Naturalistic Account of Inductive Inference
In his 1993 book "Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground" (MIT Press, 1993) Kornblith argues that inductive knowledge is possible by virtue of a fit between our innate psychological capacities and the causal structure of the world. Following Boyd, Kornblith takes the causal structure in question to be a structure of natural kinds, i.e., of homeostatically clustered properties. Such natural kinds provide a natural ground for inductive inference by virtue of the fact that our innate inferential tendencies (as revealed by empirical psychology) are structured in a way that assumes a world of natural kinds, and, thereby, tend to provide us with accurate beliefs about the world in environment populated by such natural kinds.
Read more about this topic: Hilary Kornblith
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