.  Is 
there some reason he's ok with deductive reasoning (which surely cannot 
be supported in any less of a circular manner) but sees a problem with 
inductive reasoning?

Furthermore, I'm not entirely sure what Hume sees as the distinction 
between inductive and deductive reasoning.  The generalization of 
probable theories from finite examples is pretty well explained in a 
rigorous way by the theory of probability, and it's not like there's a 
different type of reasoning used here than in other parts of math like 
algebra, geometry, etc.  Maybe you could put forth a sort of "no free 
lunch" style argument to arrive at the same conclusion Hume does, but I 
don't get the impression that's the line of reasoning he's using.

Still, interesting stuff, I'll take a deeper look sometime since I get 
the impression that I should really reread the Hume myself if I'm going 
to ask detailed questions about it.

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