Problem of Induction

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge. That is, what is the justification for either: 1. generalising about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (for example, the inference that 'all swans we have seen are white, and therefore all swans are white,' before the discovery of black swans) or 2. presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (for example, that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold).