Problem of Induction
The statistical syllogism was used by Donald Cary Williams and David Stove in their attempt to give a logical solution to the problem of induction. They put forward the argument, which has the form of a statistical syllogism:
- The great majority of large samples of a population approximately match the population (in proportion)
- This is a large sample from a population
- Therefore, this sample approximately matches the population
If the population is, say, a large number of balls which are black or white but in an unknown proportion, and one takes a large sample and finds they are all white, then it is likely, using this statistical syllogism, that the population is all or nearly all white. That is an example of inductive reasoning.
Read more about this topic: Statistical Syllogism
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