A Phenomenological Treatment of Induction: Edmund Husserl on inductive reasoning and the foundation of the empirical sciences.

Induction is commonly regarded as a central problem for philosophy and the empirical sciences. At the same time, hardly any other problem is more tangibly present in our everyday life than induction. Our daily experience is tacitly shaped by anticipations of future behavior of natural things, artifacts, people, social infrastructures, etc. Accordingly, induction is a vital element in the formation of our empirical concepts and predictions about the future. Moreover, our trust in inductive reasoning is so deeply entrenched that we have placed it at the heart of the method of the empirical sciences.
This project intends to reconstruct Edmund Husserl’s analysis of induction and justification of empirical statements in line with principles of probability. It aims, for the first time, to present Husserl’s account on induction and probability, which has remained neglected in Husserlian scholarship and unexplored in the phenomenological tradition. By tracing an uncharted path that culminates in Husserl’s reflections on induction and probability, and that differs significantly from the prevailing 20th century treatments of induction, the project also develops a new theoretical approach that distinguishes and examines a range of philosophical issues connected with induction. In this way, the project fills a gap in the existing literature and offers a new attempt at addressing the ‘problem of induction’ by re-conceiving it as a cluster of interrelated, and yet diversified, questions.