Do you want an edit of your paper? :)

And I think philosophy papers tend to rely on definition of terms more than other disciplines, so if you fail to do that or make sense from the beginning, you'll be drowning immediately.

58% may be a bit harsh. On the other hand, 65% would be generous.

Listen to what your evaluator said. Less exposition, simpler sentence structures, and spend more time on each core philosophical concepts needed for the argument.

A well-known intellectual athlete of logical positivism, — intrapersona

Near as i can tell, you did not plagiarize this. You get points for being able to turn a phrase. There are plenty of schools where this and your ability to write sentences alone would get you a B. So the question is, what school, what year, what program, what expectations?

The totality of what science investigates is predicated upon a principle that is based on a causal expectation that tomorrow will be like today and that today will be like yesterday. If one doesn’t rely on the uniformity of nature then one cannot rely on scientific experimentation because if the future does not resemble the past then any sort of asset of truth we may have is subject to change and therefore today’s truth could be tomorrow’s mistake. In this scenario, it would not be possible to know logic or truth. This is the problem that cannot be able to be legitimized or justified empirically. There is also no possibility of a priori proof either since the concept is empirical in nature and not rational. Its central thesis is to provide an account for how events relate to one another objectively and can never be proved by the observation itself — intrapersona

I read this and understand better your grade of 58. Looks good at a distance, but nonsense up close. Maybe this: Science presupposes laws. The business of science is to articulate them, and verify them through experiments.

Your instructor would be doing you a favour by taking your paragraph apart word-by-word, but that's work, and likely you'll have to do it for yourself. You can do it consciously and deliberately; it would be hard but reasonably quick, or, you can do as most students do and just hit every bump in the road for three or four years until you begin to learn what writing is.

Here's a trick: when I had written myself into a corner with no way forward, I'd take a new piece of paper, title it "What am I Trying to Say?" and then scribble (legibly) my best answer to my own question.

And it has to be said: in your paper you adapt a voice that may be called sophomore twit. You're probably smarter than that (and it afflicts people much older that sophomores). Figure out how to edit it out and gone. Best way - or one way at least - is to read more.

I have no idea whether your paper deserved its score, but producing good, clear writing can be difficult. Don't despair -- practice will result in improvement. Your philosophy course, however, is not a composition class.

You probably already have heard of ways you can improve a paper:

It's always important to understand the topic you are going to write on. Not really grasping the topic at hand can send one into the weeds. I don't know what you did or did not understand -- that's just general advice.

outline it before you write it. If you can't outline it, maybe you need more preparation to write. Read more, that sort of thing. (So, do as I say, don't do as I always did--wait until the last minute to write the paper.) It's too late to learn much more knowledge and get the paper written the night before it is due.

Use a minimum of jargon. (not because a given jargon is bad, but because writing in plain language forces you to explain, without the shorthand of jargon. Tim Wood made some good suggestions.
Straight-forward sentences are always a good idea.

If you have a particular idea about David Hume, check out some other sources on Hume (if you can find something handy) to see whether other people say the same kinds of things you are thinking of saying. If you are going to buck the standard view, then you have to write a really good paper; otherwise you'll be shot down.

Reasonable mark and comment in my view.

I agree with Wayfarer, you were certainly marked fairly, your essay has quite a few shortcomings.

"In this essay I will first start by outlining and explaining what problem Scottish philosopher David Hume encountered with respect to inductive inference and how it cannot be rectified. I will then explain what the importance of this problem is and then state a possible solution to the problem and why this solution does not work.

Point Number 1: No "I"s your introduction looks childish and unprofessional. You're also beating around the bush too much and ignoring the audience you're writing for. You're not writing for your grandfather who doesn't know philosophy. Here's an improvement:

"This paper outlines David Hume's problem of induction and investigates its historical relevance. A promissing solution is assessed and found to be inadequate."

