Luc Langlois | : Dans L’initiation à la vie bienheureuse, qui est son écrit majeur sur la philosophie de la religion, Fichte, dans le sillage de la Doctrine de la science 1804/II, insiste sur la corrélation de l’Absolu et de sa manifestation, de l’Absolu et de sa révélation dans le savoir. L’inspiration johannique de son propos s’accorde non seulement avec la prémisse de la philosophie transcendantale de la corrélation de l’être et du savoir, mais la radicalise dans une philosophie (...) de l’Absolu qui fait du savoir véritable, de la Doctrine de la science elle-même, la condition d’une authentique vie en Dieu. | : In the Introduction to a Blessed Life, which is his major writing on the philosophy of religion, Fichte, in the wake of the Doctrine of Science 1804/II, insists on the correlation of the Absolute and its manifestation, of the Absolute and its revelation in knowledge. The inspiration drawn from John is not only in acccord with the premiss of the transcendandal philosophy of the correlation between being and knowledge, but it radicalizes it in a philosophy of the Absolute which makes true knowledge, indeed the Doctrine of Science itself, the condition of an authentic life in God. (shrink)

Contents: John A. HALL and Ian JARVIE: Preface. John A. HALL and Ian JARVIE: The Life and Times of Ernest Gellner. PART 1 INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND. Ji_i MUSIL: The Prague Roots of Ernest Gellner's Thinking. Chris HANN: Gellner on Malinowski: Words and Things in Central Europe. Tamara DRAGADZE: Ernest Gellner in the Soviet East. PART 2 NATIONS AND NATIONALISM. Brendan O'LEARY: On the Nature of Nationalism: An Appraisal of Ernest Gellner's Writings on Nationalism. Kenneth MINOGUE: Ernest Gellner and the (...) Dangers of Theorising Nationalism. Anthony D. SMITH: History and Modernity: Reflection on the Theory of Nationalism. Michael MANN: The Emergence of Modern European Nationalism. Nicholas STARGARDT: Gellner's Nationalism: The Spirit of Modernisation? PART 3 PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENT. Peter BURKE: Reflections on the History of Encyclopaedias. Alan MACFARLANE: Ernest Gellner and the Escape to Modernity. Ronald DORE: Sovereign Individuals. Shmuel EISENSTADT: Japan: Non-Axial Modernity. Marc FERRO: l'Indépendance Telescopée: De la Décolonisation a l'Impérialisme Multinational. PART 4 ISLAM. Abdellah HAMMOUDI: Segmentarity, Social Stratification, Political Power and Sainthood: Reflections on Gellner's Theses. Henry MUNSON, Jr.: Rethinking Gellner's Segmentary Analysis of Morocco's Ait cAtta. Jean BAECHLER: Sur le charisme. Charles LINDHOLM: Despotism and Democracy: State and Society in the Premodern Middle East. Henry MUNSON, Jr.: Muslim and Jew in Morocco: Reflections on the Distinction between Belief and Behavior. Talal ASAD: The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. PART 5 SCIENCE AND DISENCHANTMENT. Perry ANDERSON: Science, Politics, Enchantment. Ralph SCHROEDER: From the Big Divide to the Rubber Cage: Gellner's Conception of Science and Technology. John DAVIS: Irrationality in Social Life. PART 6 RELATIVISM AND UNIVERSALS. John SKORUPSKI: The Post-Modern Hume: Ernest Gellner's 'Enlightenment Fundamentalism'. John WETTERSTEN: Ernest Gellner: A Wittgensteinian Rationalist. Ian JARVIE: Gellner's Positivism. Raymond BOUDON: Relativising Relativism: When Sociology Refutes the Sociology of Science. Rod AYA: The Devil in Social Anthropology; or, the Empiricist Exorcist; or, the Case Against Cultural Relativism. PART 7 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. William MCNEILL: A Swan Song for British Liberalism? Andrus PARK: Gellner and the Long Trends of History. Eero LOONE: Marx, Gellner, Power. Rosaire LANGLOIS: Coercion, Cognition and Production: Gellner's Challenge to Historical Materialism and Postmodernism. Ernest GELLNER: Reply to Critics. Ian JARVIE: Complete Bibliography of Gellner's Work. Name index. Subject index. (shrink)

