Читать книгу The Philosopher's Toolkit - Julian Baggini, Julian Baggini - Страница 26

I (Julian Baggini) have a confession to make. Once, while on holiday in Rome, I visited the famous street market, Porta Portese. I came across a man who was taking bets on which of the three cups he had shuffled around was covering a die. I will spare you the details and any attempts to justify my actions on the grounds of mitigating circumstances. Suffice it to say, I took a bet and lost. Having been budgeted so carefully, the cash for that night’s pizza went up in smoke.

My foolishness in this instance is all too evident. But is it right to say my decision to gamble was ‘illogical’? Answering this question requires wrangling with a dimension of logic philosophers call ‘induction’. Unlike deductive inferences, induction involves an inference where the conclusion follows from the premises not with necessity or definitely but only with probability (though even this formulation is problematic, as we’ll see).