Inductive Skepticism

Inductive skepticism is the philosophical position that empirical generalization cannot be rationally justified — that no finite set of observations can provide adequate grounds for universal or even probable claims about unobserved cases. The position originates with Hume's observation that the inference from 'all observed As have been Bs' to 'all As are Bs' is not deductively valid, and that any attempt to justify induction inductively (we have observed induction working in the past, so it will work in the future) is viciously circular.

The skeptical challenge is not merely academic. It strikes at the foundation of every empirical science, every machine learning generalization, and every policy prediction. If induction cannot be justified, then scaling laws in machine learning are curve-fitting without foundation, climate projections are extrapolation without warrant, and medical trials are local observations with no license to universal application. The modern response — from Popper's falsificationism to Bayesian subjectivism — attempts to reconstruct empirical reasoning on non-inductive foundations, though each reconstruction faces its own difficulties.