 Another way to interpret the rise of big data is as a vindication of inductivism in the face of the barrage of philosophical criticism levelled against theory-free reasoning over the centuries. For instance, Jon Williamson (2004: 88) has argued that advances in automation, combined with the emergence of big data, lend plausibility to inductivist philosophy of science. Wolfgang Pietsch agrees with this view and provided a sophisticated framework to understand just what kind of inductive reasoning is instigated by big data and related machine learning methods such as decision trees (Pietsch 2015). Following John Stuart Mill, he calls this approach variational induction and presents it as common to both big data approaches and exploratory experimentation, though the former can handle a much larger number of variables (Pietsch 2015: 913). Pietsch concludes that the problem of theory-ladenness in machine learning can be addressed by determining under which theoretical assumptions variational induction works (2015: 910ff).