ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is concerned to elicit some consequences of insisting on close comparability between inductive support for a first-order generalisation and inductive support for its instances. It shows how the proposed analytical reconstruction of discourse about inductive support applies to statistical generalisations, and describes how argument by so-called enumerative induction, and argument from the results of experimental tests, is not to be regarded as co-species of a single logical genus. The book discusses how any assessment of inductive support for hypothesis on given evidence may be reinterpreted as an assessment of how far that evidence allows the hypothesis to be simplified. Inductive syntax, thus envisaged, is then developed systematically and in detail, and its consistency is established.
