Reply to Perplexed
He did not deny it. He defined it and recognised its limitations.
He rightly asserted that empiricism was inductive, and that induction was really about the probability of reoccurrence through constant conjunction, rather than reliant on an assumption of a priori thinking.
Essay question, right? That is an inductive inference based on (1) having seen many such questions and (2) the fact that it is a very well-written question. However, it could be an original question by a philosophy novice with real insight into the problems cast by Hume. There is no logical means to decide.
Anyway, Hume is regarded as empiricist because he believes that all knowledge begins with experience, and so rejects the notion that there are innate ideas as accepted by philosophical rationalists. However his questioning of the validity of inductive proofs poses a challenge for empiricism, because it means that many of the claims that common sense will take for granted, such as that of ‘the sun rising tomorrow’, have no strictly rational warrant. In fact I think the sceptical implications of Hume’s ideas are reflected by the acceptance of the provisional nature of scientific hypotheses. They’re not regarded as immutable truths, but as working approximations, which however might be subject to revision or even abandonment by the new information. I think for that reason his contribution to modern philosophy has been highly influential.
So his empiricism rests on his taking experience as the starting point for knowledge instead of basing it on innate ideas or a priori thinking.
Yes. Empiricism is about what the world demonstrates and not what principles you hold about it.
If induction is not based on a rational principle then how does one go from a constant conjunction to an assertion of probability?
It's basically repetition; then formulate an hypothesis about what it happening, and see if it sticks. Experimenting to demonstrate the hypothesis' value would be the next step. All inductive knowledge is therefore contingent on replicability and repetition.
This is of key importance. And is something that science is apt to forget at crucial times. Paradigms tend to get established and hard to shift.
Thomas Kuhn's work has been very influential on this question. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thank you. I have heard of that book. I'll add it to my reading list.
The difficulty is that if inductive knowledge is purely contingent on repetition then it isn't really true knowledge because no matter how many times we do the experiment it could always fail the following time. This seems to make our claims of knowledge groundless and any assertions of probability merely cumulative of previous experiences and hence subjective or psychological.
Reply to Perplexed True. But nonetheless the findings of science are reliable, and the deeper science is able to describe what seems to be going on the more reliable are the laws that it devises. Alongside all this reliability is the idea that the laws are only as good as their repeated performance and descriptive power.
Reply to charleton
Undoubtedly it works but as a theory of knowledge it seems to take us into the realm of what I suppose you would call pragmatism or utilitarianism. To say it's true because it works seems unsatisfactory.
Hume new this which is why I wonder if he had a rationalist streak to his epistemology, despite being empirical by method.
That's not true. We also have abduction (leaving aside deduction atm).
Deduction is useful in metaphysics, mathematics and in foreseeing empirical consequences of scientific theories that can be tested in the future. Deduction is also useful because it helps generate coherence and understanding.
Induction means taking a finite sample size, and based on that sample size drawing the probable conclusion that some property that is common to all members of the sample will also be common to all (or most) members of the population. For example, we look at 500 swans, they're all white, so we conclude that most likely all swans are white. Induction allows us to classify things by common features.
Abduction means that we take a list of properties (for example white, long neck, beak, bird) and we associate them with a common name - swan. Then if we see something else which has those properties, we say that it most likely is also a swan. Abduction is the process by which we try to find the best explanation for something.
Induction and abduction don't provide certainty, and deduction cannot tell us something that doesn't already inhere in what we know. So deduction merely clarifies. Induction and especially abduction is what brings new knowledge in.
Deduction is useful when we talk about, for example, God. Because we all have experiences of God and divinity, it's just about clarifying it, and bringing it into focus. *waits for charleton to throw a fit* :D
This seems to make our claims of knowledge groundless and any assertions of probability merely cumulative of previous experiences and hence subjective or psychological.
The universe is inherently probabilistic.. What we observe or measure are approximations. Everything is continuously changing. Knowledge might be viewed as a recognition of patterns that are always subject to change, some changes more likely than others, especially when it comes to the behavior of life forms since life forms are able to make choices and willfully change direction.
Reply to Perplexed
Don't buy into this free will clap trap, as this flies in the face of the massive advances in science of the last 250 years which assert determinism.
Determinism is what makes the universe predictable, and everything we have gaind in understanding has been based on deterministic principles.
Don't buy into this free will clap trap, as this flies in the face of the massive advances in science of the last 250 years which assert determinism.
It is impossible to find evidence for determinism in science, though some still hold out some hope.
Very simply put, the universe is inherently probabilistic. Period. Hume simply observed this. Quantum Mechanics verified it. Actually, Heraclitus noticed this thousands of years ago.
Deleted UserFebruary 03, 2018 at 15:55#1493850 likes
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No doubt building on the lead of the cave man who grunted, "Maybe food will come this way."
No. Just a good observer like many if the ancients whose lives depended upon astute and practical observations. Hume, merely reiterated was is quite obvious to most people who obseve life as it is actually experienced.
unenlightenedFebruary 03, 2018 at 16:00#1493880 likes
Talk of probabilities rather misses Hume's point.
What are the chances that the future will be like the past? Well the future has always been like the past in the past, so if the future is anything like the past, chances are it will be like the past.
One has to assume the conclusion even to reach a probable result.
What are the chances that the future will be like the past?
Zero. Refer to Heraclitus. Something is always different. However, similarities are sufficient for practical purposes in many (most?) circumstances for all practical purposes (FAPP).
One only needs to observe and form a pattern of recognition of what is actually transpiring. There is no leap of imagination to some conclusion.
unenlightenedFebruary 03, 2018 at 16:13#1493960 likes
I like 'like'. I don't prefer 'similar'. Less picking of nits, more thinking about the arguments. The leap is that the pattern continues into the invisible future.
I find it odd that folks are quite happy with 'you can't get an ought from an is', but balk at 'you can't get a will be from a has been.'
Well, in a loose sense, he's making generalizations from observations, and so he is an empiricist.
His arguments regarding causality are sort of different from whether or not he counts as an empiricist. And he builds to them in the first section of A Treatise of Human Nature -- it's not as if he opens with "all inductive inference is invalid!" (or, really, that he concludes that, either). He comes to some queer (to common sense thinking, something he even acknowledges) conclusions, but they are worth reading if you're interested.
Perhaps it's worth noting that inductive arguments are invalid by definition. Validity is defined as the conclusion following from the premises, which would make for a deductive argument.
The leap is that the pattern continues into the invisible future.
It is not a leap. It is brought about by habitual recognition. There are tons of patterns out there, most are of be practical use for practical purposes or are simply not recognized. Perceiving, understanding, and utilizing, and creating new habitual patterns in nature is fundamental because that is precisely what humans (intelligence) do. It is evolution. Babies begin with the process the first time they are fed.
It is not a leap. It is brought about by habitual recognition.
Indeed, habit, as Hume himself says; but it is a leap that reason cannot justify. One might say, by way of analogy, that passion is the boss, habit is the worker, and reason keeps the accounts.
What are the chances that the future will be like the past? Well the future has always been like the past in the past, so if the future is anything like the past, chances are it will be like the past.
One has to assume the conclusion even to reach a probable result.
So if we had to make a bet, which option would it be wise or rational to bet on? That the future is like the past, or that it will be different? And why?
unenlightenedFebruary 03, 2018 at 19:00#1494330 likes
So if we had to make a bet, which option would it be wise or rational to bet on? That the future is like the past, or that it will be different? And why?
We do have to make a bet, and we do bet that things will go on as before. And it would be unwise to do otherwise. But rationally there is no reason to do so; except that there is nothing else to go by.
We do have to make a bet, and we do bet that things will go on as before. And it would be unwise to do otherwise.
When you say that it would be unwise, don't you really mean that it would be irrational? It would go against our reason? I mean certainly if you saw someone making the opposite bet, you'd say they have lost their mind wouldn't you?
But rationally there is no reason to do so; except that there is nothing else to go by.
I think what you really mean is that there is no necessity that the future will be like the past. Sure, in that way, induction cannot be justified through deduction if that's what you were intending to do. However, you must concede that it is overwhelmingly more likely, given the evidence, that the future will be like the past. We have a lot of data points indicating this trend. There is no necessity that the trend will continue, but we have no reason to doubt that it will. Therefore it is irrational to doubt it in the absence of a reason.
unenlightenedFebruary 03, 2018 at 19:09#1494390 likes
No, I don't have to. You have to provide some evidence or argument that does not assume what it seeks to prove.
So when you have a trend that seems to indicate something, do you bet that the next data point will be different or the same as the trend? You have reason to presume that the next data point will be X (since that's what the trend indicates) and no reason to presume it would be anything else.
unenlightenedFebruary 03, 2018 at 19:24#1494500 likes
Reply to Agustino Yes, I presume the trend will continue. But what was the reason again?
Yes, I presume the trend will continue. But what was the reason again?
Because the trend is already there, and nothing else is there and so you have no reason that could ground your doubt with regards to its continued existence. That's the reason.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 03, 2018 at 19:33#1494550 likes
Perhaps it's worth noting that inductive arguments are invalid by definition.
Every single inductive argument can be presented as a deductive argument without any kind of significant loss.
Here's an example of an inductive argument:
1. All swans we have seen in the past are white.
2. Therefore, every single swan we will see in the future will also be white.
This argument can be presented as a deductive argument in the following manner:
1. All swans we have seen in the past are white.
2. The future mimics the past to the best of its ability.
3. Therefore, every single swan we will see in the future will also be white.
The reverse is also true. You can present any deductive argument as an inductive argument.
Here's the common example of a deductive argument:
1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
Both premises can be presented as an inductive argument. In fact, that's how they are derived. "All men are mortal" simply means that every single man we have observed in the past eventually died. "Socrates is a man" simply means that what we know about Socrates is typically associated with traits that are characteristic of men. The conclusion is reached by joining these two inductive arguments.
Deduction and induction have far more in common than most people are willing to admit.
There are two types of thinking: on is focused on similarities (holism) and the other on differences (reductionism.) I prefer to focus on similarities.
There are two types of thinking: on is focused on similarities (holism) and the other on differences (reductionism.) I prefer to focus on similarities.
Bohm once wrote that creativity is about finding differences within similarities, similarities within differences, and resolving paradoxes that arise.
unenlightenedFebruary 03, 2018 at 19:40#1494600 likes
Reply to Agustino Tell it to the bitcoin investors, I'm sure they'll agree. Here's a reason to ground doubt: things change, trends reverse. But I am consenting to play your game here, as if trends changing will continue. So even your best reason, which amounts to throwing up your hands and saying 'what else?' is double-edged to say the least.
Don't buy into this free will clap trap, as this flies in the face of the massive advances in science of the last 250 years which assert determinism.
I have to take issue with this statement. The ‘massive advances of science’ have been made in respect of objective and physical discoveries about many subjects, which might or might not have any bearing whatsoever on the nature of the will, and whether it’s free or not.
There is also the case that prior to the 1920’s, there was a widespread belief in physical determinism - that everything was literally the outcome of the ‘collocation of atoms’ (Bertrand Russell’s term). But that was torpedoed by the discovery of the uncertainty principle and the indeterminate nature of sub-atomic matter. You can’t make an obvious connection to the question of ‘free will’ but the general point remains, that the notion of complete physical determinism has been torpedoed.
Suffice to say, a lot of the rhetoric about science having undermined free will, is based, I believe, in the fact that the freedom is actually scary, something we can’t handle. Maybe the notion that ‘science proves’ that we’re not free is an apparently-respectable way of avoiding what Erich Fromm described as the fear of freedom.
So his empiricism rests on his taking experience as the starting point for knowledge instead of basing it on innate ideas or a priori thinking.
Of key importance is Kant’s reaction to Hume’s scepticism. That is very lengthy topic and I won’t try to summarise it. But ask yourself this question: is rational ability or language ‘learned by experience’? I think the answer is obviously ‘a bit of both’. Children learn language, but human children learn it very easily, like no other species. That is the subject of Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’ and the like. Another big topic. But I think it is important to get some understanding of Kant’s criticism of Hume (e.g. here.)
The difficulty is that if inductive knowledge is purely contingent on repetition then it isn't really true knowledge because no matter how many times we do the experiment it could always fail the following time.
Of course considered merely logically it could always fail the next time. But could it really? Not if invariablility is really established in nature. Does our experience seem to indicate that it is? The answer would seem to be that all of human experience points to the reality of established invariances. Is it rational to believe there are established invariances if all our experience indicates that there are?
Here's a reason to ground doubt: things change, trends reverse.
That's a (logical) possibility, but you must have reasons to think it actually will reverse (not merely as a possibility) in order to rationally make that bet.
But I am consenting to play your game here, as if trends changing will continue. So even your best reason, which amounts to throwing up your hands and saying 'what else?' is double-edged to say the least.
No, logical possibility isn't sufficient to ground a doubt. In the case of the Bitcoin trend, we had actual reasons to doubt it would continue: price cannot keep going up infinitely, we've seen bubbles in the past, price grew exponentially in the absence of any solid reason and this was associated with bubbles before, etc. MANY reasons.
Why is it reasonably probable that the past predicts the future? Because the constraints or deep structures that generate patterns tend to have been built up bit by bit over a long history. For that historic weight of constraints to change, it seems probable that it would therefore have to be picked apart slowly in the same fashion - bit by bit.
But also, we know from empirical observation of nature, and now logical models of that nature, that catastrophic collapse can occur. What took a long time to build up, can also collapse in sudden and predictably unpredictable fashion.
So the world is actually far more interesting than Humean and Newtonian notions of determinism and probability could know.
We have new models of probability - non-linear and chaotic ones - that change the good old Humean debate beyond recognition anyway ... even after we have abandoned rigid deduction in favour of Bayesian induction as an epistemic foundation.
This is just a failure of the atomistic paradigm, it does not refute the simple fact that effects are the result of causes.
So you have a simple deterministic account of the quantum eraser experiments that doesn’t involve retrocausality or some kind of outlandish multiverse metaphysics?
Something has to give when faced with the evidence of quantum contextuality as a causal thing.
Reply to charleton The abrogation of causality in quantum mechanics was what caused Einstein to exclaim that he couldn't accept that 'God plays dice'. (Bohr repiled, 'stop telling God how to do things.')
"Why is it reasonably probable that the past predicts the future?" That's the wrong question. The right question is "What grounds do you have to think that the future will be different?"
What ground do you have for supposing that the sun will not rise tomorrow?
What ground do you have for supposing that the sun will not rise tomorrow?
Nothing and we have no grounds for expecting things to happen for no reason, particularly when it comes to large, complex objects like the sun.
It's like asking how do we know the sun won't turn into a giant teapot tomorrow. We can't prove that it won't deductively, but we have nothing that says stars have a means of turning into teapots.
Indeed, habit, as Hume himself says; but it is a leap that reason cannot justify.
Why is reason defined as deductive logic? Seems that animals and humans rely heavily on inductive reasoning. Deductive is something we came up with rather recently, but our ancestors didn't use it to survive, communicate and utilize tools, etc.
Maybe you can bring that up on the unperceived things not existing thread? OP is looking for a reason not to doubt. He mentions the idealist Stace who argued that there is no reason for thinking that unperceived objects and events exist.
Why is reason defined as deductive logic? Seems that animals and humans rely heavily on inductive reasoning. Deductive is something we came up with rather recently, but our ancestors didn't use it to survive, communicate and utilize tools, etc.
You can also say we came up with both inductive and deductive reasoning just recently. You think that induction isn't about "deducing" what's going to happen in the future? You think it's not about eliminating alternative possibilities in favor of a single possibility (or a narrow set of possibilities)? I was never much of a fan of this inductive/deductive division. I mean, sure, I understand the differences between the two, but I think that these differences are rather insignificant. The same with the claim that thinking (or reasoning) is necessarily a conscious activity. It's like saying that apples are necessarily conscious . . . it's sort of hilarious. Are apples necessarily conscious? Not really. There are apples out there whether we are aware of them or not. We don't make a distinction between "conscious apples" and "unconscious apples" based on whether we are aware of them or not.
Reply to Banno Different question. I was emphasising what makes it reasonable to believe in causal continuity. You are now asking the empirical question of where is the counterfactual that would cause you to doubt that continuity in some particular circumstance.
You also seem to miss the important point. We do know that catastrophes can befall even sunrises. Supernovas are just one such possibility.
And yet, even then, we now have mathematical-strength accounts that make predictions even about such unpredictability.
Apo must be having a bad day. It usually take three or four posts to goad him into an ad hom.
Bad day? Every laugh at your expense must surely be an entry in the credit column of the great ledger of life. And now you admit that your aim is to goad. Checkmate, mate.
So, the necessary Banalities having been completed, let’s get back to you explaining to me how empirical correspondence operates in the absence of conceptual coherence.
You prefer the one, and hope to avoid mentioning the other. But sadly, even induction relies on a coherent metaphysics back in the real world of pragmatic knowledge.
And I just demonstrated that fact in mentioning the need to incorporate catastrophe theory into any full view of the probabilistic basis of reasonable inference. These days (well, for these past 40 years at least), you would need a positive reason to believe your phenomena actually inhabit a stable linear realm of constraints. You would need to know there was no parameter slowly creeping into critical territory.
So how do you work that discovery into your own personal worldview I wonder? (Well not really, as it’s obvious.)
What ground do you have for supposing that the sun will not rise tomorrow?
Well, has been said already, that’s not really the point. There is no logical reason why the Earth might not be annihalated by some cosmic catastrophe. And recall that Hume is conducting an enquiry into the ‘nature of human understanding’; he’s not really concerned with the niceties of common-sense realism.
But in thinking about the OP, I came across ‘Hume’s fork’ once again, and now understand the point. Everything, says Hume, falls into the category of either a priori - things that tautologically true - or experiential - things we know from experience. These, Hume holds, are exhaustive and exclusive - every kind of true statement is one of the two. So the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, not being an analytical statement, such as 2-2=0, but being based on experience and observation, can only be an inductive prediction based on experience.
But, said Kant, what of the synthetic a priori? Those are cases where there a logical or so-called tautological argument leads to a conclusion which is not necessarily stated in the premises. Such cases have proven especially abundant in mathematical physics, where some whole class of phenomena has been predicted purely as a result of mathematical reasoning. So such discoveries have the force of logical necessity, but nevertheless rely on observation to validate.
Why is reason defined as deductive logic? Seems that animals and humans rely heavily on inductive reasoning. Deductive is something we came up with rather recently, but our ancestors didn't use it to survive, communicate and utilize tools, etc.
So you want to define reason as 'how we think'? That seems a bit broad.
Take Hume's other critique, of moral reasoning, summarised as 'you can't get an ought from an is'. And take medicine as an example. Science says that these pills have these effects, and medicine makes use of the facts. But it also has an unscientific attitude, that pain and death are bad things to be avoided if possible, and these are not facts, but -shall we say? - passions. Now Hume is by no means suggesting that we should not have these passions; he is simply saying that the reasoning of science cannot justify them, but rather is employed in their service.
Similarly, he points out that the reasoning of science, that there is this history of evidence and experience that can be described and structured according to mathematical formulae says nothing, and can say nothing about the future, because there can be no evidence of the future, it is all of the past.
And again, he is not in the least suggesting that we should not imagine the future and expect it to be like the past; he simply points out that it is not any form of reasoning that gets us there, but the equivalent of passion - habit. We want to predict the future, so we want it to be related to the past, which is what we already know of.
It's all very annoying for philosophers, because they want reason to be king, and it isn't, but a mere servant of those animal passions that the enlightened man imagines himself as having transcended.
the reasoning of science cannot justify them [passions]...
What does 'justify' mean to you in this context? I take it to mean 'demonstrate the necessity of', which is something science is entirely capable of doing. It is perfectly feasible that neuroscience, evolutionary biology, social psychology etc can identify passions which must 'necessarily' exist by virtue of our being biological entities.
Does 'justify' mean something different to you?
unenlightenedFebruary 04, 2018 at 16:00#1497510 likes
Yes it does. One might say that anti-natalism is an evolutionary dead end, but this does not entail that it is wrong. Evolution has an explanation for both selfishness and altruism, but it does not vote for either. As Dawkins says, genes are not selfish, they don't have selves, they don't have wants.
Sorry I can't make out from that what 'justify' means to you, would you mind spelling it out a bit more clearly?
unenlightenedFebruary 04, 2018 at 17:30#1497670 likes
A claim is justified by evidence of its truth or valid argument from accepted premises. I don't understand your difficulty. A bio-evolutionary/neurological explanation of belief in God is a very different thing from a justification of belief in God.
Right, so if neuroscience demonstrated it to be be 'true' that certain passions were, by biological necessity, present in the brain, how would that not be a justification?
P1. Passion x is common to all humans, it is physically impossible to be a human without also having passion x.
P2. I am a human.
C1. From p1 and p2 - I am justified in having passion x.
A bio-evolutionary/neurological explanation of belief in God is a very different thing from a justification of belief in God.
This is not analogous. The existence of God has a separate truth value to a belief in the existence of God. We cannot say with certainty that there is a God, but we can say with certainty that someone has a belief in God. Hume was never positing that a passion could have a truth value, nor that anyone ever said it could. We're talking about justifying it's presence. Otherwise the statement becomes meaningless, if we're asking that the actual property of the passion is justified, then to say that science cannot justify it is a straw man, nothing can justify the properties of an entity in that way. A passion is not a proposition, it is a state.
unenlightenedFebruary 04, 2018 at 18:34#1497790 likes
Right, so if neuroscience demonstrated it to be be 'true' that certain passions were, by biological necessity, present in the brain, how would that not be a justification?
One such passion might be a preference for one's own children's welfare over other peoples'. Thus of biological necessity, my kids are preferable to yours. and of biological necessity, you take the opposite view. Neither view is justified, and since they are mutually contradictory both of them cannot be justified on pain of logical explosion.
You're confusing 'justified' with 'true'. It is justified that I believe it is 6:40pm, if you look at your (unbeknownst to you) broken clock, it is justified that you believe it to be 6:00. We cannot both be right, but we both hold justified beliefs.
unenlightenedFebruary 04, 2018 at 18:43#1497840 likes
As Dawkins says, genes are not selfish, they don't have selves, they don't have wants.
don't listen to Dawkins - he's a bellend - listen to EO Wilson: 'the middle level of contention between the products of the two levels of evolution (Individual selection and group social extremes) that constantly move back and forth and are the creative core of the human species; that's where creativity comes from'
You are misusing the word 'justify'. Justifying a proposition does not require that no other conflicting proposition can possibly be true, it requires that you have good reason to believe the proposition.
Notwithstanding this, your example is false anyway. Only the view that child x's welfare is paramount and child y's welfare is paramount are mutually incompatible, but this is not the form our passion takes. If I had three children x,y, and z, and in the night child z was replaced with an identical looking copy, my passion would not be centred on the real child z, it would be centred on the new one. My passion does not externally refer and so incompatibility in the real world is not relevant to is truth value. My passion is that "the welfare of one's children (whoever I believe them to be) is paramount".
Furthermore, you are asking of the passions a level of reason that is not being asked of propositions about empirical truths. To say I have a passion for food, is a truth statement if the brain can be shown to be in a state common to all other humans who desire food. In the same way as 'the sky is blue' can be said to be true if all other users of the terms 'sky' and 'blue' agree. We do not ask that the proposition is justified by proving that the sky 'ought' to be blue, that it has some final cause for being blue. It is sufficient that it matches the definition of 'blue'.
SophistiCatFebruary 05, 2018 at 08:41#1499520 likes
Reply to Pseudonym You are equating justification with a reductive explanation. Sometimes that is the case, but not always, and clearly not in the case of "passions." I am sorry, but it is patently silly to say that hunger is "justified" by some reductive neurophysiological account. Justification - as you yourself said - is reason to believe. I don't require to know any facts other than my feeling of hunger in order to justifiably believe that I am hungry. If someone pointed out some other facts that suggest a different conclusion - e.g. that I had a meal less than an hour ago - those other facts wouldn't trump my justification. And if someone did a CAT scan or whatever and concluded that my "brain can be shown to be in a state common to all other humans who desire food," that would be entirely superfluous to the justification that I already have. If I feel hungry then I am hungry. Passions are self-justifying.
Justification - as you yourself said - is reason to believe.
Reductive explanation is a reason to believe. It is the standard reason we believe in everything else, that we have a reductive explanation for its being the case.
The comment I was disputing was "he is simply saying that the reasoning of science cannot justify them, [the passions]".
My argument was, in what way can the reasoning of science "justify" anything other than by explaining the causal chain of its existence back a few steps?
I have a passion 'hunger', science can explain exactly what that passion is in physical terms (brain states), why it is there causally (DNA - protein synthesis - neurons development - interaction with the environment), and also why it is there teleologically (evolutionary function of hunger). What additional thing can science provide with regards to the proposition "the sky is blue" that is missing from what science can tell us about passions such as to warrant the distinction made?
A claim is justified by evidence of its truth or valid argument from accepted premises.
Right. So the claim that the future is like the past is justified by evidence, not by a valid argument from accepted premises. It forms one of those first-principles that are not derived from any more general principles.
All that Hume showed was that there can be no non-question begging argument to justify that the future is like the past. He did not show that we lack evidence that the future is likely to be like the past or that it is irrational to believe that the future will be like the past. It clearly is not irrational.
Hume is struggling because he doesn't get it that first-principles are also derived through reason. His conception of reason is too narrow, and moved away from Plato's conception of reason, where even the passions had reasons of their own.
unenlightenedFebruary 05, 2018 at 10:13#1499890 likes
Reply to unenlightened But by the way, having evidence that the future is likely to be similar to the present neither requires knowledge of the future nor the necessity that the future really is like the past. So the sun could simply pop out of existence tomorrow, but even if that were to happen, it wouldn't justify believing it today.
unenlightenedFebruary 05, 2018 at 10:35#1499950 likes
Reply to Agustino No knowledge and no immediate experience means no evidence. So one is reduced to the inductive argument which is circular:-
[quote=me]What are the chances that the future will be like the past? Well the future has always been like the past in the past, so if the future is anything like the past, chances are it will be like the past.[/quote]
No knowledge and no immediate experience means no evidence. So one is reduced to the inductive argument which is circular:-
The evidence is my past experience. My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future is like the past. So in such particular cases, I seem to be justified in believing this - and by this, I simply mean that it would be irrational to believe the opposite. Do you mean to suggest that it is not irrational to believe the opposite? Sure, the laws of nature could change - it is logically possible. But there's no reason to believe it.
I would agree with Hume that we cannot justify the blanket, almost metaphysical statement "the future is like the past" - because no, it's not. In many regards it is different - but in some regards it is the same. We seem to be able to rationally decide which are which.
Sure, the laws of nature could change - it is logically possible. But there's no reason to believe it.
How could you possibly know this? Can you enumerate specifically the Laws you are talking about? Can you show they describe the future is like the past? Can you show even one so-called Law that hasn't changed since the beginning of time?
Can you show even one so-called Law that hasn't changed since the beginning of time?
I'm not sure if time had a beginning. No, I can't show that they haven't changed "since the beginning of time", but I can show, for example, that Newton's law of gravity has remained the same ever since the last 200 years at the very least.
Newton's "Law" it's a simple measurement within a very narrow scope over an extremely small amount of time that is an approximation.
Laws of Nature belongs in the fiction shelf, but it is still bandied about because materialism needs it. It's the go-to phrase for materialists as they cannot plea to a God or invoke the mind. As a consequence they just throw around this totally meaningless phrase hoping that no one will notice there is nothing there.
I'm not interested to discuss the metaphysics of it, my interest is that in practical terms, the laws have remained the same.
Well, the Law may stay the same but had shown to no longer be anything except an approximation and superceded by GTR. So apparently Laws are any mathematical equations that have practical application. Fine. It's open season on Laws even if outmoded.
I suppose you have a Law that predicts what time I get up every morning?
Well, the Law may stay the same but had shown to no longer be anything except an approximation and superceded by GTR. So apparently Laws are any mathematical equations that have practical application. Fine. It's open season on Laws even if outmoded.
I suppose you have a Law that predicts what time I get up every morning?
No, I don't, but if I want to build a house, I will still rely on Newton's equations, GTR or not. That Newton's equations have been superceded by GTR is of no relevance to their continued application on Earth. That may be of relevance only metaphysically.
Reply to Agustino Fine. Newton's requisition is a nice little equation, that can be used for certain types of problems for some practical purposes. Far, far, far from the fictional Laws of Nature that have immutably guided the universe since its Genesis.
unenlightenedFebruary 05, 2018 at 19:33#1501490 likes
My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future is like the past.
You're muddling the tenses. "My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future has been like the past." And this says exactly nothing about what will be.
You have to rely on the assumption that the future will be like the past in order for past evidence to be relevant to the future. Which is assuming the conclusion. I don't object to you doing it, I just object to your claim that is is reasoned.
You're muddling the tenses. "My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future has been like the past." And this says exactly nothing about what will be.
Yes, but something is fishy with Hume's argument. When we're dealing with logic, we have to establish what things we know with the greatest certainty and proceed from there. So if you have an argument whose conclusion contradicts a statement that you know to be true, then before accepting the truth of the argument (and rejecting the truth of the statement), you must compare the certainty you have in the premises of the argument, with the certainty you have in the statement that the conclusion contradicts. If the statement is more certain than the argument, then you ought to abandon the argument and look for the mistake you have made.
It is irrational to bet that the laws of nature will not apply tomorrow given how things stand today and in the past. Do you agree with that? That to me seems to be almost 100% true.
If you disagree, then you'd say it's not irrational, so the person suffering of madness who thinks gravity will pop out of existence tomorrow isn't actually being irrational. I find that very unlikely to be true. I find it highly unlikely that you honestly and authentically would stand by the statement that the person who claims gravity will pop out of existence tomorrow isn't being irrational.
So reasoning backwards from here, we either have an argument based on premises for this, or we have direct evidence for it. I think the latter. Therefore I will say that I think Hume is framing the issue in a manner that is not satisfactory. And that is because he is trying to say we need an argument backed by premises for this, whereas I'm saying that this is one of our foundational premises - or first principles - which is backed up by the very practice of living, that we do not derive from any more general principles. So when Hume tries to derive it from more general principles, he fails - as we would expect him to I would add.
unenlightenedFebruary 05, 2018 at 20:50#1501730 likes
I'm saying that this is one of our foundational premises
Yes. We reason from it, but we cannot reason to it. Which is about what Kant in his long-winded way eventually arrives at; one might say that it is part of what we mean by 'the future', that it will follow in an orderly fashion from the present and past, and if it doesn't, then we would have to call it a new world, or an afterlife, or something. But to claim, after having been dragged kicking and screaming over several pages to it, that "we would expect" the result is - extravagant.
one might say that it is part of what we mean by 'the future', that it will follow in an orderly fashion from the present and past, and if it doesn't, then we would have to call it a new world, or an afterlife, or something.
Do you think that this is what Kant says or is this unrelated?
unenlightenedFebruary 05, 2018 at 21:10#1501850 likes
Though isn't it clear that we need some first-principles, which cannot be derived via argumentation, but must be derived rather from experience?
Fuck, do you want to go another round or two[? That the future will be like or unlike the past, that it will be something or nothing, cannot be derived from experience.
Fuck, do you want to go another round or two[? That the future will be like or unlike the past, that it will be something or nothing, cannot be derived from experience.
Ok, let me switch gears then. What the future will be cannot be derived from experience - but can a rational way to behave (and we're always behaving for the future) be derived from experience?
Something has to give when faced with the evidence of quantum contextuality as a causal thing.
We simply cannot expect our models of the universe to be immune from inadequacy and eventual revision. Do we live in a universe of waves or particles? Is the universe digital or analogue? It seems to be neither and both.
We've been here before. Model revision is what makes science what it is. But at every stage of the development of science we have relied on an assumption that we can work out what is going on based on observations of what went before. Uniformitarianism and determinism has continued to sustain investigations, and results.
I do not see anything in QM to change that situation.
After all we cannot exactly predict the fall of a simple dice, yet we can define the parameters with determinism. Were we to have complete knowledge of the dice's rotation, speed, the wind resistance, the reflective properties of the table onto which it falls and so on, we'd be able to tell what the result is, and know the result could never be 7.
It is simply the case that measuring these things tend to change their values. Observations have always played their part in skewing results - ask any anthropologist.
Double slit, double nonsense. Stick to determinism and we'll understand it.
Yeah, because, you know, we haven't been measuring the acceleration of gravity in any thorough manner before that (for example). Maybe I should've said 300-400 years though, I suppose we have enough measurements from around Newton's time.
Reply to Wayfarer When Einstein said "God does not play dice" he was affirming the utter deterministic nature of the universe, and denying any miraculous or antirecessionary god.
Maybe I should've said 300-400 years though, I suppose we have enough measurements from around Newton's time.
That's why I said the above. But whether it's 200, 300 or 400 - same thing really, I mean Trump used to say that people were doing business with sticks and stones hundreds of millions of years ago - so why you gettin' on my case for just 100-200 years?! >:O
Reply to Agustino
1) Newton codified gravity 332 years ago
2) He asserted that the "law" was universal and maintained by the action of God
3) He was wrong on many issues as we now know due to Einstein.
4) Whatever Newton OR Einstein say nature remains unchanged, but the LAWS which are human constructs DO in fact change.
So to get back to the thread point, you were wrong.
1) Newton codified gravity 332 years ago
2) He asserted that the "law" was universal and maintained by the action of God
3) He was wrong on many issues as we now know due to Einstein.
4) Whatever Newton OR Einstein say nature remains unchanged, but the LAWS which are human constructs DO in fact change.
So to get back to the thread point, you were wrong.
No, I wasn't wrong. We still use Newton's equations, and not Einstein's when we build homes. It works.
As for saying that nature remains unchanged - how do you know that? :s I don't address metaphysics here, as I made it clear to Rich, but a priori it is equally possible (if not more possible) that nature changes.
You have to rely on the assumption that the future will be like the past in order for past evidence to be relevant to the future. Which is assuming the conclusion. I don't object to you doing it, I just object to your claim that is is reasoned.
The reasoning might not be purely deductive, but it is scientific reasoning that thus includes a deductive element.
So a full account of the reasoning would go that we start with an abductive step - a guess at a causal mechanism. Then we deduce the observable consequences. Then we tally the inductive confirmation.
As I argued earlier, a belief in induction is justified by a guess at a mechanism - history builds constraints on free possibility. Then from that, we can deduce the observable consequence - the past can be used to predict the future in this fashion. We will see this causal mechanism at work. And then observation - of the success of this inductive approach - will be inductively confirmed (or not).
The Hume/Newton thing arises out of a particular metaphysics - a belief that the world might be deterministic, atomistic and mechanical. But rather paradoxically, that nominalism created some serious realist type problems. It couldn't account for the existence of backdrop dimensions, such as space and time. It couldn't account for how physical events were ruled over by natural laws. It couldn't account for gravity's action at a distance.
The background metaphysics that Hume relied on to motivate an argument was so patently full of nominalist holes that it never was a complete story. Yes, it did speak to a deductive consequence of its axiomatic hypotheses - all the guesses about determinism, atomism, etc. And that part of the belief system could be inductively confirmed in its own terms. But then it also relied deductively on a set of unobservables - like the laws, and space-time, and action at a distance. These "must" exist according to the metaphysical set-up, but they could never be directly measured or shown. So they could not be inductively reasonable as such.
So Hume was making points that seemed appropriate in a particular metaphysical context. They were "reasonable" in his day. But if we are talking about a modern scientific view of reasoning, then introducing the third thing of abduction, or an axiomatic leap of the imagination, makes a big difference. It says knowledge works quite differently from how the traditional conflation of deductive logic and rationality might want to represent it.
The sharp line folk tried to draw between the rational and the empirical was too strong. All reasoning relies on a mix of both. And indeed, the mixture is triadic.
You have forms of induction book-ending the process. Abduction is the generalisation step, the inference to the best explanation. It begins as vague or hazy intuition and snaps into crisply expressed hypothesis.
After that, deduction can kick in. It has something to work on and can do its syntactic, rule-bound, thing. But while the consequences of deductive argument carry the stamp of certitude (valid is valid), it is still a case of garbage in/garbage out. The hypothesis might be wrong, or more likely just part of the story. So nothing is reasonable until it is measured against the world it pretends to model. Induction from the empirically particular back to the abductively general has to close the loop, confirming the initial guess is right (or right enough for all practical purposes).
So "reasonable" should mean reasonable in that full scientific method sense. And induction itself seems reasonable in that light. We can guess at a mechanism - the accumulation of constraints. We can deduce the observable consequences. We can measure the degree to which nature conforms to our model.
And as I say, we then encounter the ways that nature doesn't in fact conform - as in the frequency with which abrupt or catastrophic changes do occur in the world. So at that point, we need to go around the loop again. We realise that we were presuming a linear world. We need to develop a larger model that relaxes that constraint. That leads us towards non-linear models - non-linear models being more generic than linear ones.
But if we are talking about a modern scientific view of reasoning, then introducing the third thing of abduction, or an axiomatic leap of the imagination, makes a big difference. It says knowledge works quite differently from how the traditional conflation of deductive logic and rationality might want to represent it.
I have yet to see the relevance of introducing the third type of reasoning that is abductive (or retroductive) reasoning. It does more to obscure than to clarify the manner in which reasoning functions. Personally, I think you're paying way too much of your attention to a single philosopher that is Charles Sanders Peirce.
There is very little difference between induction, deduction and abduction.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 05, 2018 at 23:29#1502430 likes
My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future is like the past.
— Agustino
You're muddling the tenses. "My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future has been like the past." And this says exactly nothing about what will be.
You have to rely on the assumption that the future will be like the past in order for past evidence to be relevant to the future. Which is assuming the conclusion. I don't object to you doing it, I just object to your claim that is is reasoned.
I agree with you. I think this is the case of not understanding the question. The question is: what causes us to think in a particular manner where "particular manner" in the context of this thread refers to thinking inductively. This is an empirical question. We are asking what variable is correlated with the variable that is manner of thinking. Or if you don't want to think in terms of "manner of thinking" we can switch to thinking in terms of the belief that the future will be similar to the past. Our manner of thinking, that of induction, is based on that belief. So the question now becomes what variable is correlated with the variable that is "the future will be related to the past in manner X". There may or may not be such a variable. We're thus asking 1) is there such a variable, and 2) if there is such a variable, what is it? Then there is the infinite regress problem; of if you don't like to call it a "problem" you can call it something like the fact (or merely the possibility) that the past is infinite. If the past is infinite that means there are no "first causes". Instead, it is possible that every effect has a cause which has a cause which has a cause and so on. So explanations can only describe a fraction of a process. We go back only a number of steps back into the past. How many steps? As many as we need for our purposes.
Who wants to answer the question of the evolution of reasoning in humans? I am personally not so interested. But if you asked me to give you my best guess, this would be it: originally, organisms chose their beliefs at random. So some organisms chose to believe the future will be similar to the past and others didn't, others chose something else. Through time, those that chose to believe that the future will be similar to the past continued to exist -- for one reason or another, again, they might have survived for no reason at all but my guess would be that there were reasons for their survival and that these reasons were tied to their choice to believe that the future mimics the past -- and those that didn't, they simply disappeared. According to this story, the original choice is made at random (i.e. it's an arbitrary or an irrational choice) and the subsequent persistence to believe what they decided to believe (i.e. the unwillingness to revise the original decision) is due to the lack of survival pressure to do so. Of course, this is not necessarily true, but it's what I am inclined to think -- more or less. So basically, my explanation is an evolutionary explanation.
I have yet to see the relevance of introducing the third type of reasoning that is abductive (or retroductive) reasoning.
The relevance is that it introduces a third and missing step in reasoning as a holistic process. And it is interesting in that so far it is the least formalisable. It would be really important if we could add a formal model - a potential algorithmic approach - to our arsenal of intellectual tools.
The unarguable point is that humans are remarkably good at guessing right answers if we took a strictly random search approach to creative insight.
How do we form our intuitions in the first place? It can't just be that we try every possible key to unlock the door. Peirce made mathematical arguments about why a random search couldn't be executed in the lifetime of the cosmos. And the same arguments are made today about NP hard solutions.
Folk like Roger Penrose have really gone to town on the issue, saying it proves to them that conciousness must be a non-computational quantum process. So it wasn't just Peirce. This is an issue that is central to a lot of metaphysical positions, as well as being of great practical interest in human psychology and artificial intelligence.
Peirce actually was leaning towards a pretty mystical answer on the "how" of abduction. He talked of Galileo's il lume naturale. He wanted to use the existence of inspired guessing as a proof of the divine. And so - in that regard - I am hardly peddling the Peircean line. Although that then depends on how you interpret what Peirce actually wrote.
Anyway, my own naturalistic view is that human minds - being evolved to understand worlds - are good at unbreaking broken symmetries. We can inductively generalise and so leap to an understanding of what the unbroken generality must have looked like before it became broken in the particular way it presents itself to us.
This is a Gestalt or Holistic deal. The whole brain is set up to see figure in terms of ground. The figure breaks the symmetry of a ground. And we can then turn our attention to the nature of the ground that had that general potential to be broken.
So the search isn't a random stumble that would take forever. Awareness is already developed in a fashion that represents a symmetry-breaking. It is already broken into figure and ground. Reversing that is just a case of relaxing the mind in a certain fashion to allow the backdrop to be seen in that light. It is a short leap - like seeing the negative space in a reversible Gestalt image of vase and two faces - rather than a blind computational search through every alternative.
I guess it all depends what you think is a central question of epistemology. Is it how can we hope to have certain knowledge? Or is it how is it that we can reason in optimal fashion?
The two were connected for a while - particularly where Newtonian science finally cashed out the deterministic simplicities of Ancient Greek atomism. Determinism, deduction and computation all go together as neat metaphysical package that appears to promise absolute certainty - something quite miraculous to humans more accustomed to thinking of the world as an arbitrary and uncertain place.
But we are beyond that now. The other side of the story is again more interesting.
Yesterday I had a full bottle of red. Now it is only half full.
Erm, the story is that the future is like the past in that its total entropy has increased by much the same amount yet again.
The basic constraints in play are the physics of thermodynamics. And Hume/Newton were talking about the physics in play. It was just that that physics was the reversible story of inertial mechanics, not the irreversible story of the Cosmos as a dissipative structure.
So the surprise - the disproof of an inductive metaphysics - would be if your pissed-away bottle of red magically reconstituted again itself each night, like a Magic Pudding.
So yesterday, the slope was downhill. And tomorrow, the slope will still be downhill. That is the inductive claim here.
Everything, says Hume, falls into the category of either a priori - things that tautologically true - or experiential - things we know from experience.
Quine's Two Dogmas has great relevance here. Partly in dismissing the analytic/synthetic distinction, but mostly in showing that reductionism fails. Knowing things from experience presupposes knowing a stack of other stuff. Some form of holism must apply, such that one uses the whole language, or none at all.
Or if you prefer, to use a language is to participate in a way of living.
Now deduction makes sense. It sets out the wider grammar, by telling us that when we say one thing, we are also saying other things by implication.
Induction is simply invalid. No more than wishful thinking.
I put the half avocado in the fridge with the intent of keeping it until tomorrow.
I keep chickens because they provide eggs for me each day. Provided I keep them fed and happy.
The bread did not disappear from the cupboard.
Now if the avocado had not been in the fridge, or the chickens had not laid a couple of eggs or the bread had disappeared, I would have had cause to ponder. Sometimes these things do happen, and I find that wife ate the avocado, or that the crow has stolen the eggs, or that I misremembered buying the loaf of bread.
I don't lie awake at night worrying that the fridge will turn into a frog and hop away with my avocado.
So I think Hume had it pretty well right, in describing our acceptance of continuity as a habit. It's not something that requires justification. It's not as if, were we unable to find such a justification, we would cease to plan our mealtimes.
More than that, there is something quite odd in asking for a justification here. It's as if the questioner had missed something very central to how things happen. Rather the doubt here is absurd.
Yesterday I had a full bottle of red. Now it is only half full.
Supposing that the future is like the past requires quite a selective view.
There is repetition (habits) that are useful and there is novelty.
Humans wake up after they sleep.
Each person wakes up at approximately the same time but sometimes much different.
Most have a breakfast.
From these observations, one can begin to understand human nature.
Deduction is useless in terms of gaining further understanding, since it necessarily only restarted what is know based upon known observations. I've never witnessed any deductive argument that actually added anything to understanding since all of them rely on inductive proportions that can and will be disputed.
Deduction is useless in terms of gaining further understanding, since it necessarily only restarted what is know based upon known observations. I've never witnessed any deductive argument that actually added anything to understanding since all of them rely on inductive proportions that can and will be disputed.
It's an almost correct point. Sometimes they are helpful in working out what can and can't be said. But one only has to look at the interminable arguments for the existence of god to see their limitations.
Most tellingly, sometimes deduction shows up our inconsistencies.
But I take it we agree that it is habit that underpins our acceptance that some things will be the same tomorrow. It is the exceptions to this that require explanation. If I had found a full bottle of claret this morning, I would have cause for puzzlement.
But I take it we agree that it is habit that underpins our acceptance that some things will be the same tomorrow. It is the exceptions to this that require explanation. If I had found a full bottle of claret this morning, I would have cause for puzzlement.
I agree. Bohm wrote that we seek differences within similarities and similarities within differences.
It's not that we need evolution or Bayesian analysis or thermodynamics in order to plan. It's rather the other way around; if any of these disbarred tomorrow from following on from today, we would reject them.
The profound explanations put the cart before the horse.
So I think Hume had it pretty well right, in describing our acceptance of continuity as a habit. It's not something that requires justification. It's not as if, were we unable to find such a justification, we wold cease to plan our mealtimes.
Again, it is wonderful that you accept a pragmatic account of truth and rationality. But you are still confusing philosophy with your personal satisfactions.
Animals don't need to have an epistemic theory either. A reliance on an unquestioned habit of inductive generalisation is good enough for their everyday purposes as well.
But I'm not sure why you think that the everyday routine of your eating habits is all there is to say about epistemology. I guess you just enjoy taking an anti-metaphysics stance to its caricatured limit. But in the end, who cares when there is interesting metaphysics to be discussed.
Just don't distract us too much with all your noisy chomping.
if any of these disbarred tomorrow from following on form today, we would reject them.
How exactly could you reject them without determining which of them was responsible for some failure of prediction?
You could plan your future with Tarot cards, bedtime prayer, or gut intuition. Those have been pretty everyday habits in the past. Was there some reason they might have fallen out of fashion in the planning of your own life? Or do you still put your avocadoes in a magic box to keep them fresh, or instead a thermodynamic device called a fridge?
What metaphysics does your actual daily routine depend upon? Of course, the fridge might as well be a magic box to you. But the good folk who designed and built it might have needed some more rigorous reality model, don't you think?
I guess it all depends what you think is a central question of epistemology. Is it how can we hope to have certain knowledge? Or is it how is it that we can reason in optimal fashion?
I think that epistemology, or more simply logic, should be the study of thinking (which I define to be the process of forming beliefs or assumptions.) It should study different patterns of thinking, both actual and possible, and their pros and cons or what consequences they produce under different circumstances. This should answer the second question, which is "how can we reason in optimal fashion?", but the first question, which is "how can we hope to have certain knowledge?", will remain unanswered. I think the first question makes no sense at all. Either it does not or I simply don't understand what it means. Which one is it?
So abduction, if I understand you correctly, is a pattern of no-pattern of thinking. You say that it is the least formalisable pattern of thinking which suggests to me that it lacks pattern to a considerable degree. Or it could be that the pattern is complex and thus difficult to understand and formalise? Which one of the two is the case? I am inclined to think the former but I like to keep my options open.
So if abduction is a process of thinking that has very little pattern within itself, this means that abduction is mostly a random process. It's basically random guessing.
While I believe that there are decisions that are random, I think that a lot of abduction that occurs in real life, at least as I understand the concept, is quite ordered. If you see a disembodied head lying on the floor you are not going to assume "someone clapped his heads and this head popped out of nowhere" you are going to assume something like "someone's head has been cut off". That betrays order. Not necessarily in reality but in thought.
Abduction has the following form:
1. Event B occurs.
2. When event A occurs event B follows.
3. Therefore, event A occured before B.
That's the general version of abduction. It looks sort of like deduction. Its premises are either observed (e.g. there is a disembodied head on the floor), randomly assumed (e.g. when someone claps his hands a disembodied head pops out of nowhere) or inductively inferred (e.g. when you cut someone's head off you end up with a disembodied head.)
If we are going to use B to justify A, then we ought be more confident in B than in A. It would be odd to attempt a justification with evidence that was weaker than what is being justified.
It seems odd, then, to back up one's belief that the chooks will lay eggs tomorrow with a vast, profound theory of pragmatism.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 06, 2018 at 02:45#1503220 likes
If we are going to use B to justify A, then we ought be more confident in B than in A. It would be odd to attempt a justification with evidence that was weaker than what is being justified.
Side-question. I do not come from a philosophical background. I might be interested in philosophical problems and I might be willing to try to solve them on my own but I did not study and I generally do not read philosophy. So I do not understand many of the things that a lot of people on this board take for granted. For example, I don't really know what justification is. Everyone is talking about, and everyone is asking how, to justify this belief or to justify that belief; everyone has certain kinds of philosophical problems that they want others to solve for them or that they themselves want to solve or have solved. But most of these philosophical problems are alien to me. I do not understand what exactly is problematic. So I have to ask, unfortunately, and I believe that by doing so I will remain within the boundaries of the topic, what exactly is justification? I can make my own guesses. For example, it is perfectly sensible, based on how we use the word otherwise, to assume that to justify your beliefs means to try to convince someone else to accept them. And in order to do so, you have to do whatever is necessary for the other person to accept your beliefs. That's a very simple, very general, understanding of what it means to justify a belief. But then, some guy named Plato comes along and says that knowledge is "justified true belief" without ever explaining to whom a belief should be justified. To ourselves? But what does it mean to justify our beliefs to ourselves? Very vague term. In reality, we don't justify our beliefs to ourselves, we simply accept them and when we decide to do so we revise them. What is justification in this context? Making sure that we feel that our beliefs are good enough in order to act upon them?
