ABSTRACT
As a preliminary to identifying David Hume's key premise, some explanations are needed. One of them concerns the way the word "inductive" is used in this chapter. Inductive arguments are simply a certain class of arguments, distinguished from other classes by the fact that their premises and conclusions are propositions which respectively satisfy certain purely descriptive conditions. The premise of an inductive argument, Hume says, is no reason to believe the conclusion of it; a proposition about the observed is never a reason, however slight, to believe a contingent proposition about the unobserved. Hume's scepticism about induction must not be confused with what he calls "scepticism with regard to the senses". Hume's argument for inductive scepticism is itself, however, not quite self-contained. Hume argued for scepticism about induction in three different books. They are A Treatise of Human Nature; An Abstract [of A Treatise of Human Nature]; and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.
