- Discriminate (in philosophy)(describing how internal coherence fails to tell us which inductive schemes are valid)
- To distinguish or tell the difference between two things based on some standard or criterion.
- Extrapolation(as a criticism of assuming the universe must have a supernatural cause)
- Drawing a conclusion that goes beyond what the evidence actually supports; making a guess that stretches further than the facts allow.
- Inductive scheme(as what the riddle shows we cannot evaluate using logical consistency alone)
- A systematic method or rule for drawing general conclusions from specific examples and observations.
- Mutually inconsistent(describing how rival extrapolations conflict with one another)
- Two things that cannot both be true at the same time because they contradict each other.
- Nelson Goodman(the philosopher whose theory is being discussed)
- A 20th-century American philosopher who developed theories about how symbols (like words, pictures, and artworks) work and mean things.
- Self-consistent(describing how each extrapolation seems logically sound on its own)
- Logically coherent and free from internal contradictions—all the parts fit together without conflicting.
- The new riddle of induction(the main topic of the statement)
- A famous puzzle that challenges the idea that we can reliably predict the future based on past observations—it shows that the same evidence can support completely opposite conclusions.
- Valid (in logic)(Whether the logical steps actually work)
- When the reasoning in an argument follows the rules of logic correctly, so if the starting points are true, the conclusion must be true.
- induction(Offered as the mechanism behind empirical universality.)
- The empirical method by which observations are generalized into rules; yields only comparative or assumed universality, not strict universality.
- internal coherence(Used by moral skeptics to argue that coherence provides no evidence of correspondence to external moral facts.)
- The property of a set of beliefs being mutually consistent and mutually supporting within the set, without reference to anything outside the set.