Nothing in philosophy is simple. To the detriment of philosophy. There are thousands of books and articles on justification, and whatever i say here will excite objection.
Short answer is that a statement is justified if it can be made to fit in with your other beliefs.
So to know something it must be true, believed and cohere with some ill defined number of our other beliefs.
So the surprise - the disproof of an inductive metaphysics - would be if your pissed-away bottle of red magically reconstituted again itself each night, like a Magic Pudding.
There was an Irishman who found a lamp that had a genie in it, in an Old Wares store. He was polishing the lamp when the genie appeared. 'Make a wish', she said. 'You get three.' 'Great', he said, 'I love red wine. Give me a bottle of it, that magically reconstitutes itself when emptied'. Shazam! There it was. He chugged the entire contents. 'Wonderful', he says (hiccup.) The genie says 'so what about your other wishes?' 'Two more thanks love!' X-)
...the first question, which is "how can we hope to have certain knowledge?", will remain unanswered. I think the first question makes no sense at all.
The answer would be that we can't have any kind of absolute truth or certainty. So it is a question that was answered. That clears the field to get on with a pragmatic approach to truth and certainty.
Well, there is still then tautological, deductive or Platonic truth. Folk will want to say deductive logic is at least truth-preserving when the syntax is valid. It maps one state of affairs to another without loss of semantics. We could have a debate about that.
And then there is the allied thing of mathematical truths - the things we say about abstract objects like triangles. We can know those things for sure, in a necessary fashion. Again, we could have a debate about that too.
So in a general way, the absolutism is long dead. Pragmatism rules. But at the fringes, people still want to maintain some kind of unquestionable certainty.
So abduction, if I understand you correctly, is a pattern of no-pattern of thinking. You say that it is the least formalisable pattern of thinking which suggests to me that it lacks pattern to a considerable degree. Or it could be that the pattern is complex and thus difficult to understand and formalise? Which one of the two is the case? I am inclined to think the former but I like to keep my options open.
Not really. I was emphasising how we know it is an important part of successful thinking, and yet we are not sure if we can formalise it. We would certainly like to if we can. One of Peirce's many foundational contributions to logic was to bring the issue out into the clear light of day. I argued that he was less successful at given a proper answer.
My own thinking is informed by modern science and its efforts to build pattern recognising machines, as well as the efforts to understand the same in human brains.
Why do Fourier transforms work so well in signal processing, for example? Why do generative neural networks seem a powerful approach? We do have some mathematical models to consider now.
So if abduction is a process of thinking that has very little pattern within itself, this means that abduction is mostly a random process. It's basically random guessing.
Well if that were so, we would hardly ever arrive at a useful hypothesis. It would take us a lifetime to answer a single question in any ordinary IQ test. It is just a simple fact that we can leap towards the explanations which erase the most information and leave us with the core principle we need to follow.
Our brains do it all the time. The question becomes, how? It certainly ain't a serial search process. It certainly doesn't rely on random exploration. There is something gestalt and holistic in how we can feel the edge of an answer and then watch it flesh itself out into a fully fledged aha!
So the brain is doing something in information processing terms - unless you believe that all such mental activity is connected with divine powers.
If you see a disembodied head lying on the floor you are not going to assume "someone clapped his heads and this head popped out of nowhere" you are going to assume something like "someone's head has been cut off". That betrays order. Not necessarily in reality but in thought.
Yep. So inference to the best explanation.
And what should be noted is that we can imagine a gazillion reasons for there being a disembodied head lying on the floor. Maybe a dinosaur bit it off. Maybe that dinosaur was a pterodactyl or a t-rex. The possibilities are endless.
But no. If we are actually any good at this business of reasoning, we will discard a gazillion possibilities pretty much instantly. We will come up with some maximally plausible guess. We will use all the information to hand and assign some Bayesian process of evaluation that leaves some central body of possibility as whatever is the hypothesis that can't be so easily eliminated.
Even Sherlock Holmes knew that. He was the master of abductive logic after all - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes#Holmesian_deduction
1. Event B occurs.
2. When event A occurs event B follows.
3. Therefore, event A occured before B.
Well yes, Peirce did notice that the same terms employed by the classical versions of deductive and inductive arguments could be used to generate a third kind of argument.
So an abductive argument was already contained within the standard formalism. It followed on directly from the truth of those other two. It was there implicit and waiting to be recognised.
That should be a pretty striking fact I would have thought.
If you aren't interested in either induction or deduction, then you won't care about abduction either. But if you do care about those two things, then you have to care about the fact that the same elements just automatically then have a third combination.
And yet it is true that this sentence is in English. We can be certain of it.
Rather than being certain, we can say that those who know English have agreed upon this grammar and syntax as being English. It is helpful to understand this, because what are called "facts" are simply an agreement and consensus within a given population.
I don't really know what justification is. Everyone is talking about, and everyone is asking how, to justify this belief or to justify that belief; everyone has certain kinds of philosophical problems that they want others to solve for them or that they themselves want to solve or have solved. But most of these philosophical problems are alien to me. I do not understand what exactly is problematic. So I have to ask, unfortunately, and I believe that by doing so I will remain within the boundaries of the topic, what exactly is justification?
In relation to David Hume, the answer was developed in great detail in his book, A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding. I did study that formally, under David Stove. His main premise is like that of the other British Empiricists - that all knowledge is acquired by the senses. Hume had applied the empirical method in order to find an explanation for the way in which ideas are formed. Like other empiricists he assumed that all ideas are derived from sense impressions, but on the basis of this assumption he went beyond the work of his predecessors and denied the possibility of any genuine knowledge of anything that transcends what is supplied by the senses. This has radical consequences when you really think it through - as Hume did. So he denied that we can have real knowledge of an external world - recall in this regard, that Berkeley was also categorised as an empiricist - or of a material or spiritual substance, a self, or of God. While it was clear enough that one may believe in the reality of any or all of these objects, it was pointed out that there is no logical ground for these beliefs nor for the existence of the objects to which they refer.
The truths of logic are certain because they're implied in their premises, i.e. they do no more than re-state in the conclusion that which is present in the premises. They concern only the relationship of ideas. So this leads to 'Hume's fork' - that all knowledge is either from experience, 'a posteriori' - meaning things we learn from having experienced them ('the sun will rise tomorrow' being based on the experience of it always so doing); or it's 'a priori', with examples being 'all bachelors are unmarried' i.e. if you meet an unmarried man you know deductively (not inductively) that he's a bachelor, without reference to experience.
However, it was Kant who questioned this neat distinction between a priori and a posteriori, by way of the 'synthetic a priori', by which we can learn things that are *not* simply contained in the premises of logical statements. That is one of the main points of his famous book, Critique of Pure Reason. (There's quite a good summary here.)
(A philosopher called Quine wrote a well-known paper in the 1950's which questions the veracity of the distinction between a priori and a posteriori.)
some guy named Plato comes along and says that knowledge is "justified true belief" without ever explaining to whom a belief should be justified. To ourselves? But what does it mean to justify our beliefs to ourselves?
Actually, the discussion of the nature of knowledge in Plato is often inconclusive - various solutions are discussed, but many of them end in aporia, that is, philosophical perplexity. When you really drill down into Platonic epistemology, and the way it was developed over the ensuing centuries, it is a deep topic. Plato set the bar very high for what real knowledge is - recall that Platonism generally distrusts sensory knowledge, on the grounds that the objects of sense are in some way uneal, transitory, perishing etc. Ancient philosophy was a lot more like Eastern contemplative traditions in that respect (although also very different, as Platonism had the emphasis on mathematics and forms, which the East never really cottoned on to.) Right now I'm reading Belief and truth by a classicist called Katja Vogt, which has a really interesting take on the original Platonic dialogues on these questions.
Incidentally in most of the other points I agree with Apokrisis.
Reply to Banno Well someone can look at your facts, and say it ain't so, because consensus had not been formed. Try telling someone who never saw English that it is a fact that it is English, and you'll either get a shrug or asked to prove it. At some point the person may join the consensus but not necessarily so. For that person it remains something you just say. The "fact" is only a fact among those who agree it's is.
Reply to Banno Hmm. Again it is baffling that you sound like you believe this is some kind of devastating criticism.
Abduction finds the assumptions from which conclusions can be drawn. Deduction finds the conclusions that can be drawn from those assumptions. Inductions then confirm that the conclusions support those assumptions in terms of the predicted facts.
Deduction might be semantics preserving in being syntactically closed, but it can’t generate new information. Whereas abductive inference and inductive inference are both probabilistic in spirit and can go beyond the evidence in ampliative fashion.
As I said, abduction does seem a work in progress. It is hard to boil down its holism into some more reductionist formalism.
But another way to get at it is as retroduction.
We can say the particular fact, A, is observed. And if the general fact, B, were true, then A would be so as a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that B is true.
So it runs deduction backwards from a conclusion to a likely assumption. And it should make you think a bit about why deduction is only secure in going from the general to the particular, while going from the particular to the general is inductive - that is, going beyond the evidence by a willingness to believe a high probability is good enough to be a workable certainty.
Isn’t that just what you always want when faced by these pesky doubters?
But I agree. Once you get into this business of abduction and the full pragmatist story of how we formulate knowledge, you start to see the much larger scope of the project.
Generality must be fleshed out with some kind of best fit principle. And this is the approach familiar in a philosophy of science understanding of the framing of natural laws. We want the generalisation that discards the most information. And that is in fact a balancing act - a best systems account (BSA) that opposes simplicity and strength.
So there you have a link to Ramsey, Lewis, and the like. Abduction can be bolstered by this same principle.
Likewise the principle of indifference is critical to finding a pragmatic grounding to the particular. There are always going to be an unlimited number of potential differences. But at some point - dictated by a purpose - any further differences will cease to make a difference. And we can see how this applies to the inductive confirmation.
So we need cut offs for the general, and cut offs for the particular. When those are supplied, a process of reasoned inquiry can become self-closing in the tales it tells.
Deduction is merely already closed - syntactically. It can’t discover new semantic content.
But deduction sandwiched between abduction and induction has the means to be open enough to learn and create content. Then achieve a satisfactory degree of self-closure.
Yesterday I had a full bottle of red. Now it is only half full.
Supposing that the future is like the past requires quite a selective view.
Supposing that the future is not like the past requires an equally selective view.
It is, presumably, the same bottle of wine that was full and is now half full?
One way of avoiding confusion here is to pay close attention to tenses. There is in English no fixed distinction between tensed and un-tensed usage. There might have been once, there might be in the future, but in the meantime there is not, and the "meantime" encompasses at least the history of this thread, and however many more posts it takes to establish a change of usage.
That the future has been like the past (only different, for the nit pickers) is not a supposition, but experience. That it will be like the past, is supposition, imagination, projection.
Deduction is basically playing with definitions; nothing more.
I believe this would depend on your metaphysical assumptions. It sounds like you are taking a nominalist position which would reduce deduction to the abstract rules of description. If one were to take a more "realist" position with regard to concepts then the information derived from deductive analysis could have ontological validity.
Is it rational to believe there are established invariances if all our experience indicates that there are?
One would need to determine if we have grounds to believe that our experience is offering us valid insights into the nature of these established invariances.
We experience them and understand them as being established invariances. This means that within our cumulative and collective experience they are invariant. What kind of "valid insight" into them beyond that do you imagine we could have?
SophistiCatFebruary 06, 2018 at 21:30#1506450 likes
Reductive explanation is a reason to believe. It is the standard reason we believe in everything else, that we have a reductive explanation for its being the case.
The comment I was disputing was "he is simply saying that the reasoning of science cannot justify them, [the passions]".
My argument was, in what way can the reasoning of science "justify" anything other than by explaining the causal chain of its existence back a few steps?
You are asking the wrong question. Almost none of our beliefs are justified (in our mind) by science. So if you only accept reductive explanations as justification for beliefs, then you would have to conclude that almost all of our beliefs lack any justification whatsoever - and that cannot be true, because it is part of our usual understanding of the notion of "justified belief" that a large proportion of our beliefs is fairly justified.
I have a passion 'hunger', science can explain exactly what that passion is in physical terms (brain states), why it is there causally (DNA - protein synthesis - neurons development - interaction with the environment), and also why it is there teleologically (evolutionary function of hunger). What additional thing can science provide with regards to the proposition "the sky is blue" that is missing from what science can tell us about passions such as to warrant the distinction made?
Whether or not I know of some scientific explanation for my feeling of hunger or my perception of the color of the sky is completely irrelevant to my warrant for holding the respective beliefs.
Notice that the syllogisms under Inductive and Abductive are invalid?
Giving them a name does not alter their invalidity.
I'd submit that not only are the conclusions under Inductive and Abductive invalid, but that the chart defining inductive and abductive is invalid. That is it say, inductive logic does not lead one to the conclusion that since Socrates is a man who is mortal that all men must be mortal. Inductive reasoning does not mandate anything, but simply suggests that which is more likely. It would not be a reasonable inductive conclusion to suggest that from a single instance we can draw any likely conclusion either. But, should we observe millions of men all of whom are mortal and should we never observe one who is not mortal, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that all men are likely mortal. Sure, one day a man might emerge who is not mortal, but inductive logic doesn't mandate there will never be an immortal person. Such is no different than any other scientific, empirically based conclusion. We conclude based upon the best evidence we have.
And all of this is apples and oranges anyway because while there may be a limit to what inductive reasoning tells us about the actual world, deductive reasoning tells us nothing about the world. It tells us only about whether truth has been preserved from our premises, yet there is no suggestion (or requirement) that our premises be a truth about the world (e.g. all glurgs are gurps and all gurps are glomps, therefore all glurgs are glomps). So, you can talk about the limitations of inductive reasoning, but the limitations of deductive reasoning are more severe, as it tell us nothing at all other than whether we've correctly solved our Sudoku puzzle.
I believe this would depend on your metaphysical assumptions. It sounds like you are taking a nominalist position which would reduce deduction to the abstract rules of description.
No. logicians agree that deduction offers no new information, only clarify that which is know. Take the standard syllogism, we already know that Socrates is mortal since he was a man.
Does this mean that you believe free will to be incompatible with determinism? Would you then say that our sense of free will is an illusion?
Not that this is particularly relevant to either free will or the actual topic of this thread, but charleton is talking out of his ass: science does not "assert determinism."
And all of this is apples and oranges anyway because while there may be a limit to what inductive reasoning tells us about the actual world, deductive reasoning tells us nothing about the world. It tells us only about whether truth has been preserved from our premises, yet there is no suggestion (or requirement) that our premises be a truth about the world (e.g. all glurgs are gurps and all gurps are glomps, therefore all glurgs are glomps). So, you can talk about the limitations of inductive reasoning, but the limitations of deductive reasoning are more severe, as it tell us nothing at all other than whether we've correctly solved our Sudoku puzzle.
Thank goodness for some commonsense.
The interesting thing was that a valid deductive syllogism could be defined in terms of the three elements, the three steps, of a rule, a case, and a result. Some general "truth" that ranges over a class, some particular instance of that class, and then a consequence that could be predicated of that instance as a necessary fact.
And then the question arises of what happens when you play around with those three elements and consider what they say in a different order.
Induction was hazily understood as a converse of deduction - a step from the particular back to the general. But Peirce pursued the idea that induction itself was distinguishable into abduction and inductive confirmation. That was the way we actually seemed to reason about things in pragmatic fashion. And it was the way that science was turning into an explicit epistemology. Now you could see that this triadic story was itself already revealed in the formal tripartide structure of a deductive syllogism.
Of course the two varieties of induction were both "invalid". To go from the particular back to the general must involve a probabilistic leap of faith. A willingness to believe rather than to doubt.
But the whole problem with deduction is that it can't itself ever derive new information. It is just a system of syntax. It can only rearrange whatever semantics you put into it in a way that makes that move from the general to the particular.
So the "problem" with induction was really a problem with deduction. It was the rationalist dream that deduction could yield certain knowledge about everything. And in fact, by itself, it can yield no new knowledge at all. You needed induction to get the game started and to pragmatically justify the results.
The puzzle for me is that Banno keeps contradicting himself on these issues. One minute he is attacking the sceptics who just refuse to be pragmatic and commit to a belief that works. The next he is attacking the inductive basis of that pragmatism on the grounds the truth is "out there" beyond any such probability-based understanding.
Either he just hasn't sorted out a basic incoherence in his own epistemic metaphysics or he has something further to say which he just can't seem to bring himself to say. It's all very curious.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 07, 2018 at 00:21#1506810 likes
My own thinking is informed by modern science and its efforts to build pattern recognising machines, as well as the efforts to understand the same in human brains.
I've read your posts and I am currently trying to make sense out of them. In the mean time, I want to ask you a very simple question in order to make sure that we are on the same page. The question is: do you agree that abductive reasoning is a specific type of inductive reasoning? Ultimately, I understand that this comes down to how we define the concept of inductive reasoning. I believe that if the concept of induction is defined sufficiently narrowly that the answer would be "no". I do not, however, define it that way and I believe that others do not either.
Here's an example of abductive reasoning:
1. The grass is wet.
2. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
3. Therefore, it rained.
It is quite apparent to me that abductive reasoning is a very narrow form of reasoning. By definition, it only forms conclusions regarding events that took place in the past. This means that abductive reasoning is restricted to making "predictions" about the past. In other words, it can only be used to create retrodictions. This is unlike induction which can be used to form beliefs of any kind. This suggests to me the possibility of you defining the concept of induction narrowly as pertaining to making assumptions about the future.
Now let's take a look at a simple example of inductive reasoning. We have a sequence of numbers such as 1 2 3 4. Inductive reasoning can be defined as the process of identifying the pattern that best matches some given data and then using that pattern to form beliefs regarding data that lies outside of this data. Note that there are several ways, perhaps infinitely many different ways, that data can be outside of data. For example, you can ask "what comes after the number 4?" We can all agree it is 5. And we do so intuitively without being aware of the underlying process. We are often unware of answers to questions such as 1) how do we identify the right pattern based on the data that we're given?, and 2) how do we use that pattern to calculate the best guess regarding the unknown we are interested in? (The question #2 less so than the question #1.) We can formalize the question "what comes after number 4?" as 1 2 3 4 ? where question mark denotes the unknown we are interested in. But we can also ask "what comes before the number 1?" This would be analogous to retrodiction. We can formalize this question as ? 1 2 3 4 and we can also immediately answer it by saying that the number that comes before 1 is 0. But we can go further than that and we can ask questions such as "what comes between the number 2 and 3?" We can formalize this question as 1 - 2 ? 3 - 4 where hyphen represents an unknown we are not interested in. The answer is, of course, 2.5. An example of an inductive question that is most similar to what is called abductive reasoning would be a question formalized like 1 2 3 ? 5. This would be analogous to an abductive argument such as:
1. Number 5 is observed.
2. Every number is equal to the sum of the number that precedes it and number 1.
3. Therefore, number 5 was preceded by number 4.
Note that the abductive argument does not specify how we arrived at the rule that constitutes the premise #2. We did so using induction on a number of observations the majority of which have been ommited from the argument (i.e. the sequence of values 1 2 3 ?.) What this indicates is that abductive arguments, like deductive arguments and pretty much all other arguments, are simplifications of reality. They are simplistic. Inductive arguments are also simplistic but they are LESS simplistic than these two types of arguments. Unless, of course, you define induction narrowly.
The interesting question then is how induction, or whatever you want to call it, works. The question is how do we find the pattern that best fits some given data. In fact, my thinking is that the very concept of pattern is unnecessary. We do not need to be aware of any patterns. When I guess that the next value in the sequence 1 2 3 4 is number 5 I do not necessarily do so because I am aware of the underlying pattern. Rather, in most cases, I do so because I know that the set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} has the highest degree of similarity to the set {1, 2, 3, 4} among the sets that have the form {1, 2, 3, 4, *}. Thinking is fundamentally associative. So the interesting question then becomes the formalization of fluid concept of equality (a.k.a. similarity) between mathematical objects such as sets. The question becomes: how do we measure the degree of similarity between symbols?
Regarding AGI research, most of the research has been dedicated to modelling how the world works rather than to modelling how thinking works. I think that's the problem. Rather than having a programmer create a model of reality, an ontology, for the computer to think within, it is better for a programmer to create a model of thinking which will allow machines to create models of reality -- ontologies -- on their own based on the data that is given to them. This would make machine thinking much more adaptable.
Reply to Hanover Your observations about the syllogisms look right to me.
My objection is a small one. I would reserve the word "logic" for deductive reasoning. Talk of inductive logic gives an undeserved legitimacy to making a guess.
A graven image. It should have an all-seeing eye at its centre. Another odd example of the obsession with trinities that helped keep Pierce from mainstream approval.
None of which should be taken as disparaging Bayesian analysis and other legitimate and excellent work around this topic. Unlike the philosopher's notion of induction, and even worse, abduction, Bayesian approaches have a strong standing.
The question is how do we know when these patterns are inherent in nature as opposed to arbitrary artefacts of our mode of perceiving?
By layering patterns upon patterns seeking similarities within differences and differences within similarities. This process should provide practical knowledge of the nature of nature and life. It should be useful insights.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 07, 2018 at 01:14#1507110 likes
So, you can talk about the limitations of inductive reasoning, but the limitations of deductive reasoning are more severe, as it tell us nothing at all other than whether we've correctly solved our Sudoku puzzle.
True. I prefer to think in terms of Zebra puzzle. When someone says "deduction" I imagine think of this puzzle (that noone can solve except for genuises.)
Talk of inductive logic gives an undeserved legitimacy to making a guess.
Surely though you recognize where induction ends and speculation begins. Rational thought, even when not limited to formal deduction, is relied upon not because it's our religion, but because it works. I open the door in the morning and the cat runs in, not because we both guessed we would show up there, but we both expect one another from past events. That is logic, reason, and understanding the world. It is the J of Knowledge. Why is Gumbo there? She's hungry. That's not a guess. That's a reason, the basis that forms the reasonable and rational.Quoting Banno
None of which should be taken as disparaging Bayesian analysis and other legitimate and excellent work around this topic. Unlike the philosopher's notion of induction, and even worse, abduction, Bayesian approaches have a strong standing.
You'll have to distiguish for me the distinction you're resting upon between induction and Bayesian analysis. Bayesian analysis is simply rigorous induction isn't it? Is your objection just that you find people sloppily drawing conclusions with incomplete information and you demand greater rigor? You're simply the juror who demands more proof because you see too many other possible explanations, but you're not the juror (as perhaps you suggest) who rejects the whole enterprise of induction and refuses to draw any conclusions from it regardless of the extent of supportive evidence, right?
The question is: do you agree that abductive reasoning is a specific type of inductive reasoning?
I'm not getting too hung up on the divisions. There is the more familiar dichotomy of deductive vs inductive argument - necessary inferences vs probable inferences. That kind of works in the sense that deduction proceeds from the general to the particular with syntactic certainty while induction does the reverse of going from the particular to the general with provisional hopefulness.
But then a triadic view - one where a dichotomistic separation resolves itself into a hierarchical structure - is the special twist that Peirce brings to everything. It is the next step which completes the metaphysics.
So that is why it is a neat result - one that hierarchical structuralism predicts - that the actual process of human reasoning splits itself so cleanly into a trichotomistic process. It makes reasoning not an arbitrary business but one that works in the same basic way as the nature it wants to describe.
This is obviously a huge metaphysical deal - for those who still have faith in metaphysics as a grand unifying project.
So is abduction a specific form of induction? The Peircean question is instead where does abduction fit in the basic semiotic triad.
And it slots in as Firstness. A hypothesis is the first free and spontaneous act, which then leads to the "deductive" secondness that is mechanically determined reaction, and followed then by the thirdness which is the generalisation of such individual reactions to the form of some regular and enduring global habit.
1. The grass is wet.
2. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
3. Therefore, it rained.
But is it?
The classical deductive syllogism is:
Major premise (or the general rule: All M are P.
Minor premise (or the particular case): All S are M.
Conclusion (or result): All S are P.
Abduction then rearranges the order so that the argument is: All Ms are Ps (rule); all Ss are Ps (result); therefore, all Ss are Ms (case).
So you would have to say something like:
- Rain makes things wet.
- This grass is wet.
- Therefore, the grass was (probably) left out in the rain last night.
It is quite apparent to me that abductive reasoning is a very narrow form of reasoning. By definition, it only forms conclusions regarding events that took place in the past. This means that abductive reasoning is restricted to making "predictions" about the past. In other words, it can only be used to create retrodictions. This is unlike induction which can be used to form beliefs of any kind. This suggests to me the possibility of you defining the concept of induction narrowly as pertaining only to making assumptions about the future.
I'm not sure why it seems a problem that abduction is retroductive - that the past is being assumed to hold the key to the future. To the degree the world has actually developed some stable intelligible being, it will have developed those general constraints which serve to restrict freedom and spontaneity to give the world its predictable shape.
This is the point concerning the metaphysics. Rather than going with the classical metaphysics which thinks reality is some God-given realm of law and deterministic material action, Peirce is up-ending that view to build a logic that arises out of a completely probabilistic model of existence.
So again, induction is not a problem as it sits on the side of probability. Deduction is now the problem as the shallowness of a deterministic or mechanical metaphysics stands exposed. The issue is really why would deduction function at all? And clearly - just as we find with computers and other machines - they can't stand alone. They are helpless if it weren't for us to bookend them and makes sense of their furious syntactical whirrings.
So if you sit on the side of a probabilistic ontology, now the whole picture can snap into place properly. Abduction seeks out the constraints that must underly any observable regularity in the world. A classical/deductive/mechanical/deterministic/atomistic world is merely the emergent limit on this probabilistic description. So the task is to guess at the rules that stabilise things sufficiently that the probability of causal certainty approaches arbitrarily near 1 (or 0) for the things we might care about as fundamental facts of the world.
Will we always fall down rather than up when stepping off that cliff? Well thermodynamics says all our atoms could fluctuate upwards at that precise moment and give us a surprise. Yet also, that is almost surely never going to happen - even given a really vast number of lifetimes for our Universe.
Thus abduction does seek to recover rules already formed. And inductive confirmation seeks to show our guesses are correct. And it is all couched in probabilistic language. We no longer believe in a classical Cosmos - the one of Newton and Hume. We are presciently already into a quantum reality where concrete classicality is an emergent and inherently probabilistic limit state.
When I guess that the next value in the sequence 1 2 3 4 is number 5 I do not necessarily do so because I am aware of the underlying pattern. Rather, in most cases, we do so because we know that the superset {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} has the highest degree of similarity to the superset {1, 2, 3, 4} among the supersets that have the form {1, 2, 3, 4, *}.
I'm sure the rule you abduce is the simper one - 1+1=2. And so on, ad infinitum.
So you abduce a deductive rule, an algorithm that blindly constructs. You are recovering the set theoretic approach that is already the axiomatic basis for number theory.
A cherry-picked example which is a textbook case of deductive thought is hardly a good way to illustrate an argument about the true nature of induction. :-}
Regarding AGI research, most of the research has been dedicated to modelling how the world works rather than to modelling how thinking works. I think that's the problem. Rather than having a programmer create a model of reality, an ontology, for the computer to think within, it is better for a programmer to create a model of thinking which will allow machines to create models of reality -- ontologies -- on their own from the data that is given to them.
Well that is why I always say forget Turing Machines and symbolic logic. It is neural networkers who have been thinking about how to properly mimic the Bayesian principles by which a brain actually makes inductive predictions.
A graven image. It should have an all-seeing eye at its centre. Another odd example of the obsession with trinities that helped kept Pierce from mainstream approval.
None of which should be taken as disparaging Bayesian analysis and other legitimate and excellent work around this topic. Unlike the philosopher's notion of induction, and even worse, abduction, Bayesian approaches have a strong standing.
Rock it like it's still the 1970s!
Magnus AndersonFebruary 07, 2018 at 02:49#1507610 likes
I'm not getting too hung up on the divisions. There is the more familiar dichotomy of deductive vs inductive argument - necessary inferences vs probable inferences. That kind of works in the sense that deduction proceeds from the general to the particular with syntactic certainty while induction does the reverse of going from the particular to the general with provisional hopefulness.
Syntactic certainty, or logical validity, isn't unique to deduction. Here's an example of inductive argument that is logically invalid:
1. Every swan in the past has been white.
2. Every swan in the future will be black.
That's invalid because it violates the rules of inductive reasoning according to which the future must mimic the past.
Similarly, probability isn't unique to induction. Deductive conclusions aren't certain. They can turn out to be wrong.
The special thing about deduction is merely the fact that if its conclusion turns out to be wrong then some or all of its premises will also turn out to be wrong. This is not the case with induction.
But then a triadic view - one where a dichotomistic separation resolves itself into a hierarchical structure - is the special twist that Peirce brings to everything. It is the next step which completes the metaphysics.
I have yet to see the relevance of placing so much emphasis on the concept of trinity.
The classical deductive syllogism is:
Major premise (or the general rule: All M are P.
Minor premise (or the particular case): All S are M.
Conclusion (or result): All S are P.
Abduction then rearranges the order so that the argument is: All Ms are Ps (rule); all Ss are Ps (result); therefore, all Ss are Ms (case).
So you would have to say something like:
- Rain makes things wet.
- This grass is wet.
- Therefore, the grass was (probably) left out in the rain last night.
What's the difference? You changed the order of the premises. You put the rule in front of the observation. Charles Sanders Peirce, according to Wikipedia (1902 and after), had no problem with placing the observation before the rule.
1. The surprising fact, C, is observed. (The grass is wet.)
2. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. (If it rains, the grass gets wet.)
3. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true. (Therefore, it rained.)
You also emphasize that the conclusion is merely probable. I think that such an emphasis is unnecessary since it is a given. All conclusions can turn out to be wrong. No conclusion is certain in the sense that it cannot turn out to be wrong.
I'm not sure why it seems a problem that abduction is retroductive - that the past is being assumed to hold the key to the future.
It is not a problem. The problem is that abduction is a narrowly defined concept. Specific concepts have specific needs. What are these specific needs? This is what I am trying to understand. I want to understand its relevance.
Abduction seeks out the constraints that must underly any observable regularity in the world.
But that's what induction does. Its job is to identify regularities in data. But instead of talking about induction, or more generally intelligence or thinking, you talk about abduction. And instead of speaking in terms of regularities or patterns, you speak in terms of constraints. I don't understand why. There must be a reason. What kind of reason is it? Is it a good or a bad one?
But instead of talking about induction, or more generally intelligence or thinking, you talk about abduction.
I'm not following you. I've talked about all those things. You seem to want to make some campaign against abduction as a concept. And I am interested in how abduction fits into a holistic and naturalistic scheme of reasoning.
You will have to explain why I should be concerned by your problems with seeing a relevance in abduction. I've already explained why it would be relevant to a metaphysics that is irreducibly triadic (rather than dyadic or monadic).
And instead of speaking in terms of regularities or patterns, you speak in terms of constraints.
Constraints generate regular patterns in a probabilistic fashion. So that is how science understands physical systems. And it is how we would speak of nature if we take a systems view where we grant generality a reality as a species of cause.
So again, it is simply a reflection that I am arguing from a consistent metaphysical basis. It is how reality would be understood if you believe in an Aristotelean four causes analysis of substantial being.
I'm not following you. I've talked about all those things. You seem to want to make some campaign against abduction as a concept. And I am interested in how abduction fits into a holistic and naturalistic scheme of reasoning.
I have nothing against the concept. I am just trying to understand why you place so much emphasis on it. I don't see why such a concept is relevant. That's all. And if what I say appears to be an attack then it's merely due to the possibility that some of the things you say are no more than smokes and mirrors. I have to entertain such a possibility.
You will have to explain why I should be concerned by your problems with seeing a relevance in abduction. I've already explained why it would be relevant to a metaphysics that is irreducibly triadic (rather than dyadic or monadic).
You don't have to if you don't want to. I take it to be a matter of good will on your part.
Fine. And yet you kept asking anyway. And I kept explaining why I do find it relevant. And so far you haven't rebutted my reasons for finding it relevant. And importantly so. Yet you want to keep telling me you don't find it relevant - despite offering no supporting reasons.
And if what I say appears to be an attack then it's merely due to the possibility that some of the things you say are no more than smokes and mirrors. I have to entertain such a possibility.
I'm not bothered by your attack. I'm more disappointed at its lack of bite.
Fine. And yet you kept asking anyway. And I kept explaining why I do find it relevant. And so far you haven't rebutted my reasons for finding it relevant. And importantly so. Yet you want to keep telling me you don't find it relevant - despite offering no supporting reasons.
Can you prove a negative? If so, how do you do it? By showing that there is no evidence supporting the claim, right?
Negatives are problematic. They could be caused by personal deficiency (subjective lack such as ignorance) or they might be real (objective lack.) You can never be sure.
The best I can do in this case is to ask further questions for the purpose of clarification. Maybe my post was deficient in this regard? Could be.
Hume merely showed that induction is not deduction as far as I can tell. Popper championed the role of abduction in science; conjectures just are abductions. Feyerabend, Quine and Kuhn I cannot comment on, since I haven't read them. Can you explain how the latter three showed induction has no role to play in science?
It seems obvious to me that induction and abduction both have their own logics; logics which clearly are not the same as the logic of deduction. All three have their own roles to play in human inquiry.
The best I can do in this case is to ask further questions for the purpose of clarification.
But I asked you for clarification about this "relevance" of yours. For me, there is a background metaphysics that explains the specific relevance. For you, there must be likewise some background metaphysics - given that it seems you must have some good reason to reject my metaphysics as a relevant grounding.
So what is this metaphysics exactly? Put it on the table.
Popper championed the role of abduction in science; conjectures just are abductions.
Popper tried his best to dispose of induction and replace it with deduction in the form of falsification. He understood its illegitimacy. Abduction is not a term he much used. He did write formidably about statistical method, yet in the end held that we can never justify a theory.
Bah. No point in trying to sum up these guys in ten words or less.
I'm just going to be hard-nosed and say that what is called induction only has a legitimacy in science insofar as they are supported by deductive reasoning. There is only one sort of validity, deductive validity. Further the very idea of a single scientific method that when applied solves problems of science is fraught. Science is not algorithmic; it is a human activity with twists and turns and little accidents and big surprises.
And finish with a question: if there is a legitimate inductive logic, someone ought be able to set it out. What we have seen is some handwaving towards statistical analysis, but of course that is not induction. It has a base firmly in deductive mathematical logic.
I haven't read Popper in years, but I do seem to remember that he was greatly influenced by Peirce. What he saw as the conjectural moment of scientific inquiry; the creative imagining of explanatory scenarios, is the same as abduction as far as I can tell. I do agree with you that deductive reasoning is involved in both induction and abduction.
For example: take the well-worn example of whether the sun will rise tomorrow. On a purely deductive analysis the fact that the sun rose today and all the past days we know of provides no guarantee that it will rise tomorrow. This is just to say that there is no purely logical reason why the sun should rise tomorrow. But we can put this in deductive terms:
P1: The sun has always been observed to rise each day
P2: The rising of the sun is one of the countless invariances governed by the immutable laws of nature
P3: All lawful invariances must obtain unless some other lawful event intervenes
C: Therefore, the Sun must rise tomorrow unless some other lawful event causes it not to rise.
Is that a "legitimate inductive logic"?
Re Popper and Peirce: www.nmwt.org/nmwt/?r=article/download&id=124
Here's how I would phrase the same solution, in a somewhat simpler fashion.
1. The number of my beliefs that would have to be wrong for the sun not to come up tomorrow is extraordinarily large.
2. Therefore, the sun will rise tomorrow.
It's just as invalid as your argument, with the benefit of being briefer. :P
It's interesting to think about why this is the example of choice. The truth is, that the sun will come up tomorrow is something of which we are certain. Hence it's usefulness as an example.
I had a quick look and Peirce hardly gets a mention in Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery. Pragmatism is only mentioned in passing.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 07, 2018 at 06:00#1508210 likes
But I asked you for clarification about this "relevance" of yours. For me, there is a background metaphysics that explains the specific relevance. For you, there must be likewise some background metaphysics - given that it seems you must have some good reason to reject my metaphysics as a relevant grounding.
So what is this metaphysics exactly? Put it on the table.
I would more than like to. The problem is I have no clue what metaphysics is. What is it? I've heard stories about it but they never made any sense and in those rare cases when they did it was a combination of epistemology, logic and conceptual analysis. Maybe ask a specific question? or describe to me what metaphysics is so that I can give you an answer? I might be too demanding, I know.
Or we could discuss some of the things we have already touched upon such as how thinking works. We can discuss "the thinking algorithm" if you want. What rules do we follow when we make assumptions? How do we proceed from a set of particular knowns (i.e. past observations) to a set of ranked candidates for particular unknowns (i.e. predictions and retrodictions)? I already gave you the basic idea behind my approach but you rejected it on the ground that it was a textbook of something you call "deductive thought". I have no idea what "deductive thought" is. You appear to be fond of ANN's but you find something wrong with my approach? I have no idea what's the problem.
It's already difficult to agree on what deductive and inductive reasoning are. Most people have trouble ADMITTING that the key difference between the two is NOT that one is certain and the other is uncertain. Every conclusion is uncertain in the sense that it can turn out to be wrong. The idea of a conclusion that is not uncertan -- that is certain -- in the sense that it cannot possible turn out to be wrong is NON-SENSICAL. It is possible that there are conclusions that WILL NEVER turn out to be wrong but it makes no sense to say that there are conclusions that cannot POSSIBLY turn out to be wrong. A subtle but crucial distinction. Thus, both induction and deduction produce conclusions that are UNCERTAIN. I am not going to say PROBABLE even though I can. It should be a given that every truth-claim is probable since for a claim to be probable simply means that it has a probability value assigned to it. And every truth-claim has a probability value assigned to it. True/false is a measure of probability. And a measure of probability is simply how we subjectively rank possibilities in terms of their likelihood. True/false is two-valued probability measure. It makes no sense to call it something other than probability simply because it is not one-hundred-valued (0% to 100%) or infinite-valued (such as 0.000~ to 1.000~.) Furthermore, both induction and deduction can either be logically valid (or syntactically certain) or logically invalid (or syntactically uncertain.) I gave an example of logically invalid induction in one of my previous posts.
Almost none of our beliefs are justified (in our mind) by science. So if you only accept reductive explanations as justification for beliefs, then you would have to conclude that almost all of our beliefs lack any justification whatsoever - and that cannot be true, because it is part of our usual understanding of the notion of "justified belief" that a large proportion of our beliefs is fairly justified.
That's exactly the point I'm making. I'm not saying that our beliefs can either be justified or not (that's an entire epistemological position) I'm disputing that there is any good grounds for specify that science cannot justify the passions, as if there were some other group of things that it could justify. If there's nothing that science can justify (in that way) then the comment is entirely specious, claiming to provide some in formation about 'the passions', when in fact it is merely reporting the limits of science in general.
Whether or not I know of some scientific explanation for my feeling of hunger or my perception of the color of the sky is completely irrelevant to my warrant for holding the respective beliefs.
This rather presumes a position on conciousness which is far from agreed upon. If you take the view that conciousness is some kind of causal force than you might be right, or even if it is an epiphenomenon caused by the actual brain states it 'watches', but if it is either a brain state itself, or an epiphenomenon caused by a brain state specifically responsible for causing it, then it is perfectly possible for you to be wrong about your belief that you are hungry. 'Hungry' would be typically held as being that disposition which (in the absence of competing forces) would cause a person to eat. It is perfectly possible that your brain could be in that state, but the part of your brain responsible for generating the epiphenomenon of concious awareness erroneously reports that you are not. In that sense you would be incorrect about your assertion 'I'm hungry'.
It is perfectly possible that your brain could be in that state, but the part of your brain responsible for generating the epiphenomenon of concious awareness erroneously reports that you are not. In that sense you would be incorrect about your assertion 'I'm hungry'.
This is where pattern recognition in the form of finding differences in similarities and similarities within differences becomes the most helpful tool to a philosophy.
1) All life forms are organizing in some form to maintain life.
2) Some have brains and some do not.
3) There is no theory that explains why some particles try to survive and others do not.
4) Therefore there is some life force that acts in somewhat the same fashion (with differences and similarities) that is trying to survive and creating the feeling of hunger so that the total life entity gathers itself to survive.
This is how one forms a metaphysical point of view that is instructive and useful about one's own life and nature in general.
If one were to follow Hume's position that we have no rational basis for believing that induction from experience is a valid form of knowledge, then how can we claim that these invariances are objectively true?
Only if you accept that free will is defined as not compelled to act from external forces
So do you say that to be free is to act only from internal forces? How does one begin the process of disassociating from external forces in order to follow internal ones? Would this change not violate determinism?
I suppose 18th century science could be said to "assert determinism". The question is, does our modern science allow for non-deterministic events to take place?
It sounds like you are advocating a kind of statistical analysis to find correlations between the patterns in nature. This still doesn't get us over the "correlation is not causation" problem though.
Reply to Perplexed It appears to be quite different from statistical analysis. The mind is creating recognizing and observing new patterns and then from memory overlaying one upon the other upon the other (not necessarily consciously) and attempting to find differences within the similarities and similarities within the differences (a creative process) and then intuiting something new about nature. It is entirely a creative/intuitive process.
There is not a strict method. It is more like detective work, experimenting with new ideas and observing effects. Creativity and intuition is the path to new understanding, however it cannot be taught, it is as skill that can only be learned through practice of various creative efforts.
Reply to Rich This sounds like a psychological process, perhaps similar to what they call "prediction error" in neuroscience and learning theory. How can we tell the extend to which a pattern is created by the brain rather than inherent in world?
How can we tell the extend to which a pattern is created by the brain rather than inherent in world?
Nothing is "created" by the brain? The brain (actually the total nervous system) is merely a transmitter/receiver. Look at it. It looks like a transmitting/receiving antenna.
The mind is observing the patterns, whether it be football plays it an artist's reference model. The more we practice this amount various fields of endeavor the better we get. From this we develop the ability to create new patterns from the source patterns which yields new insights that we test. I do not this all the time when I practice Tai Chi, play piano, draw, play table tennis, sing, etc. Sometimes I find small new patterns and sometimes major new patterns. I've been doing this my whole life and with practice I get better at it. Then I experiment with it to see if it provides useful and practical applications in my life. I am always experimenting. This is true evolution of life.
This is not a guaranteed process. It is one of trial and error. Learning to adjust is also part of life and evolution. We are navigators not robots, that is the process of creating.
The objectivity of invariance consists in its being reliably observed and in such observations being intersubjectively corroborated. So contra Hume we do have a rational basis for believing that induction is a reliable means of knowledge. The basis is not purely rational (unless you follow Kant's solution) but practically rational. What more do you want?
It's just as invalid as your argument, with the benefit of being briefer. :P
I had thought the argument is valid. You say it is invalid; can you tell me why you think so?
As to Peirce's influence on Popper; I seem to remember reading about it in Unended Quest, but its a helluva long time since I read it and I could be mistaken. In any case, even if there is little or no influence, the commonality of ideas seems obvious. The model of conjecture and refutation is basically a pragmatist one.
Are you then a dualist in asserting that the mind is something distinct from the brain?
The problem still remains that if the activity of the mind is the source of the creative process we need some way of distinguishing between truths inherent in the world and patterns created by the mind.
SophistiCatFebruary 07, 2018 at 21:12#1509870 likes
That's exactly the point I'm making. I'm not saying that our beliefs can either be justified or not (that's an entire epistemological position) I'm disputing that there is any good grounds for specify that science cannot justify the passions, as if there were some other group of things that it could justify. If there's nothing that science can justify (in that way) then the comment is entirely specious, claiming to provide some in formation about 'the passions', when in fact it is merely reporting the limits of science in general.
I don't understand your point. Science does what it does - it provides explanations of a certain sort. What it does not do is provide warrant for every belief - indeed, for most beliefs. I do not require a scientific explanation of vision in order to believe that there is a table in front of me - all I need is to look and see.
'Hungry' would be typically held as being that disposition which (in the absence of competing forces) would cause a person to eat. It is perfectly possible that your brain could be in that state, but the part of your brain responsible for generating the epiphenomenon of concious awareness erroneously reports that you are not. In that sense you would be incorrect about your assertion 'I'm hungry'.
A belief, even a justified belief, does not have to be inerrant.
The problem still remains that if the activity of the mind is the source of the creative process we need some way of distinguishing between truths inherent in the world and patterns created by the mind.
I don't think so. Life is creating. One understands life by engaging in need the creative process. Looking for truths can be an engaging game, but it is parenthetically to creating and understanding the process of creating.
This still does not sound like enough to qualify as being "objectively invariant". One could imagine many things that are reliably observed and intersubectively corroborated that are not objectively true. Political associations or stock markets maybe?
The thing is, if we concede that knowledge is only practically rational does this not mean that there is truth only with regards to certain ends?
This still does not sound like enough to qualify as being "objectively invariant"
It isn't. Life is a game without rules. We create them as we go along. People, cultures, religions, countries, ethic groups all create their own game. The patterns are similar and different and a good observer may pick up on them. There is no one way. There may not be any way for all I know. I just observe and learn.
I never look for truth, only something new that may be a clue.
As to Peirce's influence on Popper; I seem to remember reading about it in Unended Quest, but its a helluva long time since I read it and I could be mistaken.
Popper wasn't directly influenced by Peirce, but did recapitulate the same line of thought. They were especially close on propensities. And Peirce of course was concerned with a much larger metaphysical project of how epistemology could be also ontology.
Later on in his career, Popper found Peirce had been saying the same things and acknowledged this in saying he wished he had known of Peirce's work earlier (Of Clocks and Clouds) and that Peirce was "one of the greatest philosophers of all times" (Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach).
Similarly when Bertrand Russell learnt about Peirce in later life - having waged his war against Jamesian pragmatism - he took the view, that "beyond doubt [Peirce] was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever."
Cheryl Misak has now documented the subterranean influence that Peirce had on Wittgenstein via Ramsey and Lewis - https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/2946
Peirce was so much ahead of his time - and also working in unfortunate circumstances - that it is only recently he has started to have his rightful impact on academic thought.
I was in a similar position. Via cognitive neurobiology, theoretical biology and paleoanthropology, I had arrived at a generally semiotic position. And then decent digests of Peirce's voluminous unpublished thoughts began to pop up. Along with a whole circle of biologists and systems scientists, it just became obvious that Peirce had sorted out the metaphysics 100 years earlier. Within a few years, we were all calling ourselves biosemioticians.
SophistiCatFebruary 07, 2018 at 21:30#1509970 likes
I suppose 18th century science could be said to "assert determinism". The question is, does our modern science allow for non-deterministic events to take place?
Of course. There are both deterministic and indeterministic models in science. As for metaphysical determinism, science as such does not take any position on it. If, for instance, you are a population geneticist, you work with probabilities, and it does not matter to you as a scientist whether those probabilities originate from some fundamentally chancy process or whether they are merely epistemic (or whether there actually is a distinction). It takes a lot of philosophical posturing to get from science to metaphysics. For example, you will probably have to take a stance on reductionism. And once you do, you may also have to bet on future physics. None of this is part of science.
This still does not sound like enough to qualify as being "objectively invariant".
It's enough for phenomena to be accepted as being objectively invariant until proven otherwise, though. What other possible criteria for judgements of objectivity could we employ, to replace intersubjective criteria?
The basis is not purely rational (unless you follow Kant's solution) but practically rational. What more do you want?
Heh. The glass that pragmatism knows to be 99.99 percent full is always going to be frustratingly empty for those who still ache for Platonic certainty. If you believe in all or nothing, then that's what you want to be the case, despite the facts.
Yes, I remember reading Russell's statement of admiration for Peirce. To me the similarities between Popper's approach and Peirce's pragmatism seem clear. I am coming to think of Peirce as one of the most underrated philosophers; the fact that he may not have had much (acknowledged) influence on the mainstream thus far says more about the mainstream than it does about Peirce. In my view much the same can be said about Whitehead.
The glass that pragmatism knows to be 99.99 percent full is always going to be frustratingly empty for those who still ache for Platonic certainty.
Right, how could certainty ever be anything more substantial than a feeling? We may say that it can be a more or less warranted feeling and that what constitutes warrant is clear, but that will never convince those whose feeling is not consonant with our own notion of warrant.
The thing is, if we concede that knowledge is only practically rational does this not mean that there is truth only with regards to certain ends?
That is how you attack the Jamesian strawman version of pragmatism.
The actual story here is that truth is the limit of rational inquiry. It is what we will believe in the end following an exhaustive pursuit. And so it is what becomes invariant within our belief structure.
So yes, this is not the good old fashioned truth of the transcendental kind - that which is true even despite there being no one around doing the knowing. The rationalist pipedream that has had such a manic grip on so many.
It is truth defined in terms of the concerns of a knower. It is a search for justified answers to the point of exhaustion - which itself is in turn a search to the point that further details cease to matter.
Pragmatism only seeks to constrain uncertainty. It can't be eliminated. And so truth - as a natural limit on a reasoned process of inquiry - is found at the point where we can afford to become indifferent to the uncertainties not yet eliminated. Our purposes - in whatever sense they exist - are sufficiently satisfied. We can't then pretend to continue to doubt - to be entranced by the remaining uncertainties - if that is merely unsatisfied knowledge that is also held by us to be of no account.