That's it. That should be your introduction. See how sexy and professional it is? :D

Next:

Although the earliest testimony of the problem of induction is dated as early as 4th century BC by the sceptical school known as Pyrrhonism (Ainslie & Donald 2003 p. 252) (really? is this true? I don't remember finding the problem of induction outlined in Sextus, perhaps you should rephrase, even though you have a citation there) , it wasn’t until the 18th century that David Hume conceived of it in consolidated form in the work known as “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding” Should be "A Treatise Of Human Nature", which was written before the Enquiry - stuff like this suggests that you don't know that one was written before the other, and you got your knowledge of Hume from Wikipedia .

I would rephrase this entire section as:

"Skeptical doubts with regards to the certainty provided by inductive reasoning existed ever since the Ancient Greek Skeptics, (please note how I avoided saying known as the Pyrrhonists - the person reading this is not a retard, he knows this already, don't waste his time.) the Pyrrhonists. Nevertheless, it was only with Hume that this skepticism manifested in the form of actively doubting the results of scientific enquiry.

When encountering inductive uncertainty, the Pyrrhonists would resort to époche, suspension of judgement, instead of continual doubt (cite Sextus). In other words, logical possibility was not seen as a ground for doubting. A Pyrrhonist would not doubt that the sun would rise tomorrow merely because it was logically possible that it won't. It is only with Réne Descartes and his successors, including David Hume, that what constitutes knowledge was re-evaluated, and hence more global forms of skeptical doubt became possible "

The above paragraph shows that you know how to situate Hume within the skeptical tradition and also how he is positioned and influenced by Descartes, as one of his immediate predecessors. It also shows that you're thinking critically about induction and the problems raised by Hume, and not just parroting what others say.

In an essay, it's okay to acknowledge that so and so said this, but you must engage with that critically.

The rest of your essay should have similar corrections. But you get the idea now hopefully.

You need to adopt a professional and scientific way of writing. Read scientific articles and adopt that style. For example:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0c32/d622a2537a5a064f410ff5f7ddb2905177b3.pdf

And also start thinking of yourself as a genius or expert on the topic. That will help you adopt the right style.



In this work, Hume (1748) elicits the concept of “The Principle of Uniformity of Nature”, which is used to justify inductive reason and scientific research. The Principle of Uniformity of Nature says that there is a direction that nature will continue on uniformly over time. Moreover, induction alone depends upon uniformity because it is what grants us to move from the particular to the general in terms of principles and concepts. However, if induction alone depends upon the uniformity of nature then the uniformity itself is not able to depend upon inductive reasoning. This is the problem Hume uncovers with respect to inductive inference.


The importance of this problem is illustrated in the fact that up until Hume, universal truths relied on particular instances of observations (of which Hume showed cannot logically be proved). This was the case for thousands of years where Europeans used to believe that there were only ever white swans in existence until they first sailed to Western Australia where they encountered black swans (Taleb & Nassim 2007 p. 13 para. 1). This illustrates the fact that however many thousands of times any particular instance occurs, it does not necessitate the possibility of it being otherwise. Knowledge alone has allowed us to put into perspective the sort of justification we might have in deducing universal conclusions from particular instances of our everyday lives. In fact, in Hume’s work he proposes there are two main ways in which we as people can interpret an idea. Firstly, in which one looks for “matters of fact” that depend upon objectivity or experience. Secondly, in which one looks to see whether there is to be found a “relation of ideas”, which is an implicit knowledge such as that found in mathematics or logic. Hume says in his final sentence of the book that if one cannot find either of those two modes of interpretation of ideas then one should “commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”(Hume 1748 p.173).


The totality of what science investigates is predicated upon a principle that is based on a causal expectation that tomorrow will be like today and that today will be like yesterday. If one doesn’t rely on the uniformity of nature then one cannot rely on scientific experimentation because if the future does not resemble the past then any sort of asset of truth we may have is subject to change and therefore today’s truth could be tomorrow’s mistake. In this scenario, it would not be possible to know logic or truth. This is the problem that cannot be able to be legitimized or justified empirically. There is also no possibility of a priori proof either since the concept is empirical in nature and not rational. Its central thesis is to provide an account for how events relate to one another objectively and can never be proved by the observation itself.


