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Inductive inferences are soritical

Silva, Matheus
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philosophy
This paper provides an inductive interpretation of the sorites paradox. It is argued that the sorites paradox is an inductive meta-meta-inference that future modus ponens applications in a soritical series will be sound. The root of the paradox lies in the fact that inductive inferences rely on evidence and epistemic norms that are insensitive to incremental differences, since they are low probability events. This prevents an epistemicist solution given that cut-off points are incremental differences. This diagnosis is also adapted to epistemic paradoxes such as the lottery paradox, the prediction paradox and the preface paradox. The other main idea of this paper is that the soritical nature of inductive inferences in addition to epistemicism motivates some arguments for inductive skepticism, such as that the evidentiary threshold of inductive inferences is unknowable, which can generate another soritical series that requires another unknowable cut-off point, and so on. The conclusion is that inductive inferences are unjustified.
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