The paper presents a comprehensive solution to the new riddle of induction. Gruesome induction is blocked because “grue” is not independent of our sampling and observation methods. Before presenting my theory, I critically survey previous versions of what I call the “independence strategy”, tracing the strategy to three different papers from the 1970s by (respectively) Wilkerson, Moreland, and Jackson. Next I critically examine recent approaches by Okasha, Godfrey-Smith, Schramm, and Freitag. All of these approaches have their virtues, but none of (...) them rules out every problem case. Nor do any of them alone explain exactly what goes wrong in all types of gruesome reasoning. My account aims to do both. Learning lessons from my criticisms of previous theories, I argue that there are several crucial types of independence. All of them are needed to rule out every problem case. I close by suggesting that the independence solution can also be adopted by proponents of other approaches—Bayesians, fans of natural kinds, and pragmatists. (shrink)

In a recent paper on Goodman's paradox, I have argued that ‘grue’ is unprojectible because the grue-evidence is doxastically dependent on the evidence that the samples are examined before t. Christopher Dorst replies that doxastic dependence is unable to yield a language-independent asymmetry with respect to ‘green’ and ‘grue’ and hence cannot resolve Goodman's paradox. In this response I hope to show that Dorst's considerations are flawed: his argument for the language-relativity of doxastic dependence is inconclusive at best—even if his (...) construal of doxastic dependence were correct. It is incorrect, however: Dorst mistakes counterfactual dependence of beliefs for belief in counterfactual dependence. I will also argue that doxastic dependence properly understood is not threatened by any of his objections. (shrink)

Freitag (2015) and Schramm (2014) have proposed different, although converging, solutions of Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction. Answering their proposals, Dorst (2016 and 2018) has used the fictitious character of a ‘grue-speaker’ as his principal device for criticizing counterfactual-based treatments of the Riddle. In this paper, I argue that Dorst’s arguments fail: On the observation of no other than green emeralds, the ‘grue-speaker’ cannot use the symmetry between the ‘green’- and ‘grue’-languages for claiming ‘grue’- instead of ‘green’-evidence, and the counterfactuals (...) involved (explicitly by Schramm and implicitly by Freitag) remain unaffected by Dorst’s proposal for how to evaluate them. (shrink)