So pragmatism includes the self in its world. Truth is defined relative to the wants of the observer.
Of course that then does bring in a new issue. We can distinguish between the highly subjective view and the highly objective one. Most folk think of "true truth" as being the kind of completely invariant knowledge that scientific-strength inquiry will bring.
But even this is very slippery. The invariances that pop out of science are general principles - ideally, the mathematical symmetries encoded in foundational equations. They seem rather ... abstract. Platonic even.
The material particulars of the world become numbers - more abstracta! - that we plug into the equations. The subjective observer is suddenly rediscovered at the heart of this maximally objectivised knowledge as the entity who must informally carry out an "act of measurement". To turn the phenomenal experience of the world into the values input into an equation is a tricky and un-formalisable step.
This is what strikes directly at the fantasy of deduction being somehow foundational. A valid syllogism is only ever going to be as truthful as the semantic cargo we plug into it.
But anyway, we have quantum theory now. Nature is really rubbing our noses in the impossibility of knowledge that is objectively true in the absence of an observer who actually does something to constrain the outcome with a choice.
We know the rationalist pipedream to be physically impossible in a foundational fashion.
Of course one could just get on with the business of science without any need for contemplating its foundations and why it works but this always strikes me as avoiding the most interesting questions.
...the fact that he may not have had much (acknowledged) influence on the mainstream thus far says more about the mainstream than it does about Peirce.
The social reasons for his relative obscurity are well documented. And many factors combined.
It did not help that he was American in that era of European domination. It did not help that most of his best work was unpublished jottings and he never wrote a cannonical book. It did not help that he was overwhelmingly ambitious in the scale of his metaphysical project exactly when the mood was harshly against that. It did not help that he was also a real working scientist and approached philosophy from that direction. It did not help that he was plunged into great poverty and academic disgrace by having an affair - something scandalous in prim Harvard, which would have been laughed off back in Europe.
Personally, I thought Peirce was pretty cranky when I was first introduced to his stuff. Then I thought, well some of his ideas certainly seem to foretell of what we are discovering now. And then eventually I found that on any deep issue at all, Peirce seemed to have it covered.
And finish with a question: if there is a legitimate inductive logic, someone ought be able to set it out. What we have seen is some handwaving towards statistical analysis, but of course that is not induction. It has a base firmly in deductive mathematical logic.
Inductive logic: Every crow ever seen is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is probably black.
Deductive logic: Every crow is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is black.
It's set out now.
Statistical analysis is validated empirically and is therefore rooted in inductive logic. Primacy rests with inductive logic, not deductive. Deduction doesn't even tell us what crows are, black is, or who Joe is.
What other possible criteria for judgements of objectivity could we employ, other than intersubjective criteria?
I was not suggesting to look outside of intersubjective criteria, but rather that we may need a better method of assessing those criteria. Otherwise we could be in a position where I can objectify as true anything with which I can obtain consensus.
I was not suggesting to look outside of intersubjective criteria, but rather that we may need a better method of assessing those criteria. Otherwise we could be in a position where I can objectify as true anything with which I can obtain consensus.
Universal consensus can come, through further observations, to be believed to have been mistaken. This happens mostly in science, though; not in regard to commonsense understandings of how to do things. When it comes to commonsense methodologies it is improvement instead of refutation.
In which case is the truth not an arbitrary product of the particular ends which we select?
It seems you are conflating truth with knowledge. The knowledge we have of how to do things is not "arbitrary"; it is based on workability. The knowledge-for-its-own-sake we have of how the world is is not arbitrary either: it is based on observation, conjecture, experiment and intersubjective corroboration.
So yes, this is not the good old fashioned truth of the transcendental kind - that which is true even despite there being no one around doing the knowing.
Was Kant's transcendentalism not rationally derived from the foundation of all possible forms of intuition? "Empirically real but transcendentally ideal"
It is truth defined in terms of the concerns of a knower. It is a search for justified answers to the point of exhaustion - which itself is in turn a search to the point that further details cease to matter.
Do we have to assume here that the concerns of the knower are paramount? How can we be justified in stating that further details cease to matter?
Was Kant's transcendentalism not rationally derived from the foundation of all possible forms of intuition? "Empirically real but transcendentally ideal"
That's a different issue. I was talking about the belief in mind-independent truth - the world as it would be experienced even when not being experienced. :)
Do we have to assume here that the concerns of the knower are paramount? How can we be justified in stating that further details cease to matter?
We know that further details cease to matter because they cease to make a difference. How we understand things to be has become sufficiently invariant.
So yes, we are the ones drawing that line. But also, we can do it in a methodical fashion. That is what the scientific method seeks to codify as best as it is able.
Collectively we get together and develop some standards of acceptable evidence. We can get pretty rigorous - like when insisting an experimental effect must pass five sigma significance to be publishable.
We know our inquiry has been exhaustive when we feel sufficiently exhausted by it!
If we are searching for our lost house keys, we might look in the bread bin twice or maybe even three times just to be sure. But much more is OCD. Doubt becomes pathological when it ceases to achieve a different result.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 08, 2018 at 01:09#1510730 likes
DEDUCTION
1. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
2. It rained.
3. Therefore, the grass is wet.
ABDUCTION
1. The grass is wet.
2. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
3. Therefore, it rained.
INDUCTION
1. It rained.
2. The grass is wet.
3. Therefore, if it rains, the grass gets wet.
Both deduction and induction rely on rules, which is to say higher level concepts, in order to arrive at their conclusions. This suggests to me that they are superficial forms of reasoning in relation to induction which operates on observations, which is to say lower level concepts. You cannot "promote" inductive argument to a deductive or an abductive argument. You can only "demote" it. This means you can turn it into a deductive or an abductive argument only by simplifying it. However, you can "promote" a deductive or an abductive argument to an inductive argument which means you make such arguments complex, that you enrich them with detail, when you turn them into an inductive argument. What this suggests to me is quite simply that . . . induction is fundamental.
Within the context of this post, the three different types of reasoning are defined narrowly to mean different ways of describing the process of arriving at our conclusions. Abduction and deduction are different from induction in that they rely on higher level concepts such as rules. This is what makes them simplistic in relation to induction. By relying on high level concepts, they get rid of a lot of detail. High level concepts = abstractions. Abstractions = simplifications of reality.
They are not equal in rank. Thus, they do not complement each other. Induction can do everything deduction and abduction can do and then some more but deduction and abduction can only do a subset of what induction can do.
So deduction and abduction are simpler than induction. There is one more thing. They are equally simplistic. Deduction is no more simplistic than abduction. This is if we take the definition of abduction to be what it is said to be. There is absolutely nothing complex about the following argument:
1. The grass is wet.
2. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
3. Therefore, it rained.
So what is the algorithm of abduction? You choose some observation (some "surprising fact") and you do so arbitrarily. You can choose any. It does not matter whether it is imaginary or real. Then you choose a conditional that is related to that observation. The conditional must be in the form "if something occurs, then the observation that you previously chose occurs". This something can be any observation of your choice (just like the first time.) Finally, in order for the conclusion to follow from the premises, and for the argument to be logically valid, the conclusion must be the unconditional part from the conditional in the premise #2 stated in the past tense. That's all. These are the rules of abduction. Very simple, right? Anyone can learn these rules and follow them.
I am sure people will say this is not abduction proper but merely a simplification of the process. Sure. What is missing? Oh, that the premises must be true? We need to add that rule? Okay, we'll add it. But wait a second, what exactly does that mean? It's rather vague, isn't it? What does it mean for a premise to be true? You have to define that rule first. And if you want, we can do it right now. Let's say we somehow manage to do it. Would that be enough? It would? Well, Peirce would disagree. If I remember correctly, Peirce revised the definition of abductive reasoning several times. Apparently, some additional rules were missing. Sure, we can add these rules too but would that be enough? Did Peirce ever arrive at a definition of abductive reasoning that he was satisfied with? No? Is abductive reasoning something that escapes definition? Is it like mystical phenomena? Simply impossible to define? Or is it merely so complex that it is difficult to define? Either way, this means we don't actually know what abductive reasoning is. We know some of its features but not all of them. And this means that these features could be anything. So what are we going to do?
This would be the argument that abduction is more complex than deduction it's just that our description of it cannot capture it. The problem with this argument is that we can say the same thing about deduction. If it looks simple, it's only because our description of it is simplistic. It is possible that deduction is infinitely complex and that it only appears to be simple because when we describe it we do so without taking into account all of its features (which would be impossible to do if it is infinitely complex.)
So there is nothing inherent to deduction that makes it simpler than abduction and nothing inherent to abduction that makes it more complex than deduction. According to the manner in which these concepts are defined in this post, they are of equal complexity (which, no matter how great, is always lower than that of induction.)
Another belief related to the concept of deduction that I have to assassinate is that deduction merely extracts knowledge that is contained within the premises. If that's true then it is also true about induction and any other patterned (i.e. rule-based) method of reasoning. Induction employs the same mechanism as deduction. There is fundamentally no difference between the two. But it's not true; it's not true that deduction merely extracts knowledge from the premises. I can easily come up with a complex mathematical expression the result of which was never known to me. Calculating the result of a mathematical expression does not simply mean recalling its result. It means inventing a result. We invent a result and then check to see if its relation to the past is appropriate (i.e. that it does not violate the rules.) Chess is deductive but how many of us actually understand its possibility space in its entirety? The myth that deduction is uncreative is perpetuated by Eastern thinkers (who no doubt suffer from inferiority complex.) Anyone who buys into it is being brainwashed.
One last thing I want to say about deduction is that it does not necessarily proceed from a general statement towards a specific statement. But then this depends on what is meant by "general statement". A general statement, I assume, has the form "all Xs are Ys". Such a statement is equivalent to a genral conditional "if P is X then P is Y". I say general conditional to mean that P is a varible which means it does not refer to anything in particular. An example of a general statement would thus be something like "all men are mortal" and an example of a general conditional would be something like "if P is man then P is mortal". Let's take a look at some examples.
The standard deductive argument:
1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal
A variation of that argument:
1. If P is a man then P is mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal
A specific version of that argument:
1. If Socrates is a man then Socrates is mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal
The last argument has no general statements. It also has no general conditionals. Instead, it has a specific conditional.
SophistiCatFebruary 08, 2018 at 09:20#1511510 likes
Reply to Janus If I understand you correctly, you are saying that induction is justified by its universal acceptance and seeming indispensability - apparently, on the general epistemic principle that universal acceptance and indispensability provide an ipso facto justification. But here is how this justification can be undermined.
A plausible account of our inductive instincts is our evolutionary history as creatures that emerged in a relatively orderly, stable environment. Our instincts were thus shaped by our past, since evolution is not forward-looking. As with other adaptations, they will serve us well, as long as things continue as they have throughout our evolutionary history. But, of course, making that assumption begs the very question: will things continue as they have in the past? (This counter-argument echoes the standard charge of circularity leveled on those who seek to justify induction by past successes.)
SophistiCatFebruary 08, 2018 at 09:25#1511520 likes
Of course one could just get on with the business of science without any need for contemplating its foundations and why it works but this always strikes me as avoiding the most interesting questions.
Well, the very fact that science gets along quite well with little or no metaphysics - and in particular, without ever needing to resolve the question of metaphysical determinism - is suggestive. Are such questions really meaningful, or are they spurious pseudo-questions that a conceptual analysis can dissolve?
But how can tell you're not just seeking whatever path happens to be favourable to you. i.e.. because it confirms your biases rather than has genuine merit.
It seems you are conflating truth with knowledge. The knowledge we have of how to do things is not "arbitrary"; it is based on workability. The knowledge-for-its-own-sake we have of how the world is is not arbitrary either: it is based on observation, conjecture, experiment and intersubjective corroboration.
In this definition, knowledge-for-own-sake would correspond to truth. However, this too seems to be based on workability. i.e. the way we chose to observe, conjecture, experiment and the method of interpretation of intersubjectve corroboration.
We know that further details cease to matter because they cease to make a difference. How we understand things to be has become sufficiently invariant.
Can we be sure that this hasn't happened simply because we've traversed a significant course in one particular direction and thus obscured the other possible paths?
Well, the very fact that science gets along quite well with little or no metaphysics - and in particular, without ever needing to resolve the question of metaphysical determinism - is suggestive. Are such questions really meaningful, or are they spurious pseudo-questions that a conceptual analysis can dissolve?
One could imagine any number of self contained systems that can articulate itself without the need for external verification but sooner or later its relationship to other fields of endeavour must come into question. Can you give any further details of such a conceptual analysis? Perhaps this would extend beyond the boundaries of science.
But how can tell you're not just seeking whatever path happens to be favourable to you. i.e.. because it confirms your biases rather than has genuine merit.
There is no intellectual way that I know of. It's more about the feeling that it brings to you. Long periods of sadness are usually an indication that a change in direction is necessary in life.
I suppose one would need to get to the bottom of the source of their feeling in order to understand the connection it has to the direction they have chosen in their life. This is a very personal kind of truth though which could lead to relativism. Is the truth different for everyone?
I suppose one would need to get to the bottom of the source of their feeling in order to understand the connection it has to the direction they have chosen in their life. This is a very personal kind of truth though which could lead to relativism. Is the truth different for everyone?
In a way yes. As Shakespeare put it "This above all, to thine ownself be true".
We are just Navigators in Life. There is not just one path. We are learning as we go along, and should we encounter turbulence, maybe it is a good time to steer in a different direction. This choice in particular is what we have, the skills we learn along the way is what we seek.
Reply to Rich Could this method not lead to avoidance of difficult situations? If one changes their course each time there is turbulence are they not just victims of circumstance?
Could this method not lead to avoidance of difficult situations? If one changes their course each time there is turbulence are they not just victims of circumstance?
It's all about developing skills. Think of yourself as a sailor. What would you do if you got turbulence? How skilled are you? Is there anyone who can give you advice? How does it compare to other times? There are no right and wrongs. Everyone is different and everyone will learn as they will.
Yes, the methods we use to gain knowledge of the world, whether for its own sake or for practical purposes, are not arbitrarily chosen but are developed over time based on what seems to work. Can you imagine an alternative approach?
the very fact that science gets along quite well with little or no metaphysics - and in particular, without ever needing to resolve the question of metaphysical determinism - is suggestive.
In actual fact, current science is plagued by an enormous metaphysical dispute, specifically, whether string theory actually is scientific, or not. Current physics now is only thought to account for 4% of the known mass and energy of the universe. And the ‘standard model’ of particle physics is also regarded as metaphysically unsatisfactory. So the fact that modern technology and science produces what we consider to be good technology doesn’t actually entail that science is any closer to understanding metaphysical truths.
Reply to Janus It was in response to the remark that science ‘gets along quite well without metaphysical truths’ How are we to judge in what sense it is ‘getting along very well’? The anomalies that I have mentioned are all basically metaphysical in nature but have been thrown up by science itself. So I’m questioning whether such a sanguine view is justified.
I think it is an exaggeration to say that "current science is plagued by an enormous metaphysical dispute, specifically, whether string theory actually is scientific, or not". First I think the question is a methodological, not a metaphysical, one. It is a question of whether string theory is testable, and whether if it is not testable, it should be counted as a scientific theory at all. That question can only be resolved over time within the practice of physics itself.
Also, physics is just one area of science. Science as a whole does not seem to be in any kind of life-threatening crisis, so I think it is fair to say that it is getting along "quite well" if not that it is getting along "very well". (Note that the "quite well" is Sophisticat's and the "very well" is yours).
Well, it's not. It's a very big argument, and it is exactly a metaphysical dispute, as it's about the nature of reality, the nature of science itself, what is knowable, and many other metaphysical questions of that nature. And that's only one of the issues. But because nobody takes metaphysics seriously, then they don't see that it's that kind of problem.
But I do agree with your above remark concerning the weakness of appealing to evolution in support of induction. That is exactly the territory of Plantinga's 'evolutionary argument against naturalism'.
My point was that, regardless of whether the question is "very big" or not, science is not "plagued by" it. Some philosophers might be.
In regard to my "remark"; ironically I wasn't targeting the weakness of appealing to evolution in support of induction, but the opposite; appealing to evolution to undermine confidence in induction.
A theory of induction is superfluous. It has no function in a logic of science.
The best we can say of a hypothesis is that up to now it has been able to show its worth, and that it has been more successful than other hypotheses although, in principle, it can never be justified, verified, or even shown to be probable. This appraisal of the hypothesis relies solely upon deductive consequences (predictions) which may be drawn from the hypothesis: There is no need even to mention “induction”.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 09, 2018 at 00:59#1513560 likes
He was a staunch opponent of induction. The purpose of thinking is to generalize. A theory (what he calls a hypothesis) can fit the data very well but be pretty bad at going beyond it. The question is: how do we generalize? "Conjectures and refutations" does not answer that. We do not assume the unknows randomly.
Just trolling along. Isn't Bayesian inference based on induction?
Magnus AndersonFebruary 09, 2018 at 02:08#1513660 likes
Reply to Banno That's what I thought. I merely wanted to confirm it. Yes, Popper hated induction.
A lot of people think there's a problem with induction. They think that the fact that inductive conclusions can turn out to be wrong is an argument against it. As if deductive conclusions aren't equally uncertain. As if thinking that "Because all swans are white and this is a swan, this swan is also white" means that the conclusion that this swan is white cannot turn out to be wrong. Yet we all know that it can. The problem is caused by equivocation. It appears strange to say that deductive arguments, and also inductive arguments, can be both certain and uncertain. That's because we're confusing logical certainty (or properly speaking validity) with empirical certainty. Deductive arguments can be logically certain/valid but they can never be empirically certain; they are always empirically uncertain. The same applies to inductive arguments. They can be logically certain/valid but they can never be empirically certain. Nietzsche said that "absolute certainty is a contradictio in adjecto" and he's right. Assumptions cannot be empirically certain because they are by definition empirically uncertain. Reasoning is the process of forming assumptions regarding events that we haven't observed. Because we didn't observe them, this means that what we think they are can always turn out to be wrong.
Popper's solution to the imaginary problem of induction was his theory of reasoning where we reason by making conjectures (i.e. by making shit up) and then by seeking refutations. He thought that relying on induction is dogmatic i.e. it makes us unwilling to adapt our models of reality in the face of new evidence. What he was blind to is the fact that adaptability is not enough. Models of reality must adapt in a specific manner. In statistics, there is something called "overfitting". It's the situation in which our models fit the data perfectly but do not go beyond it in the way that we expect it. According to Popper, this would be fine. So you have a sequence of observations such as 1 2 3 and you want to model it. Popper says you do so by coming up with any kind of model that fits the data. Okay, so I come up with a model. Now Popper says you use deduction to make predictions i.e. what kind of observations you assume will come next in the sequence. I use deduction and I get something like 1 2 3 0 0 0 0 0. I then set out to test my theory by testing my predictions against reality. I then realize that the next observation in the sequence, quite suprisingly, is number 4. I ask Popper what to do now and he says "adapt!" And I do so by changing my model so that it now makes the following predictions: 1 2 3 4 0 0 0 0. Pretty neat, huh? Well, not so if we ask our intuition. Our intuition wants to build a different model, a model that makes the following predictions: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Of course, Popper was aware that his theory is stupid, so in order to save it, he added additional rules such as Occam's rule of razor otherwise known as the principle of economy. But he never bothered to define these rules. Is it because he was afraid of doing so? what if he realized that thinking is in fact a rule-bound, deterministic, process? that thinking is fundamentally inductive?
...inductive arguments... can be logically certain/valid but they can never be empirically certain.
Well, no, thy can't be valid. Validity happens only with deductive arguments. Ascribing validity to inductive arguments is at best metaphorical, and more often than not a philosophical feint.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 09, 2018 at 02:19#1513730 likes
Reply to Banno An argument is logically valid if it does not violate the rules of reasoning. Both deduction and induction must follow some rules of reasoning.
This is logically valid:
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be white.
This is logically invalid:
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be black.
This is not merely a metaphor and certainly not a deception.
Reply to Magnus Anderson It's not valid because it contains two unrelated relations - "...in the past..." and "...in the future..."; and so the conclusion doe snot follow from the premise.
If it is valid, show us its form.
And if it is cogent, why are the swans around here black?
Magnus AndersonFebruary 09, 2018 at 02:53#1513880 likes
Reply to Banno Inductive reasoning operates according to some set of rules. This is obvious from the fact that some conclusions are permitted (e.g. that every swan in the future will be white given that all swans in the past were white) and that some conclusions are not permitted (e.g. that every swan in the future will be black given that all swans in the past were white.) When there are no rules, every premises-conclusion combination is fine.
Things exist whether we are aware of them or not. This means that rules exist whether we are aware of them or not. If we are not aware of the underlying rules of reasoning that does not mean that there are no such rules. Does that make sense? When we reason inductively we follow a set of step-by-step instructions on how to do so. But when we describe how we reason inductively we usually leave out a lot of detail. Our descriptions are not exhaustive and detailed but simplistic and shallow. We do not list EVERY SINGLE PREMISE that leads to our conclusions. So if you do not see how premises are bound to a given conclusion, that does not mean that they aren't bound.
Do I have to show you its form, i.e. describe the process in detail, in order for you to accept that inductive reasoning is a rule-bound process? Is that necessary? Shouldn't that be obvious from the fact that some premises-conclusion combinations are legal and others aren't?
A theory of induction is superfluous. It has no function in a logic of science.
The best we can say of a hypothesis is that up to now it has been able to show its worth, and that it has been more successful than other hypotheses although, in principle, it can never be justified, verified, or even shown to be probable. This appraisal of the hypothesis relies solely upon deductive consequences (predictions) which may be drawn from the hypothesis: There is no need even to mention “induction”.
Questions:
Is "a theory of induction" equivalent to the practice of inductive reasoning?
Are predicted consequences deductive? If they were they would be logically entailed by a theory being correct. I don't think this is the way it works. Think about the prediction that gravitational lensing would be observed if Einstein's theory that mass warps spacetime were correct. Gravitational lensing is not logically entailed by curvature of spacetime, but analogically suggested by knowing how a curved lens refracts light. The prediction is thus inductive and abductive not deductive, because it is based on the expectation that curved spacetime will act like curved glass or polycarbonate is observed to.
Inductive reasoning is indispensable to science, to any non-arbitrary conjecture at all. It is as much an example of inductive reasoning to think that natural processes, and the behavior of materials, were the same in the past as it is to think that they will be the same in the future. Cosmological theories and the theory of evolution would be incoherent without the assumption that the laws of nature have not changed. Without stable laws of nature we would not be able to reliably test, to verify or falsify, any theory at all.
This would seem to an example of Popper being either obtuse or disingenuous; unless he was referring to "a theory of induction" rather than to the practice of inductive reasoning, per se.
BTW, you still haven't told me why you think my deductive framing of the belief that the Sun will rise in the future is invalid.
Here's a funny thing. In deductive logic, if the premise is true, and the argument valid, then the conclusion will be true. That's what it is to be valid.
So, in your deductive example:
1. all men have blonde hair,
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates has a blonde hair.
If one and two are true, three must also be true. As it turns out, (1) is false, adn hence so is the conclusion.
But in your inductive example
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be white.
(1) is true, and yet (2) is false. That is, the premise is true, the conclusion false - the very opposite of validity.
One of the things that has been troubling me is the passionate adherence to induction being displayed here. I couldn't fathom it. It is so apparent that inductive syllogisms are invalid. How could the reasonably intelligent folk hereabouts not see this? But then: Quoting Janus
Inductive reasoning is indispensable to science,
Ah.
Overly simplistic descriptions of scientific method do say things like that. SO folk think that by dismissing induction I am dismissing science. Noting could be further from the truth.
Here's a funny thing. In deductive logic, if the premise is true, and the argument valid, then the conclusion will be true. That's what it is to be valid.
So, in your deductive example:
1. all men have blonde hair,
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates has a blonde hair.
If one and two are true, three must also be true. As it turns out, (1) is false, adn hence so is the conclusion.
But in your inductive example
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be white.
(1) is true, and yet (2) is false. That is, the premise is true, the conclusion false - the very opposite of validity.
That's true. And that applies to induction too. It applies to any kind of algorithm. If you want an algorithm to be able to map its inputs to its outputs in a way that it previously didn't, you must modify it. That's what "back-propagation" does to neural networks. Hardly ground-breaking.
The problem is that the manner in which we describe inductive reasoning is not exhaustive. We leave out many premises from our description. They thus become hidden premises.
Here's an example:
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be the same color that every swan in the past was.
3. Therefore, every swan in the future will be white.
This is a gross over-simplification of the process of inductive reasoning but it is nonetheless less of a simplification than the usual description.
I recall reading how children observer occurrences, develop hypotheses and then test them, apparently on a inherently statistical basis which the paper described as Bayesian (A Gopnik et al).
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be the same color that every swan in the past was.
3. Therefore, every swan in the future will be white.
No.
It is not the case that because every swan seen by white fellas was white, they will never see a black swan in the future.
See?
SO folk think that by dismissing induction I am dismissing science. Noting could be further from the truth.
SO how strongly do you doubt an inductive conclusion? Do you doubt it absolutely? Or is that unreasonable?
It’s a funny thing. Folk can really hate Cartesian doubt being applied too liberally. They bang on about not denying what you believe in your heart, not doubting the knowledge you are prepared to act upon.
Yet they talk as if there are no grounds to believe inductive methods of reasoning. And this red herring of deductive validity is all that is offered as an excuse. Whereas the beliefs we are prepared to act on are all derived from inductive generalisations.
As a logic of induction rather than a theory of belief, Bayesian inference does not determine which beliefs are a priori rational, but rather determines how we should rationally change the beliefs we have when presented with evidence. We begin by committing to a prior probability for a hypothesis based on logic or previous experience, and when faced with evidence, we adjust the strength of our belief in that hypothesis in a precise manner using Bayesian logic.
It is not the case that because every swan seen by white fellas was white, they will never see a black swan in the future.
Again, logical conclusions, whether they are deductive or inductive, are empirically uncertain which means they can turn out to be wrong regardless of the premises they are derived from.
For example:
1. All men have blonde hair.
2. Barack Obama is a man.
3. Therefore, Barack Obama has a blonde hair.
Although logically certain, it is not empirically certain that Barack Obama has a blonde hair. In fact, he does not. So the premises can be accepted as true and the conclusion can turn out to be empirically false.
Do you think science would fail without induction? I think not.
Again, my point is a small one - by calling what happens when we move from a sequence of observations to a prediction, inductive logic or some such, we obscure what is actually going on.
And what is actually going on is far more human, humane and downright interesting than following a mere algorithm.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 09, 2018 at 03:49#1514250 likes
Here's a funny thing. In deductive logic, if the premise is true, and the argument valid, then the conclusion will be true. That's what it is to be valid.
So, in your deductive example:
1. all men have blonde hair,
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates has a blonde hair.
If one and two are true, three must also be true. As it turns out, (1) is false, adn hence so is the conclusion.
But in your inductive example
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be white.
(1) is true, and yet (2) is false. That is, the premise is true, the conclusion false - the very opposite of validity.
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be the same color that every swan in the past was.
3. Therefore, every swan in the future will be white.
Here's the first paragraph form the Shorter Rutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, inductive inference.
According to a long tradition, an inductive inference is an inference from a premise of the form "all observed A are B" to a conclusion of the form "All A are B". Such inferences are not deductively valid, that is, even if the premise is true it is possible that the conclusion is false, since unobserved A's may differ from observed ones.
Now, does anyone here think that this is wrong? Surely at least we have agreement on this.
It is so apparent that inductive syllogisms are invalid.
Inductive reasoning, per se, is neither valid nor invalid; your mistake consists in applying a principle to it that is relevant to deductive reasoning only. You haven't given any argument to support your claim that inductive reasoning has no place in science. Also, as I have shown inductive reasoning can be re-framed in valid deductive terms. You claimed my re-framing is not valid; but you are yet to support that claim.
Also, as I have shown inductive reasoning can be re-framed in valid deductive terms. You claimed my re-framing is not valid;
To be sure, if you can indeed reframe inductive reasoning in deductive terms, it is no longer inductive reasoning, and I would have no problem with it.
That's what I suggested happens in statistical inference. But even there some folk are asserting that stats is based on induction.
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be the same color that every swan in the past was.
3. Therefore, every swan in the future will be white.
Yes, that's another example of an inductive argument being framed validly in deductive terms. Of course the argument is unsound because the second premise is false. Also it is not a good inductive argument because we had no reason to believe, prior to comprehensive exploration of the Earth, that swans if they occurred in unknown lands, would be white.
To be sure, if you can indeed reframe inductive reasoning in deductive terms, it is no longer inductive reasoning, and I would have no problem with it.
The thing is though, that the reasoning behind the assumptions that form the premises in the deductive re-framing is not itself deductive, but inductive or abductive. As with all premises of all deductive arguments (which, in terms of soundness, but not in terms of validity, are only as good as their premises); they are not themselves supported by the argument, but instead support it.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 09, 2018 at 04:13#1514500 likes
?Magnus Anderson Do I have to point out that the second premise is false?
The point is that in the following argument it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false:
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be the same color that every swan in the past was.
3. Therefore, every swan in the future will be white.
If both premises are true then every swan in the future must be white.
The right question is "What grounds do you have to think that the future will be different?"
What ground do you have for supposing that the sun will not rise tomorrow?
If you like, my objection is that inventing induction as a reason for being confident that the sun will rise tomorrow is already a step too far.
Maybe it would help to think of it thus: which is more likely, that the sun will not come up tomorrow, or that there is something amiss with inductive reasoning?
I hope you will agree that we can be more confident about the sun coming up than about the theory surrounding induction.
A weaker theory cannot support a stronger. So the theory of induction does not help us reach the conclusion that the sun will come up tomorrow.
an inductive inference is an inference from a premise of the form "all observed A are B" to a conclusion of the form "All A are B"
I wouldn't put it that way. I would say instead that " an inductive inference is sometimes an inference from a premise of the form "all observed A are B" to a conclusion of the form "All A are likely to be B" or "All A are possibly B".
But there is no need to reason to the conclusion that the sun will come up tomorrow. What would need reason is if the sun were not to come up tomorrow.
Inductive logic: Every crow ever seen is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is probably black.
Deductive logic: Every crow is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is black.
It's set out now.
Statistical analysis is validated empirically and is therefore rooted in inductive logic. Primacy rests with inductive logic, not deductive. Deduction doesn't even tell us what crows are, black is, or who Joe is.
Interesting that Banno pretended not to hear this.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 09, 2018 at 04:40#1514720 likes
Reply to Banno Why is it wrong? Because one of its premises is "every swan in the future must be of the same color every swan in the past was"? That's based on the fundamental premise of all reasoning (which is that the future will mimic the past.)
But even there some folk are asserting that stats is based on induction.
The validity of statistics is ultimately proved by the occurrence of the empirical event it references. Certain empirical events occur with apparent mathematical precision and are thus predictable deductively, but the gold standard proof is the observation. The odds of 100 heads in a row is easily proved with a calculator, but best proved by flipping coins. Only if the coin tosses match the calculator will the deduction be inductively proved true.
You have reason to believe the Sun will rise tomorrow because you have reasons to believe in the existence of gravity and the more or less invariant motions of the planets, reasons to believe in nuclear fission and electromagnetic radiation and so on. All of these are inductive, not deductive, reasons.
That raises an interesting question I hadn't considered: is validity merely a matter of syntax, or must it also involve semantics? I'll have to think on that one...
That's what I suggested happens in statistical inference. But even there some folk are asserting that stats is based on induction.
Hmm. You mean like ...
In rejecting Bayesianism and the method of inverse probabilities, Peirce argued that in fact no probability at all can be assigned to inductive arguments. Instead of probability, a different measure of imperfection of certitude must be assigned to inductive arguments: verisimilitude or likelihood. In explaining this notion Peirce offered an account of hypothesis-testing that is equivalent to standard statistical hypothesis-testing. In effect we get an account of confidence intervals and choices of statistical significance for rejecting null hypotheses. Such ideas became standard only in the twentieth century as a result of the work of R. A. Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, and others. But already by 1878, in his paper “The Probabilitiy of Induction,” Peirce had worked out the whole matter.
Corresponding to AAA-1 (deduction) we have the following argument: X% of Ms are Ps (Rule); all Ss are Ms (Case); therefore, X% of Ss are Ps (Result). Construing this argument, as we did before, as applying to drawing balls from urns, the argument becomes: X% of the balls in this urn are red; all the balls in this random sample are taken from this urn; therefore, X% of the balls in this random sample are red. Peirce still regards this argument as being a deduction, even though it is not—as the argument AAA-1 is—a necesary inference. He calls such an argument a “statistical deduction” or a “probabilistic deduction proper.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#logic
SophistiCatFebruary 09, 2018 at 07:51#1515090 likes
One could imagine any number of self contained systems that can articulate itself without the need for external verification but sooner or later its relationship to other fields of endeavour must come into question.
You are talking about metaphysical systems, surely? Because scientific systems (with the possible exception of some highly theoretical fields) are the opposite of self-contained: they are directly engaged with our senses. They may not pass Hume's very strict and literal understanding of empiricism, but they are a helluva lot better in that regard than metaphysics.
Can you give any further details of such a conceptual analysis? Perhaps this would extend beyond the boundaries of science.
Well, my question was open-ended: I do not insist that all metaphysical questions are pseudo-questions. But take a look at the literature on just about any contentious metaphysical question, such as determinism, and you will find conceptual challenges.
SophistiCatFebruary 09, 2018 at 07:55#1515110 likes
Note that this explanation that you are taking to undermine induction is itself inductively derived. It relies on that which it purports to undermine.
But it is not self-undermining. It is entirely compatible with the situation where the world ceases to be orderly some time in the future (Goodman's grue scenario).
To understand how"knowledge" is acquired, one can analyze the bird which we call crow. Enough birds with similar visible attributes, such as the color black, are witnessed by multiple observers so that a species classification is formed. It is totally arbitrary.
In time exceptions can be found, and depending upon certain arbitrary rules, a sub-species may be created or a whole new species within an arbitrary created genus may be created. And in time more exceptions will be observed and the process continued. The whole scientific process is arbitrary and approximations subject but to constant modifications depending upon the similarities and differences being observed.
As one may expect, these observations, classifications, overall observations (can animals communicate in ways more "intelligent" than humans?) and conclusions, are highly susceptible to all kinds of biases.
And from this rather eclectic accumulation of knowledge are we to find "truths" in logic, both deductive and inductive? In my observations, such a case is highly improbable. Logic, of any sort, is more or less a game for academia, most especially to imply am aura of superiority to certain disciplines, where none really exists. An average person is not only able to derive similar knowledge without resorting to logic, but in all probably will make more sense because it admits to the approximations and changeability associated with the world (universe) we live in. The better the observer the more like likely the approximation will be admitted to (there are no Laws).
Hence, the answer to any syllogism it's always maybe - with a different feeling of likelihood depending upon experiences (memory). Memory (the observer) is always a participant in judgement - science or otherwise.
unenlightenedFebruary 09, 2018 at 14:48#1515560 likes
Actually, all swans are still white; its just that Down Under, everything is upside-down and back to front and black is white and white is black.
I wasn't trying to pit science against metaphysics, I was making the point that its a worthwhile endeavour to asses the foundations of any system as well as its connection to other fields, rather than just saying shut up and calculate. Why engage in philosophy at all if science seems to work and one can just get busy with that?
I think I will take your advice and look at the literature since I am rather new to all this. However, if you can elaborate some of the conceptual issues with regard to determinism that might be helpful.
So do you say that to be free is to act only from internal forces? How does one begin the process of disassociating from external forces in order to follow internal ones? Would this change not violate determinism?
The compatibilist position finds that all acts are determined. "Free" acts are determined by the self, which is itself determined.
So - no.
If the self is determined, from where does the power of choice arise?
The determinist position is that there is no choice. Everything is determined. (If you are not a determinist, just go on believing otherwise, because that too is determined).
Thus, anything that a determinist says can be ignored (if you believe that you have the choice to ignore). Whatever a determinist tells you is meaningless, unless one believes that the Laws of Nature and the wave-particles that they govern have some kind of built-in mandate to reveal something about themselves.
Maybe there is a God that forces the Laws of Nature to provide insight to those who aren't determinists - as a matter of playing fair?
I'm not familiar with Goodman's grue scenario. In any case I was referring to the past, not the future. I don't see why, if it is based on an understanding of evolution, it would not rely on the assumption that the invariances of nature were in the past as they are today. And that assumption is as much irrationally inductive as the assumption that the invariances of nature will be in the future as they appear to be today.
I can't see how this addresses any point relevant to the discussion. You ask what reason we could have for thinking the sun will not rise tomorrow. Well, if induction is totally irrational then we have no reason for thinking the sun will or will not rise tomorrow, there would just be the normal human tendency to expect the same; to expect that it will rise (although even the belief that there is such a human tendency is itself an inductive one).
All our experience shows us that there are regularities in nature, and cumulative human experience and thought has come to weave a remarkably coherent and consistent picture of nature's invariances understood in terms of laws. All of that came about because of inductive and abductive thinking which hypothesizes that there are laws of nature. The idea that there are laws of nature cannot be derived deductively. Nothing at all that says anything about the actual world can be derived by pure deduction.
Inductive and abductive reasoning is analogical. I offered the example of gravitational lensing earlier, but it seems as though you chose to ignore it.
This is not the case. Determinism is an explanation of choice which is completely lacking from those who propose free-will.
Are you suggesting that the Laws of Nature work in such a manner that they give the real scoop about the nature of choice is to only certain people (determinists) while the rest of us are given some delusional ideas of Choice? In other words, are the Laws of Nature playing favorites in revealing the truth?
Anyway, I wasn't speaking of the nature of choice as revealed to determinists, I was speaking of REAL choice. The one that non-believers are forced to believe in by the Laws of Nature.
You ask what reason we could have for thinking the sun will not rise tomorrow
As you know full well the sun does not rise, has never risen and never shall. Inductive knowledge has furnished us with the truth that the appearance of the sun rising is the result of the earth's rotation.
And it is that persistence, not only of the patterns of nature but the persistence of human observation and recording of those observations that has painted or knowledge with what we like to call laws.
Are you suggesting that humans are able to act against the laws of cause and effect when the rest of the universe has to comply with it?
There is no such thing as the laws of cause and effect for the rest of the universe. I guess it is something determinists just make up for the heck of it. And why not?
But then again, if there was this mystical Law that governed the universe (sounds remarkably similar to God), it would be kind of strange that they reveal the Truth about themselves to only a chosen few. Is there a special prayer that the Laws of Nature are particularly fond of that non-determinists can abide themselves of in order for the Truth to be revealed to them also?
Reply to charleton I image that that laws are not fully deterministic or else that they apply over a limited scope. Is it even logically possible for full determinism to produce more than one outcome?
Reply to charleton Keep in touch then, because the Laws have me caught in this grip of non-believing, so if they happen to reveal something to you that might help, it would be much appreciated.
Is it even logically possible for full determinism to produce more than one outcome?
Nope. And such a point of view has no theory for variation in the universe. Quantum theory does.
The only way determinism works is if the Laws of Nature assume all of the authority and possibilities of gods (God). It is absolutely the silliest metaphysical theory I've ever come across and more correctly should be classified as a religion.
Reply to Janus That the sun will rise tomorrow is something we can be sure of. Anything you add to that by way of philosophical or scientific theorising will not be as certainty as that the sun will rise. Indeed, saying that we know it will rise because we understand the rotation of the Earth is exactly wrong; we understand the rotation of the Earth because the sun rises each morning.
This is not correct. Prior to knowledge of the Sun being the center of the solar system, the Sun was understood to be a wandering God whose path like those of the other planets (gods) circumambulated the celestial sphere. Each night the Sun traversed the underworld and emerged victorious the following morning. It was possible (since the Greek Gods were not omnipotent) that the dark forces of the underworld could defeat the Sun; which would mean that it would fail to rise.
On a Christian perspective the Sun could fail to rise tomorrow if it turned out that Judgement Day had arrived or if God so willed it.
We believe that it could not fail to rise on account of our understanding of gravity and thermodynamics; our world is actually much more stable and certain in a way than the ancient world which was subject to the fate of the gods or the will or whim of God.
When you talk of certainty that the Sun will rise tomorrow you are referring to a feeling and arguing that that feeling is stronger than our feeling of certainty regarding celestial mechanics or physics. In a way this is true; but the modern feeling of certainty only exists on account of either mere habit or else our understanding of science. This understanding may not be possessed by many people but within our culture scientific understanding filters down to alter common feelings about the world.
And you still haven't addressed my point about the analogical nature of inductive and abductive thinking and the inappropriateness of applying the criterion of deductive validity where it doesn't belong, in order to dismiss the importance of its role in human inquiry into the nature of the world.
Less certain to you? To me? To everybody? How can you be certain of that except perhaps in your own case? This is still a deflection in any case; so I give up.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 10, 2018 at 00:52#1516390 likes
And you still haven't addressed my point about the analogical nature of inductive and abductive thinking and the inappropriateness of applying the criterion of deductive validity where it doesn't belong, in order to dismiss the importance of its role in human inquiry into the nature of the world.
It's a matter of how he defines words. If he defines validity narrowly to mean truth-preserving validity, i.e. that an argument is valid if and only if its conclusion being false means some of its premises are false, then yes, induction is invalid because it can have a true premise and a false conclusion. But if you're like me and you define the concept of validity broadly to mean that an argument is valid if and only if it logically follows from the premises (i.e. if it does not violate the rules of reasoning) then induction is by definition valid.
Really, what he's saying is that induction, in the narrow way that he defines it, is not truth preserving. I think it's strange to say it's invalid because it suggests there is something wrong with it. If an argument is not trurh preserving that does not mean it's wrong. Sometimes, with some kinds of arguments, it does. But that does not apply to induction
Only if it is framed in deductive form, though and like you I have already presented an example of an inductive argument framed deductively. The inductive parts in that case form the assumptions in the premises which are obviously not themselves demonstrated by the argument itself; but which are also not subject to judgements of invalidity, as is the case with the premises of any deductive argument.
The premises of deductive arguments may be unsound, but unsoundness cannot be deduced, and is actually judged inductively (on the uncertain basis of experience and inference to the best explanation; in other words plausibility).
Whether or not a certain syllogism is "valid" is only relevant on graded tests.
What is relevant is knowledge is acquired by a combination of personal observations, group consensus, and periodic moments of intuition and inspiration. Such knowledge can be used in a formal manner using some symbolic logic, but the root of knowledge is in observational pattern recognition of various sorts.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 10, 2018 at 01:27#1516450 likes
Not really. If I define logical validity broadly to mean that an argument is valid if and only if it logically follows from the premises (i.e. if it does not violate the rules of reasoning) then induction is by definition valid. Note that I corrected myself? I initially said that it can be valid but then I realized that induction is defined so narrowly that it cannot be other than valid.
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Therefore, all Ps are Qs
If there is a conditional rule between the premise (the independent variable) and the conclusion (the dependent variable) which states that the P and Q in the conclusion must be the same P and Q in the premise, then it is impossible for this sort of argument to be anything other than logically valid. It is not necessary for the argument to be truth preserving to be considered valid i.e. if its conclusion is false it's not necessary that some of its premises be false.
The problem is that logical validity is poorly defined. Look at this:
In logic, an argument is valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false.
This suggests that logical validity and truth preservation are one and the same thing. They are not. Truth preservation is merely a symptom of logical validity and even then not always.
Here's an argument that is truth preserving but nonetheless invalid:
1. Donald Trump has an orange hair
2. Melania Trump is Donald Trump's wife
2. Therefore, 2+2=4
Truth preserving but not valid. The conclusion does not follow from the premises.
The reverse is also true. If an argument is not truth preserving that does not mean it's not valid. The following is perfectly valid:
1. All observed swans are white.
2. Therefore, all swans are white.
Logical validity simply means that the conclusion logically follows from the premises. It means that it does not violate the rules of reasoning. It means that the structure of the argument, the combination of the premises and conclusion, is legal.
The problem is that two distinct concepts have been confused: one broad (logical validity) and one narrow (truth preservation.) I believe the mistake stems from the initial observation that logical validity is always coupled with truth preservation. People will always make such mistakes so as long they focus on narrow concepts first and broad concepts second.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 10, 2018 at 01:45#1516480 likes
Whether or not a certain syllogism is "valid" is only relevant on graded tests.
What is relevant is knowledge is acquired by a combination of personal observations, group consensus, and periodic moments of intuition and inspiration. Such knowledge can be used in a formal manner using some symbolic logic, but the root of knowledge is in observational pattern recognition of v various sorts.
Reasoning isn't merely about making observations. A mass of observations will mean nothing to you if you cannot generalize from them. Logic is the study of this process of generalization. This process of generalization can take any of form but there is one form that we consider "rational" or "valid" and numerous other forms that we consider "irrational" or "invalid". Logic is the effort to discriminate between the two. More generally, it is the effort to discriminate between different patterns of reasoning and analyze their consequences, their pros and cons, under different circumstances.
Not really. If I define logical validity broadly to mean that an argument is valid if and only if it logically follows from the premises (i.e. if it does not violate the rules of reasoning) then induction is by definition valid.
If an argument is such that its conclusion follows necessarily from its premises then it is an deductive argument, end of story. That is how a deductive argument is defined.
Induction and abduction really consist in inferences not.
Take the example I gave earlier of graviataional lensing. The abductive/inductive reasoning is analogical.
Curved transparent materials are observed to refract light.
Space is transparent
Conclusion: It is likely that if space is curved by mass it will be observed to cause refraction of light.
The conclusion does not follow logically from the premises, the premises could be true and the conclusion false, but with additional premises involving laws of nature it could be framed in deductive form, and then the conclusion would follow logically from the premises.
The argument in its inductive form is neither valid nor invalid, though; because the "likely" makes that indeterminable. If it had said instead "therefore refraction of light will be observed", then it would be purporting to be a deductive argument, but would be invalid.
Observations together with pattern recognition combined with inspiration/intuition that gives new meaning to these recognized patterns.
A child builds a sandcastle.
Every time the ocean waves come in, it destroys the castle. (observation and pattern recognition).
Something must be done to avoid or redirect the water. (inspiration).
This is how knowledge is acquired.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 10, 2018 at 01:58#1516530 likes
If an argument is such that its conclusion follows necessarily from its premises then it is an deductive argument, end of story. That is how a deductive argument is defined.
Not true.
Here's an inductive argument:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Therefore, all Ps are Qs
The conclusion necessarily follows from the premise. You cannot conclude something like "Therefore, no P is Q". It is necessary that you conclude "Therefore, all Ps are Qs". Note that we're talking about logical necessity and not objective necessity.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 10, 2018 at 02:06#1516560 likes
Observations together with pattern recognition combined with inspiration/intuition that gives new meaning to these recognized patterns.
That's my point: observations together with the process of generalization which you call "pattern recognition combined with inspiration/intuition". That process is not arbitrary. It unfolds according to some set of rules. Logic studies the rules of that process.
Reply to Magnus Anderson If we are agreeing, then great. However, I don't know where intuition/inspiration falls within the rules of logic. Also, pattern recognition is not simply generalization. Frequently it is a process of observing differences and similarities among many patterns and then intuitively combining these intuitively conceived newer patterns into an entirely new greater pattern that allows one to acquire an entirely new way of understanding something. Most breakthroughs in metaphysics and science happen this way though the poor metaphysician is often ignored because the insights are entirely his/her own.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 10, 2018 at 02:47#1516640 likes
?Magnus Anderson If we are agreeing, then great. However, I don't know where intuition/inspiration falls within the rules of logic. Also, pattern recognition is not simply generalization. Frequently it is a process of observing differences and similarities among many patterns and then intuitively combining these intuitively conceived newer patterns into an entirely new greater pattern that allows one to acquire an entirely new way of understanding something. Most breakthroughs in science happen this way.
I think that inspiration is irrelevant to understanding how reasoning works. Intuition, on the other hand, is a poorly defined term that for the most part means nothing other than "knowing something without being able to explain how". That's not very useful.
What is important is how the set of known particulars (i.e. experience, past observations, etc) is mapped to the set of unknown particulars (i.e. predictions and retrodictions.) It might not be appropriate to call this process "generalization" since high-level concepts (i.e. laws, rules, patterns, models, universals, etc) are ignored. Instead, we map directly from known particulars to unknown particulars. We go directly from observations to predictions. In some cases, we go straight to actions.
Logic is the study of this mapping. This mapping is initially intuitive in the sense that we cannot explain how it works. But through time, with careful introspection, we gradually become aware of its inner workings. The intuition, in part or in whole, becomes formalized. It acquires a memetic existence which allows us to employ it mechanically i.e. by simply following its written instructions.
I think that inspiration is irrelevant to understanding how reasoning works.
I'm actually talking about knowledge acquisition. I believe this is what Hume was also interested in.
Intuition is not only poorly defined, it is impossible to define because it pops out of the experience of living. It just happens. However, the more one practices observation and pattern recognition, the more one is likely to have moments of inspiration because it is sharp observation skills that is the mother of inspiration. With such a process, one is merely traveling on the same path of knowledge forever. I guess one can rely on the inspiration of others
Magnus AndersonFebruary 10, 2018 at 03:14#1516750 likes
I'm actually talking about knowledge acquisition. I believe this is what Hume was also interested in.
