Abstract

This chapter describes the historical debts to Hume's argument for scepticism. It shows the great importance of what has historically been learnt from Hume's argument. The 20th-century inductive fallibilism is first introduced. It then considers the 20th-century theory of logical probability. Inductive fallibilism is so far from being a truth which everyone knows, that it is a truth which, at the ‘organic’ level, _no one_ knows. Deductivism is _not_ an idiosyncratic high re-definition of ‘reasonable inference’. It is a logico-philosophical thesis; and one of long, wide, and deep currency, at least among philosophers; which is still the unstated assumption behind much assessment of the conclusiveness of inferences, both by philosophers and by others; and which to this day has been expressly denied by almost no philosopher.