Imagine you notice that every time you drop your pencil, it falls to the ground. You’ve seen it happen a lot, so you start to believe that it always will. This kind of thinking is called inductive reasoning—it means using past experiences to guess what will happen next.
It works most of the time, and we all use it, especially in science, where we observe things and then make predictions. But here’s the tricky part: just because something has happened the same way before doesn’t guarantee it always will. That’s called the Problem of Induction.
The problem is that we don’t have a solid way to prove that the future will always follow the same rules as the past. We assume something called the uniformity of nature—the idea that the world behaves consistently—but we can’t be 100% sure of that.
Even saying, “Induction has worked before, so it will keep working,” is using induction to defend itself, which is circular reasoning. So while induction helps us make smart guesses, philosophers point out that we can’t fully explain why it should work.
That’s what makes it a problem—one we still talk about today.