While inductive arguments with premises that are true (e.g swans are animals...) are easy to create, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the conclusions are going to be cogent or sound. There’s the cartoon by Randy Glasbergen that I mentioned previously for Day 16, for example:

Penguins are black and white
Some old TV shows are black and white
Therefore, some penguins are old TV shows

To recap what was previously said about arguments:

premise→ [the move is called inference]→ conclusion

When looking at arguments, we have to consider:

1) Are the reasons true?

2) Does the conclusion/s follow from those reasons — is the inference good?

If: 1 and 2 = cogent / sound. Which means we can be convinced by it.

NB: arguments are not true or false — they are only sound or unsound [as ‘un-cogent’ isn’t a word!]

Therefore:

The problem of induction is therefore about the conclusion or conclusions — premises may be right, but penguins are just not black and white TV shows.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that we can’t act in ways that assumes that there’s going to be a conclusion that holds up our initial premises — every day, we might cross the road safely, because we see there’s a green light and therefore the traffic will wait for us to cross. 

The important thing to realise is that there may be alternative explanations for what is happening — as in the case where penguins are black and white TV shows. Probability can also have an influence on results, perhaps one day there is a possibility the previously mentioned traffic light will be broken, and a green light might not make it safe to cross the road.

Next episode I’ll discuss falsification, and you can revise over arguments by looking over previous episodes on www.365daysofphilosophy.com.