Many babies with trisomy 13 and 18 die in the first year of life. Survivors all have severe cognitive impairment. There has been a debate among both professionals and parents about whether it is appropriate to provide life-sustaining interventions to babies with these serious conditions. On one side of the debate are those who argue that there is no point in providing invasive, painful, and expensive procedures when the only outcomes are either early death or survival with severe cognitive impairment. (...) Others suggest that, although mortality is high and cognitive impairment universal, babies with these conditions have an acceptable quality of life. In this paper, we will discuss both points of view. We will review the ways in which these conditions are portrayed in pediatrics textbooks and on social media sites that offer support to parents. We will then suggest an appropriate way to deal with clinical decisions for babies with these trisomies. (shrink)

An infinite lottery machine is used as a foil for testing the reach of inductive inference, since inferences concerning it require novel extensions of probability. Its use is defensible if there is some sense in which the lottery is physically possible, even if exotic physics is needed. I argue that exotic physics is needed and describe several proposals that fail and at least one that succeeds well enough.

John D. Caputo explores the very roots of religious thinking in this thought-provoking book. Compelling questions come up along the way: 'What do I love when I love my God?' and 'What can Star Wars tell us about the contemporary use of religion?' Why is religion for many a source of moral guidance in a postmodern, nihilistic age? Is it possible to have 'religion without religion'? Drawing on contemporary images of religion, such as Robert Duvall's film _The Apostle_, Caputo (...) also provides some fascinating and imaginative insights into religious fundamentalism. (shrink)

Part I. Gnosticism and other religious movements of antiquity -- part II. Crossing boundaries : Gnosticism and Platonism.

The essays in this volume are concerned with our everyday and developed scientific systems of explanation of human behavior in terms of beliefs, attitudes,...

I am grateful to Peter Achinstein, Don Howard, and the other participants at the conference, 'The Role of Experiments in Scientific Changer', Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 30 March to 1 April, 1990, for helpful discussion, and especially to Ron Laymon for his discussion comments presented at the conference on an earlier version of this paper.

How can we reconcile two claims that are now both widely accepted: Kretschmann's claim that a requirement of general covariance is physically vacuous and the standard view that the general covariance of general relativity expresses the physically important diffeomorphism gauge freedom of general relativity? I urge that both claims can be held without contradiction if we attend to the context in which each is made.

Mathias Frisch has argued that the requirement that electromagnetic dispersion processes are causal adds empirical content not found in electrodynamic theory. I urge that this attempt to reconstitute a local principle of causality in physics fails. An independent principle is not needed to recover the results of dispersion theory. The use of ‘causality conditions’ proves to be the mere adding of causal labels to an already presumed fact. If instead one seeks a broader, independently formulated grounding for the conditions, that (...) grounding either fails or dissolves into vagueness and ambiguity, as has traditionally been the fate of candidate principles of causality. Introduction Scattering in Classical Electrodynamics Sufficiency of the Physics Failure of the Principle of Causality Proposed 4.1 A sometimes principle 4.2 The conditions of applicability are obscure 4.3 Effects can come before their causes 4.4 Vagueness of the relata and of the notion of causal process Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In a fair, infinite lottery, it is possible to conclude that drawing a number divisible by four is strictly less likely than drawing an even number; and, with apparently equal cogency, that drawing a number divisible by four is equally as likely as drawing an even number.

This book calls for a distinction between dangerous, elitist, hierarchizing myths such as Heidegger's and salutary, liberative, empowering myths that foster the humility of justice.

