Professor Ayer writes as well as ever but, by his own high standards, this book is rather slight and slipshod. The first, main and title essay is less than ninety pages. In so short a span one would not expect justice to be done to this vast topic, and it is not. Twenty pages more are spent in discussing and rejecting Harrod's attempted refutation, in his Foundations of Inductive Logic (1956), of Hume's sceptical arguments on induction. The last thirty go on a discussion of conditionals, especially of the nontruth-functional kind usually called " subjunctive " or " counterfactual ", which are involved in characterizing the generalizations that sustain inductive inference.The topic of the second essay is slight, to my mind. Harrod's argument never was more than specious ; it does not call for such attention as Ayer gives it, especially in the light of what Ayer loaves out of his first essay. The last essay is good, clear and subtle, but neither very original, nor conclusive, nor well integrated with the rest of the book. Now Ayer does not claim these qualities for it but, like the Harrod piece, it is not just there " to bring this book up to a respectable size ", as Ayer engagingly puts it in the preface. It is also supposed to bear, and clearly does bear, on the theme of the first essay ; what is not clear in detail is how it does so. Ayer admits it leaves gaps ; another draft of the whole book might have plugged a number of them to our greater profit.
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