The new riddle of induction, perhaps? You can dodge that by choosing suitable priors, or using heuristics like Occam's Razor, but then what justifies those?
The best answer to that question that I know of can be found in chapter 7 of David Deutsch's book, "The Fabric of Reality." But he's just channeling Karl Popper if you want to go straight to the source. The TL;DR is that science does not rely on induction at all.
That's a cop-out. Sure, the methodical process of science doesn't, strictly-speaking, require induction, but we still have to decide whether to expect the result of scientific inquiry to be useful.
A reference to the published literature is a cop-out??? Sorry, no.
> Sure, the methodical process of science doesn't, strictly-speaking, require induction, but we still have to decide whether to expect the result of scientific inquiry to be useful.
What??? No! We just have to observe empirically that the results of scientific inquiry are useful.
> Popper’s account appears to be incomplete in an important way. There are always many hypotheses which have not yet been refuted by the evidence, and these may contradict one another. According to the strictly deductive framework, since none are yet falsified, they are all on an equal footing. Yet, scientists will typically want to say that one is better supported by the evidence than the others. We seem to need more than just deductive reasoning to support practical decision-making (Salmon 1981). Popper did indeed appeal to a notion of one hypothesis being better or worse “corroborated” by the evidence. But arguably, this took him away from a strictly deductive view of science. It appears doubtful then that pure deductivism can give an adequate account of scientific method.
> Karl Popper's position on this issue is a cop-out.
where "this issue" is:
> The new riddle of induction, perhaps?
The reference I gave you was not directly to Popper, but rather to chapter 7 of David Deutsch's book, "The Fabric of Reality", which you quite obviously did not read because it directly answers the problem described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction
