Raven paradox

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Raven paradox, also known as Hempel's paradox or Hempel's ravens is a paradox proposed by the German logician Carl Gustav Hempel in the 1940s to illustrate a problem where inductive logic violates intuition. It reveals the fundamental problem of induction.Hempel himself accepted the paradoxical conclusion, arguing that the reason the result appears paradoxical is because we possess prior information without which the observation of a non-black non-raven would indeed provide evidence that all ravens are black.He illustrates this with the example of the generalization "All sodium salts burn yellow", and asks us to consider the observation which occurs when somebody holds a piece of pure ice in a colorless flame which does not turn yellow.