2011-10-02

A five-panel comic. Two children stand by a wooden fence. A dark-haired girl in a pink shirt asks a red-haired boy, 'Hey Bobby, you wanna play Doctor of Philosophy?' He replies, 'Okay.' She says, 'I'll show you mine, a posteriori, if you show me yours, a priori.' Bobby answers, 'Okay, but only if you can show a definite causal link between the two events.' The girl smiles confidently and says, 'That's easy: it's happened that way every time in the past.' Bobby, looking unconvinced, says, '...Okay, fine.' In the final panel Bobby stands alone calling 'Hey! No fair!' as the girl runs away down the sidewalk shouting back, 'Fool! Induction is impossible!' She tricked him using the very assumption (that the past predicts the future) that her parting line denies. Votey: A simply drawn smiling person leans on a large book whose cover reads 'David Hume,' with the caption 'So practical!' — referencing Hume's famous problem of induction.