Some people – important people, like Richard Jeffrey or Brian Skyrms – seem to believe that Laplace and de Finetti have solved the problem of induction, assuming nothing more than probabilism. I don't think that's true.
I'll try to explain what the alleged solution is, and why I'm not convinced. I'll pick Skyrms as my adversary, mainly because I've just read Skyrms and Diaconis's Ten Great Ideas about Chance, in which Skyrms presents the alleged solution in a somewhat accessible form.
Some accounts of laws of nature make it mysterious how we can empirically discover that something is a law.
The accounts I have in mind agree that if P is (or expresses) a
law of nature, then P is true, but not conversely: not all truths are laws of nature. Something X distinguishes the laws from
other truths; P is a law of nature iff P is both true and X. The
accounts disagree about what to put in for X.
Many laws are general, and thus face the problem of induction. Limited empirical evidence can never prove that an unlimited generalalization is true. But Bayesian confirmation theory tells us how and why observing evidence can at least raise the generalization's (ideal subjective) probability. The problem is that for any generalization there are infinitely many incompatible alternatives equally confirmed by any finite amount of evidence: whatever confirms "all emeralds are green" also confirms "all emeralds are grue"; for any finite number of points there are infinitely many curves fitting them all, etc. When we do science, we assign low prior probability to gerrymandered laws. We believe that our world obeys regularities that appear simple to us, that are simple to state in our language (including our mathematical language). Let's call those regularities "apparently simple", and the assumption that our world obeys apparently simple regularits "the induction assumption".
Brian Weatherson tells me that Lewis does mention Goodman's 'New Riddle' as
a task for natural properties in "Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne".
Lewis says here that we should not be scared off by "Kripkenstein's
challenge (formerly Goodman's challenge)" to find a distinction between
natural and unnatural extrapolation (p.150 in Papers in Ethics and
Social Philosophy, similar remarks can be found in the introduction to
Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology). So the first suggestion
is very probably right.
(Reading Brian's comments it now seems to me when I argued that natural
properties can't solve the New Riddle I've been confusing it with the Old
Riddle. All the New Riddle requires is an objective distinction between
good and bad extrapolations. That induction based on good extrapolations
might nevertheless yield systematically false predictions ("not work") is the
Old Riddle.)
David Lewis offers a lot of work for natural properties in his semantics,
his theory of mental content, materialism, supervenience, causation, laws
of nature, etc. Strikingly missing in this list (as opposed to the list of
Anthony Quinton, "Properties and Classes") is the solution of Goodman's New
Riddle of Induction. I don't know why Lewis never mentions this. Two
suggestions:
1) He thought it was just too obvious, and he disliked repeating arguments
of other philosophers (none of the items on Quinton's list occurs on
Lewis').