Necessary Connections and the Problem of Induction 1

For the purposes of this paper, I take the problem of induction to be a genuine sceptical problem. The challenge is to provide a reason to believe that inductive inferences are rational – a reason that does not beg the question against the sceptic by enshrining presuppositions that the sceptic will reject. The proposal that I shall consider and reject in this paper is that the sceptical problem can be solved if we focus on the metaphysics of laws of nature. Why might one think that the problem of induction has a metaphysical solution? Well, one thing that might be worrying the inductive sceptic is this: here we are, cosily occupying a tiny corner of the vast reaches of Time. Everything’s been going along pretty nicely up to now – but it might all fall apart! Anything could happen! After all, what’s stopping it? Stuff happens. So far, stuff has been kind enough to happen in nice, regular, predictable ways, by and large. But maybe the regularity of the Universe thus far has just been a matter of cosmic luck, and maybe next year or next week or in the next ten minutes our luck will run out and chaos will descend – or maybe the Universe will start behaving in other regular but far less friendly ways. Simon Blackburn calls this unfortunate condition ‘inductive vertigo’ (1993, 98). What the vertigo-sufferer apparently needs is a metaphysician, for only a metaphysician is in a position to tell the afflicted that, in fact, it can’t all fall apart. It looks as though the kind of metaphysician who is in a position to offer a cure for inductive vertigo will be someone who holds that there is something in the world that makes it regular: something that constrains how things can happen in such a way that they are guaranteed not to fall apart. In other