ABSTRACT
Enumerative induction was for them very much a second-best in ordinary science, when compared with induction by variation of circumstance; and while they had much of value to say about the latter they contributed little to the study of the former. Induction by experimental variation of circumstance is for at least two reasons primarily focused on the establishment of support for fully universal hypotheses. David Hume’s preoccupation with the causal analogue of enumerative induction is the direct ancestor of a similar tendency in certain twentieth-century psychologists’ theories of learning. To explain learned behaviour by reference to a repeated pattern of stimulation and rewarded response, for example, is to confine one’s explanatory model to processes of enumerative induction. A probabilistic theory of induction has sometimes been used as a basis for explicating the ordinary concept of information.