Our likes and dislikes--our senses and sensibilities--did not fall ready-made from the sky, argues internationally acclaimed author John D. Barrow. We know we enjoy a beautiful painting or a passionate symphony, but what we don't necessarily understand is that these experiences conjure up latent instincts laid down and perpetuated over millions of years. Now, in The Artful Universe, Barrow explores the close ties between our aesthetic appreciation and the basic nature of the Universe, challenging the commonly held view that (...) our sense of beauty is entirely free and unfettered. Barrow argues that the laws of the Universe, its environments and its astronomical appearance, have imprinted themselves upon our thoughts and actions in subtle and unexpected ways. Why do we like certain types of art or music? What games and puzzles do we find challenging? Why do so many myths and legends have common elements? Who created the cornucopia of constellations in the night sky? And why? In this eclectic and entertaining survey, Barrow answers these questions and more as he explains how the landscape of the Universe has influenced the development of philosophy and mythology, and how millions of years of evolutionary history have fashioned our attraction to certain patterns of sound and color. Barrow casts the story of human creativity and thought in a fascinating light, considering such diverse topics as our instinct for language, the origins and uses of color in Nature, why we divide time into intervals as we do, the sources of our appreciation of landscape painting, and whether computer-generated fractal art is really art. Barrow reconsiders the question of whether intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, showing that the benefits (and even the likelihood) that might follow from the discovery of life on other worlds could be very different from what we might have been led to expect. Remarkably, we find that some of the properties of the Universe that are essential for the existence of any form of life play a key role in determining psychological and religious responses to the Cosmos. Drawing on a wide variety of examples, from the theological questions raised by St. Augustine and C.S. Lewis to the relationship between the pure math of Pythagoras and the music of the Beatles, The Artful Universe covers new ground and enters a wide-ranging debate about the meaning and significance of the links between art and science. It will change our view of the creation of art and the way we see the world in which we live. (shrink)

The inaugural title in the new, Open Access series BSPS Open, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single (...) formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it. Which that is, and its extent, is determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. (shrink)

iinstein oered the prin™iple of gener—l ™ov—ri—n™e —s the fund—ment—l physi™—l prin™iple of his gener—l theory of rel—tivityD —nd —s responsi˜le for extending the prin™iple of rel—tivity to —™™eler—ted motionF „his view w—s disputed —lmost immedi—tely with the ™ounterE™l—im th—t the prin™iple w—s no rel—tivity prin™iple —nd w—s physi™—lly v—™uousF „he dis—greeE ment persists tod—yF „his —rti™le reviews the development of iinstein9s thought on gener—l ™ov—ri—n™eD its rel—tion to the found—tions of gener—l rel—tivity —nd the evolution of the ™ontinuing de˜—te (...) over his viewpointF.. (shrink)

Both natural and engineered systems are fundamentally dynamical in nature: their defining properties are causal, and their functional capacities are causally grounded. Among dynamical systems, an interesting and important sub-class are those that are autonomous, anticipative and adaptive (AAA). Living systems, intelligent systems, sophisticated robots and social systems belong to this class, and the use of these terms has recently spread rapidly through the scientific literature. Central to understanding these dynamical systems is their complicated organisation and their consequent capacities for (...) re- and self- organisation. But there is at present no general analysis of these capacities or of the requisite organisation involved. We define what distinguishes AAA systems from other kinds of systems by characterising their central properties in a dynamically interpreted information theory. (shrink)

In this brief discussion, we explicate and evaluate Heyes and colleagues’ deflationary approach to interpreting apparent evidence of domain-specific processes for social percep- tion. We argue that the deflationary approach sheds important light on how functionally specific processes in social perception can be subserved at least in part by domain-general processes. On the other hand, we also argue that the fruitfulness of this approach has been unnecessarily hampered by a contrastive conception of the relationship between domain- general and domain-specific processes. (...) As an alternative, we propose a complementary conception: the identification of domain-general processes that are engaged in instances of social perception can play a positive, structuring role by adding additional constraints to be accounted for in modelling the domain-specific processes that are also involved in such instances. (shrink)

The advent of the general theory of relativity was so entirely the work of just one person - Albert Einstein - that we cannot but wonder how long it would have taken without him for the connection between gravitation and spacetime curvature to be discovered. What would have happened if there were no Einstein? Few doubt that a theory much like special relativity would have emerged one way or another from the researchers of Lorentz, Poincaré and others. But where would (...) the problem of relativizing gravitation have led? The saga told here shows how even the most conservative approach to relativizing gravitation theory still did lead out of Minkowski spacetime to connect gravitation to a curved spacetime. Unfortunately we still cannot know if this conclusion would have been drawn rapidly without Einstein's contribution. For what led Nordström to the gravitational field dependence of lengths and times was a very Einsteinian insistence on just the right version of the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. Unceasingly in Nordström's ear was the persistent and uncompromising voice of Einstein himself demanding that Nordström see the most distant consequences of his own theory. © 1992 Springer-Verlag. (shrink)

The objection that Einstein's principle of general covariance is not a relativity principle and has no physical content is reviewed. The principal escapes offered for Einstein's viewpoint are evaluated.

