Our backyard had been free of black cats for as long as we've lived in this house, well over 400 days, except that over the last two nights, a black cat has visited our yard, meowing at the doors and windows. It's reasonable to think that it will visit again tonight. Yet 99.5% of evenings have been free of black cats. So how can it be inductively reasonable to think a black cat will visit tonight?
Presumably, it is because the data from the last two days is more relevant than the data from the earlier days, even though there are two orders of magnitude more black-cat-free days. But why is that data more relevant?
Granted, yesterday and the day before are more temporally similar to today than the other days. But why should temporal similarity override other kinds of similarity? No doubt there are many features (say, temperature, lunar phase, etc.) in respect of which today is more like some other day in the past 400 than like yesterday or the day before—after all, the earlier 398 days have a wide diversity of properties. But temporal similarity seems particularly important.
Maybe it is because we expect clumping, both in time and in space. Two black-cat evenings suggest the beginning of a clump.
I am curious: Is our expectation of clumping a priori justified or only a posteriori? Clumping seems to be a kind of
continuity. Is an expectation of continuity a priori justified or only a posteriori?
