全文30ページ（本文のみ）ですが、一日10ページ位ずつ読むことを進めます。テーマも「気候変動」です。ちょっと古い(2004)ですが、一読の価値はあると思います。
The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change:How Do We Know We're Not Wrong?
[Naomi Oreskes]
pp.16-7(pp.80-1)
http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/Oreskes2007.pdf
The Inductive and Deductive Models of Science
The most widely cited models for understanding scientific reasoning are induction and deduction. Induction is the process of generalizing from specific examples. If I see 100 swans and
they are all white, I might conclude that all swans are white. If I saw 1,000 white swans or 10,000, I would surely think that all swans were white, yet a black one might still be lurking somewhere. As David Hume famously put it, even though the sun has risen thousands of times before, we have no way to prove that it will rise again tomorrow.
Nevertheless, common sense tells us that the sun is extremely likely to rise again tomorrow, even if we can’t logically prove that it’s so. Common sense similarly tells us that if we had seen ten thousand white swans, then our conclusion that all swans were white would be more robust than if we had seen only ten. Other things being equal, the more we know about a subject, and the longer we have studied it, the more likely our conclusions about it are to be true.
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