Intuition is not only poorly defined, it is impossible to define because it pops out of the experience of living. It just happens. However, the more one practices observation and pattern recognition, the more one is likely to have moments of inspiration because it is sharp observation skills that is the mother of inspiration. With such a process, one is merely traveling on the same path of knowledge forever. I guess one can rely on the inspiration of others
It makes sense to me to say that objects that are defined to be infinite in scope are impossible to be described in entirety. It makes sense because it is true by definition. You defined the object under your scrutiny to be infinite in size, so it's impossible to fully exhaust it. If you define a human body to be infinite in complexity, you cannot hope to describe it completely. No matter how much of it you include in your description, there is always something about it you have yet to describe. Though you cannot describe such phenomena in entirely, you can nonetheless describe it in part. Your descriptions can be more or less exhaustive. The same thing about intuition. Regardless of whether you define it to be finite or infinite in complexity, you can always describe it to a higher or lower degree.
What I am trying to understand is why do you think that intuition is impossible to describe. I can describe my intuition no problem. All I have to do is make an effort to do so. Again, intuition is merely defined as a process of decision making that is outside of our awareness.
Again, intuition is merely defined as a process of decision making that is outside of our awareness.
My intuition moments just happen. Something may trigger the moment of epiphany. Something some someone says. Maybe a passing scene. Maybe a dream. It just happens for unknown reasons. It springs out and things all of a sudden makes sense. I've had situations where everything didn't make sense and all of a sudden the mist clears and every piece of the puzzle becomes clear. That moment of inspiration is write undefinable for me. It is as did the deeper soul is speaking.
SophistiCatFebruary 10, 2018 at 08:31#1517040 likes
I think I will take your advice and look at the literature since I am rather new to all this. However, if you can elaborate some of the conceptual issues with regard to determinism that might be helpful.
I am myself in a (leisurely) process of reading up on such issues, although at the moment I am more focused on causation.
An accessible introduction to determinism (or lack thereof) in physics can be found in the works of John Earman (he has written a number of articles, as well as a book). Here is his article in a book Freedom and Determinism (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy):
One might have hoped that this survey would provide an answer to the question: If we believe modern physics, is the world deterministic or not? But there is no simple and clean answer. The theories of modern physics paint many different and seemingly incommensurable pictures of the world; not only is there no unified theory of physics, there is not even agreement on the best route to getting one. And even within a particular theory— say, QM or GTR—there is no clear verdict. This is a reflection of the fact that determinism is bound up with some of the most important unresolved foundations problems for these theories. While this linkage makes for frustration if one is in search of a quick and neat answer to the above question, it also makes determinism an exciting topic for the philosophy of science.
Determinism is bound up with other topics. Philosophers find issues with the concept of the laws of nature. Reductionism is also a very controversial issue. The failure of either of these concepts threatens the very cogency of the question "Is the universe deterministic?"
SophistiCatFebruary 10, 2018 at 09:54#1517100 likes
I'm not familiar with Goodman's grue scenario. In any case I was referring to the past, not the future. I don't see why, if it is based on an understanding of evolution, it would not rely on the assumption that the invariances of nature were in the past as they are today. And that assumption is as much irrationally inductive as the assumption that the invariances of nature will be in the future as they appear to be today.
The theory of evolution, like any theory, is based on what we already know. Induction is a way of inferring what we don't know, whether it occurs in the past or in the future. Having evolved in a regular environment (regular enough for practical purposes), we are conditioned to trust in induction, because those who in the past could best exploit those regularities had a fitness advantage. But all that was in the (known) past. Our shared inductive instincts owe everything to the past and nothing to the future, which is why it is not right to appeal to those instincts for validating inferences of future observations.
By the way, to return to the topic of the thread, one can read Hume as mounting a similar argument, only he believed that our causal and inductive beliefs are shaped by observing "constant conjunctions" of similar events. Hume's psychological explanations may be too simplistic for our age, but the idea here is basically the same: induction's seeming self-evidence is not enough to justify it when you consider why it seems to be self-evident.
I can't see any point of disagreement here; other than the pedantic one concerning the idea of the sun rising.
Sometimes posts are designed to agree.
Surely it does not always have to be confrontational.
Since we are discussing induction it is worth pointing out that the common sense perception that the sun rises was thought to be true for thousands of years, yet clever application of skepticism and induction has given us the heliocentric hypothesis.
So far from being flawed, it is worth pointing out the value of the scientific method.
?charleton I image that that laws are not fully deterministic or else that they apply over a limited scope. Is it even logically possible for full determinism to produce more than one outcome?
Perplexed by name; perplexed by nature. Seems you want to keep your deterministic cake but want to eat the free will topping too.
Who or what decides when determinism leaves the room?
induction's seeming self-evidence is not enough to justify it when you consider why it seems to be self-evident.
The problem is that everything is constantly changing. Induction is only approximated. There is no evidence of the unchanging nature of the universe and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Determinists are determined but have no evidence to support its preferences. And Hume was quite on target with his analysis of the psychological effect on induction. There are not only biases galore in all human activity, but in addition fundamental to quantum theory is the notion that the observer cannot be divorced from the measurement of the system.
"Cleonis, you seem to also be confused on the purpose of the theory. Is Heliocentric system more convenient, and therefore, more useful? Absolutely. Does it give you any predictions you could not acquire in Geocentric system? Absolutely not. And when I map coordinates on Earth, is it more convenient to keep inertial frame of reference, or one that is fixed to rotating Earth. The later, of course. But does that mean that the Earth suddenly stopped rotating? No. Convenience of one model over the other does not imply any sort of physical truth. It's just that, a convenience. In order for one thing to be true and for another to be false, the two models must provide disagreement in predictions. Are there any disagreements in predictions? No. Then it is no more wrong to say that Earth is the center of the universe around which all else rotates, than it is to say that Earth rotates around the Sun.
"The purpose of GR, as you put it, is to consolidate SR with newtonian gravitation, from what I've read. It's achievement is being a good physical theory with accurate predictions. In newtonian gravitation, you have mass acting on mass. I can't recall ever reading or hearing that there is any significant mass-space coupling in newtonian gravitation. You seem to be discussing the philosophy of GR rather than its physics. Whether you choose to beleive that there exists a curved 4-D entity called spacetime which couples to matter, or whether you believe spacetime is a convenient mathematical tool for GR is completely up to the individual phycisist."
There are scientists who are completely reworking the theory of gravity based upon the notion of quantum entanglement and a holographic universe which will yield a mathematics that will be in approximate concordance with GR but with a completely new way of viewing gravity. One such scientist, Erik Verlinde, spoke at a symposium where he stated that he began looking at this new approach because he wasn't at all philosophical comfortable with the Big Bang Theory of the universe.
SophistiCatFebruary 10, 2018 at 15:52#1517480 likes
The conclusion necessarily follows from the premise.
I don't know of any logic where this would be the case. Induction is, generally speaking, plausible reasoning. So normally you would conclude that any P is probably Q, with the strength of this inference depending on how many Ps have been observed and perhaps other considerations.
By deductive reasoning we usually understand the application of something like Aristotelian or Classical logic. The rules of inference are fixed; even when we reason informally, if the reasoning is deductive, it can be straightforwardly translated into a formal logic without the loss of accuracy.
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the inductive logic. There is informal plausible reasoning, which can only be loosely approximated by some of the formal statistics, such as Bayesian inference.
Perplexed by name; perplexed by nature. Seems you want to keep your deterministic cake but want to eat the free will topping too.
Definitely! :) Yes I would seek to find some sort of compromise. Are you saying you'd be happy to give up free will?
Magnus AndersonFebruary 10, 2018 at 18:04#1517650 likes
Reply to SophistiCat The concept of logical necessity has been mystified. In order to demystify it we must first understand that a logical argument is nothing more than a mathematical function; or more generally, a relation between two sets. You have premises, which are analogous to inputs, and a conclusion, which is analogous to outputs. It's pretty straightforward to determine whether an equation is true or false. If f(a, b) = a + b then f(2, 2) = 5 is not true. The conclusion (5) does not follow from the premises (2 and 2.) That would be analogous to a logically invalid argument. I think this is pretty clear to everyone. What's not clear is that this is exactly what it means for an argument to be logically invalid. Most people think in terms of truth-preservation. But truth-preservation and logical validity are two different things. In the example above, we're dealing with tautalogical (or unconditional) truths. 2, 2 and 5 are all logically true. It is thus impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. And yet, the argument is not valid. Truth-preservation is just a common symptom of validity. Nothing more. To equate the two is to say that 2 + 2 = 5 is valid which is counter-intuitive. And to say that induction is invalid merely because it is not explicitly truth-preserving is deceptive since it indicates there is something wrong with it.
Truth-preservation is a very deceptive concept because it suggests that if you know the past that you can predict the future with certainty. That's not true. A much more careful definition is required in order to avoid that but that is a non-trivial task.
Every logical conclusion is empirically uncertain. This means that even if you know all of the past with perfect accuracy, your predictions can still turn out to be wrong. Thus, it makes no sense to emphasize that inductive conclusions are probable since deductive conclusions are no less probable.
Definitely! :) Yes I would seek to find some sort of compromise.
There is no compromise. Just one choice, one probabilistic (or random choice), no matter how small, destroys determinism. Compatibilism attempts to compromise but any reading of it yields a contortionist mess. Something like you can will want you want, but if you want what you will, you'll end up with wants but no will ... or some silliness like that.
In any case, no compromise. However, since what you think is determined (if you are still a determinist at this reading), it should be of no mind to you. When the Laws of Nature get around to allowing you to believe in something else, they'll let you know. I hope you are happy with whatever decision that had been already made for you.
Reply to Banno What we need to remember about Popper's version of Peirce's triadic modelling relation is of course that Popper makes the leap from merely a psychology of reasoning to claims about a transcendental or objective truth. The signs are cut adrift from their interpretant..
Popper seems to take his three worlds more ontologically seriously than I had assumed. It is more than just a metaphor or a convenient figure of thought. He credits Plato with the discovery of the third world, but differs from him as to it divine origin and claims that it is too restrictive in its scope. The stoics, he recalls, took over the Platonic realm of forms and added to it, not only objects, such as numbers, but relations between them, such as expressed by theorems. Problems too were to be part of it as well.
The conclusion necessarily follows from the premise. You cannot conclude something like "Therefore, no P is Q". It is necessary that you conclude "Therefore, all Ps are Qs". Note that we're talking about logical necessity and not objective necessity.
1. Some men are bald
Do you seriously believe that this logically entails that all men are bald?
Wow, man, if you really believe that then I'm not sure there is any point conversing with you further.
The theory of evolution, like any theory, is based on what we already know. Induction is a way of inferring what we don't know, whether it occurs in the past or in the future.
Evolution is based on the assumption that the invariances of nature have been consistently the same during the past as we find them today. I am pointing out that this assumption is as just as warranted or unwarranted as the assumption that the invariances of nature will be the same in the future as today. So, my point was that inductive inferences are essential to the theory (Evolution) that you were purporting to use to undermine the justifiability of inductive reasoning. I'm surprised you cannot see the problem with this.
Do you seriously believe that this logically entails that all men are bald?
Wow, man, if you really believe that then I'm not sure there is any point conversing with you further.
Maybe you should start paying attention to what other people are saying.
I've already said that every conclusion is empirically (or semantically) uncertain. Even if you knew everything there is to know about the past, your predictions can still turn out to be wrong. The future is under no obligation to mimic the past.
The problem is that you do not understand what logical consequence is.
The problem is that you do not understand what logical consequence is.
No, the problem is that you apparently cannot explain what you think logical consequence is. You also need to explain what you think the difference between logical and objective necessity is, and for that matter what you think objective necessity could even be.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 11, 2018 at 03:32#1518320 likes
Reply to Janus I can say the same about you. In fact, I'd probably be more right than you are. A lot of people think they understand what they are talking about; and they do, but very superficially. If I asked you to define logical consequence, I'm pretty sure you'd struggle. Either that or you would define it the same way that I do just unnecessarily narrowly.
The logical consequence of 2 + 2 is 4. That's what you get when you follow the rules of addition. In the same way, the logical consequence of "Some Ps are Qs" is "All Ps are Qs". That's what you get when you follow the rules of induction. Very simple.
the logical consequence of "Some Ps are Qs" is "All Ps are Qs"
It's just not so; and I doubt anyone would agree with you. Have you studied logic at all?
In predicate logic
? x: P(x) or (x) P(x) means P(x) is true for all x. ( 'x' here substitutes for 'Q' in your example)
? x: P(x) means there is at least one x such that P(x) is true.
( '? x' means "all x" or "for all x". '? x' means "there exists x").
There is a clear logical distinction between these two types of propositions, but in your understanding they are conflated, and the distinction is discarded.
You seem to think that if the logical entailment of "Some P's are Q's" is not "No P's are Q's" then it must be "All P's are Q's". this is simply mistaken; the only logical consequence of "Some P's are Q's" is that some P's are Q's.
I don't know...I hadn't formed the opinion that we disagree when it comes to logical entailment. :)
Magnus AndersonFebruary 11, 2018 at 04:37#1518430 likes
Reply to Janus You are focusing too much on specifics. Sort of like Banno. This can be dangerously deceptive. Banno says that induction is invalid which suggests that there is something wrong with it. You try to counter this by saying that induction is neither valid nor invalid. But does Banno really care? Of course not. He's focusing on his extremely narrow definitions. Nothing can change his mind because what he says is true by definition. Both of you are being too formal. Both of you ignore there's much debate about what logical consequence is. Both of you restrict yourself to Wikipedia and high-school textbooks. I am certainly not the first to speak of inductive validity but is that really important?
An argument is valid in the general sense of the word if it does not violate the rules of reasoning.
This is valid:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. All Ps are Qs
This is invalid:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. No P is Q
This is also invalid:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Half of Ps are Qs, half of Ps are not Qs
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Half of Ps are Qs, half of Ps are not Qs
It's all relative to the rules of reasoning.
OK, I think I see where you are coming from now. It may be consistent with "some Ps are Qs" that all Ps are Qs, but not that no Ps are Qs. So, you are thinking of logical consequence, not in the sense of logical entailment, but of semantic consistency.
I don't see why
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Half of Ps are Qs, half of Ps are not Qs
is counted by you as invalid by this criterion of consistency, though, because it seems perfectly consistent with "some Ps are Qs" that half of Ps could be, and the other half not be, Qs.
Banno says that induction is invalid which suggests that there is something wrong with it. You try to counter this by saying that induction is neither valid nor invalid.But does Banno really care? Of course not. He's focusing on his extremely narrow definitions. Nothing can change his mind because what he says is true by definition.
Where I disagree with Banno is that it is appropriate to submit inductive reasoning to the criterion of logical validity; which belongs to only to deductive reasoning. I also may disagree with him in thinking that all inductive reasoning can be reframed in deductive form and that it then does become subject to what you would call the "narrow" notion of validity.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 11, 2018 at 05:07#1518470 likes
OK, I think I see where you are coming from now. It may be consistent with "some Ps are Qs" that all Ps are Qs, but not that no Ps are Qs. So, you are thinking of logical consequence, not in the sense of logical entailment, but of semantic consistency.
I am not sure we are on the same page. I don't think that the argument is valid because the two sentences are consistent. I don't even know what that means. I am saying that the argument is valid because it does not violate the rules of that particular type of reasoning. In induction, the rule is "if most Ps are Qs then you must conclude that all Ps are Qs." The rule is implicit in the narrow definition of induction making inductive reasoning necessarily valid (i.e. it cannot be invalid.) I covered this in one of my previous posts.
Here's a general form of probabilistic argument:
1. X out of Y Ps is Q
2. Therefore, this P is R
I intentionally define probabilistic reasoning to be of this general form in order to make it possible for it to be invalid.
Here's a valid probabilistic argument:
1. 3 out of 5 men are alcoholics
2. Therefore, this man is an alcoholic
Here's an invalid probabilistic argument:
1. 3 out of 5 men are alcoholics
2. Therefore, this man is not an alcoholic
Why is this argument invalid? Because it violates the rules of probabilistic reasoning. The main rule of probabilistic reasoning is that if most Ps are Qs then you must conclude that a particular P is also a Q. If you don't, the argument is invalid.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 11, 2018 at 06:08#1518510 likes
Where I disagree with Banno is that it is appropriate to submit inductive reasoning to the criterion of logical validity; which belongs to only to deductive reasoning. I also may disagree with him in thinking that all inductive reasoning can be reframed in deductive form and that it then does become subject to what you would call the "narrow" notion of validity.
If you define validity the way he does, as truth-preservation, then yes, he's right, induction is invalid because its conclusion can be true and its premises, defined restrictively, false. There is no arguing with this. The question is: why is that relevant? The answer is probably that it isn't relevant. The "problem" with induction is that there is no problem with induction but with deduction. The problem is our understanding of logical necessity. It's a very deceptive concept. We say that a deductive argument is valid if it is impossible for the premises to be true and for the conclusion to be false. This suggests that there is such athing as absolute certainty. And this is caused by the fact that we are confusing two different types of premises: low-level premises (such as observations) and high-level premises (such as general statements.) Put simply, we are confusing observations with assumptions. That's a problem. Induction operates on low-level premises (observations) whereas deduction operates on both low-level premises (observations) and high-level premises (generalizations.) Observations cannot contradict other observations. What observations can do is they can contradict our generalizations or assumptions. This is because generalizations are derived from observations. So if the base of observations from which a generalization is derived changes, it's very possible for the generalization to change as well. Take a look at the following argument:
1. All men are white
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore, Socrates is white
Insofar the second premise is a raw observation it cannot change if the conclusion turns out to be false. However, the first premise can because it is a general statement. Such a general statement is derived inductively from previous observations. It's an open system. If it is possible for the set of observations on which it is based to change, for example by making a new observation, then it is possible for the statement to change as well. If the conclusion turns out to be false then we'll have a new observation in our set of observations and this observation, telling us that there exists a man who is not white, would require that we change our conclusion. On the other hand, exceptions do not disprove the rule, they merely make it weaker. So if a thousand men are white and a single man is black then we can preserve our general statement. But if we reach a point where a thousand men are white and a ten thousand of men are black, then we'd have to change it. This is, of course, a simplification of what's going on in reality. Our conclusions need not be this simplistic in practice. We can let exceptions influence our actions. But describing in words how this process works is a chore.
Both deductive and inductive arguments are adaptive it's just that deduction adapts through contradiction whereas induction adapts through observation. The second might also be true of deduction but it's usually not the case because most people see deduction as distinctively negative (or eliminative) process. In fact, they think of it so negatively that they think that every contradiction requires a change in one of the premises. Which is sort of true but is also sort of insane. As Einstein said and Popper thought, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; however a single experiment can prove me wrong." The question is, of course, how precise you want to be. Most people are fine with ignoring exceptions. Within that sort of mindset, falsification/negation is not so different from verification/affirmation. Many deductionists also think that deduction can only tell you what's wrong and never what's right. Think of Socrates, think of his dialectic, think of his famous statement "the only thing I know is that I know nothing."
Ah! Magnus might think that because both can be true, it is valid.
but unfortunately these can also both be true:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Not all Ps are Qs
Anyway, he's a newbie, and will probably realise his error eventually.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 11, 2018 at 07:43#1518580 likes
Reply to Banno That's not what I think. Just because the premises are true, or can be true, does not mean the argument is valid. "True xor true = true" is not valid even though its premises and conclusion are all logically true and equal to true.
SophistiCatFebruary 11, 2018 at 08:00#1518600 likes
Evolution is based on the assumption that the invariances of nature have been consistently the same during the past as we find them today. I am pointing out that this assumption is as just as warranted or unwarranted as the assumption that the invariances of nature will be the same in the future as today. So, my point was that inductive inferences are essential to the theory (Evolution) that you were purporting to use to undermine the justifiability of inductive reasoning. I'm surprised you cannot see the problem with this.
I understand what you are saying. I am granting, for the sake of an argument, one half of your "invariances of nature," so to speak: those that lie in the past. This is not so unreasonable: all the evidence that we have of such invariances is in the past.
Will these invariances persist into the future? You gave a kind of transcendental argument (correct me if I am wrong): our shared inductive intuitions provide us with a reason to believe the affirmative. But, as I have argued, the fact that we have those intuitions is not independent from the (already assumed) fact that nature exhibited invariances in the past. So what I am saying is that shared intuitions do not provide you with a reason to believe that invariances will persist into the future, over and above the assumption of invariance in the past.
The more I observe this thread, the more I realize (empirically) how useless logic is. What is literally happening is that not-logical thinking it's being used to figure out whether the conclusions of deductions and inductions are reasonable. Very instructive.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 11, 2018 at 12:30#1518990 likes
I am going to return to something @apokrisis said in response to me on page 8.
Constraints generate regular patterns in a probabilistic fashion. So that is how science understands physical systems. And it is how we would speak of nature if we take a systems view where we grant generality a reality as a species of cause.
So again, it is simply a reflection that I am arguing from a consistent metaphysical basis. It is how reality would be understood if you believe in an Aristotelean four causes analysis of substantial being.
I am struggling to understand what you mean when you say "constraint". The way I understand it, and the only way I can sensibly interpret it, is that the word "constraint" means nothing other than pattern, regularity, law, order, etc. However, as it appears, that's not what you mean by the word. Instead, you mean something . . . else. What this else is I don't know. I think it has something to do with "downward causation". Which is another obscure term that is often thrown around. Perhaps I should start a new thread dedicated to this concept? Just to see if someone else can elucidate it for me. Or maybe someone here can help me with it?
Constraint is, as I understand it, simply a limit to what is possible. The opposite of it is freedom. It is that which allows us to discriminate between those possibilities that are more likely and those that are less likely. It's a very simple concept. But your exposition is generally quite obscure and complicated (as is that of Charles Sanders Peirce.) This suggests to me that we might not be on the same page.
You say that "history builds constraints on free possibility". The only sensible manner in which I can interpret this statement is in the sense that the world we live in is relatively constant. The universe is flux, i.e. it is constantly changing, but it is doing so at a rate that is sufficiently low to make induction successful in most cases. The world we live in, in other words, is stable enough to make induction good at making predictions. This makes perfect sense. But the fact that you do not express yourself in such simple terms suggests to me that your point is a different one. In fact, it suggests to me that you find this type of process philosophy, the one championed by Heraclitus and Nietzsche, deficient in certain regards.
If you define validity the way he does, as truth-preservation, then yes, he's right, induction is invalid because its conclusion can be true and its premises, defined restrictively, false.
"Truth-preservation" is really just consistency, which means not having premises which contradict one another or the conclusion. The validity of deductive arguments is independent of the truth of premises, maybe that's where you're becoming confused; I don't know.
This is not so unreasonable: all the evidence that we have of such invariances is in the past.
Yes, but even counting written records of the human past as knowledge relies on the assumption that those written records have not themselves changed; that they are the same as when they were written. When it comes to the pre-historic past all bets are off. If the laws of nature could change in the future then why could they not have changed innumerable times in the past? How could we know? All of what we count as knowledge is based on the assumption that they have not changed, just as all our predictions of the future assume that they will not change. Even out trust in our own memories assumes that they have not changed. Once you open the Panodra's Box of radically questioning belief in natural stability and invariance the logical conclusion is chaos; the total undermining of all our supposed knowledge. Hume just didn't go far enough; he didn't see where his questioning would logically lead.
SophistiCatFebruary 11, 2018 at 21:07#1519830 likes
Reply to Janus Oh sure, inferences of past events are as vulnerable to skepticism as inferences of future events, and at some point, when you come to question your cognitive abilities, you immediately undercut your own line of reasoning.
Hume was an empiricist, not a skeptic. He believed that perceptions were the ultimate source of truth. He also apparently believed that at least some understanding of the world could be firmly grounded in perceptions and thus be validated. Of course, a thoroughgoing skeptic could destroy this worldview without breaking a sweat.
So what can we do? Well, if you seek the ultimate grounding of your beliefs in rules - be they the rules of deduction or some other epistemic rules, such as the wisdom of the crowds - then you are setting yourself up for disappointment. I think that induction is normative, not unlike ethics, which similarly resists grounding in something external to itself. You believe in it not for any reason, but because you can't help it.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 11, 2018 at 21:08#1519840 likes
"Truth-preservation" is really just consistency, which means not having premises which contradict one another or the conclusion. The validity of deductive arguments is independent of the truth of premises, maybe that's where you're becoming confused; I don't know.
Maybe I'm not the one who's getting confused ;) I understand very well what truth-preservation is. My point is that it's a concept that is 1) narrow, 2) complicated and 3) deceptive. Don't tell me it's not complicated. It is. There is a much simpler and a much better way to define logical validity. Validity in general, outside of logic, means "the state of being legally acceptable". We can define logical validity in the same exact way, as the state of being legally acceptable. This means that a logical argument is one that abides by the rules of reasoning (whatever they are.) This is broad enough to cover all the different types of validity (not only truth-preservation), it is not unnecessarily complicated and it is not deceptive. It fits every single need perfectly. If we need specific concepts, we can use those too, but we don't have to rely on them all the time. They are, in many situations, inappropriate. Again, that's how I define the concept of validity and that's how I think validity should be defined. It's not how most people think. You don't have to accept it if you don't want to though you can argue against it.
I would have to first understand what you mean (and you haven't explained it in any way that makes it all clear to me) before I could agree or argue against it. So, best leave it, I guess. :s
Magnus AndersonFebruary 11, 2018 at 21:12#1519870 likes
I would have to first understand what you mean (and you haven't explained it in any way that makes it all clear to me) before I could agree or argue against it. So, best leave it, I guess. :s
You don't understand what it means for a logical argument to abide by the rules of reasoning?
You believe in it not for any reason, but because you can't help it.
I would not put it that way; I would say that we follow inductive reasoning for the practical reason that there is no alternative, and I would also say that it is reasonable to have faith in it, because, leaving aside (what I would consider unreasonable) radical skepticism, all our experience and understanding confirms that nature is indeed replete with invariance. There seems, on the contrary to be no good reason, beyond a certain kind of carping logic, to question that.
No I can't comprehend your eccentric account of the rules of reason.
I don't think that's eccentric. I think that what they teach you in school is eccentric. The rules of reasoning, or inference, is a very intuitive idea.
You know what a mathematical function is, right? It's a relation between two sets where every element from the first set is associated with exactly one element from the second set. Now, I think that this is too strict. Instead of thinking in terms of mathematical functions, I tend to think in terms of partial functions, since these are more relaxed; or better yet, in terms of relations. But even these are kind of strict . . . The basic idea is that you have two sets which may or may not be related to each other. It's sort of like a system except we're not talking about variables, parameters, etc. Well, we can, if you want; we can say we have two variables or two parameters but no more and no less than that. That's what every logical argument fundamentally is. Can we agree on that? We have a set of premises on one side and a set of conclusions on the other side. And we also have connections, or associations, between the two sets (which may also be absent; again, we love general concepts because they give us more freedom.) We need some basic rules to limit what kind of premises and what kind of conclusions are permitted. Once these are set, we need to determine what kind of associations are permitted and/or expected. This is where "the rules of reasoning" kick in. This is what determines whether any given argument is valid or not. No notion of consistency whatsoever. Just associations and rules that determine what kind of associations are legal and what kinds are not. You can't just associate any kind of premise with any kind of conclusion, right? Reasoning is a process that works according to a set of rules. So if you note that "All men are mortal" and that "John is mortal" you cannot conclude that "John is a man". You can't associate these two premises with that conclusion. It's against the rules.
Reply to Janus I'm somewhat nonplussed by the conversation here.
Magnus clearly has a simplistic and ill informed understanding of logic, and you have pointed out how his examples of induction are invalid. A valid argument is one in which if the presumptions are true, then the conclusion must also be true.
And it is also I hope clear that on this definition of validity, induction is famously not valid. (x)f(x) does not follow from any number of instances f(a), f(b), f(c)...
Yes, I do agree that inductive arguments cannot satisfy the criterion of validity. I have also said that any inductive argument can be re-framed as a deductive argument to which that criterion can then be applied, but I acknowledge that this requires the addition of an extra premise or premises. And I would say that these additional premises would generally consist in the assumption that nature is invariant.
Yes, I think modern physics makes it seem plausible that invariance is not deterministic, but instead probabilistic; yet it seems that invariance on macro scales does look, for all intents and purposes, deterministic.
It seems that cyclical repetitions of patterns in nature are observed everywhere. The inference that there is either rigidly or probabilistically determined invariance of the microphysical constituents of physical nature seems natural once the idea of supernatural determinants have been rejected.
Yes, I think modern physics makes it seem plausible that invariance is not deterministic, but instead probabilistic; yet it seems that invariance on macro scales does look, for all intents and purposes, deterministic.
You don't need invariance. You just need a limit on variance. And probability theory models limits on variance.
So i’m Going to suggest that invariance is something of what Sam called a hinge proposition.
A better "hinge proposition" - as it is gives its own founding reasons - is the view that invariance is the emergent limit to variation.
And from that metaphysics, the reasonableness of inductive inference follows quite naturally.
Induction only needs extra metaphysical bolstering if invariance is taken as the metaphysically fundamental condition. But if your complaint against the invariance of induction is that nothing prevents nature varying, then a view of induction based on the fact that variation itself can suppress variance means induction has no case to answer on that score.
Deduction, on the other hand, has a metaphysical problem once you grant that nature is fundamentally variable.
SophistiCatFebruary 12, 2018 at 06:38#1520850 likes
and I would also say that it is reasonable to have faith in it, because, leaving aside (what I would consider unreasonable) radical skepticism, all our experience and understanding confirms that nature is indeed replete with invariance. There seems, on the contrary to be no good reason, beyond a certain kind of carping logic, to question that.
Aaand... we are back to circular reasoning. There is no good reason, other than an epistemology that is already shot through with induction, to conclude that "nature is replete with invariance." You could take that not as a conclusion but as an assumption and try to ground your epistemology in that assumption*, but that seems like a strange move. An epistemology is something you already have and would find very difficult to let go. Why chuck it out in favor of a less intuitive, less psychologically secure assumption? Pragmatically, this would seem like the less favorable option.
*Or you could do something even more convoluted and put your faith into some religious or metaphysical narrative (a la @apokrisis) from which the regularity of nature would then fall out.
*Or you could do something even more convoluted and put your faith into some religious or metaphysical narrative (a la apokrisis) from which the regularity of nature would then fall out.
So you are saying that the problem of induction doesn’t hinge on the metaphysical assumption that causality may not be invariant? Curious. What other motivation does it have?
And so I simply say go with that same assumption. Permit nature to vary. And then understand it’s apparent invariance in terms of the self organisation of limits.
After all, that is the world as science has found it to be, if you’ve been keeping up.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 12, 2018 at 10:26#1521360 likes
Constraint is, as I understand it, simply a limit to what is possible. The opposite of it is freedom.
— Magnus Anderson
Yep. Simple really.
The world we live in, in other words, is stable enough to make induction good at making predictions. This makes perfect sense.
— Magnus Anderson
Yep. You got it again.
Alright. That might be the case. But I think that you're saying a bit more than that. I am not sure. Your insistence that you're not interested in narrow subjects such as logic, epistemology, conceptual analysis, etc suggests to me that your interest lies in devising a theory of everything i.e. a theory that explains how everything in the universe works. And I belive that's what you mean when you talk about metaphysics. Metaphysics = a theory of how everything works. You also talk about how your metaphysics is not reductionistic but instead holistic. How do we interpret this? I interpret it to mean that you are in fact a monist. A dialectical monist. Yin-yang philosophy. You want to unite the opposites. Uncontrolled interaction is not enough. There must be a central force, some kind of God, controlling the antagonism. Hence your focus on trichotomies, triadic conceptual structures. Very reminiscent of Aristotle's theory of golden mean. You have a center and two extremes. Left, middle and right. So in the case of order~chaos dichotomy, you want to subsume the two to a third category which is basically that of order (which explains why you make a distinction between constraints and patterns or regularities which you say are merely observable.) So you're acknowledging the dualism and then reducing it to monism under the guise of trialism. There is chaos but this chaos is subsumed to order. I think that Perice said something along the lines that there is no absolute certainty but that there is absolute truth. That would make him a very clever absolutist in my book. But is he? I am not sure. Further investigation required.
There is chaos but this chaos is subsumed to order. I think that Perice said something along the lines
Peirce said: 1) there was Chance Tychism and from this came 2) Mind and from this came 3) Matter, matter being effete Mind.
Now compare this to Daoism:
First came 1) The Dao (Mind) then came 2) Opposites as waves (Yin/Yang) as a manifestation of the Dao then came 3) Creative energy (Qi) as a inner manifestation of the waves.
What so both have common? The Mind. And was does the Mind do? It explores and learns. Induction, as some may call it is fundamental to experienced life. It is not a question of logical validity.It is what life does.
SophistiCatFebruary 12, 2018 at 20:53#1522110 likes
And so I simply say go with that same assumption. Permit nature to vary. And then understand it’s apparent invariance in terms of the self organisation of limits.
After all, that is the world as science has found it to be, if you’ve been keeping up.
What's wrong with a circular argument if it takes the form of the scientific method?
The circle is that of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. So "induction" gets split into the assuming of some hypothesis and then the assessing of the evidence in favour of that hypothesis (or the lack of good reason to doubt it).
The metaphysics is then informed by that. In Peirce's case, it led him to challenge the prevailing ontic determinism of his day. He argued that the logic of how we reason is in fact the logic of how nature itself must develop its regular habits. So that revised metaphysics - one that sees probability and chance as fundamental in nature - becomes then the new hypothesis.
And what do you know? Shortly after, quantum mechanics was born.
Not really. We have to make assumptions to get started. As I have shown if you make the assumptions explicit inductive reasoning can be framed in deductive forms. Science bases itself on the assumption that there are "laws of nature" that determine the invariances that are observed everywhere. At the most fundamental level we have the Strong Nuclear Force, the Weak Nuclear Force, the Electromagnetic Force and the Gravitational Force. Then there are the laws of thermodynamics.
Science theory at every level is based on the presumption that these laws hold. Of course there is no merely logical reason why they should hold. But these are the premises of the whole 'argument' of science, and just like the premises of any argument; their soundness cannot be demonstrated by the argument itself, but must be taken on faith. We take these premises on faith simply because there are no viable alternatives; we cannot even begin to imagine what an alternative could look like.
SophistiCatFebruary 12, 2018 at 21:43#1522170 likes
What's wrong with a circular argument if it takes the form of the scientific method?
Its utter pointlessness? I mean, if you've already helped yourself to induction, what's the point of circling back to "justify" it via one of its purported consequences?
I interpret it to mean that you are in fact a monist. A dialectical monist. Yin-yang philosophy. You want to unite the opposites. Uncontrolled interaction is not enough. There must be a central force, some kind of God, controlling the antagonism.
No controlling hand is needed. The dichotomy or symmetry breaking just goes freely to to its equilibrium balance. It finds its own eventual rest state where it is evenly broken across all scales of being. Hence the final state of a natural system that is just forever freely growing in evenly-paced fashion is going to be fractal. It will have the structure of a scalefree hierarchy.
Hence your focus on trichotomies, triadic conceptual structures.
Yep. The triadic structure is the balanced hierarchical relation that emerges from the symmetry breaking.
A hierarchy represents a state of maximum local~global asymmetry. You have opposing limits of scale appearing as a system develops its own history. It becomes a world organised into the general and the particular, the global constraints or laws and the local degrees of freedom.
You have a center and two extremes. Left, middle and right.
No. The dichotomous extremes are the local and the global. The middle is then the spectrum of scales that span the space (and time) inbetween.
So for instance, the Universe is bounded at one end by the Planck scale, at the other by the cosmic event horizon. Then we humans sit about exactly middle.
So in the case of order~chaos dichotomy, you want to subsume the two to a third category which is basically that of order (which explains why you make a distinction between constraints and patterns or regularities which you say are merely observable.)
Well now this is talking about how the whole thing develops.
So in the beginning - as Peirce describes - it starts with the symmetry of a Firstness or Vagueness. There is just the purest kind of chaos. Unbounded fluctuation.
Then you get secondness as fluctuations start to collide or react with each other in deterministic fashion. You get local events happening.
Then, after some time, you get enough local events happening to start to sort things out and create some kind of common history. You get regular patterns or habits emerging. The system develops a memory. A bunch of random local events start to add up in ways that build a general regulating pattern.
This situation is modelled by scalefree hierarchies. Take a case like the network of world airports. An airport could be freely built anywhere. But as the network starts to grow, it becomes convenient to begin to hub them. You will get certain airports becoming very large as the critical node in larger network. The airport system will develop a clear stratification - a hierarchy of airport sizes that is optimal in terms of achieving a total flow of air-traffic through the system.
So in the beginning, there are just a random scatter of airports all around the same size. By the end, there is a stratified and organised system that emerges in a random fashion to satisfy the general constraint of needing to maximise the flow.
No controlling hand is needed. Just a general constraint of having to optimise the dynamics.
So you're acknowledging the dualism and then reducing it to monism under the guise of trialism. There is chaos but this chaos is subsumed to order.
Nothing is being hidden. But one of the difficult mental changes in gear needed to understand Peirce is that Thirdness is the third stage that incorporates the other two stages. So Thirdness is not monistic but irreducibly triadic. As it says on the box. It is only "monistic" in the sense of being holistic - speaking about the oneness of an irreducibly complex whole.
Monism is usually a substantialist's ontology. It is all about a metaphysics of a single stuff - whether that be materialist stuff or spiritual stuff. So quite different from a Peircean metaphysics where all stuff is the emergent product of an irreducibly triadic process.
Likewise, vagueness of Firstness may sound like a monistic stuff, but it ain't. It sounds like some kind of material being, and yet it can't be that. It is just an unformed potential. Substantial being is what it starts to become - once we get to the dyadicity of Secondness, or brute reaction.
Its utter pointlessness? I mean, if you've already helped yourself to induction, what's the point of circling back to "justify" it via one of its purported consequences?
You are not making sense. How does inquiry even get started unless you are willing to hazard the concrete guess that you are then committed to checking via measurement against the reality you are modelling?
What is it that you are attacking here? I can hear your angry noises, but the target of your unhappiness is very unclear.
Even Hume said we reason inductively because that is what is natural to our psychology. So we only "help ourselves to induction" in the sense that we find ourselves already the products of an evolutionary process. We were born to be pragmatically successful at predicting our worlds.
In Hume's day, there wasn't a lot of science to back up that evolutionary view. But now our best models of neurocognition are explicitly Bayesian. We took the hypothesis and ran with it. The results confirmed the guess.
We take these premises on faith simply because there are no viable alternatives; we cannot even begin to imagine what an alternative could look like.
I would say not quite. The Newtonian breakthrough involved a metaphysical presumption about invariant laws. And now the modern presumption is that all such invariances must be emergent regularities. All the forces of nature are patterns that emerge in self-organising fashion from collective action.
So Newton talked of transcendent laws. Modern physics is aiming at a story of immanently self-organising constraints.
And the two different ontologies map fairly obviously to a generally deductive or computational and deterministic metaphysics, and generally inductive or probabilistic and developmental metaphysics.
So we do have two alternative metaphysics in play. And each would generate its own particular kinds of hypotheses when it comes down to scientific theory.
SophistiCatFebruary 12, 2018 at 22:17#1522260 likes
Not really. We have to make assumptions to get started. As I have shown if you make the assumptions explicit inductive reasoning can be framed in deductive forms.
You cannot replace induction with deduction salva veritate, since induction is plausible reasoning and deduction is certain reasoning. If you assume "invariances of nature" of a certain sort, then you can make a case for the viability of inductive inference in general, but you cannot thereby turn any specific inductive inference into a deduction.
As for starting assumptions, I think that induction itself makes for the most natural starting assumption (since we are already strongly predisposed to it) - more so than the rather complicated cocktail of assumptions that you are proposing.
Science bases itself on the assumption that there are "laws of nature" that determine the invariances that are observed everywhere.
The basic inductive intuition is more local, more restricted than that. Yes, induction implies that we can perceive persistent patterns in nature, but that's it. And that's all the "assumption" that science requires to get going. It does not require us to assume from the start that all of nature is completely subject to laws, much less that these laws form a reductive hierarchy with a fundamental theory of everything at the bottom. Such ideas are viable, but they are not basic, nor are they necessary. Science happily proceeds with local laws and "special" theories.
Yes, I acknowledge the differences between a deterministic and a probabilistic explanation for the laws of nature; my point was only that we have no alternative to the laws themselves to focus our investigations; whether we think of them as ultimately transcendent or as immanently emergent.
If you assume "invariances of nature" of a certain sort, then you can make a case for the viability of inductive inference in general, but you cannot thereby turn any specific inductive inference into a deduction.
Firstly that is exactly what I was proposing to do "make a case for the viability of inductive inference in general". Determinism can be framed deductively as:
1.There are immutable laws which determine every event down to the minutest detail
2. Therefore every event must occur exactly as it does occur and the immutable laws are its sufficient reason
You can also put specific inductive inferences into deductive forms by adding extra premises which insure that you must end up with the result that is observed. It doesn't matter how ad hoc these extra premises might be, you can still produce a deductively valid argument. The argument may be wildly wrong, completely unsound; but from the point of view of validity that doesn't matter. All you need is a little imagination; and this is supplied by abductive reasoning.
Science happily proceeds with local laws and "special" theories.
Science could do that but it would not be the comprehensive science we have today; which does base itself on the foundation of the four forces and the three laws of thermodynamics. The mistake in your interpretation of what I have been arguing seems to be that you think I am claiming that science must presume these forces and laws to be absolute; I don't say it has to do that; but I do say it needs to take them provisionally; and that is just what the inductive method today consists in. These forces and laws were not the premises in the past, to be sure, but other things were premised in the past that have come to be thought as dis-confirmed, and to have been superceded by current premises. Very few people would argue that no progress has been made in science, surely? And it is all based on inductive and abductive reasoning.
SophistiCatFebruary 12, 2018 at 22:36#1522310 likes
Even Hume said we reason inductively because that is what is natural to our psychology. So we only "help ourselves to induction" in the sense that we find ourselves already the products of an evolutionary process. We were born to be pragmatically successful at predicting our worlds.
The conclusion that inductive reasoning is a product of our evolutionary development comes at the far end of a long process of inductive inference. So that cannot be the sense in which we help ourselves to induction: we did that long before we had any inkling of such far-reaching conclusions.
my point was only that we have no alternative to the laws themselves to focus our investigations;
Agreed. We have to identify the invariances as the essential features of the landscape. They start as the surprises in need of an explanation.
Which again gets back to the fact that brain's operate inductively. For nature's regularity to be such a surprising fact - something we could even notice - we would have had to have been expecting something rather different.
The conclusion that inductive reasoning is a product of our evolutionary development comes at the far end of a long process of inductive inference. So that cannot be the sense in which we help ourselves to induction: we did that long before we had any inkling of such far-reaching conclusions.
You will have to explain why this "helping ourselves" is some kind of problem. It might be if you believed that deduction is more fundamental than induction or something. But how can it be if it is the other way around?
Reply to Perplexed "Free Will"??? There is nothing to give up here.
When I make a decision, or act in any way it is determined by who and what I am; and through my needs, motivation and volition.
I would rather I determined my own fate than be free of myself, as that makes no sense whatever.
Rubbish.
This is just poor logic. A broken deduction, pretending to be something. Nothing to do with induction at all.
An inductive argument is more like X happens after Y all the time. So maybe X is caused by Y.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is only fallacious if it is wrong.
SO are we talking conjectures and refutations - falsification?
That is, we see f(a), f(b), f(c)..., propose the conjecture that (x)f(x), and actively seek to find an example of E(x)~f(x)?
That could be a way; but I was thinking of conjecture just as the 'creative imagination' part of science which then gets worked into hypotheses that make predictions as to what we would be likely to observe if our conjectures were correct; predictions which can then be tested by further experiment and observation to see whether they actually obtain. I think Pooper was right that no amount of such verification ever absolutely proves a theory. On the other hand could we say that any number of counter examples could ever absolutely refute a theory? This doesn't seem to make sense, because surely to falsify one judgement is to verify another; that the first judgement is wrong, no?
For nature's regularity to be such a surprising fact - something we could even notice - we would have had to have been expecting something rather different.
That's an intriguing, yet puzzling, statement: could you flesh it out a bit?
Reply to Janus
No one "expects."
We get born and learn.
And shit, if that rock was just like the last one. I drop it and it falls!!!
I hit the cat and it runs away! I fall over and it hurts.
The sun keeps on appearing every morning.
That's what a deterministic universe looks like.
Maybe tomorrow the sun will be shaped like a turnip?
You will have to explain why this "helping ourselves" is some kind of problem. It might be if you believed that deduction is more fundamental than induction or something. But how can it be if it is the other way around?
This is a very good point. Deduction being a derivative puristic formalization of inductive reasoning can hardly arrogate to itself such a priority. Without its ancestor it would never have existed in the first place. And without its living relatives, it could tell us nothing whatsoever about the world.
LOL, I'm not really sure what you're wanting to say here. That's twice in a row now, so maybe the problem lies with me. Here's an abductive/ inductive inference: not enough sleep maybe? :-O
Reply to Janus
At the risk of not causing more confusion....
By "expect" I was responding to the statement "For nature's regularity to be such a surprising fact - something we could even notice - we would have had to have been expecting something rather different.", which you asked apokrisis about.
Reply to Janus Well why was Newtonian determinism such a metaphysical surprise? Because it stands directly against the belief that we are creatures of capricious whims and desires.
In pre-scientific thinking, the world as a whole was understood animistically. It also operated like a mind. So the idea that physical events had no essential choice was a surprise given that context of expectations.
We can't induce generalities from particulars unless we already have some general reason to notice those particulars in the first place. Nature has to falsify some already extant mental prediction - one held implicitly at least. The facts have to be drawn to our attention by failing to fit.
That is why I keep stressing the other neglected side of the story - the principle of indifference that then becomes our tolerance for exceptions to the rule. No constraint on the accidental can ever be total (in the way that the deductionists/absolutists/mechanists dream it). So any "law of nature" has to be fundamentally a probability statement. And it becomes an informal judgement - part of the act of measurement - where to set a reasonable threshold on that.
Banno always likes to argue from a trancendental absolutist perspective - that there is a fact of the matter.
But Peirce kicked that logicist's nonsense for touch. Reality itself is probabilistic. Our modelling of that reality is self-interested. Those are the fundamental constraints in play when it comes any putative "theories of truth". We can draw lines across reality - such as where we feel that differences cease to make a real difference. But the lines are essentially informal and pragmatic. They are justified subjectively in the end.
But if we can also then define what would be maximally subjective, we do have a shot at defining what the maximally objective would be in contrast. Which is of course the stall that science sets up.
René DescartesFebruary 13, 2018 at 06:32#1523640 likes
Rubbish.
This is just poor logic. A broken deduction, pretending to be something. Nothing to do with induction at all.
An inductive argument is more like X happens after Y all the time. So maybe X is caused by Y.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is only fallacious if it is wrong.
You're being pedantic. It's what people to do in order to feel superior (when they are actually not.) See Banno for example.
Here's an amendment to my argument:
1. Some Ps are Qs (e.g. all of the observed ones)
2. Therefore, all Ps are Qs (in my opinion, so yeah, maybe I'm wrong, it's not certain)
Basically, what we have here is people who do not think ob their own but parrot. So when someone comes along and does not repeat the popular narrative word-by-word he's subjected to pathetic pedantry.
SophistiCatFebruary 13, 2018 at 08:00#1523860 likes
1.There are immutable laws which determine every event down to the minutest detail
2. Every event must occur exactly as it does occur and the immutable laws are its sufficient reason
I am not sure why you bring up determinism at this point. Are you saying that inductive/deductive split is equivalent to indeterminism/determinism? The laws of nature could be deterministic, but we don't know that (we don't even know that there are laws of nature). And even if we did somehow know that with certainty, that knowledge alone wouldn't have removed the need for inductive inference, since we still wouldn't have had sufficient information to deduce everything we wish to know.
You can also put specific inductive inferences into deductive forms by adding extra premises which insure that you must end up with the result that is observed.
That wouldn't be the same inference - it would be a different inference with the same conclusion. But I in any case, I am not seeing the significance of this observation.
SophistiCatFebruary 13, 2018 at 08:06#1523870 likes
You will have to explain why this "helping ourselves" is some kind of problem. It might be if you believed that deduction is more fundamental than induction or something. But how can it be if it is the other way around?
I am not saying that helping ourselves to induction is a problem - quite the opposite. Or if it is a problem, any "cure" that has been proposed so far - any putative justification for induction - is worse than the "disease."
I don't think that deduction is less fundamental than induction; deductive reasoning seems to be at least as fundamental as inductive. But that doesn't mean that one can subsume the other.
No it would be the same inference with the premises made explicit. And the point is simply that inductive arguments can be rendered in deductive form in order to be presented as valid arguments.
If you don't see the significance of that to refute the claim that inductive arguments are not valid then I guess that would be to your detriment, not mine.
1.There are immutable laws which determine every event down to the minutest detail
2. Every event must occur exactly as it does occur and the immutable laws are its sufficient reason
This is more of a tautology.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 13, 2018 at 10:59#1524210 likes
Reply to Magnus Anderson
Deduction is about definitions. About figuring out a fact from a generalised law.
Induction is empirical. It seeks to offer provisional laws FROM observations.
All Ps are Qs, and such arguments have no bearing on induction.
If you can't work that our you need to run along.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 13, 2018 at 11:50#1524320 likes
Here's the first paragraph form the Shorter Rutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, inductive inference.
According to a long tradition, an inductive inference is an inference from a premise of the form "all observed A are B" to a conclusion of the form "All A are B". Such inferences are not deductively valid, that is, even if the premise is true it is possible that the conclusion is false, since unobserved A's may differ from observed ones.
Now, does anyone here think that this is wrong? Surely at least we have agreement on this.