1. Introduction. David Malament has described a natural and satisfying resolution of the traditional problems of Newtonian cosmology—natural in the sense that it effects the escape by altering Newtonian gravitation theory in a way that leaves its observational predictions completely unaffected. I am in full agreement with his approach. There is one part of his account, however, over which Malament has been excessively modest. The resolution requires a modification to Newtonian gravitation theory. Malament presents the modification as so straightforward as (...) to be automatic. This trivializes the crucial postulate, which I shall call the “relativity of acceleration.” It is a significant physical statement in its own right and requires careful justification. Moreover the postulate proved easy to overlook for decades of discussion of the paradox. It really only becomes natural from the perspective of the newer geometric methods Malament exploits. There the postulate has become a commonplace. My purpose here is to develop the following: While Newtonian cosmology can be repaired satisfactorily, in its traditional form it remains deeply troubled. These troubles can be expressed most vividly as the paradoxical contradictions indicated below. They persist in both the integral and differential formulations of Newtonian gravitation theory. Malament's careful geometric treatment is necessarily dense. By taking some liberties with precision, his core result can be expressed in a far simpler form. Attempts to avoid the resolution Malament describes do lead to disaster. Therefore this episode can be inverted and used as the strongest extant argument for the relativity of acceleration in Newtonian gravitation theory. (shrink)

Written with poignancy and compassion, Do We Still Need Doctors? is a personal account from the front lines of the moral and political battles that are reshaping America's health care system. Using compelling firsthand experiences, clinical vignettes, and moral arguments, John D. Lantos, a pediatrician, asks whether, as we proceed with the redesign of our health care system, doctors will -- or should -- continue to fulfill the roles and responsibilities that they have in the past. Interspersing moving personal (...) stories of his young patients suffering from AIDS, cancer, and other chronic or terminal illnesses with his own stirring dilemmas of truth telling, creative navigation of HMO bureaucracy, and reflections on the identity crisis of medical education, Dr. Lantos reveals how changes in out health care system and new technologies are fostering new ways of understanding and responding to illness. He taps into the public's sense of wanting doctors and hospitals to do something other than what they do now and the frustrating disagreement about what they should do in the future. (shrink)

There can be no mistaking the importance of Caputo's work." —Edith Wyschogrod "No one interested in Derrida, in Caputo, or in the larger question of postmodernism and religion can afford to ignore this pathbreaking study.

This introduction to the philosophy of social psychological science repudiates traditional empiricist and hermeneutical accounts, advancing instead a realist philosophy that stresses the social dimensions of mind and action.

The duality of truth and falsity in a Boolean algebra of propositions is used to generate a duality of belief and disbelief. To each additive probability measure that represents belief there corresponds a dual additive measure that represents disbelief. The dual measure has its own peculiar calculus, in which, for example, measures are added when propositions are combined under conjunction. A Venn diagram of the measure has the contradiction as its total space. While additive measures are not self-dual, the epistemic (...) state of complete ignorance is represented by the unique, monotonic, non-additive measure that is self-dual in its contingent propositions. Convex sets of additive measures fail to represent complete ignorance since they are not self-dual. (shrink)

