Description:
<p>The Lottery Paradox has been thought to provide a reductio argument against probabilistic accounts of inductive inference. As a result, much work in artificial intelligence has concentrated on qualitative methods of inference, including default logics, which are intended to model some varieties of inductive inference. It has recently been shown that the paradox can be generated within qualitative default logics. However, John Pollock's qualitative system of defeasible inference (named OSCAR), does avoid the Lottery Paradox by incorporating a rule designed specifically for that purpose. I shall argue that Pollock's system instead succumbs to a worse disease: it fails to allow for induction at all (a disease sometimes known as "Conjunctivitis').</p>