I guess it does make sense, Sawaz, that induction is fundamental to other animals’ experience of the world as well.

Thanks Snurp! I wish I could return that favor more often but your area of philosophy is one I don’t know enough about to question with any competency.

Yes, I am playing a bit fast and loose with terminology in this post. The reason for that is because I’m trying to keep my blog posts short (for me). That means I had to sacrifice some clarity for simplicity.

My favorite philosophers have, for the most part, been empiricist so I guess it’s fair to apply the label to myself as well. Reality may well be more than our structured experiences, as you put it, but our structured experiences are all of reality that we can know with any certainty. This is why I used our ‘experience of reality’ instead of just ‘reality’.

That induction is important in experiencing reality is difficult to argue with. You might be saying something else, though, when you say that it “serves as a starting point for or experience of reality.” It seems to me that this is somewhat different from the question of reality. I think there may be some muddle here between “experience” and “reality,” and I think that could have unclear consequences.

Also, I’m not sure how exactly to take the idea that induction is fundamental. Is there anything besides experience that has a hand in establishing reality, so to speak? Or does it exist as a law of sorts beforehand? If you are an empiricist (which of course Hume was, and which you definitely seem to be, and which many professional philosophers are), then you may not think so. If reality is nothing more than the structured experiences we have, then this seems right. But I’m not sure it quite gets to reality as such, or, I should say, to the whole of it.

I’m going to take a pseudo-Kantian angle here. I recall you once mentioning long ago that you had read the Critique of Pure Reason, but didn’t find it too memorable. In a sense, that book was a response to Hume. Kant had a rationalist tendency throughout his life, but was seriously perturbed by Hume’s arguments (“I openly confess, the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction.”) Kant felt that Hume raised challenging questions but failed to give sufficient explanations; induction and association may explain why we act in certain ways and experience certain things, but they don’t explain reality, existence as such, part of the problem being of course that such psychological explanations are based on the world of experience (thus an understanding of the world) already. The result is that, to put it in your terms, if induction is an axiom (I don’t recall Kant’s exact position, and I don’t want to screw it up), it’s not the primary one. What those primary axioms actually are is what Kant delves into, and the course of metaphysics afterwards has been strongly affected by him, however indirectly (and less so in English-speaking philosophy, which was probably more strongly affected by Hume).

Now, your post was titled “The Fundamental Axiom of Experience,” so if you were only referring to experience itself, then I’m not sure how much all of this helps. In ordinary experience, we do treat induction with something like the status you give it. Not just in obvious examples of cause and effect, either: a Humean could explain an object as a consistent grouping of properties that, as a collective, comes to be identified over time (and through experience) as a thing, a one with many properties. It’s an axiom we all abide by. But to call it a fundamental axiom, as though it’s prior to all others, I’m not sure of. As to the equating of reality and experience, I’m not sure from your post whether you are doing that, so feel free to clear that up. As for me, oh dear too many words should stop talking now.