The Surfactant, Positive Pressure, and Oxygenation Randomized Trial (SUPPORT) has been the focal point of many different criticisms regarding the ethics of the study ever since publication of the trial's findings in 2010 and 2012. In this article, we focus on a concern that the technical design and implementation details of the study were ethically flawed. While the federal Office Human Research Protections focused on the consent form, rather than on the study design and implementation, OHRP's critiques of the consent (...) form reveal views about the study design and implementation that we believe are fundamentally flawed. These criticisms about the design and implementation of SUPPORT, if generalized, become relevant concerns about these aspects of many comparative effectiveness research studies.Our analytical approach will be to use SUPPORT as a prime example of comparative effectiveness research and show why it challenges some prevailing assumptions about the riskiness of research. We will address five aspects of the study design and implementation: 1) randomization, 2) treatment by protocol, 3) choice of endpoints, 4) lack of a “standard care” control group, and 5) the use of altered oximeters. Examining these aspects will allow us to answer two specific central questions. The first is a methodological question with ethical implications: was the study designed in such a way as to answer the primary study question? The second question is whether the study design added or decreased risk to the babies enrolled in the study compared to babies who were not in the study. (shrink)

Applying an ever more radical hermeneutics, John D. Caputo breaks down the name of God in this irrepressible book. Instead of looking at God as merely a name, Caputo views it as an event, or what the name conjures or promises in the future. For Caputo, the event exposes God as weak, unstable, and barely functional. While this view of God flies in the face of most religions and philosophies, it also puts up a serious challenge to fundamental tenets (...) of theology and ontology. Along the way, Caputo’s readings of the New Testament, especially of Paul’s view of the Kingdom of God, help to support the "weak force" theory. This penetrating work cuts to the core of issues and questions—What is the nature of God? What is the nature of being? What is the relationship between God and being? What is the meaning of forgiveness, faith, piety, or transcendence?—that define the terrain of contemporary philosophy of religion. (shrink)

We introduce the computable FS-jump, an analog of the classical Friedman–Stanley jump in the context of equivalence relations on the natural numbers. We prove that the computable FS-jump is proper with respect to computable reducibility. We then study the effect of the computable FS-jump on computably enumerable equivalence relations (ceers).

We introduce a new family of jump operators on Borel equivalence relations; specifically, for each countable group [Formula: see text] we introduce the [Formula: see text]-jump. We study the elementary properties of the [Formula: see text]-jumps and compare them with other previously studied jump operators. One of our main results is to establish that for many groups [Formula: see text], the [Formula: see text]-jump is proper in the sense that for any Borel equivalence relation [Formula: see text] the [Formula: see (...) text]-jump of [Formula: see text] is strictly higher than [Formula: see text] in the Borel reducibility hierarchy. On the other hand, there are examples of groups [Formula: see text] for which the [Formula: see text]-jump is not proper. To establish properness, we produce an analysis of Borel equivalence relations induced by continuous actions of the automorphism group of what we denote the full [Formula: see text]-tree, and relate these to iterates of the [Formula: see text]-jump. We also produce several new examples of equivalence relations that arise from applying the [Formula: see text]-jump to classically studied equivalence relations and derive generic ergodicity results related to these. We apply our results to show that the complexity of the isomorphism problem for countable scattered linear orders properly increases with the rank. (shrink)

This paper represents the first installment of alarger project devoted to the relevance of pragmatism forbioethics. One self-consciously pragmatist move would be toreturn to the classical pragmatist canon of Peirce, James andDewey in search of substantive doctrines or methodologicalapproaches that might be applied to current bioethicalcontroversies. Another pragmatist (or neopragmatist) move wouldbe to subject the regnant principlist paradigm to Richard Rorty'ssubversive assaults on foundationalism in epistemology andethics. A third pragmatist method, dubbed ``freestandingpragmatism'' by its proponents, embraces a ``pragmatist'' approachto practical (...) reasoning without discernable moorings either to theclassical canon or to Rorty's neopragmatism. This thirdpragmatist approach to method in practical ethics is the subjectof this article. I begin with an examination of freestandingpragmatism in the theory of judicial decision making. I arguethat this version of legal pragmatism – so described on account ofits commitments to contextualism, instrumentalism, eclecticism,and freedom from grand theory – bears a striking resemblance tomuch self-described pragmatist work in bioethics today. Ifurther argue that if this is what we mean by ``pragmatism,'' thenin a certain sense ``we are all pragmatists now.''. (shrink)