Basically, the encyclopedia is saying that inductive arguments have the following form:
1. All observed As are Bs
2. Therefore, all As are Bs
You must be smarter than this encyclopedia because it says nothing about the conclusion being "merely" probable. Right?
I generalized this to:
1. Some As are Bs
2. Therefore, all As are Bs
The premise is no longer restricted to observations.
That's OK, but it is no longer determinism. The only aspect of determinism that is being maintained is the word. Why the infatuation with the word? I think it lies in a religious-like faith in the Laws of Nature. But then we need to discuss the overall human condition and the desire for outside forces to rule one's life.
Yes and the point is that insofar as the conclusions are contained in the premises of all valid deductive arguments they are all, in a certain sense, tautologies.
Basically Hume's criticism of inductive arguments amounts to saying they are not rationally justified because they are not tautologous in this sense.
However by making explicit the implicit premises in inductive arguments I.e. regularity, invariance, you can render them as tautologies.
Example:
1. All observed swans have been white
2. There is a natural law that ensures that swans must be white
C. Therefore all swans are white
A more truly tautologous form which basically says the same thing would be:
If there is a natural law that ensures that swans must be white then all swans must be white.
It does depend on the definition of 'tautology' though. Are tautologies simply true by definition?
1. All observed swans have been white
2. There is a natural law that ensures that swans must be white
C. Therefore all swans are white
A more truly tautologous form which basically says the same thing would be:
If there is a natural law that ensures that swans must be white then all swans must be white.
It does depend on the definition of 'tautology' though. Are tautologies simply true by definition?
But this puts it all back to deduction, since you are not drawing out a generality from the particularities. You are using a generalism -point 1 (above) is redundant, C the conclusion is a tautology of 2.
If who I am at a given moment is completely determinate then is any choice possible?
Yes, all choices are determined by antecedent conditions. What makes them different from the automatic consequences of inanimate cause and effect is that outwardly the choice emerged from an agent whose condition is unknowable to an observer. Each of us (agents) are a universe unto themselves, a black box of complexity.
What makes them different from the automatic consequences of inanimate cause and effect is that outwardly the choice emerged from an agent whose condition is unknowable to an observer.
Do you say that the condition is unknowable to the agent themselves?
However by making explicit the implicit premises in inductive arguments I.e. regularity, invariance, you can render them as tautologies.
And in doing so two things happen. The first is that it is no longer an inductive argument, but an deductive one. The second is that the premise used is itself dubious.
The first premise is deductively redundant, but there would not be any motivation to make the assumption that forms the second premise if no white swans had ever been observed.
It is true that the second premise does not deductively follow from the first, but the first does deductively follow from the second. It is not essential to the validity of a deductive argument that premises follow from one another; the important criterion is that they cannot be inconsistent with one another, and that the conclusion cannot be false if the deductively salient premises are true.
It could be better put into this simpler form:
If it is a consequence of natural law that all swans must be white, then all observed swans will be white.
Banno always likes to argue from a trancendental absolutist perspective - that there is a fact of the matter.
What a dreadful creature is Banno! Speaking things that cannot be spoken, such as "it is true that there are black swans"! He says that some statements can be true!
See him use the trancendental absolutist perspective! "It is true that this sentence is in English"! "It is true that I have two hands"!
I was in a similar position. Via cognitive neurobiology, theoretical biology and paleoanthropology, I had arrived at a generally semiotic position. And then decent digests of Peirce's voluminous unpublished thoughts began to pop up. Along with a whole circle of biologists and systems scientists, it just became obvious that Peirce had sorted out the metaphysics 100 years earlier. Within a few years, we were all calling ourselves biosemioticians.
And in doing so two things happen. The first is that it is no longer an inductive argument, but an deductive one. The second is that the premise used is itself dubious.
Exactly, that is just the point I have been trying to drive home! Your second point is irrelevant, though, because the dubiousness of premises is irrelevant to the validity of deductive arguments.
The second premise is not just dubious, but wrong, as is the conclusion. And indeed, at least in my case, so is the first premise.
Yes, I know; I am Australian, after all. I go drawing in Centennial Park most Saturdays and every swan I see is black (or grey in the case of the young ones).
But, again, I am only addressing the issue of validity.
Does anyone else find it odd that Apo can't actually say that his metaphysics is true? He acts as if it is true, and speaks as if it is true; but it binds him never to utter that truth. Indeed, he can't make any truth claims.
On the other hand why not simply: "there are black swans" and "this sentence is in English"?
Yes, indeed. "there are black swans" and "It is true that there are black swans" are truth functionally equivalent. You and I can say either. Apo is restricted to one but not the other by his metaphysics.
I would rather say that there is a rational discourse that might reasonably be called induction, a rational discourse that is valid because it can always be framed in deductive form.
Deduction by itself tells us nothing about the world. Some valid deductive arguments have premises that are considered to be self-evident (like mathematics), some have premises that are motivated by inferences to what might be thought to be best explanations (like abductive conjectures and inductive inferences), and others have premises and conclusions which are simply nonsensical. (All glorps are purple. All twaddlewhackers are glorps. Therefore all twaddlewhackers are purple). Deduction is merely a form; a deductive argument is only as good, when it comes to soundness, as its premises.
I think apo could say that his metaphysics is true is he were to assert that his metaphysics fairly represents what the community of enquirers will ultimately come to believe at the culmination of human metaphysical speculation.
Yes, indeed. "there are black swans" and "It is true that there are black swans" are truth functionally equivalent. You and I can say either. Apo, is restricted to one but not the other by his metaphysics.
So, "there are black swans" is true iff "it is true that there are black swans" is true?
Deduction by itself tells us nothing about the world. Some valid deductive arguments have premises that are considered to be self-evident (like mathematics),
Think about that for a bit. Mathematics tells us nothing about the world?
I think apo could say that his metaphysics is true is he were to assert that his metaphysics fairly represents what the community of enquirers will ultimately come to believe at the culmination of human metaphysical speculation.
Which is to say he could claim it was true if he changed the meaning of "true".
OK, bottom line is I could not put my faith in any of the grand philosophical schemes of the nineteenth century. The analytic turn - which is now ubiquitous - offers instead a set of rational tools with which to take philosophical issues apart, in marked contrast to the fake grandeur of sandcastle pragmatism or transcendental realism.
I've never been decided about that question; it can depend on what you mean by "tell something about the world". It does seem as though mathematics must tell us something about the world or about ourselves. But it seems to be more the fact that we can do mathematics that seems to tells us something, rather than the math itself. Would you say mathematics per se tell us anything empirical about the world?
What about phenomenology or process philosophy? Have they nothing at all to offer to increase our overall understanding of human life and the world in your view? I tend to think that all possible avenues of intellectual enquiry and speculation should be explored; if possible without prejudice.
Deductive Logic is a bit like grammar. It gives a structure to what can be said.
Mathematics does much the same. So the answer to Zeno’s paradoxes are provided by the grammar of integral calculus, which sets out how we can talk about motion.
Speaking things that cannot be spoken, such as "it is true that there are black swans"! He says that some statements can be true!
But your spoken truths always rely on unspoken ambiguities.
Are we talking about adult black swans or their fluffy white goslings? Are we talking about "swans" as being generically Cygnus atratus, or Cygnus olor and Cygnus cygnus? Are we talking about black swans that include albino Cygnus atratus?
So we can resolve some of these ambiguities with more careful speech. We can say that is a member of the genus Cygnus. It is black.
Yet ambiguity is in principle irreducible in speech acts. We can only hope to constrain it. Which is where pragmatism comes in as it then only make sense to put so much effort into constraining the semantics of our utterances. The truths we tell turn out to have as least as much to do with our intentions as they do with "the facts of the world".
As a biologist, you could have a hearty debate about the genus Cygnus. Are geese really so different? Are they not just chubbier members of the tribe, Cygnini? Or perhaps we need to be more restrictive about the true swans. There are grounds to rule out the coscoroba swan as a proper member of the subfamily, Cygninae.
So as usual, you make your simplistic statements about objective truths and pretend to be amazed when sensible folk roll their eyes. Of course we can say that's just Banno, taking his furtive pleasure in waggling his naive realism in public again, hoping to scandalise.
Pragmatism is for serious grown-ups. But you play in the corner with your little thing if you want to.
The interesting point for me here is whether grammar, or calculus, are themselves deductively or intuitively derived. I think they as much the result of imaginative insight (abduction) than of sheer deduction. Even in analytical philosophy of language it ultimately comes down to what is intuitively obvious to us, no?
So, can we say it is deductively certain that grammar gives a structure to what can be said? Could we not equally say that analysis of the structure of what can be said gives us grammar?
Reply to Janus what might be interesting and important is what can’t be said. We can’t say something and it’s negation; we can’t deduce a universal from a number of instances.
And what can be said. We can talk of infinitesimal motion.
But yes, imagination and creativity are paramount. Look at Kripke’s modal Logic.
Odd, also, that from what I understand Apo rejects the body of modern logic. But perhaps I misunderstand him, since that seems so absurd.
Does anyone else find it odd that Apo can't actually say that his metaphysics is true? He acts as if it is true, and speaks as if it is true; but it binds him never to utter that truth. Indeed, he can't make any truth claims.
So you have changed your position on hinge propositions all of a sudden. Curious.
I would rather say that there is a rational discourse that might reasonably be called induction, a rational discourse that is valid because it can always be framed in deductive form.
That is why Peirce was concerned with the proper grammar of reasoning. You need to wrap the deductive bit in the preface of an abduction and the conclusion of inductive confirmation.
Banno adopts the transcendental view of the naive realist. Or at least his speech acts are identical to a naive realist. So same thing.
Deduction is syntactically close and so of course can't introduce semantic novelty. It can only rearrange the facts it is given. So deduction can't know about the truth of the world - even the kind of pragmatic truth that is the truth of a semiotic relation between a self and its world.
Therefore "truth-telling" needs some way of introducing the underlying semantics in a sensible fashion. The inductive side of the equation needs to be formalised as possible - even if in the end it is going to be still irreducibly an art.
And that is Peirce's innovation - later sort of recapitulated by Popper. He didn't bother trying to make induction work as inverse deduction (even if it sort of does work that way). He broke induction into the complementary steps of hypothesis formation and hypothesis confirmation. And deduction stood inbetween as a fully formal connection. Deduction turns general concepts into particular predictions.
So as much as possible, human thinking was cast as a formal and grammatical habit.
I realise you understand this. I just wanted to sum up the critical gist of the thread again. :)
Odd, also, that from what I understand Apo rejects the body of modern logic. But perhaps I misunderstand him, since that seems so absurd.
To deal with this one last misrepresentation, the logic you are talking about is designed for dealing with the particular or individuated. So of course it is part of the body of logic. It just ain't the whole - or holistic - story.
The whole story is triadic. It includes the logic of generality and the logic of vagueness.
Yeah. It would be useful if you could decide how you approach hinge propositions given your comments about me. But I fully expect you to take rapid evasive action as usual.
Quick, start waggling your naive realism again. That always attracts an inquisitive crowd.
Reply to Banno To remind you, here was a fulsome reply. Now rather than doing your usual of pretending it wasn’t said, then coming in later with claims of a refusal to reply, let’s see you respond with a counter argument.
Do you dispute the correctness of what I say here? If so, make a case.
But your spoken truths always rely on unspoken ambiguities.
Are we talking about adult black swans or their fluffy white goslings? Are we talking about "swans" as being generically Cygnus atratus, or Cygnus olor and Cygnus cygnus? Are we talking about black swans that include albino Cygnus atratus?
So we can resolve some of these ambiguities with more careful speech. We can say that is a member of the genus Cygnus. It is black.
Yet ambiguity is in principle irreducible in speech acts. We can only hope to constrain it. Which is where pragmatism comes in as it then only make sense to put so much effort into constraining the semantics of our utterances. The truths we tell turn out to have as least as much to do with our intentions as they do with "the facts of the world".
Reply to apokrisis well the basic logical issue in you argument is that it’s structure is that of a transcendental Argument; that there is only one solution, pragmatism.
So even if one entertains your view of ambiguity, pragmatism is one possibility among many.
And even then, that whole reply does not address the criticisms I set out.
There is here a failure on your part to commit. Do you have a partner? Is your affection for them only probable? Is your respect for rationality based on certainty or just what suits your purpose? Do you have hands or are you only partially confident In hand utility?
well the basic logical issue in you argument is that it’s structure is that of a transcendental. Argument; that there is only one solution, pragmtism.
It's hard to be sure how to interpret this bizzarely incoherent sentence. But how would it be a problem if there were some transcendental argument in play, and what are you saying that argument is?
My post was about the irreducible ambiguity of speech acts and how that is indeed exactly what we would expect of a constraints-based view of logic. In the end, it is up to us - in informal fashion - to decide what counts as the "truth" in terms of some act of measurement or observation.
You seem to be talking about something else now. But then you don't even seem to be talking English anymore. And is that a half-empty bottle of red I spy on your kitchen counter?
There is here a failure on your part to commit. Do you have a partner? Is your affection for them only probable? Is your respect for rationality based on certainty or just what suits your purpose? Do you have hands or are you only partially confident In hand utility?
Again you are choosing to talk past the case I've already made. Not very charitable, hey?
I've said Pragmatism is making the choice to believe. Indeed, the choice to ignore exceptions to the rule is part of the constraints-based deal. Uncertainty is irreducible. But also, we can find reasons for thinking that after a certain point - one defined in terms of our interests or purposes - any further differences fail to make a real difference.
So goose, swan or duck? Sometimes it doesn't matter. And sometimes it might.
There are always going to be differences. Is the three-legged rabbit still a rabbit? If Bonzo the dog's arse is a hair off the mat, is Bonzo still sat on the mat? But to the degree our semantics are aligned - and the semantics include our intentions - then we can all draw a line across reality with enough agreement to make translation second-nature rather than an arduous process of exegesis.
You keep relying on this easy translatability to speak like a naive realist. Who can deny the Cygnus atratus is a black swan? Who can deny the dog is on the mat? Who can deny your first sentence was in English? But as I am saying, you are relying on a principle of indifference to dismiss any skepticism. You are making a choice in terms of some concept of a self with its intentions. And that is not a formal thing. But Pragmatism gets us as close to formalising this epistemic state of affairs as epistemology can get. Hence science is pragmatism in practice. The proof is in the application.
I note that you try to divert the conversation to the red herring that pragmatism = Jamesian utility. And this is after I've already cited Russell's rightful dismissal of James ... and quiet praise for Peirce.
Just another example of how dismally you argue your case. Every time you get caught out, just pretend it never happened.
Do you say that the condition is unknowable to the agent themselves?
We can never have full knowledge of all the causalities, but no I am not saying that. On the most basic level, we are not aware of all the chemical pathways that make us hungry for example. Low blood sugar ,balance of hormones etc... we just feel hunger and that informs our motivation to seek food.
I am what determines my actions. My life, my experience, my emotion, my volition, what my body tells me. Free will is simply not being constrained by external forces - it is not some magical ability to act against what makes me determined.
I am a determinist. I am determined.
we just feel hunger and that informs our motivation to seek food.
But then we still get to choose to follow these instincts or not. Obviously we are still constrained by external forces. I don't get to chose to suddenly appear upside down six miles above the earths surface. But clearly my choices allow for the possibility of diverting determinism in more than one possible direction. Is this a roll of the dice, or do I have the power to load the dice in my favour?
Reply to Banno Odd. First you promise that you will be getting back to me with a proper reply and then you edit your message to tell me to look up transcendental arguments.
Are you now telling me that you are not a Peircean because you prefer to be a Kantian? :D
What about phenomenology or process philosophy? Have they nothing at all to offer to increase our overall understanding of human life and the world in your view? I tend to think that all possible avenues of intellectual enquiry and speculation should be explored; if possible without prejudice.
True; a good philosopher is able to understand a novel philosophical approach at a gut level, and yet still step away from it so that they can criticise it.
For me the private language argument shows the limits of phenomenology, and process philosophy has not yet shown its potential. At the moment I have become more interested in exploring belief and its variations, following on from the thread Sam started.
This thread has served to reinforce my rejection of induction as a rational process, recognising the ad lib nature of scientific enquiry. Belief, conviction, certainty and so on are best understood as decisions rather than the forced result of some algorithmic scientific process.
True; a good philosopher is able to understand a novel philosophical approach at a gut level, and yet still step away from it so that they can criticise it.
Yes, I agree with this. The point of all rational inquiry is really critique it seems. I mean the rational part is to keep check on the intuitive part. Analysis should aim to find the inconsistencies and incoherence in philosophical proposals and approaches.
For me the private language argument shows the limits of phenomenology, and process philosophy has not yet shown its potential. At the moment I have become more interested in exploring belief and its variations,
Good phenomenology is an inter-subjective project, though. It's true that we can never have certainty that our private experiences are more or less the same, but why should they not be if we share the same culture and biology; the same public expressions? This expectation seems reasonable; although to return to the subject of the discussion, it can never be deductively certain. So, again, it is an inductive expectation; where would we be without them? It seems that deduction alone cannot be any more than 'pouring from the empty into the void'.
Belief, conviction, certainty and so on are best understood as decisions rather than the forced result of some algorithmic scientific process.
Again, I agree. The notion that our beliefs are completely deterministic leads to the conclusion that they are not freely acquired and held. If that were true, there would be no point...
The inquiry into the nature of belief is interesting; but it seems that any such inquiry must be phenomenological, which means descriptive (I think the Wittgenstein of the PI is pretty close to being a phenomenologist), rather than scientific, in the sense of proposing hypotheses. That's why I think current attempts to explain human behavior, ethics, aesthetics and belief in general in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory are wrongheaded.
It's true that we can never have certainty that our private experiences are more or less the same, but why should they not be if we share the same culture and biology; the same public expressions?
I can go along with this; but discussions of phenomenology very quickly turn into effing the ineffable. At that point the discussion becomes mystical.
I'm increasingly drawn to externalism with regard to knowledge, belief, and other aspects of mind. Remove private mental language and it becomes evident that they are somehow things in the world. That's badly expressed, but that is the area in which I am reading at present.
This thread has served to reinforce my rejection of induction as a rational process, recognising the ad lib nature of scientific enquiry. Belief, conviction, certainty and so on are best understood as decisions rather than the forced result of some algorithmic scientific process.
So if it ain't inductive and it ain't deductive, then how is the decision "rational"? Surely the whole bleeding point of epistemology - a theory of truth - is to have some actual theory about the best process for arriving at that destination?
What does a no-process system of belief look like, anyone?
Reply to apokrisis I'm still here. And for the record, my request for a debate or thread on the pros and cons of your theory of truth remains; I am happy to join you in a discussion between ourselves. I'd be interested to see you come clean about things like your inability to state a truth or give an accurate measurement and your rejection of logic and the concealed scientism that underpins your views. That request has stood for a few years now, and continues to stand.
But that's not for your benefit. You don't do philosophy, you just preach the Good Word of Peirce.
I'd be interested to see you come clean about things like your inability to state a truth or give an accurate measurement and your rejection of logic and the concealed scientism that underpins your views.
Those are just your misreprentations of what I have said. And I’ve corrected you on them often enough.
Truth is what we believe in the long run following a process of reasoned inquiry.
Acts of measurement are informal and so always reflect the embeddness, the intentionality, of the person(s) seeking the answers. Accuracy is a pragmatic thing, not an absolute one.
I don’t reject predicate logic or deductive syntax. I place them within a more holistic view of logic that is triadic.
My scientism is hardly concealed. Nor the fact that I am a holist or systems scientist rather than a reductionist or atomistic scientist.
So your complaints are just bullshit. You’ve heard me say these exact same things many times. It is not me who bottles it when the discussion gets detailed and your general lack of a choherent position is exposed.
If you want a debate, you’ve got one right here. But you don’t really want a debate where you have to give a position and then a proper defence. We’ve all seen that time and again.
Acts of measurement are informal and so always reflect the embeddness, the intentionality, of the person(s) seeking the answers. Accuracy is a pragmatic thing, not an absolute one.
So, then, what is the height of the Eiffel tower? Is it 324 metres? When I ask you questions like this you seem to need to add some sort of explanation when a simple yes or no would suffice. Why the added
complexity?
You confuse truth and belief. Yep, I've pointed that out before. You do not have a theory of truth, you have a theory of belief.
Not a problem. That's what I say. Pragmatism is a theory of justified belief - as well as a theory of how the notion of objective truth is a naive realist pipedream.
Now maybe you want to define truth as tautological truth. But I just call that a theory of tautology. If you have a syntax closed in a way that prevents any possible semantic leakage, then sure, it is "truth preserving" in its grammar.
But only logic wonks would call syntactical water-tightness "truth". It's not what we really mean by truth, is it?
So, then, what is the height of the Eiffel tower? Is it 324 metres? When I ask you questions like this you seem to need to add some sort of explanation when a simple yes or no would suffice. Why the added complexity?
Well given that I like to be as careful as possible about epistemology, then of course I can't just accept the idiotic simplicities of a naive realist answer.
So if you don't like "complicated" answers, that's your tough shit. Don't pretend to be an epistemologist.
So we are agreed that you are not offering a theory of truth. A good start.
I'm not too sure what objective truth is. Are there subjective truths, to oppose them? And if so, are they amenable to the same pragmatic analysis? Or are there subjective truths but no objective truths?
You again didn't directly address the question of the height of the Eiffel Tower. Is it 324 metres, give or take a bit? It's actually an important point, because it has odd implications. If you say that the tower is 324m heigh, then it seems you are committed to it being true that it is 324 m heigh. Whether you like it or not, that tautology is hard to shake.
After all, we also agree that we need to be as careful as possible with our epistemology.
I don't accept that there are two types of truth - subjective and objective. I think it best to take the notion of truth as unanalysable, as fundamental. Truth is introduced as soon as a language becomes able to talk about itself or another language. Of course an language that can talk about itself by that very fact includes a semantics. So it seems to me that your comments regarding syntax and semantics are a bit odd. I do not, for example, understand what you might mean by: Quoting apokrisis
If you have a syntax closed in a way that prevents any possible semantic leakage, then sure, it is "truth preserving" in its grammar.
What is semantic leakage? Will it stain?
Let's go over validity and induction again, and let me know if we agree.
An argument will be valid just in the case that, if the assumptions are true, then the conclusion will also be true.
We can set out induction as follows. We have observations f(a), f(b), f(c)... for some limited and incomplete interpretation of a,b,c... and f.
An induction would have it that from f(a), f(b), f(c)... we can conclude (x)f(x). This is clearly invalid.
So you can either offer a different definition of induction, or you can re-define validity to include such an induction.
I'm not too sure what objective truth is. Are there subjective truths, to oppose them? And if so, are they amenable to the same pragmatic analysis? Or are there subjective truths but no objective truths?
If you think I am not offering a theory of truth, how could I possibly answer that? So evidently - despite what you just said - you agree that I'm offering a theory of truth.
That's as close as can be got, and I have said it to the point of tedium.
So we have: "The Eiffel Tower is 324 metres high, give or take a bit" is true IFF The Eiffel Tower is 324 metres high, give or take a bit.
Fine. But how do we get from that truth condition to a belief that is in fact justified and therefore true? What is the reasonable thing to do to validate the proposition? How do we establish the truth or falsity of this statement in practice?
I shouldn't have to ask really. But you always go oddly silent when called on to explain the grounds why one would assent to such a statement as if there were an unassailable fact.
I'm sure that is because you would have to sound pretty Peircean in your answer. But surprise me.
I don't accept that there are two types of truth - subjective and objective.
Those would be the complementary limits on pragmatically justified belief. So all actual belief would lie within those opposing extremes.
Thus you could say all belief is just belief. And yet also there is the standard distinction between belief that is at one extreme, just an individual's idiosyncratic view - their personal truth - and at the other end, the kind of truth that aims to be as impersonal as possible.
What there isn't is your naive realist truth - a truth in which no person is involved as a believer with a purpose giving shape to that truth.
The naive realist is a representationalist. S/he looks at the world and sees facts. A Peircean realist looks at the world and see signs. The facts are already part of a semantic structure. That is how we can know anything. We are looking at meaning from the get go.
That explains why the naive realist feels both so convinced by the transparent simplicity with which they just look and "see the world", and why naive realism is so wrong as an epistemology.
Let's go over validity and induction again, and let me know if we agree.
Where have I claimed that abduction or inductive confirmation are "valid"? Why do you harp on about something which is not an issue anyone is disputing?
Hanover put it very neatly. But in typical fashion, you just blanked his inconvenient truth.
Deduction may be valid but it produces no new knowledge. It is syntactically closed and, by design, can't. And that is why the species of induction are so much more important in the end - if you actually want to create new knowledge. You have to be able to go beyond the known to improve on what you've got. Scientific reasoning then ensures that error-minimising feedback is built into that loop of thought.
I'm increasingly drawn to externalism with regard to knowledge, belief, and other aspects of mind. Remove private mental language and it becomes evident that they are somehow things in the world. That's badly expressed, but that is the area in which I am reading at present.
I'm not really much familiar with externalism, beyond a passing acquaintance with Putnam's
'twin-Earth' argument which featured in an undergrad course at Sydney Uni I participated in about 10 years ago. I remember I didn't find it very convincing. Somebody posted a link to a series of interviews with Riccardo Manzotti recently. I read some of those, and I seem to remember you were commenting favorably on them. Is that the sort of thing you have in mind?
Reply to Janus I found Putnam's view less that convincing. But I enjoyed that Manzotti read. Yes, that's where my thoughts are leading. It idea that mind is an interaction with the world appears not unreasonable.
In the context of this thread, having such-and-such a belief becomes having such-and-such an approach to the world. In philosophical jargon, beliefs are doxastic shorthand to explain actions.
That's just what induction is though; the assumption that things will be as they have been observed to be, and the underlying assumption is that there is a lawlike regularity in nature that determines that such invariances will obtain. Laws could be deterministic or statistically probablistic; it doesn't matter, the point is that invariance is assured if there are such laws; and if we don't presume such laws, then we have no principle to guide our investigations.
Reply to apokrisis How do I define truth. That you still ask that question is curious.
You, I and whoever else is reading this are most probably competent users of English. As such we show that we can use "...is true" correctly. Now providing a definition is providing synonyms, and hence leads to circularity - words defining more words.
You might recall Wittgenstein mentioning that the meaning of a term is its use?
It follows that pragmatism is not a theory of truth, although of course it re-defines the word "truth" to its own ends. Not being a theory of truth, it is also not a theory of justified true belief - not a theory of knowledge. Hence your Quoting apokrisis
Truth is what we believe in the long run following a process of reasoned inquiry.
Well, no, it isn't. Truth is quite distinct from belief. Pragmatism leaves truth unaddressed.
But how do we get from that truth condition to a belief that is in fact justified and therefore true?
Being justified does not make a proposition true. This is a fine example of the sort of confusion that enters into the discussion when you change the meaning of the word "true". Justification leads to belief, not to truth.
Pragmatism, together with other substantive theories such as coherence and foundationalism, offer neat ways of justifying our beliefs. But they do not explain what truth is. That's right - I am saying that pragmatism is a good thing. But not as an explanation of truth.
I'm not too sure what objective truth is. Are there subjective truths, to oppose them? And if so, are they amenable to the same pragmatic analysis? Or are there subjective truths but no objective truths?
If you think I am not offering a theory of truth, how could I possibly answer that? So evidently - despite what you just said - you agree that I'm offering a theory of truth.
There is also the possibility that the distinction between objective and subjective, and pragmatism, are incoherent. The issue here is that despite rejecting the notion of truth, you continue to speak of objective truth.
...explain the grounds why one would assent to such a statement as if there were an unassailable fact.
One can assent to whatever one likes. The question is how reasonable that assent is.
What would be wrong would be to assert that there is only one method that can be used to decide. As if the way one decided the height of the Eiffel Tower were the same as the way one decides the declaration of human rights or that one loves one's partner. Pragmatism does not answer all such questions.
The Eiffel Tower
Still unanswered. Is the tower 324m tall, give or take a bit?
I say that it is, and further that it is true that the tower is 324m tall.
But you can't. All you can do is say that you believe that it is 324m tall.
For fun, as you won't ever set out a counter position when making your scoffing noises about mine, let's take this profile statement you make.
Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.
Beliefs range over propositions. (arguably, they might be made to range over statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald.)
Beliefs set out a relation of a particular sort between an agent and a proposition.
This relation is such that if the agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.
The logical problem here, the philosophical interesting side issue, is that beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.
______________
We know some statement when at the least we believe it, it fits in with our other beliefs, and when it is true.
The "fits in with other beliefs" is a first approximation for a justification. Something stronger is needed, but material implication will not do.
Discard Gettier. The definition is not hard-and-fast.
It does not make sense to ask if we know X to be true; that's exactly the same as asking if we know X. The "we only know it if it is true" bit is only there because we can't know things that are false.
If you cannot provide a justification, that is, if you cannot provide other beliefs with which a given statement coheres, then you cannot be said to know it.
A belief that is not subject to doubt is a certainty.
Now let's analyse and see how different it really is from what I would say.
Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.
As I understand the distinction you want to make, it seems to be that only a statement that is both crisply definite and an actual possibility is a truth-apt proposition. The semantics have to have a real world basis. There must be here an actual present king of France, and baldness must be an actual state a head could have.
I guess my question is then whether you are making this distinction simply in the spirit of "good practice", or whether you think it is a black and white distinction with no pragmatic wiggle room.
For instance, I would claim that there is always irreducible ambiguity or vagueness in any such proposition. How do we define "bald". That in itself is a standard Sorites paradox example.
And how do you handle fictional or modal possibilities. There are books or logical worlds where there are French kings that are variously bald or hirsute in ways that give propositional meaning to the statement.
So I can go along with this distinction as a target if what you are stressing is that a well-formed logical assertion is about some actually possible state of the world - because "truth" only really applies to the relation that we pragmatically have with a world. It becomes silly to even talk about truth or falsity except in a context where there is a world to determine that truth or falsity to the propositioner floating the proposition.
Beliefs range over propositions. (arguably, they might be made to range over statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald.)
Beliefs set out a relation of a particular sort between an agent and a proposition.
This relation is such that if the agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.
OK. The idea of beliefs now brings that pragmatic relation between a self and its world into focus. It highlights that there is the larger thing of a relation. There has to be a causal coupling such that beliefs drive actions, and then those actions feed back to impact the beliefs.
This stresses the embedded and ecological nature of the reasoning relation we have with the world against other possible approaches to truth. Understood this way, it just is pragmatism. Where it might fall short is that it doesn't seem to continue on to the semiotic consequences of a modelling relations view of the mind and what it can know of the world.
The semiotic view of course adds that the "mind" in fact only deals in signs of the world. The psychological goal is construct a self separate from the world. And so the world - as some set of physical energies - must be filtered in a way that transforms it into an Umwelt. It must be experienced in terms of a set of signs that are readable at the level of automatic habit. We don't have to think about an apple being red - even though redness is already a qualitative interpretation by the brain. We just "see" the apple as red. That is the Umwelt we experience - our map by which we navigate the territory.
Of course, this triadic semiotic view of our relation to the world is more complex. The usual way to frame things is dyadic and representational. There is just us (with our experiences) and the world that our sense-data are representing. However - for a theory of truth that aims to be realistic in terms of the actual psychological structure of human conception - we do need to follow through from simply asserting a practical embeddedness in the world to an understanding of the relation that is fully (bio)semiotic.
But in general, I take this to state that - contra to idealist theories which might want to found themselves on impractical doubts about the world even being there - you are asserting that theories of truth start with the world already being in play. So hard dualism is out. Some kind of physicalism is the case. A psychological machinery of some kind is assumed to be involved in the whole affair.
I of course agree with that basic pragmatic stance. In the end, it is silly to doubt there is the world out there - in some sense. And so epistemology's job is to understand the more fundamental thing of the "modelling relation" that connects "minds" and "worlds".
However, the semiotic view says it would then be dangerously like naive realism to take the "agent" for granted in some fashion as a "real thing" - a fundamental and unanalysable bit of ontological furniture. The semiotic view is that the self emerges from the modelling as well - as the necessary distinction that is producing the counter-concept of "the world".
So Banno might want his drink of water. And his actions might achieve that as the drink is really there to be had. But a truly rigorous semiotic analysis would have a lot of questions about this reified "Banno". As well as about the "world" that this Banno reifies as some set of interpretable signage.
The logical problem here, the philosophical interesting side issue, is that beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.
Hmm. Do you mean we put a narrative spin on the actions we find ourselves involved with? We can concoct any number of "reasonable" stories for why A led to B?
I think this again is just getting into the real world mechanics of cognition. The self that concocts such explanations is just that part of "us" that has the learnt and cultural skill of inductively framing hypotheses that are concrete in ways that make them testable. And then the actual holistic nature of forming intentions and making decisions defies complete capture by simple reductionist causal statements.
We want to say that A led to B as that is the "proper form" for analytic thinking. But the brain operates in a fashion that is more like Bayseian induction - holistically constraints-based processing. It doesn't have to do the one right thing. It just has to eliminate as many of the things that might go wrong as possible. So I can want to hit the tennis ball cleanly out of the centre of the racket to hit a spot two inches from the line. But all I can really do is limit the amount of miss-hit to an acceptable degree so that the ball winds up near enough to an aiming point to do the damage.
The shot is overdetermined in the sense that there is some general envelope of miss-hits that still do the job. And it is not a logical problem as a constraints-based logic says all you can aspire to do is limit the uncertainty of our actions in the world. Pragmatically, we show we already believe that to be the case by building in an error margin by aiming just inside the line rather than right at it.
And the same ought to be the case with any theory of propositional truths. A statement can't point straight at the facts. It can only constrain matters so that we minimise our uncertainty that "the truth" lies within the bounds we have picked out by our assertion. And it is not a problem as we can always tighten up the constraints if the accuracy seems an issue. We can measure things more closely and report on the results of that.
We know some statement when at the least we believe it, it fits in with our other beliefs, and when it is true.
The "fits in with other beliefs" is a first approximation for a justification. Something stronger is needed, but material implication will not do.
Right. So now we want a version of JTB. And the justification bit ought to involve generalised conceptual coherence, not just a representational correspondence based on particulars matched to particulars.
That is certainly my view, if so. That is holism at work. That is how a self or agent would emerge to be the stable centre of things. As Peirce said, you can doubt anything, but not everything at once. There is that backdrop ground of belief - those "propositional hinges" we've been talking about - which is necessary to the whole business.
But again, justified beliefs seem enough for a theory of truth. Truth - as some absolute transcendent reality - drops out of the picture because there is only, in the end, the relativity of a modelling relation. Absolute truth is replaced by minimal reason to be uncertain.
And semiotics would make an even stronger statement. Our experience of the world couldn't even be noumenal as that runs counter to the very logic of a modelling relation. A map mustn't be the territory - as how the hell are we going to fold up a landscape of mountains and rivers so that it fits neatly into our back pocket? We want to reduce our knowledge of the actual world to a system of easily navigated signs. And this crucially changes the very notion of what "truth" aspires to be about.
It does not make sense to ask if we know X to be true; that's exactly the same as asking if we know X. The "we only know it if it is true" bit is only there because we can't know things that are false.
This is where you are guilty of sleight of tongue I would say. You use "to know" in a naive realist sense that presumes the world to be some "state of affairs". The facts are just the facts. But they can never be that as to be meaningful, they must become interpreted signs. They are only facts in the sense of being already part of an ongoing habit of interpretance.
So yes, when we assert we know, we mean that our belief is really justified. The true bit does drop out as what we are speaking about is our confident certainty.
And your own earlier stab at coherence or holism seems to argue against you here. That says we can't "know things that are false" - but on the grounds of conceivability. Your over-determinism accepts we could have understood the world in many lights - depending on our intentions, even if those intentions were constrained by the "facts of the world" to which they then were exposed by acts of inquiry.
You can't have it both ways. If all we ever know is the result of pragmatic inquiry, then falsehood and truth both drop out due to generalised coherence - until there is some reason that we find our backgrounding state of belief to be inadequate for some reason and set about inquiring further.
There is no point talking about the truth of the thing-in-itself as truth, as a property, is a property of the modelling relation and not of the "world" - the world being just that aspect of the relation which we know in a background interpretive way, just as we also know about the "we" that is meant to be the agent, the self, that is the stable centre of all this knowledge business.
Externalism doesn't fly. Epistemology has to find its rigour in developing an internalist discourse that does the best possible job.
A belief that is not subject to doubt is a certainty.
Or near enough.
Well, summing up, I see a lot of pragmatism in your counter to idealism. Truth-telling doesn't even make sense without some world out there anchoring things.
Yet then this fails to continue on. Recognising that there is a modelling relation brings up the reality of the self that anchors the other side of the equation. And also, if there is a real world out there, it is not even in our interests to see it nakedly for what it is. We need to be able to look and see a world that has us in it. We need a world that is already transformed into a system of signs, an umwelt. Our perceiving of the world has to include the division that produces us as the "self" doing the perceiving. And that degree of meaning has to be built into the "simple facts" - like that the apple is "red".
So in my approach, a theory of truth has to fit with the facts of psychology. And if the psychological story is pretty complex, new and unfamilar, that's just how it is. It is still the foundation.
But your approach does still seem mired in a naive realism. It starts to make the pragmatic case against idealism. But then reverts to a naive realism framing just as soon as it has put a little distance from the foe. The world is some set of actual and definite facts. The mind just reflects that facticity in direct fashion - re-presenting the external in some internal theatre of private experience.
And then some kind of behaviourist epistemology becomes the "rigorous" way to deal with private experiences at a communal or philosophy of language level. We can speak objectively about how people act. We can assert propositions and use behaviour as evidence that there is generalised coherent agreement among a community about the way the world truly is. Or at least the degree to which a belief is not being doubted.
So yeah, I'm still feeling your account falls way short because it targets a level of objectivity that is not just functionally impossible, but not even in fact functional. It is an account that by-passes the central psychological realisation that we don't even want to see the world as it really is, but the world that has us in it, and so the world that is already transformed into a "private"* set of meanings.
* The meanings aren't literally private of course as they are going to be biologically shared across a species with a common neuro-evolutionary heritage, as well as being shared across humans by a culture of linguistically structured conception. So we don't wind up back in solipsistic territory. As said, the "self" is also recognised as part of the "truth-producing" business here.
That's just what induction is though; the assumption that things will be as they have been observed to be, and the underlying assumption is that there is a lawlike regularity in nature that determines that such invariances will obtain.
I don't so much disagree with this as find it off target.
Seeing the world as consistent already requires a certain selectiveness; an awareness of the consistencies and a blindness to the inconsistencies. the world changes from day to day, but we choose certain patterns out of the chaos.
My position is that we do not believe that there are patterns in reality because we apply an inductive method.
But rather that we see and become certain of the patterns themselves.
And induction was made up by philosophers as an excuse for that certainty, but that it doesn't really work.
The Eiffel Tower
Still unanswered. Is the tower 324m tall, give or take a bit?
I say that it is, and further that it is true that the tower is 324m tall.
But you can't. All you can do is say that you believe that it is 324m tall.
It's a failure to commit on your part.
Again, what do you mean by "true"? You want to make a naive realist point without having to defend doing that. So that is the dodge I always pull you up on.
I am happy to commit to the justification of belief in pragmatic fashion. Truth is just another way of saying I can show I have no good reason to doubt.
If you want to defend your own naive realist framing, get on with it. Quit bottling the challenge. :)
But for fun, do you believe the tower is 324m tall yourself? Just tell me yes or no! And how.
And when during the day is it so exactly 324m tall? Are we now talking about the hot Eiffel tower that is 15cm taller in the heat of the midday sun, or the one that is 15cm shorter when night falls and its cools down?
Do we in fact now have two Eiffel towers. Or a vast ensemble - one for every nanometre of variation.
Oh goodness, how do we measure the height as it expands/contracts unevenly as the sun hits only one side. It can bend 18cm away from the sun. So which is its true height now - the actual distance to the ground or the full distance if it were standing up straight?
Of course, Banno the tourist guide doesn't need to care. He just reads his facts off Wiki. But Banno the scientist might want to rely on some more careful process of inquiry. A hand-waving approach always makes for poor philosophy.
You, I and whoever else is reading this are most probably competent users of English. As such we show that we can use "...is true" correctly. Now providing a definition is providing synonyms, and hence leads to circularity - words defining more words.
So I have to provide definitions and you get to hide behind commonsense usage?
It follows that pragmatism is not a theory of truth, although of course it re-defines the word "truth" to its own ends.
Again, how could that be the case in your world of no definitions?
Some modicum of consistency please. If it works for pragmatists to have adopted their behaviouristic "redefinition" as a community, then it works for them. You yourself have taken away your own grounds to criticise.
Sometimes I really can't believe your apparent lack of embarrassment as you loudly scrape the bottoms of those barrels.
Well, no, it isn't. Truth is quite distinct from belief. Pragmatism leaves truth unaddressed.
It treats it as the limit of inquiry. That might be a different answer to the one you have in mind - not that you could have a definition in mind! - but it is still the issue being addressed.
As you seemed to want to believe, justified belief leads to a generalised coherence. Things become "true" as they become so fundamental in that fashion.
This is the difficulty of arguing against you. You do a better job of constantly contradicting yourself. You are revealing what happens when you eschew the goal of a unitary metaphysics (well, at least a unitary view that is slightly more complex than naive realism). You praise generalised coherence. But your epistemology sadly lacks that very advantage.
Pragmatism, together with other substantive theories such as coherence and foundationalism, offer neat ways of justifying our beliefs. But they do not explain what truth is. That's right - I am saying that pragmatism is a good thing. But not as an explanation of truth.
So again, what is this "truth" you keep referring to? Apart from a naive realism about the world being a collection of facts.
Sure, you will say it is something unanalysably fundamental. And why it is sayable - you keep mentioning it - it is also to be consigned to the metaphysically unspeakable. You mustn't explain it.
But bullshit is a pretty obvious thing to. It's obvious when someone is bullshitting their way through a discussion.
The issue here is that despite rejecting the notion of truth, you continue to speak of objective truth.
I can't both redefine truth and reject truth. Especially when you are saying truth is undefinable. So you are both misrepresenting me and also talking illogical bollocks again.
I can speak of objective truth as a limit. And that is what I did.
If you have a counter argument, great, that is what you then tap out into a wee post in reply. But if your only defence is to lie about things I've just said, that makes your position truly hopeless.
What would be wrong would be to assert that there is only one method that can be used to decide. As if the way one decided the height of the Eiffel Tower were the same as the way one decides the declaration of human rights or that one loves one's partner. Pragmatism does not answer all such questions.
Again, pragmatism can still have the aim of covering all the epistemic ground between the opposing limits of the objective and the subjective.
So it starts with rejecting both naive realism and idealism. But then accepts that knowledge is indeed framed by those two complementary epistemic limits.
And it is engaged with the challenge of finding an epistemic method which does span the whole gamut.
So while you may take a view that it fails in its goals (having told me you have deliberately read no Peirce at all), at least there is nothing wrong in the way it sets out its grand metaphysical project.
I mean what do you think "a theory of truth" would be? A whole bunch of different theories, depending on whether we are talking of towers, politics or partners?
While you are carefully avoiding the challenge of defining truth, you certainly seem to be claiming that there is some unified theory of truth to be had.
So once again, your story is full of holes and self-contradictions. A very poor effort when all is said and done.
Reply to Banno ...bear in mind that you seem to be sometimes adding the clause "give or take a bit", and so making a probabilistic statement about the Eiffel Tower. Your claims about there being "a truth" are couched in the language of an inductive inference.
So again, there is an internal inconsistency you need to address.
If you are happy with the fundamentally probabilistic metaphysics of pragmatism, then you ought to come clean and say so. A degree of ambiguity or uncertainty is part and parcel of any constraints-based ontology. It is not a problem for my approach, and indeed its an epistemic advantage.
Among other things, it gives an even deeper justification for induction as a method. We have no choice but to talk about the generality of an average, a mean, that is our reasonable leap beyond any available evidence.
We never see "the average" in observing a probabilistic world. We only see a variety of particular instances when we get out and measure. And yet we happily treat the average as the reality, the truth. You are doing that too - and perhaps you have dropped mention of the "give or take a bit" for that reason?
It reveals that scratch a nominalist and you find a realist. Generality is not just an idea, an arbitrary product of inductive argument, but a real fact of the world. Apparently. :)
You, I and whoever else is reading this are most probably competent users of English. As such we show that we can use "...is true" correctly. Now providing a definition is providing synonyms, and hence leads to circularity - words defining more words.
You might recall Wittgenstein mentioning that the meaning of a term is its use?
Again, how could that be the case in your world of no definitions?
A world without definitions is not a world without meaning.
Your pragmatism changes the meaning of "...is true" to suit itself. A fair move, so long as you recognise that you are no longer talking about what other folk mean by "...is true".
As you seemed to want to believe, justified belief leads to a generalised coherence. Things become "true" as they become so fundamental in that fashion.
No; although they might be justified.
Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music.
My position is that we do not believe that there are patterns in reality because we apply an inductive method.
But rather that we see and become certain of the patterns themselves.
That's right; we see the patterns and make the abductive/ inductive inferences to laws and forces that explain the patterns. 'Abduction' and 'induction' are just names for two discernibly different kinds of thinking that we do. It is the system of abductively and inductively inferred different forces and laws, and the way they cohere that constitutes the body of discourse and discipline we call science.
I think it's more than that. It is seeing the patterns and inferring their relations to other patterns in terms of universally active laws (laws which may be thought to be either deterministic or probabilistic; supernatural or natural, transcendental or immanent; it doesn't matter in regard to the genesis of abductive and inductive thinking).
Magnus AndersonFebruary 16, 2018 at 13:25#1536090 likes
But for fun, do you believe the tower is 324m tall yourself? Just tell me yes or no! And how.
And when during the day is it so exactly 324m tall? Are we now talking about the hot Eiffel tower that is 15cm taller in the heat of the midday sun, or the one that is 15cm shorter when night falls and its cools down?
Do we in fact now have two Eiffel towers. Or a vast ensemble - one for every nanometre of variation.
Oh goodness, how do we measure the height as it expands/contracts unevenly as the sun hits only one side. It can bend 18cm away from the sun. So which is its true height now - the actual distance to the ground or the full distance if it were standing up straight?
Of course, Banno the tourist guide doesn't need to care. He just reads his facts off Wiki. But Banno the scientist might want to rely on some more careful process of inquiry. A hand-waving approach always makes for poor philosophy.
Apo's having a field day with Banno. Made me giggle.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 16, 2018 at 13:35#1536130 likes
My position is that we do not believe that there are patterns in reality because we apply an inductive method.
But rather that we see and become certain of the patterns themselves.
So we see, or we used to see, a pattern of birds of a feather - a white feather - with long necks, webbed feet and quite big, and come up with a word 'swan'. I suppose the word might have an ostensive definition in the first instance(s), "a bird like that one", but pedantic classificationists eventually come up with a specification of 'likeness' that constitutes the natural kind -'swan', a definition.
"A (adult) swan is a big white bird with a long neck."
From which we can deduce, 'All (adult) swans are white'. And that is a necessary truth, according to the definition.
Then captain Cook, or whoever it was, rocks up with stories about big black birds with long necks that look remarkably similar to swans, except for the colour. And it seems to me we have a choice; either we can invent a new word, 'naws', to signify these strange colour-inverted creatures, or we can change (widen) the definition to include them as swans.
But if this is a true account of how it goes, then on the one side the claim that all swans are white is not an induction, but says nothing about what Captain Cook might or might not find on his travels, and on the other, neither is it an empirical fact that what he found were black swans. The truth of the matter depends on how we choose to use words. We decided to call them swans, and changed the meaning of the word. The decision confers certainty either (contradictory) way, and the facts (of there being long-necked black birds) are not decisive after all.
And does the Eiffel tower not have foundations, too?
Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music.
C'mon Banno. This is laughably awful.
Remember, it is me who is putting forward a "theory of truth" that explains why language games have this kind of pragmatic looseness. I am arguing against strict definitions on the semiotic grounds that words can only constrain semantics in useful, purpose-serving fashion. There is always then a creatively open freedom when it comes to interpretation, coupled to the principle of indifference that allows us to limit the interpretive freedom on the grounds that it ain't being helpful.
So you are trying to hide behind precisely the thing that my semiotic approach explains.
It's not a method; its not algorithmic. It's just seeing the pattern.
Yep. And thank goodness our brains can work like that. There is a natural way to reason, as evolution shows.
The question is why for a minute would you expect actual humans to be algorithmic?
Again you are showing that there is just no joined-up, consistent position you are defending in this thread.
One minute, you are all about the absolute certainty of grammars, heights and the rules of chess. The next you are all about the mysterious truths of love, art and breakfast. You claim you yearn for the discipline of a formal debate and yet call even your own profile post a "straw man".
You chop and change for rhetorical purposes and oddly expect no-one to notice. Curious.
I am arguing against strict definitions on the semiotic grounds that words can only constrain semantics in useful, purpose-serving fashion.
Here is part of your writing that makes sense; although written it in such a constipated fashion. Yes, we need only define words so far as is needed for the task at hand.
One does not need to take on the whole pragmatic doctrine for this.
The truth of the matter depends on how we choose to use words.
Yes - exactly right. So the anatomy of the black bird was sufficiently similar to the white bird called "swan" for that word to be used in the new case. Those similarities in anatomy are real, if not decisive.
If you like, we can take the foundations into account in our measurement. And sure, the units we use are conventional. We can set up conventions for the measurement of the height of the tower. HTe conventions are part of our language, not part of the tower.
What Apo's position leads to, although he will not say it, is the conclusion that the tower has no height apart from the measurement.
