Abstract

Harman and Kulkarni provide a rigorous and informative discussion of reliable reasoning, drawing philosophical conclusions from the elegant formal results of statistical learning theory. They have presented a strong case that statistical learning theory is highly relevant to issues in philosophy and psychology concerning inductive inferences. Although I agree with their general thrust, I want to take issue with some of the philosophical and psychological conclusions they reach. I will first discuss the general problem of assessing norms and propose a metanormative decision procedure that can then be applied to the assessment of inductive methods. In particular, I will apply it to the assessment of the method of inference that Harman and Kulkarni call transduction.