A well-known intellectual athlete of logical positivism, A. J. Ayer, gives credence to the notion that our logical uncertainty of induction is owed in great part to Hume (Ayers 1946 p. 37 para. 2). Indeed there is cause to be uncertain, as explained previously. Although, one way in which one could seem to potentially overcome the dilemma Hume encountered is to "adopt a rationalist view, according to which induction can after all be justified on a purely a priori basis" (Bonjour 1998 p.200 para. 2). BonJour (1998) states that “anything known a priori must be necessary, true in all possible worlds, since a priori evidence, being independent of any empirical input from the actual world, could not distinguish one possible world from another.”(p.208 para. 4). Given then that a priori propositions are fundamentally necessary, what follows is that every possible world which share attributes to our world, is a world in which the truth makes it highly probable that the corresponding conclusion is true. Therefore, the notion that the future will resemble the past indicates that such a change would occur by “sheer coincidence or chance”. This clearly indicates that chaos in nature would not be not possible. This is highly unlikely because of the truth of our various inductive premises. This concept is conceived to be “probabilistic” and is not based on any knowledge of pattern and consistency. Due to this it converts the notion in to being a posteriori and assumes that it is entirely able to perceive necessarily probabilistic truth a priori that is not based upon concepts of recurrence, pattern and consistency among others.


With these things considered in totality, the problem of induction seems most likely not to be a problem about the outside world so much as it is with the human minds potentials and limitations. It would be safe to infer that Hume did not doubt an external world existed and that there are causal connections inherent within that world and that we indeed have the capacity to formulate representations of such things in our mind. What I believe Hume did doubt however was that the establishment of such things are impossible to be rationally authenticated and made evident, of which I concur with and have provided reasons for in this essay. This therefore means that rational authentication of this kind is inert in proving truth for the most basic matters of existence." — intrapersona

58 is a harsh grade, but there is indeed room for improvement. As others have said, structure and outline seems to be what is lacking.

Mainly you need to start with a strong thesis statement. Your introduction is a kind of compound thesis that pulls the essay in different overall directions (exploring the problem, showing why it cannot be rectified, and rebutting one attempt to overcome it). Everything should be ordered so that it more or less supports one conclusion; if your conclusion is "Hume's induction problem cannot be overcome" then you need to craft an introduction that introduces what the induction problem is, and a thesis statement that summarily introduces your argument and it's conclusion. Here's what I think would be a more focused introduction with the thesis in bold.

In Hume's work "An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding" (1748), he elicits the concept of “The Principle of Uniformity of Nature”, which is used to justify inductive reason and scientific research. The problem Hume uncovers with respect to inductive inference is that if induction alone depends upon the uniformity of nature then the uniformity itself is not able to depend upon inductive reasoning or be considered scientific. All attempts to overcome it, such as Bonjour's appeal to a priori reason, have failed, and so Hume's problem of induction remains unsolved.

Defining the problem itself is secondary (but essential introductory ground work) to your main point, so you might as well get it out of the way in the introduction. The real form of your argument is to show why attempts to solve it have failed, and so to make your essay more persuasive you really ought to address more than one approach to solving the induction problem (this would also make for a much more satisfying thesis statement): All attempts to overcome it, such as Bonjour's appeal to a priori reason, Popper's insistence that science uses corroboration rather than induction, and Stove's argument from statistical truth, have failed, and so Hume's problem of induction remains unsolved.

Obviously getting into Stove's and Poppers positions are a matter of choice, but to do so would be well in line with supporting the position you have taken. With a more substantiated and specific position, the structure of the essay reveals itself:

para 1: [intro to Hume's problem + Thesis]

Paragraph 2 [Rebutting Bonjour]

Paragraph 3 [Rebutting Popper]

Paragraph 4 [Rebutting Stove]

Paragraph 5 [ restating/summarizing the argument/thesis with benefit of explanations from the body + adding a very brief afterthought if appropriate]

Doing all this in only 1000 words might be a bit hard hard to squeeze in, but it's much better to force concise writing and fit more substance in rather than to spend time giving a history and honorable mentions of the ideas and people involved (unless it's really relevant or important to your point).