I don't agree with that. The tower has a specifiable height. To say otherwise is to fail to have language engage with the world.
Reply to Janus OK, so Newton saw the patterns of apples falling and of planetary motion, and brought the two together in one set of equations. Wonderful stuff.
Newton saw the patterns of apples falling and of planetary motion, and brought the two together in one set of equations. But that process did not involve induction.
Of course it did. The imaginative hypothesis that the two patterns are related by an unseen structuring principle or force (law or force of gravity) is abductive reasoning, and the thought that if this is true then the same invariant patterns will always be observed is inductive reasoning. According to inductive reasoning apples will always fall, and the motions of the planets will be predictable as long as the current balance of natural laws and forces holds..
Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music.
Continuing the effort to flush out the contrasting epistemic positions here - not being one to bottle a debate - we can see that Banno is channeling the metaphysics of Wittgenstein circa the Tractatus here.
So there is the reasonable belief that: “The great problem round which everything I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?”.
Inductively, we can sense that reality does have a deep pattern. There is a rational, logical or mathematical structure at the heart of existence. And so "a theory of truth" becomes philosophically fundamental. It is not merely an epistemic issue. It is potentially ontological. Understanding rationality is understanding nature.
Wittgenstein famously came up with his own metaphysical position on truth. As a property, it belongs to the class of statements that are either tautological or empirical. The logical positivists loved that bit. But then Wittgenstein added there are also all the unspeakable truths that "manifest" as life's "mysteries".
Some folk feel that was a brilliant insight. It gave philosophy a reason to continue to be, safely separate from the utilitarian concerns of science. Philosophy could be the study of ineffable values. It could become a democratic and pluralistic exercise in which everyone could have their own truth systems, even pretty irrational ones.
Other folk might instead think that this was a gigantic cop-out. Natural philosophers for instance. Rather than truth being cosmopolitan and PoMo, or Biblical and "obvious" (Banno's version), truth would be still unifiable under a common metaphysics.
Natural philosophy would take the view that all Wittgenstein's dichotomy was doing was enshrining the distinction between the observer and the observables - the truth-teller and the truths told. And this is the motif that runs through all Banno's replies. The observer can be taken dualistically for granted. Banno doesn't even want to deal with the difference between the objective and the subject. He doesn't want to deal with the way purposes must shape inquiries and therefore what can count for the answering "facts". By dividing truth in terms of the empirical vs the axiological, value judgements are made safely transcendental and disconnected from the natural world.
Science is tied to the world by the strictness of a method. But then "philosophers" are free to just get on with being naive realists, simply assert their beliefs about what is real and certain as far as they are personally concerned, without needing to defend whatever opinion just came to mind. When pressed for justification, they can hang up a notice on the door - "out to lunch".
Anyway, my natural philosophy approach - the systems science or holistic approach that traces back to Aristotelean four causes metaphysics - is different in an important way. Apart from it just presuming the unity of nature.
The problem for a logicist's approach to metaphysics is that it presumes that reality is a structure. The hidden order of reality is some closed, eternal, fixed sort of pattern. It exists.
By contrast, a metaphysics that arises out of the natural view is that of emergent process. Things develop. They begin vague, formless, chaotic. But regularity or habit emerges to reduce this initial boundless variety. Reality becomes structured with time. It settles into a coherent and rational pattern.
As said, this is induction in a nutshell. A chaos of the particular becomes formed into definite and regular being via its own emergent self-regulation. Generality emerges to turn the particular into local actions that serve an ongoing weaving of a pattern. Constraints create reality as an average of what was possible.
So induction - in that general sense of being how probability works - is metaphysically basic. And deduction - as the mechanical story of classically absolute constraint - is then how the process of self-organising development looks once it has become so highly developed that it is almost completely formed by its general laws or habits.
At the end of time, a process manifests a mathematical-strength structure. Logical necessity finally appears to rule. And we can measure that in the lack of spontaneity or surprise to be found in the system. By the last stage, reality might as well be deductive or computational as any continuing action in the system has been ruled random, meaningless or entropic by the principle of indifference. All that remains once a system hits equilibrium are differences not making a difference.
So what we have here is a clear clash of ontologies. It is a metaphysics of existence or being against a metaphysics of development or becoming.
And Peircean semiotics then slots in as the holistic view of logic as a general semiotic mechanism - the trick by which development and the emergence of regular habits could even take place.
That process view is then logically robust enough - in terms of being a "theory of truth" - to unify the empirical and the axiological. We don't have to tolerate the debate-avoidance tactic of those who want to say there is scientific truth but then also - just as ontically - whatever is my own personally obvious subjective truth. The one that is unspeakable and manifests in private revelation. Often when I'm out to lunch and doing some serious unbottling.
So the anatomy of the black bird was sufficiently similar to the white bird called "swan" for that word to be used in the new case. Those similarities in anatomy are real, if not decisive.
Sufficiently similar for whom?
Again, the world does not arbitrate in the absolute way you want to suggest. There has to a self with a purpose at the other end of the semantic relationship. And that is the holistic deal that a "theory of truth" needs to deal with.
So again, you point at the world in a bid to deflect attention from the other half of this story. Someone had to make a judgement about "yes, similar enough vs no, much too different". And epistemically, that judgement would have to be secured by being able to point at a reason - a general intention - that was served in this particular instance.
If you like, we can take the foundations into account in our measurement. And sure, the units we use are conventional. We can set up conventions for the measurement of the height of the tower. HTe conventions are part of our language, not part of the tower.
What Apo's position leads to, although he will not say it, is the conclusion that the tower has no height apart from the measurement.
I don't agree with that. The tower has a specifiable height. To say otherwise is to fail to have language engage with the world.
Keep misrepresenting. My position is that "height" is a theoretical quality or generality that we can then quantify or measure in particular instances.
So going around measuring heights is a simple everyday pragmatic affair. Peirce's job as a scientist was doing just this at the level of international bureau of standards work. He was responsible for creating practical definitions for your standardised ruler or clock.
A mountain doesn't "have" a height. Height is an abstract or theoretical notion that we can go out and measure for a reason.
Jeez, you rail often enough against metaphysical realism - the existence of universals - and yet you talk way more realist than me. :)
So yes, I will always make the distinction that height is a theoretical construct when you come lumberingly along, talking naive realism about these things.
So yes, I will always make the distinction that height is a theoretical construct when you come lumberingly along, talking naive realism about these things.
So again, for you a mountain does not have a height until it is measured.
Of course it did. The imaginative hypothesis that the two patterns are related by an unseen structuring principle or force (law or force of gravity) is abductive reasoning, and the thought that if this is true then the same invariant patterns will always be observed is inductive reasoning. According to inductive reasoning apples will always fall, and the motions of the planets will be predictable as long as the current balance of natural laws and forces holds.
But let's not pretend that calling it "abduction" suffices to show its rationality. It's not the case that abduction is universally accepted. I invite you to read the SEP article on abduction and on Peirce's view of abduction. For a start there is the distinction between generating an hypothesis and justifying that hypothesis. If you want to call generating an hypothesis abduction, well and good. But I think that more is needed to justify the hypothesis. Induction and abduction are insufficient to justify a claim.
So again, for you a mountain does not have a height until it is measured.
Again, the difference is that my approach speaks about "the world that has us in it". It makes it explicit that "truth" applies to a modelling relation.
So for example, did Uluru have a "height" for the Anangu people before the white fella arrived with his Cartesian notion of a co-ordinate space?
An aboriginal form of life would measure Uluru in terms of the time it would take to scale it. Within that culture, what makes obvious sense is to speak about a degree of personal effort.
This keeps the two sides of the modelling relation front of mind. There is of course a big fat rock with a waterhole on top that is a significant landmark. But if you showed up back then, belligerently demanding of everyone you met, "deny that it is true that Uluru has a height of 863m", then you can appreciate what a crass move that might be.
Any notion of a measurement has to be motivated by a reason, a point of view. Measurements are not an objective feature of the world. They are a theory about the world that can be used to form statements which we can then confirm or challenge by some suitable act of observation. We can imagine the world in terms of a systems of signs - like a metre ruler, a ticking clock, an ergometer - and then read off a number that tells us about the quantity of some quality.
So in pressing me to confess that some tower or mountain has some measured height - in the naively realistic sense that height is an actual property of the world rather than a property of a modelling relation with the world - you are just making the same kind of cultural faux pas.
You are belligerently demanding that I bow to your ingrained white man Cartesian rationalism, saying that I have no right to the view that these kinds of "truths" are all relative to some purpose, some point of view.
Now of course, not just a couple of posts backs, you were trying to argue for that kind of socially constructed or PoMo notion of truth. You wanted to say that music, love and breakfast are so tied up with values that measuring them is more art than science.
Again, I can't make excuses for your inconsistencies. You lurch from one side of the debate to the other because you just haven't succeeded in thinking things through in a unified way.
But eventually you may start to see the point of actually having a modelling relations approach to epistemology. You will see that naive realism fails utterly. Just as does dyadic representationalism. You have no real choice except to up your game and understand "truth" as an irreducibly triadic epistemic relation with the world.
It's more subtle than that. Or at least you find this surprisingly difficult to understand.
What we are trying to arrive at is not a re-presentation of the world - the noumenal view - but instead a world, an umwelt, that is the world as it is useful for us to understand it. That is, the phenomenal view.
So if it is useful to see a tower in terms of height, then that is how we learn to see towers. And clearly, for white men with a grand project to rule the world, understanding reality in terms of Cartesian co-ordinates was a real plus.
But would you deny the Anangu chap his truth when he puffs out his cheeks and replies he doesn't know about your metres of elevation, but the Eiffel Tower looks a bloody effort to climb. Better start now before the day gets too long.
Again, that is not to say that science can't have the goal of a rigorously objective epistemology. There is a world out there, as well as whatever theoretical image we form of it.
Despite your attempts to make that the issue, a modelling relations approach is quite explicit that it believes there is a world - the Kantian thing-in-itself - to be modelled.
However then what is justified, what is believed, what is certain, what is true, is the image we form - the image that is the "world with us in it". Between the interpretance and the world stands the sign - the umwelt. And it connects both sides of the deal in fixing the idea of the "observing self" along with the "observable world".
The world may be recalcitrant. But it "has" that property only in the light of the fact that it refuses "our wishes". And in your naive realism, your white man cultural supremacism, you are failing to acknowledge that knowledge of the world is grounded in the third thing of the umwelt, the system of sign, that arises in the middle to fix some particular "truth" relation.
Epistemology must always recognise that fact
It is great to have the goal of complete scientific objectivity - or alternatively, to want to have the complete subjectivity of the poet, gourmet or lover. However to justify belief properly, we have to understand why complete objectivity and complete subjectivity are themselves impossible. They are the limiting extremes of a common mediating relation.
Get that straight and all the naive epistemic nonsense and inconsistency will just melt away.
An aboriginal form of life would measure Uluru in terms of the time it would take to scale it.
I doubt that, since the Rock is sacred and climbing it is something contemptible that German tourists do.
Doubtless its height has changed over time; the stomping of German tourists may have reduced it somewhat over the last few years. And yet, if its height has indeed changed, then by that very fact, it has a height.
I can't begin to contemplate how you would go about saying in pragmatic terms that Uluru is not as heigh now as it was two hundred years ago.
Was the term "An aboriginal form of life" meant to be insulting? or just gratuitous?
Models. I'd refer you to Davidson again, but it is apparent you can't squeeze him into your Peirce-shaped hole either. Again, in Pragmatism all you have is the model; it never links to the world. Whereas the ordinary folk talk of chairs and cars and rocks, you understand that they are really talking about models-of chairs and models-of-rocks. The best way to deal with someone who thinks there are no rocks might be to stone him until he is more agreeable.
Reply to apokrisis Indeed, as I said, they do not fit your Peirce-shaped hole.
Are you able to read other philosophies with any sympathy?
I had a quick look through the diatribe you wrote contra the notes from the profile page. I entirely agree with you that they are different from Peirce. I don't think you have made any significant effort to understand Wittgenstein or Davidson or Searle or any of the other thinkers I use - or indeed, any other thinkers. You've found the answer and that's that.
First year philosophy classes consist in exposing novices to a wide range of ideas, working with those ideas until they really feel the bite, and then forcing them to criticise those ideas. You missed all of that by coming to philosophy sideways, through engineering. You are not a philosopher.
Well, good for you. Enjoy your intellectual retirement.
Reply to Banno They are very neat. :) I can't deny their sway.
I also admire your continued parlay with apo. Not that I'd do it in the same way, or even agree with your arguments -- but simply the fact that you continue to argue. It's actually helped me to understand apo a bit more; not just your commentary but also apo's responses. Something I didn't have the patience for, but really should (philosophically speaking).
If it is a consequence of natural law that all swans must be white, then all observed swans will be white.
This is deduction. not only is it NOT induction but it is wrong, indcutively
"Swans" are what we call some birds. There is no natural law defining human speech.
If we define swan as a type of white bird then black swans are not even swans. Nature does not give a hoot what we want to call things.
Reply to Banno Gratuitous? That I used the appropriate Wittgensteinian terminology?
You really need to make up your mind. Either I'm guilty of being dogmatically Peircean or I in fact acknowledge where the later Witti recapitulates the essential epistemology of Peirce.
As you know, aborigines had a very different relation to their landscape than the one you are insisting upon as the rightful and uncontradictable ground of signification. They didn't look and see objects they needed to measure with rulers so they could give legitimate answers to questions about "height".
Sure they lived in the same world as us. But they had their form of life, and we have ours. And why would we insist in some crude fashion that ours is the correct conception of the world.
It might certainly be the appropriate one for a modern western way of life dominated by engineering of course. Engineers are meant to be able to be measure the world with your unambiguous Cartesian certainty. :)
In the end, you can attempt to justify your white man/Cartesian rationalist language game in terms of its "scientific objectivity". But as I keep reminding you, that very objectivity derives from an epistemic cut that makes a break between "the mind" and "the world" - ie: the observer and the observable - in dualistic fashion. You are relying on the very Cartesianism that you claim to have put behind you.
And that is what we keep seeing in all your posts on the issue. You keep trying to trap people into speaking with white man/Cartesian rationalism. You point at the Eiffel Tower - an engineered object being obviously your best example - and demand I acknowledge it has "a height". Either I play your elitist language game, share your cultural form of life - conform to your "wisdom" - or else I "other" myself, demonstrate that I won't play that game and so can be treated as some crazy dark-skinned sub-human pagan outsider. A Peircean worshipper, in your words. ;)
It is this attitude of yours that I find (amusingly) offensive. By claiming that language games/forms of life are essentially unanalysable truths, you then assert a hegemonic right to have yours treated as the correct cultural representation of reality.
If someone won't simply just answer the question in the form in which you present it - say it is true that some edifice or other "has a height", as the height is a notion that has been "actually measured" - then they are part of the out-group, not part of your in-group, and rightfully get everything they deserve for that.
Is it not at all disturbing that you failed to acknowledge the semiotic right of first Australians to their own authentic form of life when given the opportunity? For some reason, you think that to be a "gratuitous" point?
We had agreed that induction was (deductively) invalid. You didn't see that as an issue.
We agreed that your Pragmatic doctrine suffers an extreme anti-realism, to the extent that it can only talk about measurements, and certainly not rocks or towers or such.
We agreed that I was making it up as I went along, while you believe you have all the answers.
A neat sift. As if form of life had only one meaning.
Directing us away from the debate.
But it was you who made a fuss about my use of "form of life". You asked - confusingly - whether that was an insult (to aborigines?) or gratuitous (so in what possible sense gratuitious?).
For once take some responsibility. You directed the conversation to this new focus. But nicely, it reveals the essential problem I have with your standard "othering" rhetorical strategy. You simply try to bully people into submission by constructing an in-group/out-group dynamic.
You will go on and on about apo - some mythical apo - who is an engineer with no philosophical background, who is "religious" about some mystic figure whom you distain to actually read, who seems to have too much time on his hands to have a worthwhile life.
I'm not objecting to this game playing. I really enjoy it from an anthropological point of view. It is very revealing about the exact issue we are discussing.
But I will still point out that you do use the rhetorical strategies that are basic to colonialist and racist attitudes. Your form of life might be that of a white middle-class Aussie liberal, but here in this thread you are choosing to employ a different language game.
I just gave you the chance to explain yourself - to backtrack on your dog whistle appeals to rally against the "alien" in the group. It is interesting that you now very swiftly want to move away.
And of course that is how the net functions. You can rely on the fact people have forgotten anything posted three or four posts after it was said. When in trouble - instantly re-direct. It looks like you are engaged in a debate when really your only interest is in establishing who is in, who is out, in your little circle of friends.
Well I made my arguments. I also commented on what you had to say about yours, even though I had to pull it in from elsewhere. You have said nothing substantive against my position as far as I can tell. Now I'm commenting on your rhetorical strategy and the reasons behind it.
We agreed that your Pragmatic doctrine suffers an extreme anti-realism, to the extent that it can only talk about measurements, and certainly not rocks or towers or such.
No. That is your construction. And it is a deliberately obtuse one for rhetorical effect.
You already have all my arguments concerning why that is a misrepresentation of my position - if you want to actually engage in a debate and not merely a pissing game.
Reply to Banno I'm going to lunch. When I get back, I expect a post that is something worth a response.
In what sense is "height" real?
Sure there is a world out there - even if just noumenal. So this is not about idealism. It is about epistemology in the light of the practicalities of being in a modelling relation with that world.
In that light then, in what sense is "height" real?
Use the example you suggested and which I am happy to run with. We have aborigines and their relation to landcape features like Uluru. We have white europeans and their relation to feats of engineering like the Eiffel Tower.
Compare and contrast what "real" means in such differing "forms of life".
I'm going to lunch. When I get back, I expect a post that is something worth a response.
Yes, Sir!
X-)
Enjoy your lunch. I can't decide between poached eggs or some Thai chicken and tofu soup for breakfast. But I am going to make a zucchini slice for lunch.
In that light then, in what sense is "height" real?
In the sense that Uluru has a certain height, regardless of our measuring it. But that your Pragmatism cannot admit this; and so is fraught with anti-realism.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 17, 2018 at 23:20#1541930 likes
We had agreed that induction was (deductively) invalid. You didn't see that as an issue.
What's the relevance of stating the obvious fact that induction is not a deductively valid method?
What's the relevance of stating that induction is not truth preserving?
What's the relevance of stating that the following argument . . .
1. All observed As are Bs
2. Therefore, all As are Bs
. . .is such that its premise can be true and its conclusion still be false?
Noone disagrees with that.
Noone disagreed with that.
The subject has been the relevance of making such a statement.
Does it imply that there is something wrong with induction?
What does it imply?
Does it imply anything at all?
Not the answer that I was expecting. But it does justify every single post I wrote in response to your claim. For I was right: you do think that the fact that induction is deductively invalid (i.e. not truth-preserving) means that there is something wrong with it.
I was expecting you are going to say something along the lines that induction does not adequately represent the manner in which we naturally reason. For reasoning is, as you claim, something that cannot be captured by words, something that forever transcends them. To which I would have responded with something along the lines that every model of reality is grounded in a subset of reality and is therefore always a good candidate for being a simplification of the said reality. So there should be nothing strange when we discover that our models are not perfectly accurate; for in most instances, they were not even expected to be perfect.
n the sense that Uluru has a certain height, regardless of our measuring it. But that your Pragmatism cannot admit this; and so is fraught with anti-realism.
Rather than just answer with the same repeated misrepresentation, answer the question as it was posed. Or show where the literature of Pragmatism supports your contention of it being anti-realism as such.
So again. How is height "real" in your book. How is "height" to be understood when you are not imposing a concept involving Cartesian co-ordinates - and one presuming the Earth to be the Copernican centre of that inertial reference frame? What should "height" mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life?
Drop the evasions and misrepresenations. Just try to answer my questions honestly and directly.
To say it is true that the Eiffel Tower has a height, and that the height is 324m, is already admitting that "height" is a theoretical construct. An answer in metres - above some "foundation-line" - is only "true" because we agree that it would be a suitable response in terms of some ontological story we share through a common language, a common form of life.
Why are you not prepared to admit to this obvious epistemic fact?
So yes, we could then go on from there to discuss in what sense a model of reality based on Cartesian co-ordinates might be better than an aboriginal model that treats distances more in terms of notions of the duration of an effort.
Rather than being racist, a Pragmatic view says we can at least ask this question because "truth" in the pragmatic conception is what reason will arrive at in the fulness of time. It is what Nozick called the invariant view. We can see that some views are more subjective or observer-dependent than others. And so epistemically, we can have the goal of arriving at the view with is the most objective, or least observer-dependent as possible. Enter the justification or the scientific method.
So Pragmatism can both speak to the right of folk to construct the view of the world that they find most useful, and also still hold out the goal of moving towards a view of the world that is the most mind-independent or ontically abstracted. You can recover the Cartesian co-ordinates that you seem so attached to in the long run perhaps.
But now, once again, I'm answering my own questions, showing where there could be some agreement with your half-baked naive realism that poses as some kind of philosophical quietism.
A good student needs to have a go at giving an answer himself. So forget what I just said. Tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life - given that we are not talking about idealism but the indirect realism of pragmatism.
Magnus AndersonFebruary 18, 2018 at 00:20#1542200 likes
You can easily "fix" induction by turning it into a deductive argument such as follows:
1. All observed As are Bs
2. The future mimics the past
3. Therefore, all As in the future will also be Bs
Note that this is still a form of induction. I am saying it is not induction to make Banno and others, such as Janus and that autistic boy who calls himself chester-something, happy. When they use words in a formally precise manner, i.e. when their words align with the manner they are defined by Google, Wikipedia and other established sources, they are happy. Nothing makes them happier than using words in a formally precise manner. So let them have their happiness, let us concede that the above argument is not a form of inductive argument but a form of deductive argument. We lose nothing by doing so, that's for certain. But despite our best efforts, despite our concession, the above argument won't make Banno happy. He will argue, desperately, that the second premise is wrong and that the entire argument falls apart because of it. The premise is wrong, he will claim, because there are moments in our past that were not doing their best to mimic the moments in our past that preceded them. Apparently, not every point in time mimics the set of points in time that preceded it. This, my friends, is supposedly an argument against the second premise. Of course, Banno is full of shit because Banno, like pretty much every single human being on planet Earth, routinely makes decisions by taking this premise for granted. Otherwise, Banno would never be able to eat his breakfast and make love to his girlfriend. He wouldn't be able to so much as compose a forum post. Nothing can function without induction. So an attack on induction is an attack on intelligence itself. What we have here is a form of schizm. Banno says one thing but does another thing. He says induction is wrong but his actions say it's not wrong. So what exactly is wrong? Is it induction? or is it something with Banno?
The future does not have to mimic the past all the time. It is enough that it mimics the past most of the time. Exceptions do not disprove the rule.
To say it is true that the Eiffel Tower has a height, and that the height is 324m, is already admitting that "height" is a theoretical construct.
Sure, the measurement is a construct. We can agree on that.
The issue is that for your Pragmatism there is only the measurement. Hence for you height must be a measurement.
But Uluru will be 863m, whether you measure it or not.
How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us.
Your criticism is no more than saying that we can't talk (and that includes measuring) without the social constructs of language. Sure. But our social conventions have no influence on the height of Uluru.
In order to name something, there must be something to name.
But let's not pretend that calling it "abduction" suffices to show its rationality. It's not the case that abduction is universally accepted. I invite you to read the SEP article on abduction and on Peirce's view of abduction. For a start there is the distinction between generating an hypothesis and justifying that hypothesis. If you want to call generating an hypothesis abduction, well and good. But I think that more is needed to justify the hypothesis. Induction and abduction are insufficient to justify a claim.
I don't have enough time to read that article now. In any case I have been reading Peirce on and off for many years now, and am pretty familiar with his ideas of abduction and induction. Abductive reasoning generates hypotheses, and inductive reasoning (if anything) justifies them.
The idea that things have invariant natures which reliably determine how they can behave, interact with others things, and so on is an example of inductive thinking.
Hypotheses that consist in schemes that give accounts of posited mechanisms that determine the natures of things, and their consequent interactions and relations are examples of abductive reasoning. Such hypotheses cannot be derived from pure deductive thought (although they can be set out in deductive forms where the premises are the parts that are not deductively given, as with all deductive syllogisms), and they cannot be justified by pure deduction either, but can only be justified, if at all, by empirical observation or plausibility. Plausibility itself is not deductive but is based on experience and imagination, which again is induction and abduction.
But Uluru will be 863m, whether you measure it or not.
Actually, f you measure it in situ you will get about 348 m. I couldn't believe it was 863 m high, so I looked it up. 863 m is its height above sea level.
To return to the argument: that judgement is not deductively validated, though. It is justified by inductive reasoning which tells you that it is plausible to think that what is presented as official geographical knowledge is trustworthy.
You could put this reasoning in deductive form.
What is presented as official geographical facts and figures is always trustworthy
The figures given for the elevation and prominence of Uluru is trustworthy are official geographical figures
Therefore the figures given for the elevation and prominence of Uluru are trustworthy.
But Uluru will be 863m, whether you measure it or not.
Oh dear. White man speaks patronisingly again. Cartesian co-ordinates exist whether that is a theory by which you make useful sense of your world or not.
How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us.
And now throw in some slap-dash relativism to show reality in fact has no preferred co-ordinate frame.
Height may be what you measure as a vertical distance from the ground ... until you throw in the next metaphysical twist of the co-ordinate frame tale. Keeping up wee black fella at the back of the class?
Your criticism is no more than saying that we can't talk (and that includes measuring) without the social constructs of language. Sure. But our social conventions have no influence on the height of Uluru.
They are what make the notion of "a height" meaningful - a proposition that would be truth-apt within a certain form of life.
You are wanting to talk about some notion of height that is "mind-independent true" - not grounded in a form of life. I am pointing out that all such truth talk is dependent on some communal, language encoded, point of view.
You are welcome to try to justify your leap from the pragmatic view to an epistemology of naive realism. But so far you haven't done that.
Again, address the specific question I put to you.
Tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life.
Actually, f you measure it in situ you will get about 348 m. I couldn't believe it was 863 m high, so I looked it up. 863 m is its height above sea level
LOL. But Banno covered that already.... "How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us."
So apparently the number of metres in question is both utterly arbitrary - choose any reference point - and also a physical, mind-independent, fact.
I could accept abduction as creating hypotheses. But if so, i don't see any advantage in using the term abduction. Why not just talk about creativity? Is it only to place it in the Peircian holy trinity with deduction and induction? Then forget it.
And I continue to fail to see how an invalid induction can be used as a justification. Consider an alternative - coherentism, for example. A belief is justified if it coheres with our other beliefs. Isn't that a superior account of justification than an invalid half-argument such as {f(a), f(b), therefor (x)f(x)}?
For a start there is the distinction between generating an hypothesis and justifying that hypothesis. If you want to call generating an hypothesis abduction, well and good. But I think that more is needed to justify the hypothesis. Induction and abduction are insufficient to justify a claim.
More weirdness. Banno is told how it works. Inductive thought is about the creative leap from the particular instance to the general rule. Peirce then came along to argue that the scientific method - which had by then proven itself pretty successful - was in fact based on a three-step process of reasoning.
Rather than a dyadic opposition of induction and deduction - which of course wasn't really working out - Peirce made it explicit that "truth" is arrived at via a three step logic.
It starts with abduction - the leap from some particular surprising fact to some guess about a general rule. So this is broadly an inductive step in going from the particular to the general.
Then the next step would - quite logically - be to use the generality to make particular predictions. If the hypothetical rule were true, consequences could be safely deduced. Particular facts could be derived with syntactical certainty. They couldn't be logically wrong - given the truth of the general premiss.
Banno likes the sound of "valid" as the description of a deductive inference of this sort. It somehow suggests that induction is the faulty and shameful part of the deal if you are new to the game of critical thinking. It's a neat rhetorical strategy.
Then third we get the inductive confirmation to close the loop. Deduction gives us a prediction about particular observable facts. The presence of those observables then allow a second completing move from the particular back to the general. The general is shown to be true in the light of the available evidence.
So induction - going from the particular to the general.
Deduction - going from the general to the particular.
Put the two together in the right logical order and you have a holistic relation that can be used in recursive fashion to approach the natural limits on rational inquiry.
So apparently the number of metres in question is both utterly arbitrary - choose any reference point - and also a physical, mind-independent, fact.
Note the inclusion of the straw word "utterly"?
More intelectual dishonesty.
Choose any point you like as the origin, choose any units you like. They can be translated into metric or imperial or cubits or whatever.
What would be living with a contradiction would be to assert that we can measure the height of the rock, and yet also to maintain that the rock has no height. That there is only the measurement.
Choose any point you like as the origin, choose any units you like. They can be translated into metric or imperial or cubits or whatever.
Sure. If you have a theory of abstract reference frames then you can add the further constraint that it’s distances are ruled off in terms of some arbitrary unit. But so far you haven’t shown how that mental construct relates to someone’s world as a useful fact.
As I say, the aboriginal form of life is said to want to think about spatial distance in terms of duration of effort. The Aussie education system is suppose to recognise that cultural difference in its attempts to teach basic mathematical concepts in a way that don’t continue to favour the later white settlers.
So is a reply not in metres, or any equivalent notion of counting a unit of distance, going to get marked wrong by you? Does everyone have to conform to your Cartesian conception of reality?
Speak clearly now. You have probably used up your last chance.
I could accept abduction as creating hypotheses. But if so, i don't see any advantage in using the term abduction. Why not just talk about creativity? Is it only to place it in the Peircian holy trinity with deduction and induction? Then forget it.
For me it fits because there seem to be basically three modes of being led in thought.
The etymology for 'deduce' is "lead down, derive" (in Medieval Latin, "infer logically"), from de- "down" (see de-) + ducere "to lead," from PIE root *deuk- "to lead." ; which seems appropriate since a deduction is an abstracted form of thought.
The etymology for 'induce' is "to lead by persuasions or other influences," from Latin inducere "lead into, bring in, introduce, conduct; persuade; suppose, imagine,"
The etymology for 'abduce' is "to draw away" by persuasion or argument, 1530s, from Latin abductus, past participle of abducere "to lead away, take away," also in figurative senses, from ab "off, away from" (see ab-) + ducere "to lead," from PIE root *deuk- "to lead." Related: Abduced; abducing.
The prefixes 'ab' 'in' and 'de' seem to give clues to the character of each mode.
'De' is "Latin adverb and preposition of separation in space, meaning "down from, off, away from," and figuratively "concerning, by reason of, according to;"
'In' is an "element meaning "into, in, on, upon""
'Ab' is a "word-forming element meaning "away, from, from off, down," denoting disjunction, separation, departure; from Latin ab (prep.) "off, away from" in reference to space or distance, also of time"
Etymological source: The Online Etymology Dictionary
And I continue to fail to see how an invalid induction can be used as a justification. Consider an alternative - coherentism, for example. A belief is justified if it coheres with our other beliefs. Isn't that a superior account of justification than an invalid half-argument such as {f(a), f(b), therefor (x)f(x)}?
A belief "cohering with other beliefs' just is validation by abduction and induction as well as deduction, when you think about it. I think the problem is that you are looking at induction as Hume did, as something that somehow must rely on immediate perception or else amount to nothing. It relies rather on cumulative perception. Humans have always posited causes for observed events, different types of causes for different types of events, and at least since the Enlightenment a nature which consists in a unified concatenation of causes (laws and forces). This is what has evolved into science considered as a whole interrelated system of understanding. All of this has been arrived at by inductive (observational), abductive (speculative) and deductive (logical; for the parts contributed by mathematics and geometry) reasonings. It is that scientific (in the broadest possible sense) body of understanding that determines what is considered plausible; i'e' what "coheres with other beliefs", I would say.
LOL. But Banno covered that already.... "How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us."
Ha ha, looks like I was just being pedantic then, wanting to say that the height of the Rock would normally be thought of as its height from the surrounding desert.
I'm not sure what Banno has in mind; but in general I would agree that some mountains do project up more from the Surface than others, regardless of whether anything has been measured or where you are looking from and so on.
I had a similar argument with Wayfarer once about one pair of things being closer to each other, than another pair. He wanted to claim that it was a matter of perspective, but I think he was thinking about whether they looked closer or not. Even then, I don't follow Nagel in thinking the "view from nowhere" is unattainable. It is if you think it is truly a view from no perspective at all, but when you realize it is actually a view from no particular perspective, which means from every perspective, then it becomes apparent that it is not incoherent and is, at least in principle, attainable, even if not absolutely attainable (whatever that could mean).
A belief "cohering with other beliefs' just is validation by abduction and induction as well as deduction, when you think about it.
I can't find much here to disagree with you on.
There remains a special place for deduction. If one has true premises and a valid argument then the truth of the conclusion must follow. This is not the case with induction and abduction (the word puts me in mind of alien experiments...)
If one grants abduction and induction, then their place can only be in justifying belief, not in finding truth. Unless one follows @apokrisis in rejecting truth altogether.
If one grants abduction and induction, then their place can only be in justifying belief, not in finding truth.
Yes, I think that's right. Science does not give us truth but speculative understanding. Truth (in the propositional sense, at least) is a rather pedestrian affair to do with official facts and figures, and the obtaining of states of affairs.
It is if you think it is truly a view from no perspective at all, but when you realize it is actually a view from no particular perspective, which means from every perspective, then it becomes apparent that it is not incoherent and is, at least in principle, attainable, even if not absolutely attainable (whatever that could mean).
Yep. It is an interesting exercise to imagine seeing any object from every perspective possible. So Ayers Rock from the inside, from every distance outside, then over all timescales as well. Any notion of its substantial being would become dissolved in some truly panscopic view that built in no preference.
And then contrast that with the kind of scientific view we aim for where we instead see Ayers Rock in terms of natural laws and initial conditions. More like a wire frame computer simulation.
If one grants abduction and induction, then their place can only be in justifying belief, not in finding truth. Unless one follows apokrisis in rejecting truth altogether.
Don’t be such a sook. If you agree with Janus, you agree with me. Get over it.
Led by repeated observations of objects invariably falling to Earth and the rising of Sun, moon and planets, to believe that such events will always happen (induction) he imagines that there is a natural law that determines these events, and in a further leap of imagination (abduction) he thinks that these seemingly very different events may be manifestations of a single law or force.
If this thought process is not essentially deductive (even it can, although not exhaustively, be framed in deductive form) then what would you say it could be other than inductive and/ or abductive?
I would say that it is inductive in the sense that experience naturally induces us to think that way, and abductive in that our imaginations abduce (which means they lead us away) from concrete instances to generalities and analogies. It's like the abductive thought I mentioned before that if spacetime is curved then it might be expected, analogously to curved glass and other transparent materials, to refract light. I mean this thought is not deductive in the sense that curvature of spacetime logically entails that light will be refracted. So the observed refraction of light does not prove that spacetime is curved.
Perhaps you could give an account of your thoughts on these specific examples.
Cool, it's a very interesting thought experiment. From any possible viewpoint it would still be larger (and more enduring and endurant) than an apple, though, it seems.
Yes, it's hard to imagine Uluru slowly emerging out of some very different milieu, and where in that process we would locate the "initial conditions".
It is hard to find in that description events that take the inductive form. So again I suggest that induction is a post hoc account. As such I do not agree that it takes a centra place in science.
What exactly do you mean "events that take the inductive form" and which description are you referring to?
I would say that all accounts of human activities and thought processes are "post hoc" so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make in pointing that out in this particular case.
Apparently Newton thought he was doing inductive reasoning. From the Wiki article you linked:
"This is a general physical law derived from empirical observations by what Isaac Newton called inductive reasoning."
It is hard to find in that description events that take the inductive form. So again I suggest that induction is a post hoc account. As such I do not agree that it takes a centra place in science.
So does that account instead describe deduction as being central to the development of the thinking involved? I think not.
Newton's theory of universal gravitation has of course become a classic test case for philosophy of science. Newton himself rejected a simple hypothetico-deductive model in favour of "the Newtonian style" which endorsed an abductive approach able to take the leap from complex particulars to simple generalities.
Inference to the best explanation involves a back and forth where the world as it is seen, and the laws that might explain that, swim into view together as the two halves a modelling relation. So the particular is extrapolated to discover some general - motivated by the reasonable metaphysical principle that lawful simplicity underlies all the messy real world complexity. And then the truth of that generality is checked against what it then predicts. It is tested by whether it seems to predict the particulars that were used to predict it.
So abduction is a mix of the inductive and deductive - but at a still vague level. All it needs is the start of what feels like it is going to become a good fit. Things are starting to snap together. A pattern is beginning to emerge.
You can try to formalise abduction as an if-then habit of thought. It is a species of induction in attempting the "invalid" thing of going from the particular to the general. And it is also "invalid" in that it accepts vagueness as a suitable grounding. Nothing actually has to be crisply or definitely stated at the beginning. That is instead the desired destination. Meanwhile a loose fit is good enough if it is a fit that seems to be growing tighter as work is done to clarify the direction being revealed.
Anyway, it is if-then reasoning. If this general rule were the case, these kinds of particular results would not look surprising. These kinds of particular results do exist. Therefore the general rule is probably the case. And historians show that this is the way Newton moved in his reasoning to develop a mathematically-definite theory.
So all reasoning involves this two-way interaction. We need to go from the particular to the general, and from the general to the particular, in as secure a way as possible. Obviously, deduction is more secure than induction because it introduces no new semantics. But then the cost of that is that deduction can introduce no new semantics.
Then the sense that this is a real jump, not some gradual change, is explained by the complex world of messy particulars being the state of broken symmetry in nature. And what we are trying to recover - as the trick that makes scientific models work - is the deeper symmetry that got broke.
We have a smashed up lot of glass bits on the floor. And a lot of bits are probably missing. We theb want to know whether it was once a glass vase or a glass dish, or whatever.
So the move from the particular to the general is seeking a hidden symmetry that is believed to lurk behind a messy complexity. We can't see that symmetry directly as a further thing to observe - symmetry-breakings tend to be thermally irreversible and so the past is gone. But we can imagine it mathematically. We can recover it as a mathematical idea.
Any amount of observables can't add up inductively to reveal the hidden whole. What's broke is broke when it comes to our available view of reality. But we can leap imaginatively to the kind of symmetry that could be broken to yield the kind of fragments we see all around.
So reasoning itself is an irreducible coupling of the inductive and deductive directions of thought. And then abduction goes to the fact that this self-organising loop has to start off as a seed and then grow into full and definite flower.
Abduction has both flavours of thought coupled together - as it must to be capable of growth towards a definite understanding. But it is that possibly successful thought still in its tentative stage - one where a loose fit is still acceptable. We are in a state of mind where we are allowing ourselves to be guided by some general principles - like that simple symmetries lie behind every messy and complex broken symmetry - and then looking backwards retroductively to see what generalisation can in fact predict the particulars we seem to identify as being suggestive or significant.
The peculiarity of an elliptical orbit could be explained if it were composed of an inertial straightline motion coupled to a centripetal accelerative force. The inertia is a symmetry, so falls out of the story. You now just have to account for the symmetry breaking which is the centripetal force exerted by a planetary body.
But why should only planets have gravity? Right, let's again find the symmetry. All masses attract. It is not something special but something which is the same for all. The symmetry of the force is broken only by the accident of the locally differing quantities of mass involved. There is the universal principle - the further inductive leap of imagination - needed to get a proper theory going.
And so a sharp picture of this thing called gravity swims into theoretical view. Eventually we can crank out predictions and begin to support the theory's newly acquired, strictly deductive, form with a sufficient weight of inductive confirmation.
Induction and deduction are initially entwined so closely as an if-then inference to the best explanation that the lines are blurred. The mind abductively has to juggle both at once in loose fashion.
But the goal - as a scientist - is to arrive at a clean separation between a theory and its truth. In the end, you want the deductive bit to stand alone as some mathematical grammar that encodes a symmetry and its symmetry breaking. And then the inductive bit becomes the evidence that supports that theoretical structure in terms of the observables that are close enough to whatever was predicted not to count as an unwanted surprise.
Reply to apokrisis A bit late but I do want to say I didn't want to "out" you in speaking to Banno. I have liked his exchanges with you because it's helped me get a better grasp of your philosophical orientation -- and, even if it may be frustrating for you -- I enjoy that fact.
I do not think of you as "outsider"; just thought that was worth mentioning with some of your posts I read here.
I don't think that deduction is less fundamental than induction; deductive reasoning seems to be at least as fundamental as inductive. But that doesn't mean that one can subsume the other.
(I am just quoting the last post of an interesting conversation between @SophistiCat and @apokrisis. This topic is also somewhat related to a recent thread on intuition (link).)
I don't know if either of your thoughts have changed on this in the last few years. It seems to me that SophistiCat's objections are weighty for anyone who doesn't accept the approach of pragmatism, but I think it is equally clear that there must be some tertium quid that is being overlooked. I tend to think this tertium quid is Aristotle's notion of induction which was then helped by the metaphysical justification that Christianity provided for it. In the Medieval period the genus was referred to as intellection, a sort of direct knowing as opposed to discursive knowledge.
Usually when we think of induction we think of observing a series of regularities and then forming a probabilistic guess that the next event will also adhere to that regularity. For example, Reply to SophistiCat calls induction "probable reasoning" as opposed to the "certain reasoning" of deduction. For Aristotle and the Medievals (and probably also Plato) it was different. There is a kind of certain knowledge in induction/intellection, distinct from probabilistic reasoning.
But there is a more recent and more accessible entry point to the topic, and it is found in the language acquisition of children. Walker Percy was a doctor, novelist, and semioticist:
Percy experienced [symbol acquisition] firsthand. His second daughter, Ann, was born deaf. Her language tutor and the whole family participated in her language education, and Percy saw her symbolic acquisition in process, in a much different and more conscious manner than the automatic attainment of the average toddler.
A number of Percy's books relate to this subject, but especially The Message in the Bottle and Signposts in a Strange Land. Section 2 of that dissertation is a quick introduction to the topic, "2. The Children: The Magic and Mystery of Naming" (again, an English dissertation). The standard case, which Percy also focused on, is Helen Keller.
In a nutshell the idea is that when you train a dog to sit you are doing something fundamentally different than when you train a child to use language. This is particularly obvious in cases like Helen Keller, where the transition from dyadic to triadic activity is so stark, beautiful, and hard-won.
Or rather, when Helen finally understood the symbol 'water', something fundamentally different occurred than when the dog finally responded to the sign 'sit', even though the stimuli presented were not overly different (children manage symbol acquisition even in spite of parents who approach the task the same way they might approach the training of a dog). At some point Helen crossed a mysterious threshold and understood that 'water' is a symbol, not a sign, and her mind was opened to the entirely new reality of symbols. This, I claim, is intellection (induction), or at least something very close to it. 'Water' changed from being a mere lever which was pulled whenever Helen was thirsty, to a symbolic reality that existed on a plane distinct from stimuli and conditioning and utility.
This is the sort of qualitative 'jump' that Aristotle means by induction. It is the act of seeing a truth in a way that is 'spiritual' and not merely mechanical (for lack of a better word). It also applies in a variety of different contexts. Sometimes we intellect/induct the nature of some reality from frequent exposure, like Helen. Sometimes we require a variety of different arguments before the truth of a conclusion finally "clicks" for us. But even the terms, propositions, inferential rules, and inferential steps of formal arguments require a sort of direct intellectual perception, similar to Helen's symbolic association between 'water' and the physical stuff she was so familiar with via her senses.
Helen's "jump" was not deductive reasoning; it was not abductive reasoning; it was not inductive reasoning (a la Hume); so what was it? The "jump" doesn't occur with dogs or cats or llamas. It isn't predictable or controllable; Helen's teachers often despaired that it would ever occur. "Magical" is not a bad word for it, but in any case it is entirely foreign to our modern mechanistic approach to reality.
Whatever the case, it seems to me that Reply to apokrisis could be right in his claim that "helping ourselves" to inductive reasoning may not be a problem, so long as it is understood in this very rarefied sense. If intellection really is a tertium quid, then it is not bound by the rules of deduction or Humean induction. The only reason we can't help ourselves to it is because it doesn't wait on our beck and call in the way that deduction or Humean induction do, but this is a rather different problem than the one that SophistiCat complained of.
Comments (578)
He did not deny it. He defined it and recognised its limitations.
He rightly asserted that empiricism was inductive, and that induction was really about the probability of reoccurrence through constant conjunction, rather than reliant on an assumption of a priori thinking.
Anyway, Hume is regarded as empiricist because he believes that all knowledge begins with experience, and so rejects the notion that there are innate ideas as accepted by philosophical rationalists. However his questioning of the validity of inductive proofs poses a challenge for empiricism, because it means that many of the claims that common sense will take for granted, such as that of ‘the sun rising tomorrow’, have no strictly rational warrant. In fact I think the sceptical implications of Hume’s ideas are reflected by the acceptance of the provisional nature of scientific hypotheses. They’re not regarded as immutable truths, but as working approximations, which however might be subject to revision or even abandonment by the new information. I think for that reason his contribution to modern philosophy has been highly influential.
Thank you both. I am a newbie with an interest in the epistemological development of science. I apologise if this was a bit of a stock question.
So his empiricism rests on his taking experience as the starting point for knowledge instead of basing it on innate ideas or a priori thinking.
If induction is not based on a rational principle then how does one go from a constant conjunction to an assertion of probability?
Yes. Empiricism is about what the world demonstrates and not what principles you hold about it.
It's basically repetition; then formulate an hypothesis about what it happening, and see if it sticks. Experimenting to demonstrate the hypothesis' value would be the next step. All inductive knowledge is therefore contingent on replicability and repetition.
This is of key importance. And is something that science is apt to forget at crucial times. Paradigms tend to get established and hard to shift.
Thomas Kuhn's work has been very influential on this question.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thank you. I have heard of that book. I'll add it to my reading list.
The difficulty is that if inductive knowledge is purely contingent on repetition then it isn't really true knowledge because no matter how many times we do the experiment it could always fail the following time. This seems to make our claims of knowledge groundless and any assertions of probability merely cumulative of previous experiences and hence subjective or psychological.
Undoubtedly it works but as a theory of knowledge it seems to take us into the realm of what I suppose you would call pragmatism or utilitarianism. To say it's true because it works seems unsatisfactory.
Hume new this which is why I wonder if he had a rationalist streak to his epistemology, despite being empirical by method.
That is all we have.
Deduction can only say it is true because we say it is!!! Deduction is basically playing with definitions; nothing more.
That's not true. We also have abduction (leaving aside deduction atm).
Deduction is useful in metaphysics, mathematics and in foreseeing empirical consequences of scientific theories that can be tested in the future. Deduction is also useful because it helps generate coherence and understanding.
Induction means taking a finite sample size, and based on that sample size drawing the probable conclusion that some property that is common to all members of the sample will also be common to all (or most) members of the population. For example, we look at 500 swans, they're all white, so we conclude that most likely all swans are white. Induction allows us to classify things by common features.
Abduction means that we take a list of properties (for example white, long neck, beak, bird) and we associate them with a common name - swan. Then if we see something else which has those properties, we say that it most likely is also a swan. Abduction is the process by which we try to find the best explanation for something.
Induction and abduction don't provide certainty, and deduction cannot tell us something that doesn't already inhere in what we know. So deduction merely clarifies. Induction and especially abduction is what brings new knowledge in.
Deduction is useful when we talk about, for example, God. Because we all have experiences of God and divinity, it's just about clarifying it, and bringing it into focus. *waits for charleton to throw a fit* :D
The universe is inherently probabilistic.. What we observe or measure are approximations. Everything is continuously changing. Knowledge might be viewed as a recognition of patterns that are always subject to change, some changes more likely than others, especially when it comes to the behavior of life forms since life forms are able to make choices and willfully change direction.
Sub-category of deduction.
Don't buy into this free will clap trap, as this flies in the face of the massive advances in science of the last 250 years which assert determinism.
Determinism is what makes the universe predictable, and everything we have gaind in understanding has been based on deterministic principles.
It is impossible to find evidence for determinism in science, though some still hold out some hope.
Very simply put, the universe is inherently probabilistic. Period. Hume simply observed this. Quantum Mechanics verified it. Actually, Heraclitus noticed this thousands of years ago.
No. Just a good observer like many if the ancients whose lives depended upon astute and practical observations. Hume, merely reiterated was is quite obvious to most people who obseve life as it is actually experienced.
What are the chances that the future will be like the past? Well the future has always been like the past in the past, so if the future is anything like the past, chances are it will be like the past.
One has to assume the conclusion even to reach a probable result.
Zero. Refer to Heraclitus. Something is always different. However, similarities are sufficient for practical purposes in many (most?) circumstances for all practical purposes (FAPP).
Quoting unenlightened
I prefer "similar to the past" FAPP.
One only needs to observe and form a pattern of recognition of what is actually transpiring. There is no leap of imagination to some conclusion.
I find it odd that folks are quite happy with 'you can't get an ought from an is', but balk at 'you can't get a will be from a has been.'
His arguments regarding causality are sort of different from whether or not he counts as an empiricist. And he builds to them in the first section of A Treatise of Human Nature -- it's not as if he opens with "all inductive inference is invalid!" (or, really, that he concludes that, either). He comes to some queer (to common sense thinking, something he even acknowledges) conclusions, but they are worth reading if you're interested.
It is not a leap. It is brought about by habitual recognition. There are tons of patterns out there, most are of be practical use for practical purposes or are simply not recognized. Perceiving, understanding, and utilizing, and creating new habitual patterns in nature is fundamental because that is precisely what humans (intelligence) do. It is evolution. Babies begin with the process the first time they are fed.