In books such as The World Within the World and The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, astronomer John Barrow has emerged as a leading writer on our efforts to understand the universe. Timothy Ferris, writing in The Times Literary Supplement of London, described him as "a temperate and accomplished humanist, scientist, and philosopher of science--a man out to make a contribution, not a show." Now Barrow offers the general reader another fascinating look at modern physics, as he explores the quest for (...) a single, unifying theory that will unlock nature's secrets. Theories of Everything is more than a history of science, more than a popular report on recent research and discoveries. Barrow provides a reflective, intelligent commentary on what a true Theory of Everything would be--its ingredients, its limitations, and what it could tell us about the universe. Never before, he writes, have physicists been so confident and so eager in the hunt for this "cosmic Rosetta Stone," as he calls it: "a single all-embracing picture of all the laws of nature from which the inevitability of all things seen must follow with unimpeachable logic." He lays out eight essential ingredients for a Theory of Everything and then explores each in turn, tracing how our knowledge has developed and how scientific discovery relates to our changing philosophy and religious thought in each area. Some of these ingredients are obvious--the laws of nature must be explained, for example, as well as its organizing principles--but others may be surprising, such as broken symmetries and selection biases. A Theory of Everything must account for the fact that the universe is "messy and complicated," he tells us, and for the limitations imposed by the questions we ask and the information we can obtain. The key lies in the remarkable capacity of mathematics to express the fundamental workings of the physical world--a language that the human mind is uniquely equipped to understand and manipulate. Barrow examines what mathematics actually is and describes how it makes the universe intelligible and provides a path to the underlying coherence in nature--which has led, in fact, to arguments that the universe itself is a vast computer. Yet even the most complete theory, even the most comprehensive mathematical explanation, cannot account for the uncomputable varieties of human experience and thought. "No non-poetic account of reality," he writes, "can be complete." In a field where the authorities converse in equations and mathematical notations, John Barrow speaks with the voice of thoughtful and knowledgeable humanist. Written with eloquence and expertise, Theories of Everything establishes a new perspective on humanity's efforts to explain the universe. (shrink)

"Against Ethics is beautifully written, clever, learned, thought-provoking, and even inspiring." —Theological Studies "Writing in the form of his ideas, Caputo offers the reader a truly exquisite reading experience.... his iconic style mirrors a truly refreshing honesty that draws the reader in to play." —Quarterly Journal of Speech "Against Ethics is, in my judgment, one of the most important works on philosophical ethics that has been written in recent years.... Caputo speaks with a passion and a concern that are rare (...) in academic philosophy. His profound sense of humor deepens the passion of the viewpoints he develops." —Mark C. Taylor "Obligation happens!" declares Caputo in this brilliant and witty postmodern critique of ethics, framed as a contemporary restaging of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. (shrink)

In Leo Szilard’s 1929 thought experiment, a Maxwell demon manipulates a one-molecule gas to reverse the second law of thermodynamics. The demon must fail, Szilard argued, since there is hidden entropy creation in the demon’s collecting of information. This thought experiment is an inconsistent muddle of improper idealizations. It diverted an already successful literature of exorcism into degenerating speculations about about a connection between thermodynamic entropy and information. These confusions persist today in a voluminous literature. Narrative conventions in a thought (...) experiment allow thought experimenters great latitude in deciding which processes are typical and bear generalization and which can be idealized away as incidental. For its abuse of this latitude and the extent of the harm it caused, this thought experiment merits the distinction of the worst thought experiment in science. (shrink)

My purpose in this chapter is to survey some of the principal approaches to inductive inference in the philosophy of science literature. My first concern will be the general principles that underlie the many accounts of induction in this literature. When these accounts are considered in isolation, as is more commonly the case, it is easy to overlook that virtually all accounts depend on one of very few basic principles and that the proliferation of accounts can be understood as efforts (...) to ameliorate the weaknesses of those few principles. In the earlier sections, I will lay out three inductive principles and the families of accounts of induction they engender. In later sections I will review standard problems in the philosophical literature that have supported some pessimism about induction and suggest that their import has been greatly overrated. In the final sections I will return to the proliferation of accounts of induction that frustrates efforts at a final codification. I will suggest that this proliferation appears troublesome only as long as we expect inductive inference to be subsumed under a single formal theory. If we adopt a material theory of induction in which individual inductions are licensed by particular facts that prevail only in local domains, then the proliferation is expected and not problematic. (shrink)