All premises are inductive, which pretty much invalidates all deductive logic. I actually agree. Everything is subject to change.
Indeed, habit, as Hume himself says; but it is a leap that reason cannot justify. One might say, by way of analogy, that passion is the boss, habit is the worker, and reason keeps the accounts.
Reason would suggest that this exactly what one should recognize. It is definitely keeping accounts of what one is observing.
So if we had to make a bet, which option would it be wise or rational to bet on? That the future is like the past, or that it will be different? And why?
We do have to make a bet, and we do bet that things will go on as before. And it would be unwise to do otherwise. But rationally there is no reason to do so; except that there is nothing else to go by.
When you say that it would be unwise, don't you really mean that it would be irrational? It would go against our reason? I mean certainly if you saw someone making the opposite bet, you'd say they have lost their mind wouldn't you?
Quoting unenlightened
I think what you really mean is that there is no necessity that the future will be like the past. Sure, in that way, induction cannot be justified through deduction if that's what you were intending to do. However, you must concede that it is overwhelmingly more likely, given the evidence, that the future will be like the past. We have a lot of data points indicating this trend. There is no necessity that the trend will continue, but we have no reason to doubt that it will. Therefore it is irrational to doubt it in the absence of a reason.
No, I don't have to. You have to provide some evidence or argument that does not assume what it seeks to prove.
So when you have a trend that seems to indicate something, do you bet that the next data point will be different or the same as the trend? You have reason to presume that the next data point will be X (since that's what the trend indicates) and no reason to presume it would be anything else.
Because the trend is already there, and nothing else is there and so you have no reason that could ground your doubt with regards to its continued existence. That's the reason.
Every single inductive argument can be presented as a deductive argument without any kind of significant loss.
Here's an example of an inductive argument:
1. All swans we have seen in the past are white.
2. Therefore, every single swan we will see in the future will also be white.
This argument can be presented as a deductive argument in the following manner:
1. All swans we have seen in the past are white.
2. The future mimics the past to the best of its ability.
3. Therefore, every single swan we will see in the future will also be white.
The reverse is also true. You can present any deductive argument as an inductive argument.
Here's the common example of a deductive argument:
1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
Both premises can be presented as an inductive argument. In fact, that's how they are derived. "All men are mortal" simply means that every single man we have observed in the past eventually died. "Socrates is a man" simply means that what we know about Socrates is typically associated with traits that are characteristic of men. The conclusion is reached by joining these two inductive arguments.
Deduction and induction have far more in common than most people are willing to admit.
There are two types of thinking: on is focused on similarities (holism) and the other on differences (reductionism.) I prefer to focus on similarities.
Bohm once wrote that creativity is about finding differences within similarities, similarities within differences, and resolving paradoxes that arise.
LOL.
That's like saying its impossible to find evidence of pages of paper in the content of a book.
BTW. This "." is a period. You said period period.
I have to take issue with this statement. The ‘massive advances of science’ have been made in respect of objective and physical discoveries about many subjects, which might or might not have any bearing whatsoever on the nature of the will, and whether it’s free or not.
There is also the case that prior to the 1920’s, there was a widespread belief in physical determinism - that everything was literally the outcome of the ‘collocation of atoms’ (Bertrand Russell’s term). But that was torpedoed by the discovery of the uncertainty principle and the indeterminate nature of sub-atomic matter. You can’t make an obvious connection to the question of ‘free will’ but the general point remains, that the notion of complete physical determinism has been torpedoed.
Suffice to say, a lot of the rhetoric about science having undermined free will, is based, I believe, in the fact that the freedom is actually scary, something we can’t handle. Maybe the notion that ‘science proves’ that we’re not free is an apparently-respectable way of avoiding what Erich Fromm described as the fear of freedom.
Quoting Perplexed
Of key importance is Kant’s reaction to Hume’s scepticism. That is very lengthy topic and I won’t try to summarise it. But ask yourself this question: is rational ability or language ‘learned by experience’? I think the answer is obviously ‘a bit of both’. Children learn language, but human children learn it very easily, like no other species. That is the subject of Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’ and the like. Another big topic. But I think it is important to get some understanding of Kant’s criticism of Hume (e.g. here.)
Of course considered merely logically it could always fail the next time. But could it really? Not if invariablility is really established in nature. Does our experience seem to indicate that it is? The answer would seem to be that all of human experience points to the reality of established invariances. Is it rational to believe there are established invariances if all our experience indicates that there are?
Some trends reverse, I thought it was obvious we were talking about the continuation of things like the laws of nature, not Bitcoin price trends...
Quoting unenlightened
That's a (logical) possibility, but you must have reasons to think it actually will reverse (not merely as a possibility) in order to rationally make that bet.
Quoting unenlightened
No, logical possibility isn't sufficient to ground a doubt. In the case of the Bitcoin trend, we had actual reasons to doubt it would continue: price cannot keep going up infinitely, we've seen bubbles in the past, price grew exponentially in the absence of any solid reason and this was associated with bubbles before, etc. MANY reasons.
This is just a failure of the atomistic paradigm, it does not refute the simple fact that effects are the result of causes.
But also, we know from empirical observation of nature, and now logical models of that nature, that catastrophic collapse can occur. What took a long time to build up, can also collapse in sudden and predictably unpredictable fashion.
So the world is actually far more interesting than Humean and Newtonian notions of determinism and probability could know.
We have new models of probability - non-linear and chaotic ones - that change the good old Humean debate beyond recognition anyway ... even after we have abandoned rigid deduction in favour of Bayesian induction as an epistemic foundation.
So you have a simple deterministic account of the quantum eraser experiments that doesn’t involve retrocausality or some kind of outlandish multiverse metaphysics?
Something has to give when faced with the evidence of quantum contextuality as a causal thing.
What ground do you have for supposing that the sun will not rise tomorrow?
Nothing and we have no grounds for expecting things to happen for no reason, particularly when it comes to large, complex objects like the sun.
It's like asking how do we know the sun won't turn into a giant teapot tomorrow. We can't prove that it won't deductively, but we have nothing that says stars have a means of turning into teapots.
Why is reason defined as deductive logic? Seems that animals and humans rely heavily on inductive reasoning. Deductive is something we came up with rather recently, but our ancestors didn't use it to survive, communicate and utilize tools, etc.
Maybe you can bring that up on the unperceived things not existing thread? OP is looking for a reason not to doubt. He mentions the idealist Stace who argued that there is no reason for thinking that unperceived objects and events exist.
You can also say we came up with both inductive and deductive reasoning just recently. You think that induction isn't about "deducing" what's going to happen in the future? You think it's not about eliminating alternative possibilities in favor of a single possibility (or a narrow set of possibilities)? I was never much of a fan of this inductive/deductive division. I mean, sure, I understand the differences between the two, but I think that these differences are rather insignificant. The same with the claim that thinking (or reasoning) is necessarily a conscious activity. It's like saying that apples are necessarily conscious . . . it's sort of hilarious. Are apples necessarily conscious? Not really. There are apples out there whether we are aware of them or not. We don't make a distinction between "conscious apples" and "unconscious apples" based on whether we are aware of them or not.
You also seem to miss the important point. We do know that catastrophes can befall even sunrises. Supernovas are just one such possibility.
And yet, even then, we now have mathematical-strength accounts that make predictions even about such unpredictability.
I much prefer my question. One hopes not to need celestial mechanics and Bayesian Inference in order to plan one's breakfast with confidence.
Focus, Banno. Breathe deeply and focus. :)
(Sorry, Mum.)
Bad day? Every laugh at your expense must surely be an entry in the credit column of the great ledger of life. And now you admit that your aim is to goad. Checkmate, mate.
So, the necessary Banalities having been completed, let’s get back to you explaining to me how empirical correspondence operates in the absence of conceptual coherence.
You prefer the one, and hope to avoid mentioning the other. But sadly, even induction relies on a coherent metaphysics back in the real world of pragmatic knowledge.
And I just demonstrated that fact in mentioning the need to incorporate catastrophe theory into any full view of the probabilistic basis of reasonable inference. These days (well, for these past 40 years at least), you would need a positive reason to believe your phenomena actually inhabit a stable linear realm of constraints. You would need to know there was no parameter slowly creeping into critical territory.
So how do you work that discovery into your own personal worldview I wonder? (Well not really, as it’s obvious.)
Well, has been said already, that’s not really the point. There is no logical reason why the Earth might not be annihalated by some cosmic catastrophe. And recall that Hume is conducting an enquiry into the ‘nature of human understanding’; he’s not really concerned with the niceties of common-sense realism.
But in thinking about the OP, I came across ‘Hume’s fork’ once again, and now understand the point. Everything, says Hume, falls into the category of either a priori - things that tautologically true - or experiential - things we know from experience. These, Hume holds, are exhaustive and exclusive - every kind of true statement is one of the two. So the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, not being an analytical statement, such as 2-2=0, but being based on experience and observation, can only be an inductive prediction based on experience.
But, said Kant, what of the synthetic a priori? Those are cases where there a logical or so-called tautological argument leads to a conclusion which is not necessarily stated in the premises. Such cases have proven especially abundant in mathematical physics, where some whole class of phenomena has been predicted purely as a result of mathematical reasoning. So such discoveries have the force of logical necessity, but nevertheless rely on observation to validate.
Back to two dogmas. The fork is more like a spoon.
So you want to define reason as 'how we think'? That seems a bit broad.
Take Hume's other critique, of moral reasoning, summarised as 'you can't get an ought from an is'. And take medicine as an example. Science says that these pills have these effects, and medicine makes use of the facts. But it also has an unscientific attitude, that pain and death are bad things to be avoided if possible, and these are not facts, but -shall we say? - passions. Now Hume is by no means suggesting that we should not have these passions; he is simply saying that the reasoning of science cannot justify them, but rather is employed in their service.
Similarly, he points out that the reasoning of science, that there is this history of evidence and experience that can be described and structured according to mathematical formulae says nothing, and can say nothing about the future, because there can be no evidence of the future, it is all of the past.
And again, he is not in the least suggesting that we should not imagine the future and expect it to be like the past; he simply points out that it is not any form of reasoning that gets us there, but the equivalent of passion - habit. We want to predict the future, so we want it to be related to the past, which is what we already know of.
It's all very annoying for philosophers, because they want reason to be king, and it isn't, but a mere servant of those animal passions that the enlightened man imagines himself as having transcended.
What does 'justify' mean to you in this context? I take it to mean 'demonstrate the necessity of', which is something science is entirely capable of doing. It is perfectly feasible that neuroscience, evolutionary biology, social psychology etc can identify passions which must 'necessarily' exist by virtue of our being biological entities.
Does 'justify' mean something different to you?
Yes it does. One might say that anti-natalism is an evolutionary dead end, but this does not entail that it is wrong. Evolution has an explanation for both selfishness and altruism, but it does not vote for either. As Dawkins says, genes are not selfish, they don't have selves, they don't have wants.
Sorry I can't make out from that what 'justify' means to you, would you mind spelling it out a bit more clearly?
Right, so if neuroscience demonstrated it to be be 'true' that certain passions were, by biological necessity, present in the brain, how would that not be a justification?
Quoting unenlightened
P1. Passion x is common to all humans, it is physically impossible to be a human without also having passion x.
P2. I am a human.
C1. From p1 and p2 - I am justified in having passion x.
Quoting unenlightened
This is not analogous. The existence of God has a separate truth value to a belief in the existence of God. We cannot say with certainty that there is a God, but we can say with certainty that someone has a belief in God. Hume was never positing that a passion could have a truth value, nor that anyone ever said it could. We're talking about justifying it's presence. Otherwise the statement becomes meaningless, if we're asking that the actual property of the passion is justified, then to say that science cannot justify it is a straw man, nothing can justify the properties of an entity in that way. A passion is not a proposition, it is a state.
One such passion might be a preference for one's own children's welfare over other peoples'. Thus of biological necessity, my kids are preferable to yours. and of biological necessity, you take the opposite view. Neither view is justified, and since they are mutually contradictory both of them cannot be justified on pain of logical explosion.
You're confusing 'justified' with 'true'. It is justified that I believe it is 6:40pm, if you look at your (unbeknownst to you) broken clock, it is justified that you believe it to be 6:00. We cannot both be right, but we both hold justified beliefs.
don't listen to Dawkins - he's a bellend - listen to EO Wilson: 'the middle level of contention between the products of the two levels of evolution (Individual selection and group social extremes) that constantly move back and forth and are the creative core of the human species; that's where creativity comes from'
You are misusing the word 'justify'. Justifying a proposition does not require that no other conflicting proposition can possibly be true, it requires that you have good reason to believe the proposition.
Notwithstanding this, your example is false anyway. Only the view that child x's welfare is paramount and child y's welfare is paramount are mutually incompatible, but this is not the form our passion takes. If I had three children x,y, and z, and in the night child z was replaced with an identical looking copy, my passion would not be centred on the real child z, it would be centred on the new one. My passion does not externally refer and so incompatibility in the real world is not relevant to is truth value. My passion is that "the welfare of one's children (whoever I believe them to be) is paramount".
Furthermore, you are asking of the passions a level of reason that is not being asked of propositions about empirical truths. To say I have a passion for food, is a truth statement if the brain can be shown to be in a state common to all other humans who desire food. In the same way as 'the sky is blue' can be said to be true if all other users of the terms 'sky' and 'blue' agree. We do not ask that the proposition is justified by proving that the sky 'ought' to be blue, that it has some final cause for being blue. It is sufficient that it matches the definition of 'blue'.
Quoting SophistiCat
Reductive explanation is a reason to believe. It is the standard reason we believe in everything else, that we have a reductive explanation for its being the case.
The comment I was disputing was "he is simply saying that the reasoning of science cannot justify them, [the passions]".
My argument was, in what way can the reasoning of science "justify" anything other than by explaining the causal chain of its existence back a few steps?
I have a passion 'hunger', science can explain exactly what that passion is in physical terms (brain states), why it is there causally (DNA - protein synthesis - neurons development - interaction with the environment), and also why it is there teleologically (evolutionary function of hunger). What additional thing can science provide with regards to the proposition "the sky is blue" that is missing from what science can tell us about passions such as to warrant the distinction made?
Right. So the claim that the future is like the past is justified by evidence, not by a valid argument from accepted premises. It forms one of those first-principles that are not derived from any more general principles.
All that Hume showed was that there can be no non-question begging argument to justify that the future is like the past. He did not show that we lack evidence that the future is likely to be like the past or that it is irrational to believe that the future will be like the past. It clearly is not irrational.
Hume is struggling because he doesn't get it that first-principles are also derived through reason. His conception of reason is too narrow, and moved away from Plato's conception of reason, where even the passions had reasons of their own.
Yes, and the only people who have evidence of the future are Nostradamus and Jehovah's Witnesses.
I am Nostradamus, what are you talking about? :-!
[quote=me]What are the chances that the future will be like the past? Well the future has always been like the past in the past, so if the future is anything like the past, chances are it will be like the past.[/quote]
The evidence is my past experience. My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future is like the past. So in such particular cases, I seem to be justified in believing this - and by this, I simply mean that it would be irrational to believe the opposite. Do you mean to suggest that it is not irrational to believe the opposite? Sure, the laws of nature could change - it is logically possible. But there's no reason to believe it.
I would agree with Hume that we cannot justify the blanket, almost metaphysical statement "the future is like the past" - because no, it's not. In many regards it is different - but in some regards it is the same. We seem to be able to rationally decide which are which.
How could you possibly know this? Can you enumerate specifically the Laws you are talking about? Can you show they describe the future is like the past? Can you show even one so-called Law that hasn't changed since the beginning of time?
I'm not sure if time had a beginning. No, I can't show that they haven't changed "since the beginning of time", but I can show, for example, that Newton's law of gravity has remained the same ever since the last 200 years at the very least.
Newton's "Law" it's a simple measurement within a very narrow scope over an extremely small amount of time that is an approximation.
Laws of Nature belongs in the fiction shelf, but it is still bandied about because materialism needs it. It's the go-to phrase for materialists as they cannot plea to a God or invoke the mind. As a consequence they just throw around this totally meaningless phrase hoping that no one will notice there is nothing there.
I'm not interested to discuss the metaphysics of it, my interest is that in practical terms, the laws have remained the same.
Well, the Law may stay the same but had shown to no longer be anything except an approximation and superceded by GTR. So apparently Laws are any mathematical equations that have practical application. Fine. It's open season on Laws even if outmoded.
I suppose you have a Law that predicts what time I get up every morning?
No, I don't, but if I want to build a house, I will still rely on Newton's equations, GTR or not. That Newton's equations have been superceded by GTR is of no relevance to their continued application on Earth. That may be of relevance only metaphysically.
You're muddling the tenses. "My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future has been like the past." And this says exactly nothing about what will be.
You have to rely on the assumption that the future will be like the past in order for past evidence to be relevant to the future. Which is assuming the conclusion. I don't object to you doing it, I just object to your claim that is is reasoned.
Yes, but something is fishy with Hume's argument. When we're dealing with logic, we have to establish what things we know with the greatest certainty and proceed from there. So if you have an argument whose conclusion contradicts a statement that you know to be true, then before accepting the truth of the argument (and rejecting the truth of the statement), you must compare the certainty you have in the premises of the argument, with the certainty you have in the statement that the conclusion contradicts. If the statement is more certain than the argument, then you ought to abandon the argument and look for the mistake you have made.
It is irrational to bet that the laws of nature will not apply tomorrow given how things stand today and in the past. Do you agree with that? That to me seems to be almost 100% true.
If you disagree, then you'd say it's not irrational, so the person suffering of madness who thinks gravity will pop out of existence tomorrow isn't actually being irrational. I find that very unlikely to be true. I find it highly unlikely that you honestly and authentically would stand by the statement that the person who claims gravity will pop out of existence tomorrow isn't being irrational.
So reasoning backwards from here, we either have an argument based on premises for this, or we have direct evidence for it. I think the latter. Therefore I will say that I think Hume is framing the issue in a manner that is not satisfactory. And that is because he is trying to say we need an argument backed by premises for this, whereas I'm saying that this is one of our foundational premises - or first principles - which is backed up by the very practice of living, that we do not derive from any more general principles. So when Hume tries to derive it from more general principles, he fails - as we would expect him to I would add.
Yes. We reason from it, but we cannot reason to it. Which is about what Kant in his long-winded way eventually arrives at; one might say that it is part of what we mean by 'the future', that it will follow in an orderly fashion from the present and past, and if it doesn't, then we would have to call it a new world, or an afterlife, or something. But to claim, after having been dragged kicking and screaming over several pages to it, that "we would expect" the result is - extravagant.
Well, what can I say, I am an extravagant man >:O
Though isn't it clear that we need some first-principles, which cannot be derived via argumentation, but must be derived rather from experience?
Quoting unenlightened
Do you think that this is what Kant says or is this unrelated?
Fuck, do you want to go another round or two[? That the future will be like or unlike the past, that it will be something or nothing, cannot be derived from experience.
Quoting Agustino
No, I'm being totally unfair to Kant here, because this is a thread about Hume.
Ok, let me switch gears then. What the future will be cannot be derived from experience - but can a rational way to behave (and we're always behaving for the future) be derived from experience?
We simply cannot expect our models of the universe to be immune from inadequacy and eventual revision. Do we live in a universe of waves or particles? Is the universe digital or analogue? It seems to be neither and both.
We've been here before. Model revision is what makes science what it is. But at every stage of the development of science we have relied on an assumption that we can work out what is going on based on observations of what went before. Uniformitarianism and determinism has continued to sustain investigations, and results.
I do not see anything in QM to change that situation.
After all we cannot exactly predict the fall of a simple dice, yet we can define the parameters with determinism. Were we to have complete knowledge of the dice's rotation, speed, the wind resistance, the reflective properties of the table onto which it falls and so on, we'd be able to tell what the result is, and know the result could never be 7.
It is simply the case that measuring these things tend to change their values. Observations have always played their part in skewing results - ask any anthropologist.
Double slit, double nonsense. Stick to determinism and we'll understand it.
Yeah, because, you know, we haven't been measuring the acceleration of gravity in any thorough manner before that (for example). Maybe I should've said 300-400 years though, I suppose we have enough measurements from around Newton's time.
Check your basic arithmetic!
That's why I said the above. But whether it's 200, 300 or 400 - same thing really, I mean Trump used to say that people were doing business with sticks and stones hundreds of millions of years ago - so why you gettin' on my case for just 100-200 years?! >:O
1) Newton codified gravity 332 years ago
2) He asserted that the "law" was universal and maintained by the action of God
3) He was wrong on many issues as we now know due to Einstein.
4) Whatever Newton OR Einstein say nature remains unchanged, but the LAWS which are human constructs DO in fact change.
So to get back to the thread point, you were wrong.
No, I wasn't wrong. We still use Newton's equations, and not Einstein's when we build homes. It works.
As for saying that nature remains unchanged - how do you know that? :s I don't address metaphysics here, as I made it clear to Rich, but a priori it is equally possible (if not more possible) that nature changes.
The reasoning might not be purely deductive, but it is scientific reasoning that thus includes a deductive element.
So a full account of the reasoning would go that we start with an abductive step - a guess at a causal mechanism. Then we deduce the observable consequences. Then we tally the inductive confirmation.
As I argued earlier, a belief in induction is justified by a guess at a mechanism - history builds constraints on free possibility. Then from that, we can deduce the observable consequence - the past can be used to predict the future in this fashion. We will see this causal mechanism at work. And then observation - of the success of this inductive approach - will be inductively confirmed (or not).
The Hume/Newton thing arises out of a particular metaphysics - a belief that the world might be deterministic, atomistic and mechanical. But rather paradoxically, that nominalism created some serious realist type problems. It couldn't account for the existence of backdrop dimensions, such as space and time. It couldn't account for how physical events were ruled over by natural laws. It couldn't account for gravity's action at a distance.
The background metaphysics that Hume relied on to motivate an argument was so patently full of nominalist holes that it never was a complete story. Yes, it did speak to a deductive consequence of its axiomatic hypotheses - all the guesses about determinism, atomism, etc. And that part of the belief system could be inductively confirmed in its own terms. But then it also relied deductively on a set of unobservables - like the laws, and space-time, and action at a distance. These "must" exist according to the metaphysical set-up, but they could never be directly measured or shown. So they could not be inductively reasonable as such.
So Hume was making points that seemed appropriate in a particular metaphysical context. They were "reasonable" in his day. But if we are talking about a modern scientific view of reasoning, then introducing the third thing of abduction, or an axiomatic leap of the imagination, makes a big difference. It says knowledge works quite differently from how the traditional conflation of deductive logic and rationality might want to represent it.
The sharp line folk tried to draw between the rational and the empirical was too strong. All reasoning relies on a mix of both. And indeed, the mixture is triadic.
You have forms of induction book-ending the process. Abduction is the generalisation step, the inference to the best explanation. It begins as vague or hazy intuition and snaps into crisply expressed hypothesis.
After that, deduction can kick in. It has something to work on and can do its syntactic, rule-bound, thing. But while the consequences of deductive argument carry the stamp of certitude (valid is valid), it is still a case of garbage in/garbage out. The hypothesis might be wrong, or more likely just part of the story. So nothing is reasonable until it is measured against the world it pretends to model. Induction from the empirically particular back to the abductively general has to close the loop, confirming the initial guess is right (or right enough for all practical purposes).
So "reasonable" should mean reasonable in that full scientific method sense. And induction itself seems reasonable in that light. We can guess at a mechanism - the accumulation of constraints. We can deduce the observable consequences. We can measure the degree to which nature conforms to our model.
And as I say, we then encounter the ways that nature doesn't in fact conform - as in the frequency with which abrupt or catastrophic changes do occur in the world. So at that point, we need to go around the loop again. We realise that we were presuming a linear world. We need to develop a larger model that relaxes that constraint. That leads us towards non-linear models - non-linear models being more generic than linear ones.
When we build homes????
How does nature change?
I have yet to see the relevance of introducing the third type of reasoning that is abductive (or retroductive) reasoning. It does more to obscure than to clarify the manner in which reasoning functions. Personally, I think you're paying way too much of your attention to a single philosopher that is Charles Sanders Peirce.
There is very little difference between induction, deduction and abduction.
I agree with you. I think this is the case of not understanding the question. The question is: what causes us to think in a particular manner where "particular manner" in the context of this thread refers to thinking inductively. This is an empirical question. We are asking what variable is correlated with the variable that is manner of thinking. Or if you don't want to think in terms of "manner of thinking" we can switch to thinking in terms of the belief that the future will be similar to the past. Our manner of thinking, that of induction, is based on that belief. So the question now becomes what variable is correlated with the variable that is "the future will be related to the past in manner X". There may or may not be such a variable. We're thus asking 1) is there such a variable, and 2) if there is such a variable, what is it? Then there is the infinite regress problem; of if you don't like to call it a "problem" you can call it something like the fact (or merely the possibility) that the past is infinite. If the past is infinite that means there are no "first causes". Instead, it is possible that every effect has a cause which has a cause which has a cause and so on. So explanations can only describe a fraction of a process. We go back only a number of steps back into the past. How many steps? As many as we need for our purposes.
Who wants to answer the question of the evolution of reasoning in humans? I am personally not so interested. But if you asked me to give you my best guess, this would be it: originally, organisms chose their beliefs at random. So some organisms chose to believe the future will be similar to the past and others didn't, others chose something else. Through time, those that chose to believe that the future will be similar to the past continued to exist -- for one reason or another, again, they might have survived for no reason at all but my guess would be that there were reasons for their survival and that these reasons were tied to their choice to believe that the future mimics the past -- and those that didn't, they simply disappeared. According to this story, the original choice is made at random (i.e. it's an arbitrary or an irrational choice) and the subsequent persistence to believe what they decided to believe (i.e. the unwillingness to revise the original decision) is due to the lack of survival pressure to do so. Of course, this is not necessarily true, but it's what I am inclined to think -- more or less. So basically, my explanation is an evolutionary explanation.
Yesterday I had a full bottle of red. Now it is only half full.
Supposing that the future is like the past requires quite a selective view.
The relevance is that it introduces a third and missing step in reasoning as a holistic process. And it is interesting in that so far it is the least formalisable. It would be really important if we could add a formal model - a potential algorithmic approach - to our arsenal of intellectual tools.
The unarguable point is that humans are remarkably good at guessing right answers if we took a strictly random search approach to creative insight.
How do we form our intuitions in the first place? It can't just be that we try every possible key to unlock the door. Peirce made mathematical arguments about why a random search couldn't be executed in the lifetime of the cosmos. And the same arguments are made today about NP hard solutions.
Folk like Roger Penrose have really gone to town on the issue, saying it proves to them that conciousness must be a non-computational quantum process. So it wasn't just Peirce. This is an issue that is central to a lot of metaphysical positions, as well as being of great practical interest in human psychology and artificial intelligence.
Peirce actually was leaning towards a pretty mystical answer on the "how" of abduction. He talked of Galileo's il lume naturale. He wanted to use the existence of inspired guessing as a proof of the divine. And so - in that regard - I am hardly peddling the Peircean line. Although that then depends on how you interpret what Peirce actually wrote.
Anyway, my own naturalistic view is that human minds - being evolved to understand worlds - are good at unbreaking broken symmetries. We can inductively generalise and so leap to an understanding of what the unbroken generality must have looked like before it became broken in the particular way it presents itself to us.
This is a Gestalt or Holistic deal. The whole brain is set up to see figure in terms of ground. The figure breaks the symmetry of a ground. And we can then turn our attention to the nature of the ground that had that general potential to be broken.
So the search isn't a random stumble that would take forever. Awareness is already developed in a fashion that represents a symmetry-breaking. It is already broken into figure and ground. Reversing that is just a case of relaxing the mind in a certain fashion to allow the backdrop to be seen in that light. It is a short leap - like seeing the negative space in a reversible Gestalt image of vase and two faces - rather than a blind computational search through every alternative.
I guess it all depends what you think is a central question of epistemology. Is it how can we hope to have certain knowledge? Or is it how is it that we can reason in optimal fashion?
The two were connected for a while - particularly where Newtonian science finally cashed out the deterministic simplicities of Ancient Greek atomism. Determinism, deduction and computation all go together as neat metaphysical package that appears to promise absolute certainty - something quite miraculous to humans more accustomed to thinking of the world as an arbitrary and uncertain place.
But we are beyond that now. The other side of the story is again more interesting.
Erm, the story is that the future is like the past in that its total entropy has increased by much the same amount yet again.
The basic constraints in play are the physics of thermodynamics. And Hume/Newton were talking about the physics in play. It was just that that physics was the reversible story of inertial mechanics, not the irreversible story of the Cosmos as a dissipative structure.
So the surprise - the disproof of an inductive metaphysics - would be if your pissed-away bottle of red magically reconstituted again itself each night, like a Magic Pudding.
So yesterday, the slope was downhill. And tomorrow, the slope will still be downhill. That is the inductive claim here.
Quine's Two Dogmas has great relevance here. Partly in dismissing the analytic/synthetic distinction, but mostly in showing that reductionism fails. Knowing things from experience presupposes knowing a stack of other stuff. Some form of holism must apply, such that one uses the whole language, or none at all.
Or if you prefer, to use a language is to participate in a way of living.
Now deduction makes sense. It sets out the wider grammar, by telling us that when we say one thing, we are also saying other things by implication.
Induction is simply invalid. No more than wishful thinking.
So before we invented entropy we could not plan our lunch.
Your account is just too complex.
Well, maybe some of us have larger epistemic concerns than the world that encompasses our breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Your account is just so shallow. ;)
I put the half avocado in the fridge with the intent of keeping it until tomorrow.
I keep chickens because they provide eggs for me each day. Provided I keep them fed and happy.
The bread did not disappear from the cupboard.
Now if the avocado had not been in the fridge, or the chickens had not laid a couple of eggs or the bread had disappeared, I would have had cause to ponder. Sometimes these things do happen, and I find that wife ate the avocado, or that the crow has stolen the eggs, or that I misremembered buying the loaf of bread.
I don't lie awake at night worrying that the fridge will turn into a frog and hop away with my avocado.
So I think Hume had it pretty well right, in describing our acceptance of continuity as a habit. It's not something that requires justification. It's not as if, were we unable to find such a justification, we would cease to plan our mealtimes.
More than that, there is something quite odd in asking for a justification here. It's as if the questioner had missed something very central to how things happen. Rather the doubt here is absurd.
There is repetition (habits) that are useful and there is novelty.
Humans wake up after they sleep.
Each person wakes up at approximately the same time but sometimes much different.
Most have a breakfast.
From these observations, one can begin to understand human nature.
Deduction is useless in terms of gaining further understanding, since it necessarily only restarted what is know based upon known observations. I've never witnessed any deductive argument that actually added anything to understanding since all of them rely on inductive proportions that can and will be disputed.
It's an almost correct point. Sometimes they are helpful in working out what can and can't be said. But one only has to look at the interminable arguments for the existence of god to see their limitations.
Most tellingly, sometimes deduction shows up our inconsistencies.
But I take it we agree that it is habit that underpins our acceptance that some things will be the same tomorrow. It is the exceptions to this that require explanation. If I had found a full bottle of claret this morning, I would have cause for puzzlement.
I agree. Bohm wrote that we seek differences within similarities and similarities within differences.
The profound explanations put the cart before the horse.
Again, it is wonderful that you accept a pragmatic account of truth and rationality. But you are still confusing philosophy with your personal satisfactions.
Animals don't need to have an epistemic theory either. A reliance on an unquestioned habit of inductive generalisation is good enough for their everyday purposes as well.
But I'm not sure why you think that the everyday routine of your eating habits is all there is to say about epistemology. I guess you just enjoy taking an anti-metaphysics stance to its caricatured limit. But in the end, who cares when there is interesting metaphysics to be discussed.
Just don't distract us too much with all your noisy chomping.
How exactly could you reject them without determining which of them was responsible for some failure of prediction?
You could plan your future with Tarot cards, bedtime prayer, or gut intuition. Those have been pretty everyday habits in the past. Was there some reason they might have fallen out of fashion in the planning of your own life? Or do you still put your avocadoes in a magic box to keep them fresh, or instead a thermodynamic device called a fridge?
What metaphysics does your actual daily routine depend upon? Of course, the fridge might as well be a magic box to you. But the good folk who designed and built it might have needed some more rigorous reality model, don't you think?
I think that epistemology, or more simply logic, should be the study of thinking (which I define to be the process of forming beliefs or assumptions.) It should study different patterns of thinking, both actual and possible, and their pros and cons or what consequences they produce under different circumstances. This should answer the second question, which is "how can we reason in optimal fashion?", but the first question, which is "how can we hope to have certain knowledge?", will remain unanswered. I think the first question makes no sense at all. Either it does not or I simply don't understand what it means. Which one is it?
So abduction, if I understand you correctly, is a pattern of no-pattern of thinking. You say that it is the least formalisable pattern of thinking which suggests to me that it lacks pattern to a considerable degree. Or it could be that the pattern is complex and thus difficult to understand and formalise? Which one of the two is the case? I am inclined to think the former but I like to keep my options open.
So if abduction is a process of thinking that has very little pattern within itself, this means that abduction is mostly a random process. It's basically random guessing.
While I believe that there are decisions that are random, I think that a lot of abduction that occurs in real life, at least as I understand the concept, is quite ordered. If you see a disembodied head lying on the floor you are not going to assume "someone clapped his heads and this head popped out of nowhere" you are going to assume something like "someone's head has been cut off". That betrays order. Not necessarily in reality but in thought.
Abduction has the following form:
1. Event B occurs.
2. When event A occurs event B follows.
3. Therefore, event A occured before B.
That's the general version of abduction. It looks sort of like deduction. Its premises are either observed (e.g. there is a disembodied head on the floor), randomly assumed (e.g. when someone claps his hands a disembodied head pops out of nowhere) or inductively inferred (e.g. when you cut someone's head off you end up with a disembodied head.)
I am struggling to see something interest here.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
This is a transcendental argument. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/
They need to be treated with great caution; they are a source of much philosophical slight-of-hand.
Really? Is that the best you can do?
If we are going to use B to justify A, then we ought be more confident in B than in A. It would be odd to attempt a justification with evidence that was weaker than what is being justified.
It seems odd, then, to back up one's belief that the chooks will lay eggs tomorrow with a vast, profound theory of pragmatism.
Side-question. I do not come from a philosophical background. I might be interested in philosophical problems and I might be willing to try to solve them on my own but I did not study and I generally do not read philosophy. So I do not understand many of the things that a lot of people on this board take for granted. For example, I don't really know what justification is. Everyone is talking about, and everyone is asking how, to justify this belief or to justify that belief; everyone has certain kinds of philosophical problems that they want others to solve for them or that they themselves want to solve or have solved. But most of these philosophical problems are alien to me. I do not understand what exactly is problematic. So I have to ask, unfortunately, and I believe that by doing so I will remain within the boundaries of the topic, what exactly is justification? I can make my own guesses. For example, it is perfectly sensible, based on how we use the word otherwise, to assume that to justify your beliefs means to try to convince someone else to accept them. And in order to do so, you have to do whatever is necessary for the other person to accept your beliefs. That's a very simple, very general, understanding of what it means to justify a belief. But then, some guy named Plato comes along and says that knowledge is "justified true belief" without ever explaining to whom a belief should be justified. To ourselves? But what does it mean to justify our beliefs to ourselves? Very vague term. In reality, we don't justify our beliefs to ourselves, we simply accept them and when we decide to do so we revise them. What is justification in this context? Making sure that we feel that our beliefs are good enough in order to act upon them?
Nothing in philosophy is simple. To the detriment of philosophy. There are thousands of books and articles on justification, and whatever i say here will excite objection.
Short answer is that a statement is justified if it can be made to fit in with your other beliefs.
So to know something it must be true, believed and cohere with some ill defined number of our other beliefs.
But that's not the whole story...
There was an Irishman who found a lamp that had a genie in it, in an Old Wares store. He was polishing the lamp when the genie appeared. 'Make a wish', she said. 'You get three.' 'Great', he said, 'I love red wine. Give me a bottle of it, that magically reconstitutes itself when emptied'. Shazam! There it was. He chugged the entire contents. 'Wonderful', he says (hiccup.) The genie says 'so what about your other wishes?' 'Two more thanks love!' X-)
The answer would be that we can't have any kind of absolute truth or certainty. So it is a question that was answered. That clears the field to get on with a pragmatic approach to truth and certainty.
Well, there is still then tautological, deductive or Platonic truth. Folk will want to say deductive logic is at least truth-preserving when the syntax is valid. It maps one state of affairs to another without loss of semantics. We could have a debate about that.
And then there is the allied thing of mathematical truths - the things we say about abstract objects like triangles. We can know those things for sure, in a necessary fashion. Again, we could have a debate about that too.
So in a general way, the absolutism is long dead. Pragmatism rules. But at the fringes, people still want to maintain some kind of unquestionable certainty.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Not really. I was emphasising how we know it is an important part of successful thinking, and yet we are not sure if we can formalise it. We would certainly like to if we can. One of Peirce's many foundational contributions to logic was to bring the issue out into the clear light of day. I argued that he was less successful at given a proper answer.
My own thinking is informed by modern science and its efforts to build pattern recognising machines, as well as the efforts to understand the same in human brains.
Why do Fourier transforms work so well in signal processing, for example? Why do generative neural networks seem a powerful approach? We do have some mathematical models to consider now.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Well if that were so, we would hardly ever arrive at a useful hypothesis. It would take us a lifetime to answer a single question in any ordinary IQ test. It is just a simple fact that we can leap towards the explanations which erase the most information and leave us with the core principle we need to follow.
Our brains do it all the time. The question becomes, how? It certainly ain't a serial search process. It certainly doesn't rely on random exploration. There is something gestalt and holistic in how we can feel the edge of an answer and then watch it flesh itself out into a fully fledged aha!
So the brain is doing something in information processing terms - unless you believe that all such mental activity is connected with divine powers.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Yep. So inference to the best explanation.
And what should be noted is that we can imagine a gazillion reasons for there being a disembodied head lying on the floor. Maybe a dinosaur bit it off. Maybe that dinosaur was a pterodactyl or a t-rex. The possibilities are endless.
But no. If we are actually any good at this business of reasoning, we will discard a gazillion possibilities pretty much instantly. We will come up with some maximally plausible guess. We will use all the information to hand and assign some Bayesian process of evaluation that leaves some central body of possibility as whatever is the hypothesis that can't be so easily eliminated.
Even Sherlock Holmes knew that. He was the master of abductive logic after all - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes#Holmesian_deduction
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Well yes, Peirce did notice that the same terms employed by the classical versions of deductive and inductive arguments could be used to generate a third kind of argument.
So an abductive argument was already contained within the standard formalism. It followed on directly from the truth of those other two. It was there implicit and waiting to be recognised.
That should be a pretty striking fact I would have thought.
If you aren't interested in either induction or deduction, then you won't care about abduction either. But if you do care about those two things, then you have to care about the fact that the same elements just automatically then have a third combination.
What's odd is that you want to waste all your time on a philosophy site ranting against critical thinking.
But I'm guessing you suddenly have a lot of time to waste for some reason.
And yet it is true that this sentence is in English. We can be certain of it.
Just drop the word "absolute" and you can avoid vast quantities of philosophical guff.
Neat diagram.
Notice that the syllogisms under Inductive and Abductive are invalid?
Giving them a name does not alter their invalidity.
Rather than being certain, we can say that those who know English have agreed upon this grammar and syntax as being English. It is helpful to understand this, because what are called "facts" are simply an agreement and consensus within a given population.
In relation to David Hume, the answer was developed in great detail in his book, A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding. I did study that formally, under David Stove. His main premise is like that of the other British Empiricists - that all knowledge is acquired by the senses. Hume had applied the empirical method in order to find an explanation for the way in which ideas are formed. Like other empiricists he assumed that all ideas are derived from sense impressions, but on the basis of this assumption he went beyond the work of his predecessors and denied the possibility of any genuine knowledge of anything that transcends what is supplied by the senses. This has radical consequences when you really think it through - as Hume did. So he denied that we can have real knowledge of an external world - recall in this regard, that Berkeley was also categorised as an empiricist - or of a material or spiritual substance, a self, or of God. While it was clear enough that one may believe in the reality of any or all of these objects, it was pointed out that there is no logical ground for these beliefs nor for the existence of the objects to which they refer.
The truths of logic are certain because they're implied in their premises, i.e. they do no more than re-state in the conclusion that which is present in the premises. They concern only the relationship of ideas. So this leads to 'Hume's fork' - that all knowledge is either from experience, 'a posteriori' - meaning things we learn from having experienced them ('the sun will rise tomorrow' being based on the experience of it always so doing); or it's 'a priori', with examples being 'all bachelors are unmarried' i.e. if you meet an unmarried man you know deductively (not inductively) that he's a bachelor, without reference to experience.
However, it was Kant who questioned this neat distinction between a priori and a posteriori, by way of the 'synthetic a priori', by which we can learn things that are *not* simply contained in the premises of logical statements. That is one of the main points of his famous book, Critique of Pure Reason. (There's quite a good summary here.)
(A philosopher called Quine wrote a well-known paper in the 1950's which questions the veracity of the distinction between a priori and a posteriori.)
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Actually, the discussion of the nature of knowledge in Plato is often inconclusive - various solutions are discussed, but many of them end in aporia, that is, philosophical perplexity. When you really drill down into Platonic epistemology, and the way it was developed over the ensuing centuries, it is a deep topic. Plato set the bar very high for what real knowledge is - recall that Platonism generally distrusts sensory knowledge, on the grounds that the objects of sense are in some way uneal, transitory, perishing etc. Ancient philosophy was a lot more like Eastern contemplative traditions in that respect (although also very different, as Platonism had the emphasis on mathematics and forms, which the East never really cottoned on to.) Right now I'm reading Belief and truth by a classicist called Katja Vogt, which has a really interesting take on the original Platonic dialogues on these questions.
Incidentally in most of the other points I agree with Apokrisis.
No, they are not. A fact is better understood as what is true despite your belief - or consensus.
Calling them invalid does nothing except highlight that their truth claims hinge on matters of semantics rather than syntax.
It's so funny watching you trying to rescue your metaphysical preferences while pretending not to care about metaphysics. :P
Go on. Tell us about lunch again.
So now you prefer the locution to be: "The answer would be that we can't have any kind of truth or certainty."?
Are you sure? Try again perhaps.
Hume's point stands.
Abduction finds the assumptions from which conclusions can be drawn. Deduction finds the conclusions that can be drawn from those assumptions. Inductions then confirm that the conclusions support those assumptions in terms of the predicted facts.
Deduction might be semantics preserving in being syntactically closed, but it can’t generate new information. Whereas abductive inference and inductive inference are both probabilistic in spirit and can go beyond the evidence in ampliative fashion.
As I said, abduction does seem a work in progress. It is hard to boil down its holism into some more reductionist formalism.
But another way to get at it is as retroduction.
We can say the particular fact, A, is observed. And if the general fact, B, were true, then A would be so as a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that B is true.
So it runs deduction backwards from a conclusion to a likely assumption. And it should make you think a bit about why deduction is only secure in going from the general to the particular, while going from the particular to the general is inductive - that is, going beyond the evidence by a willingness to believe a high probability is good enough to be a workable certainty.
Isn’t that just what you always want when faced by these pesky doubters?
But I agree. Once you get into this business of abduction and the full pragmatist story of how we formulate knowledge, you start to see the much larger scope of the project.
Generality must be fleshed out with some kind of best fit principle. And this is the approach familiar in a philosophy of science understanding of the framing of natural laws. We want the generalisation that discards the most information. And that is in fact a balancing act - a best systems account (BSA) that opposes simplicity and strength.
So there you have a link to Ramsey, Lewis, and the like. Abduction can be bolstered by this same principle.
Likewise the principle of indifference is critical to finding a pragmatic grounding to the particular. There are always going to be an unlimited number of potential differences. But at some point - dictated by a purpose - any further differences will cease to make a difference. And we can see how this applies to the inductive confirmation.
So we need cut offs for the general, and cut offs for the particular. When those are supplied, a process of reasoned inquiry can become self-closing in the tales it tells.
Deduction is merely already closed - syntactically. It can’t discover new semantic content.
But deduction sandwiched between abduction and induction has the means to be open enough to learn and create content. Then achieve a satisfactory degree of self-closure.
Dayuuuuuum >:O >:O >:O
Supposing that the future is not like the past requires an equally selective view.
It is, presumably, the same bottle of wine that was full and is now half full?
One way of avoiding confusion here is to pay close attention to tenses. There is in English no fixed distinction between tensed and un-tensed usage. There might have been once, there might be in the future, but in the meantime there is not, and the "meantime" encompasses at least the history of this thread, and however many more posts it takes to establish a change of usage.
That the future has been like the past (only different, for the nit pickers) is not a supposition, but experience. That it will be like the past, is supposition, imagination, projection.
I believe this would depend on your metaphysical assumptions. It sounds like you are taking a nominalist position which would reduce deduction to the abstract rules of description. If one were to take a more "realist" position with regard to concepts then the information derived from deductive analysis could have ontological validity.
Quoting charleton
Does this mean that you believe free will to be incompatible with determinism? Would you then say that our sense of free will is an illusion?
The question is how do we know when these patterns are inherent in nature as opposed to arbitrary artefacts of our mode of perceiving?
Thank you for your answer, I will read into Kant to try to get a deeper understanding of these subtleties.
One would need to determine if we have grounds to believe that our experience is offering us valid insights into the nature of these established invariances.
We experience them and understand them as being established invariances. This means that within our cumulative and collective experience they are invariant. What kind of "valid insight" into them beyond that do you imagine we could have?
You are asking the wrong question. Almost none of our beliefs are justified (in our mind) by science. So if you only accept reductive explanations as justification for beliefs, then you would have to conclude that almost all of our beliefs lack any justification whatsoever - and that cannot be true, because it is part of our usual understanding of the notion of "justified belief" that a large proportion of our beliefs is fairly justified.
Quoting Pseudonym
Whether or not I know of some scientific explanation for my feeling of hunger or my perception of the color of the sky is completely irrelevant to my warrant for holding the respective beliefs.
I'd submit that not only are the conclusions under Inductive and Abductive invalid, but that the chart defining inductive and abductive is invalid. That is it say, inductive logic does not lead one to the conclusion that since Socrates is a man who is mortal that all men must be mortal. Inductive reasoning does not mandate anything, but simply suggests that which is more likely. It would not be a reasonable inductive conclusion to suggest that from a single instance we can draw any likely conclusion either. But, should we observe millions of men all of whom are mortal and should we never observe one who is not mortal, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that all men are likely mortal. Sure, one day a man might emerge who is not mortal, but inductive logic doesn't mandate there will never be an immortal person. Such is no different than any other scientific, empirically based conclusion. We conclude based upon the best evidence we have.
And all of this is apples and oranges anyway because while there may be a limit to what inductive reasoning tells us about the actual world, deductive reasoning tells us nothing about the world. It tells us only about whether truth has been preserved from our premises, yet there is no suggestion (or requirement) that our premises be a truth about the world (e.g. all glurgs are gurps and all gurps are glomps, therefore all glurgs are glomps). So, you can talk about the limitations of inductive reasoning, but the limitations of deductive reasoning are more severe, as it tell us nothing at all other than whether we've correctly solved our Sudoku puzzle.
No. logicians agree that deduction offers no new information, only clarify that which is know. Take the standard syllogism, we already know that Socrates is mortal since he was a man.
Quoting Perplexed
Only if you accept that free will is defined as not compelled to act from external forces.
Not that this is particularly relevant to either free will or the actual topic of this thread, but charleton is talking out of his ass: science does not "assert determinism."
Thank goodness for some commonsense.
The interesting thing was that a valid deductive syllogism could be defined in terms of the three elements, the three steps, of a rule, a case, and a result. Some general "truth" that ranges over a class, some particular instance of that class, and then a consequence that could be predicated of that instance as a necessary fact.
And then the question arises of what happens when you play around with those three elements and consider what they say in a different order.
Induction was hazily understood as a converse of deduction - a step from the particular back to the general. But Peirce pursued the idea that induction itself was distinguishable into abduction and inductive confirmation. That was the way we actually seemed to reason about things in pragmatic fashion. And it was the way that science was turning into an explicit epistemology. Now you could see that this triadic story was itself already revealed in the formal tripartide structure of a deductive syllogism.
Of course the two varieties of induction were both "invalid". To go from the particular back to the general must involve a probabilistic leap of faith. A willingness to believe rather than to doubt.
But the whole problem with deduction is that it can't itself ever derive new information. It is just a system of syntax. It can only rearrange whatever semantics you put into it in a way that makes that move from the general to the particular.
So the "problem" with induction was really a problem with deduction. It was the rationalist dream that deduction could yield certain knowledge about everything. And in fact, by itself, it can yield no new knowledge at all. You needed induction to get the game started and to pragmatically justify the results.
The puzzle for me is that Banno keeps contradicting himself on these issues. One minute he is attacking the sceptics who just refuse to be pragmatic and commit to a belief that works. The next he is attacking the inductive basis of that pragmatism on the grounds the truth is "out there" beyond any such probability-based understanding.
Either he just hasn't sorted out a basic incoherence in his own epistemic metaphysics or he has something further to say which he just can't seem to bring himself to say. It's all very curious.
I've read your posts and I am currently trying to make sense out of them. In the mean time, I want to ask you a very simple question in order to make sure that we are on the same page. The question is: do you agree that abductive reasoning is a specific type of inductive reasoning? Ultimately, I understand that this comes down to how we define the concept of inductive reasoning. I believe that if the concept of induction is defined sufficiently narrowly that the answer would be "no". I do not, however, define it that way and I believe that others do not either.
Here's an example of abductive reasoning:
1. The grass is wet.
2. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
3. Therefore, it rained.
It is quite apparent to me that abductive reasoning is a very narrow form of reasoning. By definition, it only forms conclusions regarding events that took place in the past. This means that abductive reasoning is restricted to making "predictions" about the past. In other words, it can only be used to create retrodictions. This is unlike induction which can be used to form beliefs of any kind. This suggests to me the possibility of you defining the concept of induction narrowly as pertaining to making assumptions about the future.
Now let's take a look at a simple example of inductive reasoning. We have a sequence of numbers such as 1 2 3 4. Inductive reasoning can be defined as the process of identifying the pattern that best matches some given data and then using that pattern to form beliefs regarding data that lies outside of this data. Note that there are several ways, perhaps infinitely many different ways, that data can be outside of data. For example, you can ask "what comes after the number 4?" We can all agree it is 5. And we do so intuitively without being aware of the underlying process. We are often unware of answers to questions such as 1) how do we identify the right pattern based on the data that we're given?, and 2) how do we use that pattern to calculate the best guess regarding the unknown we are interested in? (The question #2 less so than the question #1.) We can formalize the question "what comes after number 4?" as 1 2 3 4 ? where question mark denotes the unknown we are interested in. But we can also ask "what comes before the number 1?" This would be analogous to retrodiction. We can formalize this question as ? 1 2 3 4 and we can also immediately answer it by saying that the number that comes before 1 is 0. But we can go further than that and we can ask questions such as "what comes between the number 2 and 3?" We can formalize this question as 1 - 2 ? 3 - 4 where hyphen represents an unknown we are not interested in. The answer is, of course, 2.5. An example of an inductive question that is most similar to what is called abductive reasoning would be a question formalized like 1 2 3 ? 5. This would be analogous to an abductive argument such as:
1. Number 5 is observed.
2. Every number is equal to the sum of the number that precedes it and number 1.
3. Therefore, number 5 was preceded by number 4.
Note that the abductive argument does not specify how we arrived at the rule that constitutes the premise #2. We did so using induction on a number of observations the majority of which have been ommited from the argument (i.e. the sequence of values 1 2 3 ?.) What this indicates is that abductive arguments, like deductive arguments and pretty much all other arguments, are simplifications of reality. They are simplistic. Inductive arguments are also simplistic but they are LESS simplistic than these two types of arguments. Unless, of course, you define induction narrowly.
The interesting question then is how induction, or whatever you want to call it, works. The question is how do we find the pattern that best fits some given data. In fact, my thinking is that the very concept of pattern is unnecessary. We do not need to be aware of any patterns. When I guess that the next value in the sequence 1 2 3 4 is number 5 I do not necessarily do so because I am aware of the underlying pattern. Rather, in most cases, I do so because I know that the set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} has the highest degree of similarity to the set {1, 2, 3, 4} among the sets that have the form {1, 2, 3, 4, *}. Thinking is fundamentally associative. So the interesting question then becomes the formalization of fluid concept of equality (a.k.a. similarity) between mathematical objects such as sets. The question becomes: how do we measure the degree of similarity between symbols?
Regarding AGI research, most of the research has been dedicated to modelling how the world works rather than to modelling how thinking works. I think that's the problem. Rather than having a programmer create a model of reality, an ontology, for the computer to think within, it is better for a programmer to create a model of thinking which will allow machines to create models of reality -- ontologies -- on their own based on the data that is given to them. This would make machine thinking much more adaptable.
My objection is a small one. I would reserve the word "logic" for deductive reasoning. Talk of inductive logic gives an undeserved legitimacy to making a guess.
A graven image. It should have an all-seeing eye at its centre. Another odd example of the obsession with trinities that helped keep Pierce from mainstream approval.
None of which should be taken as disparaging Bayesian analysis and other legitimate and excellent work around this topic. Unlike the philosopher's notion of induction, and even worse, abduction, Bayesian approaches have a strong standing.
By layering patterns upon patterns seeking similarities within differences and differences within similarities. This process should provide practical knowledge of the nature of nature and life. It should be useful insights.
True. I prefer to think in terms of Zebra puzzle. When someone says "deduction" I imagine think of this puzzle (that noone can solve except for genuises.)
Surely though you recognize where induction ends and speculation begins. Rational thought, even when not limited to formal deduction, is relied upon not because it's our religion, but because it works. I open the door in the morning and the cat runs in, not because we both guessed we would show up there, but we both expect one another from past events. That is logic, reason, and understanding the world. It is the J of Knowledge. Why is Gumbo there? She's hungry. That's not a guess. That's a reason, the basis that forms the reasonable and rational.Quoting Banno
You'll have to distiguish for me the distinction you're resting upon between induction and Bayesian analysis. Bayesian analysis is simply rigorous induction isn't it? Is your objection just that you find people sloppily drawing conclusions with incomplete information and you demand greater rigor? You're simply the juror who demands more proof because you see too many other possible explanations, but you're not the juror (as perhaps you suggest) who rejects the whole enterprise of induction and refuses to draw any conclusions from it regardless of the extent of supportive evidence, right?
I'm not getting too hung up on the divisions. There is the more familiar dichotomy of deductive vs inductive argument - necessary inferences vs probable inferences. That kind of works in the sense that deduction proceeds from the general to the particular with syntactic certainty while induction does the reverse of going from the particular to the general with provisional hopefulness.
But then a triadic view - one where a dichotomistic separation resolves itself into a hierarchical structure - is the special twist that Peirce brings to everything. It is the next step which completes the metaphysics.
So that is why it is a neat result - one that hierarchical structuralism predicts - that the actual process of human reasoning splits itself so cleanly into a trichotomistic process. It makes reasoning not an arbitrary business but one that works in the same basic way as the nature it wants to describe.
This is obviously a huge metaphysical deal - for those who still have faith in metaphysics as a grand unifying project.
So is abduction a specific form of induction? The Peircean question is instead where does abduction fit in the basic semiotic triad.
And it slots in as Firstness. A hypothesis is the first free and spontaneous act, which then leads to the "deductive" secondness that is mechanically determined reaction, and followed then by the thirdness which is the generalisation of such individual reactions to the form of some regular and enduring global habit.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
But is it?
The classical deductive syllogism is:
Major premise (or the general rule: All M are P.
Minor premise (or the particular case): All S are M.
Conclusion (or result): All S are P.
Abduction then rearranges the order so that the argument is: All Ms are Ps (rule); all Ss are Ps (result); therefore, all Ss are Ms (case).
So you would have to say something like:
- Rain makes things wet.
- This grass is wet.
- Therefore, the grass was (probably) left out in the rain last night.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
I'm not sure why it seems a problem that abduction is retroductive - that the past is being assumed to hold the key to the future. To the degree the world has actually developed some stable intelligible being, it will have developed those general constraints which serve to restrict freedom and spontaneity to give the world its predictable shape.
This is the point concerning the metaphysics. Rather than going with the classical metaphysics which thinks reality is some God-given realm of law and deterministic material action, Peirce is up-ending that view to build a logic that arises out of a completely probabilistic model of existence.
So again, induction is not a problem as it sits on the side of probability. Deduction is now the problem as the shallowness of a deterministic or mechanical metaphysics stands exposed. The issue is really why would deduction function at all? And clearly - just as we find with computers and other machines - they can't stand alone. They are helpless if it weren't for us to bookend them and makes sense of their furious syntactical whirrings.
So if you sit on the side of a probabilistic ontology, now the whole picture can snap into place properly. Abduction seeks out the constraints that must underly any observable regularity in the world. A classical/deductive/mechanical/deterministic/atomistic world is merely the emergent limit on this probabilistic description. So the task is to guess at the rules that stabilise things sufficiently that the probability of causal certainty approaches arbitrarily near 1 (or 0) for the things we might care about as fundamental facts of the world.
Will we always fall down rather than up when stepping off that cliff? Well thermodynamics says all our atoms could fluctuate upwards at that precise moment and give us a surprise. Yet also, that is almost surely never going to happen - even given a really vast number of lifetimes for our Universe.
Thus abduction does seek to recover rules already formed. And inductive confirmation seeks to show our guesses are correct. And it is all couched in probabilistic language. We no longer believe in a classical Cosmos - the one of Newton and Hume. We are presciently already into a quantum reality where concrete classicality is an emergent and inherently probabilistic limit state.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
I'm sure the rule you abduce is the simper one - 1+1=2. And so on, ad infinitum.
So you abduce a deductive rule, an algorithm that blindly constructs. You are recovering the set theoretic approach that is already the axiomatic basis for number theory.
A cherry-picked example which is a textbook case of deductive thought is hardly a good way to illustrate an argument about the true nature of induction. :-}
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Well that is why I always say forget Turing Machines and symbolic logic. It is neural networkers who have been thinking about how to properly mimic the Bayesian principles by which a brain actually makes inductive predictions.
Rock it like it's still the 1970s!
Syntactic certainty, or logical validity, isn't unique to deduction. Here's an example of inductive argument that is logically invalid:
1. Every swan in the past has been white.
2. Every swan in the future will be black.
That's invalid because it violates the rules of inductive reasoning according to which the future must mimic the past.
Similarly, probability isn't unique to induction. Deductive conclusions aren't certain. They can turn out to be wrong.
The special thing about deduction is merely the fact that if its conclusion turns out to be wrong then some or all of its premises will also turn out to be wrong. This is not the case with induction.
Quoting apokrisis
I have yet to see the relevance of placing so much emphasis on the concept of trinity.
Quoting apokrisis
What's the difference? You changed the order of the premises. You put the rule in front of the observation. Charles Sanders Peirce, according to Wikipedia (1902 and after), had no problem with placing the observation before the rule.
1. The surprising fact, C, is observed. (The grass is wet.)
2. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. (If it rains, the grass gets wet.)
3. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true. (Therefore, it rained.)
You also emphasize that the conclusion is merely probable. I think that such an emphasis is unnecessary since it is a given. All conclusions can turn out to be wrong. No conclusion is certain in the sense that it cannot turn out to be wrong.
Quoting apokrisis
It is not a problem. The problem is that abduction is a narrowly defined concept. Specific concepts have specific needs. What are these specific needs? This is what I am trying to understand. I want to understand its relevance.
Quoting apokrisis
But that's what induction does. Its job is to identify regularities in data. But instead of talking about induction, or more generally intelligence or thinking, you talk about abduction. And instead of speaking in terms of regularities or patterns, you speak in terms of constraints. I don't understand why. There must be a reason. What kind of reason is it? Is it a good or a bad one?
Quoting apokrisis
What does that mean?
I'm not following you. I've talked about all those things. You seem to want to make some campaign against abduction as a concept. And I am interested in how abduction fits into a holistic and naturalistic scheme of reasoning.
You will have to explain why I should be concerned by your problems with seeing a relevance in abduction. I've already explained why it would be relevant to a metaphysics that is irreducibly triadic (rather than dyadic or monadic).
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Constraints generate regular patterns in a probabilistic fashion. So that is how science understands physical systems. And it is how we would speak of nature if we take a systems view where we grant generality a reality as a species of cause.
So again, it is simply a reflection that I am arguing from a consistent metaphysical basis. It is how reality would be understood if you believe in an Aristotelean four causes analysis of substantial being.
They are deductively invalid; but that's no surprise since they are not purported to be deductive syllogisms.
I have nothing against the concept. I am just trying to understand why you place so much emphasis on it. I don't see why such a concept is relevant. That's all. And if what I say appears to be an attack then it's merely due to the possibility that some of the things you say are no more than smokes and mirrors. I have to entertain such a possibility.
Quoting apokrisis
You don't have to if you don't want to. I take it to be a matter of good will on your part.
"Science works by induction"
"Ah! well, that's an end to that problem, then!"
Hume, Popper, Feyerabend, Quine, Kuhn - all show that it's questionable.
So did I make a big thing of it, or have I just replied to your continuing questions about it?
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Fine. And yet you kept asking anyway. And I kept explaining why I do find it relevant. And so far you haven't rebutted my reasons for finding it relevant. And importantly so. Yet you want to keep telling me you don't find it relevant - despite offering no supporting reasons.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
I'm not bothered by your attack. I'm more disappointed at its lack of bite.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
It's not a case of not wanting to. You have simply failed to supply an argument that could be evaluated.
Can you prove a negative? If so, how do you do it? By showing that there is no evidence supporting the claim, right?
Negatives are problematic. They could be caused by personal deficiency (subjective lack such as ignorance) or they might be real (objective lack.) You can never be sure.
The best I can do in this case is to ask further questions for the purpose of clarification. Maybe my post was deficient in this regard? Could be.
Hume merely showed that induction is not deduction as far as I can tell. Popper championed the role of abduction in science; conjectures just are abductions. Feyerabend, Quine and Kuhn I cannot comment on, since I haven't read them. Can you explain how the latter three showed induction has no role to play in science?
It seems obvious to me that induction and abduction both have their own logics; logics which clearly are not the same as the logic of deduction. All three have their own roles to play in human inquiry.
But I asked you for clarification about this "relevance" of yours. For me, there is a background metaphysics that explains the specific relevance. For you, there must be likewise some background metaphysics - given that it seems you must have some good reason to reject my metaphysics as a relevant grounding.
So what is this metaphysics exactly? Put it on the table.
Popper tried his best to dispose of induction and replace it with deduction in the form of falsification. He understood its illegitimacy. Abduction is not a term he much used. He did write formidably about statistical method, yet in the end held that we can never justify a theory.
Bah. No point in trying to sum up these guys in ten words or less.
I'm just going to be hard-nosed and say that what is called induction only has a legitimacy in science insofar as they are supported by deductive reasoning. There is only one sort of validity, deductive validity. Further the very idea of a single scientific method that when applied solves problems of science is fraught. Science is not algorithmic; it is a human activity with twists and turns and little accidents and big surprises.
And finish with a question: if there is a legitimate inductive logic, someone ought be able to set it out. What we have seen is some handwaving towards statistical analysis, but of course that is not induction. It has a base firmly in deductive mathematical logic.
I haven't read Popper in years, but I do seem to remember that he was greatly influenced by Peirce. What he saw as the conjectural moment of scientific inquiry; the creative imagining of explanatory scenarios, is the same as abduction as far as I can tell. I do agree with you that deductive reasoning is involved in both induction and abduction.
For example: take the well-worn example of whether the sun will rise tomorrow. On a purely deductive analysis the fact that the sun rose today and all the past days we know of provides no guarantee that it will rise tomorrow. This is just to say that there is no purely logical reason why the sun should rise tomorrow. But we can put this in deductive terms:
P1: The sun has always been observed to rise each day
P2: The rising of the sun is one of the countless invariances governed by the immutable laws of nature
P3: All lawful invariances must obtain unless some other lawful event intervenes
C: Therefore, the Sun must rise tomorrow unless some other lawful event causes it not to rise.
Is that a "legitimate inductive logic"?
Re Popper and Peirce: www.nmwt.org/nmwt/?r=article/download&id=124
Here's how I would phrase the same solution, in a somewhat simpler fashion.
1. The number of my beliefs that would have to be wrong for the sun not to come up tomorrow is extraordinarily large.
2. Therefore, the sun will rise tomorrow.
It's just as invalid as your argument, with the benefit of being briefer. :P
It's interesting to think about why this is the example of choice. The truth is, that the sun will come up tomorrow is something of which we are certain. Hence it's usefulness as an example.
I had a quick look and Peirce hardly gets a mention in Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery. Pragmatism is only mentioned in passing.
I would more than like to. The problem is I have no clue what metaphysics is. What is it? I've heard stories about it but they never made any sense and in those rare cases when they did it was a combination of epistemology, logic and conceptual analysis. Maybe ask a specific question? or describe to me what metaphysics is so that I can give you an answer? I might be too demanding, I know.
Or we could discuss some of the things we have already touched upon such as how thinking works. We can discuss "the thinking algorithm" if you want. What rules do we follow when we make assumptions? How do we proceed from a set of particular knowns (i.e. past observations) to a set of ranked candidates for particular unknowns (i.e. predictions and retrodictions)? I already gave you the basic idea behind my approach but you rejected it on the ground that it was a textbook of something you call "deductive thought". I have no idea what "deductive thought" is. You appear to be fond of ANN's but you find something wrong with my approach? I have no idea what's the problem.
It's already difficult to agree on what deductive and inductive reasoning are. Most people have trouble ADMITTING that the key difference between the two is NOT that one is certain and the other is uncertain. Every conclusion is uncertain in the sense that it can turn out to be wrong. The idea of a conclusion that is not uncertan -- that is certain -- in the sense that it cannot possible turn out to be wrong is NON-SENSICAL. It is possible that there are conclusions that WILL NEVER turn out to be wrong but it makes no sense to say that there are conclusions that cannot POSSIBLY turn out to be wrong. A subtle but crucial distinction. Thus, both induction and deduction produce conclusions that are UNCERTAIN. I am not going to say PROBABLE even though I can. It should be a given that every truth-claim is probable since for a claim to be probable simply means that it has a probability value assigned to it. And every truth-claim has a probability value assigned to it. True/false is a measure of probability. And a measure of probability is simply how we subjectively rank possibilities in terms of their likelihood. True/false is two-valued probability measure. It makes no sense to call it something other than probability simply because it is not one-hundred-valued (0% to 100%) or infinite-valued (such as 0.000~ to 1.000~.) Furthermore, both induction and deduction can either be logically valid (or syntactically certain) or logically invalid (or syntactically uncertain.) I gave an example of logically invalid induction in one of my previous posts.
That's exactly the point I'm making. I'm not saying that our beliefs can either be justified or not (that's an entire epistemological position) I'm disputing that there is any good grounds for specify that science cannot justify the passions, as if there were some other group of things that it could justify. If there's nothing that science can justify (in that way) then the comment is entirely specious, claiming to provide some in formation about 'the passions', when in fact it is merely reporting the limits of science in general.
Quoting SophistiCat
This rather presumes a position on conciousness which is far from agreed upon. If you take the view that conciousness is some kind of causal force than you might be right, or even if it is an epiphenomenon caused by the actual brain states it 'watches', but if it is either a brain state itself, or an epiphenomenon caused by a brain state specifically responsible for causing it, then it is perfectly possible for you to be wrong about your belief that you are hungry. 'Hungry' would be typically held as being that disposition which (in the absence of competing forces) would cause a person to eat. It is perfectly possible that your brain could be in that state, but the part of your brain responsible for generating the epiphenomenon of concious awareness erroneously reports that you are not. In that sense you would be incorrect about your assertion 'I'm hungry'.
This is where pattern recognition in the form of finding differences in similarities and similarities within differences becomes the most helpful tool to a philosophy.
1) All life forms are organizing in some form to maintain life.
2) Some have brains and some do not.
3) There is no theory that explains why some particles try to survive and others do not.
4) Therefore there is some life force that acts in somewhat the same fashion (with differences and similarities) that is trying to survive and creating the feeling of hunger so that the total life entity gathers itself to survive.
This is how one forms a metaphysical point of view that is instructive and useful about one's own life and nature in general.
If one were to follow Hume's position that we have no rational basis for believing that induction from experience is a valid form of knowledge, then how can we claim that these invariances are objectively true?
Could clarification not provide new information? After all, if it is already known then why clarify in the first place?
Quoting charleton
So do you say that to be free is to act only from internal forces? How does one begin the process of disassociating from external forces in order to follow internal ones? Would this change not violate determinism?
I suppose 18th century science could be said to "assert determinism". The question is, does our modern science allow for non-deterministic events to take place?
It sounds like you are advocating a kind of statistical analysis to find correlations between the patterns in nature. This still doesn't get us over the "correlation is not causation" problem though.
There is not a strict method. It is more like detective work, experimenting with new ideas and observing effects. Creativity and intuition is the path to new understanding, however it cannot be taught, it is as skill that can only be learned through practice of various creative efforts.
100%. Totally psychological. Quoting Perplexed
Nothing is "created" by the brain? The brain (actually the total nervous system) is merely a transmitter/receiver. Look at it. It looks like a transmitting/receiving antenna.
The mind is observing the patterns, whether it be football plays it an artist's reference model. The more we practice this amount various fields of endeavor the better we get. From this we develop the ability to create new patterns from the source patterns which yields new insights that we test. I do not this all the time when I practice Tai Chi, play piano, draw, play table tennis, sing, etc. Sometimes I find small new patterns and sometimes major new patterns. I've been doing this my whole life and with practice I get better at it. Then I experiment with it to see if it provides useful and practical applications in my life. I am always experimenting. This is true evolution of life.
This is not a guaranteed process. It is one of trial and error. Learning to adjust is also part of life and evolution. We are navigators not robots, that is the process of creating.
The objectivity of invariance consists in its being reliably observed and in such observations being intersubjectively corroborated. So contra Hume we do have a rational basis for believing that induction is a reliable means of knowledge. The basis is not purely rational (unless you follow Kant's solution) but practically rational. What more do you want?
I had thought the argument is valid. You say it is invalid; can you tell me why you think so?
As to Peirce's influence on Popper; I seem to remember reading about it in Unended Quest, but its a helluva long time since I read it and I could be mistaken. In any case, even if there is little or no influence, the commonality of ideas seems obvious. The model of conjecture and refutation is basically a pragmatist one.
Are you then a dualist in asserting that the mind is something distinct from the brain?
The problem still remains that if the activity of the mind is the source of the creative process we need some way of distinguishing between truths inherent in the world and patterns created by the mind.
I don't understand your point. Science does what it does - it provides explanations of a certain sort. What it does not do is provide warrant for every belief - indeed, for most beliefs. I do not require a scientific explanation of vision in order to believe that there is a table in front of me - all I need is to look and see.
Quoting Pseudonym
No, I do not take any metaphysical positions about consciousness. I am making straightforward observations about beliefs and justifications.
Quoting Pseudonym
A belief, even a justified belief, does not have to be inerrant.
No. It is all the same - one - just moving in opposite directions. Life is organizing while matter is decaying. But they are the same stuff.
Quoting Perplexed
I don't think so. Life is creating. One understands life by engaging in need the creative process. Looking for truths can be an engaging game, but it is parenthetically to creating and understanding the process of creating.
This still does not sound like enough to qualify as being "objectively invariant". One could imagine many things that are reliably observed and intersubectively corroborated that are not objectively true. Political associations or stock markets maybe?
The thing is, if we concede that knowledge is only practically rational does this not mean that there is truth only with regards to certain ends?
It isn't. Life is a game without rules. We create them as we go along. People, cultures, religions, countries, ethic groups all create their own game. The patterns are similar and different and a good observer may pick up on them. There is no one way. There may not be any way for all I know. I just observe and learn.
I never look for truth, only something new that may be a clue.
Quoting Janus
Popper wasn't directly influenced by Peirce, but did recapitulate the same line of thought. They were especially close on propensities. And Peirce of course was concerned with a much larger metaphysical project of how epistemology could be also ontology.
Later on in his career, Popper found Peirce had been saying the same things and acknowledged this in saying he wished he had known of Peirce's work earlier (Of Clocks and Clouds) and that Peirce was "one of the greatest philosophers of all times" (Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach).
Similarly when Bertrand Russell learnt about Peirce in later life - having waged his war against Jamesian pragmatism - he took the view, that "beyond doubt [Peirce] was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever."
Cheryl Misak has now documented the subterranean influence that Peirce had on Wittgenstein via Ramsey and Lewis - https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/2946
Peirce was so much ahead of his time - and also working in unfortunate circumstances - that it is only recently he has started to have his rightful impact on academic thought.
I was in a similar position. Via cognitive neurobiology, theoretical biology and paleoanthropology, I had arrived at a generally semiotic position. And then decent digests of Peirce's voluminous unpublished thoughts began to pop up. Along with a whole circle of biologists and systems scientists, it just became obvious that Peirce had sorted out the metaphysics 100 years earlier. Within a few years, we were all calling ourselves biosemioticians.
Of course. There are both deterministic and indeterministic models in science. As for metaphysical determinism, science as such does not take any position on it. If, for instance, you are a population geneticist, you work with probabilities, and it does not matter to you as a scientist whether those probabilities originate from some fundamentally chancy process or whether they are merely epistemic (or whether there actually is a distinction). It takes a lot of philosophical posturing to get from science to metaphysics. For example, you will probably have to take a stance on reductionism. And once you do, you may also have to bet on future physics. None of this is part of science.
It's enough for phenomena to be accepted as being objectively invariant until proven otherwise, though. What other possible criteria for judgements of objectivity could we employ, to replace intersubjective criteria?
Quoting Perplexed
How would you know they are not "objectively true" though, other than by reliable observation and intersubjective corroboration?
Quoting Perplexed
I don't understand this question. Humans desire knowledge in order to accomplish practical ends, and they also desire knowledge just for its own sake.
Heh. The glass that pragmatism knows to be 99.99 percent full is always going to be frustratingly empty for those who still ache for Platonic certainty. If you believe in all or nothing, then that's what you want to be the case, despite the facts.
Yes, I remember reading Russell's statement of admiration for Peirce. To me the similarities between Popper's approach and Peirce's pragmatism seem clear. I am coming to think of Peirce as one of the most underrated philosophers; the fact that he may not have had much (acknowledged) influence on the mainstream thus far says more about the mainstream than it does about Peirce. In my view much the same can be said about Whitehead.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, how could certainty ever be anything more substantial than a feeling? We may say that it can be a more or less warranted feeling and that what constitutes warrant is clear, but that will never convince those whose feeling is not consonant with our own notion of warrant.
Perhaps you're right. But it could also be a recipe for mass conformism. How does one tell the difference?
That is how you attack the Jamesian strawman version of pragmatism.
The actual story here is that truth is the limit of rational inquiry. It is what we will believe in the end following an exhaustive pursuit. And so it is what becomes invariant within our belief structure.
So yes, this is not the good old fashioned truth of the transcendental kind - that which is true even despite there being no one around doing the knowing. The rationalist pipedream that has had such a manic grip on so many.
It is truth defined in terms of the concerns of a knower. It is a search for justified answers to the point of exhaustion - which itself is in turn a search to the point that further details cease to matter.
Pragmatism only seeks to constrain uncertainty. It can't be eliminated. And so truth - as a natural limit on a reasoned process of inquiry - is found at the point where we can afford to become indifferent to the uncertainties not yet eliminated. Our purposes - in whatever sense they exist - are sufficiently satisfied. We can't then pretend to continue to doubt - to be entranced by the remaining uncertainties - if that is merely unsatisfied knowledge that is also held by us to be of no account.
So pragmatism includes the self in its world. Truth is defined relative to the wants of the observer.
Of course that then does bring in a new issue. We can distinguish between the highly subjective view and the highly objective one. Most folk think of "true truth" as being the kind of completely invariant knowledge that scientific-strength inquiry will bring.
But even this is very slippery. The invariances that pop out of science are general principles - ideally, the mathematical symmetries encoded in foundational equations. They seem rather ... abstract. Platonic even.
The material particulars of the world become numbers - more abstracta! - that we plug into the equations. The subjective observer is suddenly rediscovered at the heart of this maximally objectivised knowledge as the entity who must informally carry out an "act of measurement". To turn the phenomenal experience of the world into the values input into an equation is a tricky and un-formalisable step.
This is what strikes directly at the fantasy of deduction being somehow foundational. A valid syllogism is only ever going to be as truthful as the semantic cargo we plug into it.
But anyway, we have quantum theory now. Nature is really rubbing our noses in the impossibility of knowledge that is objectively true in the absence of an observer who actually does something to constrain the outcome with a choice.
We know the rationalist pipedream to be physically impossible in a foundational fashion.
Of course one could just get on with the business of science without any need for contemplating its foundations and why it works but this always strikes me as avoiding the most interesting questions.
From experience, I can relate to you it is diametrically opposite. It happens thus when each person seeks their own path.
The social reasons for his relative obscurity are well documented. And many factors combined.
It did not help that he was American in that era of European domination. It did not help that most of his best work was unpublished jottings and he never wrote a cannonical book. It did not help that he was overwhelmingly ambitious in the scale of his metaphysical project exactly when the mood was harshly against that. It did not help that he was also a real working scientist and approached philosophy from that direction. It did not help that he was plunged into great poverty and academic disgrace by having an affair - something scandalous in prim Harvard, which would have been laughed off back in Europe.
Personally, I thought Peirce was pretty cranky when I was first introduced to his stuff. Then I thought, well some of his ideas certainly seem to foretell of what we are discovering now. And then eventually I found that on any deep issue at all, Peirce seemed to have it covered.
Give it another 100 years. His due will be given.
Inductive logic: Every crow ever seen is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is probably black.
Deductive logic: Every crow is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is black.
It's set out now.
Statistical analysis is validated empirically and is therefore rooted in inductive logic. Primacy rests with inductive logic, not deductive. Deduction doesn't even tell us what crows are, black is, or who Joe is.
I was not suggesting to look outside of intersubjective criteria, but rather that we may need a better method of assessing those criteria. Otherwise we could be in a position where I can objectify as true anything with which I can obtain consensus.
Quoting Janus
My point was that those two things alone are not enough to confirm or deny objectivity.
Quoting Janus
In which case is the truth not an arbitrary product of the particular ends which we select?
Universal consensus can come, through further observations, to be believed to have been mistaken. This happens mostly in science, though; not in regard to commonsense understandings of how to do things. When it comes to commonsense methodologies it is improvement instead of refutation.
Quoting Perplexed
What else do you imagine might come into play then?
Quoting Perplexed
It seems you are conflating truth with knowledge. The knowledge we have of how to do things is not "arbitrary"; it is based on workability. The knowledge-for-its-own-sake we have of how the world is is not arbitrary either: it is based on observation, conjecture, experiment and intersubjective corroboration.
Was Kant's transcendentalism not rationally derived from the foundation of all possible forms of intuition? "Empirically real but transcendentally ideal"
Quoting apokrisis
Do we have to assume here that the concerns of the knower are paramount? How can we be justified in stating that further details cease to matter?
That's a different issue. I was talking about the belief in mind-independent truth - the world as it would be experienced even when not being experienced. :)
Quoting Perplexed
We know that further details cease to matter because they cease to make a difference. How we understand things to be has become sufficiently invariant.
So yes, we are the ones drawing that line. But also, we can do it in a methodical fashion. That is what the scientific method seeks to codify as best as it is able.
Collectively we get together and develop some standards of acceptable evidence. We can get pretty rigorous - like when insisting an experimental effect must pass five sigma significance to be publishable.
We know our inquiry has been exhaustive when we feel sufficiently exhausted by it!
If we are searching for our lost house keys, we might look in the bread bin twice or maybe even three times just to be sure. But much more is OCD. Doubt becomes pathological when it ceases to achieve a different result.
1. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
2. It rained.
3. Therefore, the grass is wet.
ABDUCTION
1. The grass is wet.
2. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
3. Therefore, it rained.
INDUCTION
1. It rained.
2. The grass is wet.
3. Therefore, if it rains, the grass gets wet.
Both deduction and induction rely on rules, which is to say higher level concepts, in order to arrive at their conclusions. This suggests to me that they are superficial forms of reasoning in relation to induction which operates on observations, which is to say lower level concepts. You cannot "promote" inductive argument to a deductive or an abductive argument. You can only "demote" it. This means you can turn it into a deductive or an abductive argument only by simplifying it. However, you can "promote" a deductive or an abductive argument to an inductive argument which means you make such arguments complex, that you enrich them with detail, when you turn them into an inductive argument. What this suggests to me is quite simply that . . . induction is fundamental.
Within the context of this post, the three different types of reasoning are defined narrowly to mean different ways of describing the process of arriving at our conclusions. Abduction and deduction are different from induction in that they rely on higher level concepts such as rules. This is what makes them simplistic in relation to induction. By relying on high level concepts, they get rid of a lot of detail. High level concepts = abstractions. Abstractions = simplifications of reality.
They are not equal in rank. Thus, they do not complement each other. Induction can do everything deduction and abduction can do and then some more but deduction and abduction can only do a subset of what induction can do.
So deduction and abduction are simpler than induction. There is one more thing. They are equally simplistic. Deduction is no more simplistic than abduction. This is if we take the definition of abduction to be what it is said to be. There is absolutely nothing complex about the following argument:
1. The grass is wet.
2. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
3. Therefore, it rained.
So what is the algorithm of abduction? You choose some observation (some "surprising fact") and you do so arbitrarily. You can choose any. It does not matter whether it is imaginary or real. Then you choose a conditional that is related to that observation. The conditional must be in the form "if something occurs, then the observation that you previously chose occurs". This something can be any observation of your choice (just like the first time.) Finally, in order for the conclusion to follow from the premises, and for the argument to be logically valid, the conclusion must be the unconditional part from the conditional in the premise #2 stated in the past tense. That's all. These are the rules of abduction. Very simple, right? Anyone can learn these rules and follow them.
I am sure people will say this is not abduction proper but merely a simplification of the process. Sure. What is missing? Oh, that the premises must be true? We need to add that rule? Okay, we'll add it. But wait a second, what exactly does that mean? It's rather vague, isn't it? What does it mean for a premise to be true? You have to define that rule first. And if you want, we can do it right now. Let's say we somehow manage to do it. Would that be enough? It would? Well, Peirce would disagree. If I remember correctly, Peirce revised the definition of abductive reasoning several times. Apparently, some additional rules were missing. Sure, we can add these rules too but would that be enough? Did Peirce ever arrive at a definition of abductive reasoning that he was satisfied with? No? Is abductive reasoning something that escapes definition? Is it like mystical phenomena? Simply impossible to define? Or is it merely so complex that it is difficult to define? Either way, this means we don't actually know what abductive reasoning is. We know some of its features but not all of them. And this means that these features could be anything. So what are we going to do?
This would be the argument that abduction is more complex than deduction it's just that our description of it cannot capture it. The problem with this argument is that we can say the same thing about deduction. If it looks simple, it's only because our description of it is simplistic. It is possible that deduction is infinitely complex and that it only appears to be simple because when we describe it we do so without taking into account all of its features (which would be impossible to do if it is infinitely complex.)
So there is nothing inherent to deduction that makes it simpler than abduction and nothing inherent to abduction that makes it more complex than deduction. According to the manner in which these concepts are defined in this post, they are of equal complexity (which, no matter how great, is always lower than that of induction.)
Another belief related to the concept of deduction that I have to assassinate is that deduction merely extracts knowledge that is contained within the premises. If that's true then it is also true about induction and any other patterned (i.e. rule-based) method of reasoning. Induction employs the same mechanism as deduction. There is fundamentally no difference between the two. But it's not true; it's not true that deduction merely extracts knowledge from the premises. I can easily come up with a complex mathematical expression the result of which was never known to me. Calculating the result of a mathematical expression does not simply mean recalling its result. It means inventing a result. We invent a result and then check to see if its relation to the past is appropriate (i.e. that it does not violate the rules.) Chess is deductive but how many of us actually understand its possibility space in its entirety? The myth that deduction is uncreative is perpetuated by Eastern thinkers (who no doubt suffer from inferiority complex.) Anyone who buys into it is being brainwashed.
One last thing I want to say about deduction is that it does not necessarily proceed from a general statement towards a specific statement. But then this depends on what is meant by "general statement". A general statement, I assume, has the form "all Xs are Ys". Such a statement is equivalent to a genral conditional "if P is X then P is Y". I say general conditional to mean that P is a varible which means it does not refer to anything in particular. An example of a general statement would thus be something like "all men are mortal" and an example of a general conditional would be something like "if P is man then P is mortal". Let's take a look at some examples.
The standard deductive argument:
1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal
A variation of that argument:
1. If P is a man then P is mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal
A specific version of that argument:
1. If Socrates is a man then Socrates is mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal
The last argument has no general statements. It also has no general conditionals. Instead, it has a specific conditional.
A plausible account of our inductive instincts is our evolutionary history as creatures that emerged in a relatively orderly, stable environment. Our instincts were thus shaped by our past, since evolution is not forward-looking. As with other adaptations, they will serve us well, as long as things continue as they have throughout our evolutionary history. But, of course, making that assumption begs the very question: will things continue as they have in the past? (This counter-argument echoes the standard charge of circularity leveled on those who seek to justify induction by past successes.)
Well, the very fact that science gets along quite well with little or no metaphysics - and in particular, without ever needing to resolve the question of metaphysical determinism - is suggestive. Are such questions really meaningful, or are they spurious pseudo-questions that a conceptual analysis can dissolve?
But how can tell you're not just seeking whatever path happens to be favourable to you. i.e.. because it confirms your biases rather than has genuine merit.
In this definition, knowledge-for-own-sake would correspond to truth. However, this too seems to be based on workability. i.e. the way we chose to observe, conjecture, experiment and the method of interpretation of intersubjectve corroboration.
Can we be sure that this hasn't happened simply because we've traversed a significant course in one particular direction and thus obscured the other possible paths?
SophistiCat, just to let you know that I haven't been notified for the past two replies that you have sent me.
Quoting SophistiCat
One could imagine any number of self contained systems that can articulate itself without the need for external verification but sooner or later its relationship to other fields of endeavour must come into question. Can you give any further details of such a conceptual analysis? Perhaps this would extend beyond the boundaries of science.
There is no intellectual way that I know of. It's more about the feeling that it brings to you. Long periods of sadness are usually an indication that a change in direction is necessary in life.
I suppose one would need to get to the bottom of the source of their feeling in order to understand the connection it has to the direction they have chosen in their life. This is a very personal kind of truth though which could lead to relativism. Is the truth different for everyone?
In a way yes. As Shakespeare put it "This above all, to thine ownself be true".
We are just Navigators in Life. There is not just one path. We are learning as we go along, and should we encounter turbulence, maybe it is a good time to steer in a different direction. This choice in particular is what we have, the skills we learn along the way is what we seek.
It's all about developing skills. Think of yourself as a sailor. What would you do if you got turbulence? How skilled are you? Is there anyone who can give you advice? How does it compare to other times? There are no right and wrongs. Everyone is different and everyone will learn as they will.
Yes, the methods we use to gain knowledge of the world, whether for its own sake or for practical purposes, are not arbitrarily chosen but are developed over time based on what seems to work. Can you imagine an alternative approach?
In actual fact, current science is plagued by an enormous metaphysical dispute, specifically, whether string theory actually is scientific, or not. Current physics now is only thought to account for 4% of the known mass and energy of the universe. And the ‘standard model’ of particle physics is also regarded as metaphysically unsatisfactory. So the fact that modern technology and science produces what we consider to be good technology doesn’t actually entail that science is any closer to understanding metaphysical truths.
I think it is an exaggeration to say that "current science is plagued by an enormous metaphysical dispute, specifically, whether string theory actually is scientific, or not". First I think the question is a methodological, not a metaphysical, one. It is a question of whether string theory is testable, and whether if it is not testable, it should be counted as a scientific theory at all. That question can only be resolved over time within the practice of physics itself.
Also, physics is just one area of science. Science as a whole does not seem to be in any kind of life-threatening crisis, so I think it is fair to say that it is getting along "quite well" if not that it is getting along "very well". (Note that the "quite well" is Sophisticat's and the "very well" is yours).
Note that this explanation that you are taking to undermine induction is itself inductively derived. It relies on that which it purports to undermine.
Well, it's not. It's a very big argument, and it is exactly a metaphysical dispute, as it's about the nature of reality, the nature of science itself, what is knowable, and many other metaphysical questions of that nature. And that's only one of the issues. But because nobody takes metaphysics seriously, then they don't see that it's that kind of problem.
But I do agree with your above remark concerning the weakness of appealing to evolution in support of induction. That is exactly the territory of Plantinga's 'evolutionary argument against naturalism'.
My point was that, regardless of whether the question is "very big" or not, science is not "plagued by" it. Some philosophers might be.
In regard to my "remark"; ironically I wasn't targeting the weakness of appealing to evolution in support of induction, but the opposite; appealing to evolution to undermine confidence in induction.
Just trolling along. Isn't Bayesian inference based on induction?
A lot of people think there's a problem with induction. They think that the fact that inductive conclusions can turn out to be wrong is an argument against it. As if deductive conclusions aren't equally uncertain. As if thinking that "Because all swans are white and this is a swan, this swan is also white" means that the conclusion that this swan is white cannot turn out to be wrong. Yet we all know that it can. The problem is caused by equivocation. It appears strange to say that deductive arguments, and also inductive arguments, can be both certain and uncertain. That's because we're confusing logical certainty (or properly speaking validity) with empirical certainty. Deductive arguments can be logically certain/valid but they can never be empirically certain; they are always empirically uncertain. The same applies to inductive arguments. They can be logically certain/valid but they can never be empirically certain. Nietzsche said that "absolute certainty is a contradictio in adjecto" and he's right. Assumptions cannot be empirically certain because they are by definition empirically uncertain. Reasoning is the process of forming assumptions regarding events that we haven't observed. Because we didn't observe them, this means that what we think they are can always turn out to be wrong.
Popper's solution to the imaginary problem of induction was his theory of reasoning where we reason by making conjectures (i.e. by making shit up) and then by seeking refutations. He thought that relying on induction is dogmatic i.e. it makes us unwilling to adapt our models of reality in the face of new evidence. What he was blind to is the fact that adaptability is not enough. Models of reality must adapt in a specific manner. In statistics, there is something called "overfitting". It's the situation in which our models fit the data perfectly but do not go beyond it in the way that we expect it. According to Popper, this would be fine. So you have a sequence of observations such as 1 2 3 and you want to model it. Popper says you do so by coming up with any kind of model that fits the data. Okay, so I come up with a model. Now Popper says you use deduction to make predictions i.e. what kind of observations you assume will come next in the sequence. I use deduction and I get something like 1 2 3 0 0 0 0 0. I then set out to test my theory by testing my predictions against reality. I then realize that the next observation in the sequence, quite suprisingly, is number 4. I ask Popper what to do now and he says "adapt!" And I do so by changing my model so that it now makes the following predictions: 1 2 3 4 0 0 0 0. Pretty neat, huh? Well, not so if we ask our intuition. Our intuition wants to build a different model, a model that makes the following predictions: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Of course, Popper was aware that his theory is stupid, so in order to save it, he added additional rules such as Occam's rule of razor otherwise known as the principle of economy. But he never bothered to define these rules. Is it because he was afraid of doing so? what if he realized that thinking is in fact a rule-bound, deterministic, process? that thinking is fundamentally inductive?
Well, no, thy can't be valid. Validity happens only with deductive arguments. Ascribing validity to inductive arguments is at best metaphorical, and more often than not a philosophical feint.
How so?
This is logically valid:
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be white.
This is logically invalid:
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be black.
This is not merely a metaphor and certainly not a deception.
No, it is not valid.
If it is valid, show us its form.
And if it is cogent, why are the swans around here black?
Things exist whether we are aware of them or not. This means that rules exist whether we are aware of them or not. If we are not aware of the underlying rules of reasoning that does not mean that there are no such rules. Does that make sense? When we reason inductively we follow a set of step-by-step instructions on how to do so. But when we describe how we reason inductively we usually leave out a lot of detail. Our descriptions are not exhaustive and detailed but simplistic and shallow. We do not list EVERY SINGLE PREMISE that leads to our conclusions. So if you do not see how premises are bound to a given conclusion, that does not mean that they aren't bound.
Quoting Banno
Do I have to show you its form, i.e. describe the process in detail, in order for you to accept that inductive reasoning is a rule-bound process? Is that necessary? Shouldn't that be obvious from the fact that some premises-conclusion combinations are legal and others aren't?
Quoting Banno
If an argument is valid that does not mean that its conclusion is empirically true.
Here's a valid logical argument:
1. All men have blonde hair.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates has a blonde hair.
Does that mean it is empirically true that Socrates has a blonde hair? No.
Questions:
Is "a theory of induction" equivalent to the practice of inductive reasoning?
Are predicted consequences deductive? If they were they would be logically entailed by a theory being correct. I don't think this is the way it works. Think about the prediction that gravitational lensing would be observed if Einstein's theory that mass warps spacetime were correct. Gravitational lensing is not logically entailed by curvature of spacetime, but analogically suggested by knowing how a curved lens refracts light. The prediction is thus inductive and abductive not deductive, because it is based on the expectation that curved spacetime will act like curved glass or polycarbonate is observed to.
Inductive reasoning is indispensable to science, to any non-arbitrary conjecture at all. It is as much an example of inductive reasoning to think that natural processes, and the behavior of materials, were the same in the past as it is to think that they will be the same in the future. Cosmological theories and the theory of evolution would be incoherent without the assumption that the laws of nature have not changed. Without stable laws of nature we would not be able to reliably test, to verify or falsify, any theory at all.
This would seem to an example of Popper being either obtuse or disingenuous; unless he was referring to "a theory of induction" rather than to the practice of inductive reasoning, per se.
BTW, you still haven't told me why you think my deductive framing of the belief that the Sun will rise in the future is invalid.
So, in your deductive example:
1. all men have blonde hair,
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates has a blonde hair.
If one and two are true, three must also be true. As it turns out, (1) is false, adn hence so is the conclusion.
But in your inductive example
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be white.
(1) is true, and yet (2) is false. That is, the premise is true, the conclusion false - the very opposite of validity.
No, I am saying he was inconsistent and mistaken if he did not support it.
Quoting Janus
Ah.
Overly simplistic descriptions of scientific method do say things like that. SO folk think that by dismissing induction I am dismissing science. Noting could be further from the truth.
But Popper being wrong does not make induction right.
That's true. And that applies to induction too. It applies to any kind of algorithm. If you want an algorithm to be able to map its inputs to its outputs in a way that it previously didn't, you must modify it. That's what "back-propagation" does to neural networks. Hardly ground-breaking.
The problem is that the manner in which we describe inductive reasoning is not exhaustive. We leave out many premises from our description. They thus become hidden premises.
Here's an example:
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be the same color that every swan in the past was.
3. Therefore, every swan in the future will be white.
This is a gross over-simplification of the process of inductive reasoning but it is nonetheless less of a simplification than the usual description.
Is that enough to prove my point?
I recall reading how children observer occurrences, develop hypotheses and then test them, apparently on a inherently statistical basis which the paper described as Bayesian (A Gopnik et al).
No.
It is not the case that because every swan seen by white fellas was white, they will never see a black swan in the future.
See?
I don't object to Bayesian inference.
But that's not induction.
SO how strongly do you doubt an inductive conclusion? Do you doubt it absolutely? Or is that unreasonable?
It’s a funny thing. Folk can really hate Cartesian doubt being applied too liberally. They bang on about not denying what you believe in your heart, not doubting the knowledge you are prepared to act upon.
Yet they talk as if there are no grounds to believe inductive methods of reasoning. And this red herring of deductive validity is all that is offered as an excuse. Whereas the beliefs we are prepared to act on are all derived from inductive generalisations.
Wiki says:
Do you think scientific method must be algorithmic?
I suspect that is a bit of this underpinning the defence of inductivism.
An algorithmic science would be dreadfully impoverished.
Again, logical conclusions, whether they are deductive or inductive, are empirically uncertain which means they can turn out to be wrong regardless of the premises they are derived from.
For example:
1. All men have blonde hair.
2. Barack Obama is a man.
3. Therefore, Barack Obama has a blonde hair.
Although logically certain, it is not empirically certain that Barack Obama has a blonde hair. In fact, he does not. So the premises can be accepted as true and the conclusion can turn out to be empirically false.
Induction is just invalid.
Cool.
Why?
Do you think science would fail without induction? I think not.
Again, my point is a small one - by calling what happens when we move from a sequence of observations to a prediction, inductive logic or some such, we obscure what is actually going on.
And what is actually going on is far more human, humane and downright interesting than following a mere algorithm.
No, I am saying that induction must be invalid . . . because you say so.
Quoting Banno
Now you sound like a mystic.
Magnus, I've shown repeatedly that in an induction the conclusion does not follow from true premises. It's not just my say so.
Cheers.
What you did is called backpedalling.
You were wrong in this post of yours:
Quoting Banno
You never addressed that.
My response was this:
Quoting Magnus Anderson
And yours?
Now, does anyone here think that this is wrong? Surely at least we have agreement on this.
Inductive reasoning, per se, is neither valid nor invalid; your mistake consists in applying a principle to it that is relevant to deductive reasoning only. You haven't given any argument to support your claim that inductive reasoning has no place in science. Also, as I have shown inductive reasoning can be re-framed in valid deductive terms. You claimed my re-framing is not valid; but you are yet to support that claim.
I can live with that, if you prefer. Just so long as we drop the pretence of its being valid.
Quoting Janus
To be sure, if you can indeed reframe inductive reasoning in deductive terms, it is no longer inductive reasoning, and I would have no problem with it.
That's what I suggested happens in statistical inference. But even there some folk are asserting that stats is based on induction.
Yes, that's another example of an inductive argument being framed validly in deductive terms. Of course the argument is unsound because the second premise is false. Also it is not a good inductive argument because we had no reason to believe, prior to comprehensive exploration of the Earth, that swans if they occurred in unknown lands, would be white.
The thing is though, that the reasoning behind the assumptions that form the premises in the deductive re-framing is not itself deductive, but inductive or abductive. As with all premises of all deductive arguments (which, in terms of soundness, but not in terms of validity, are only as good as their premises); they are not themselves supported by the argument, but instead support it.
The point is that in the following argument it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false:
1. All swans in the past were white.
2. Every swan in the future will be the same color that every swan in the past was.
3. Therefore, every swan in the future will be white.
If both premises are true then every swan in the future must be white.
Quoting Banno
If you like, my objection is that inventing induction as a reason for being confident that the sun will rise tomorrow is already a step too far.
Maybe it would help to think of it thus: which is more likely, that the sun will not come up tomorrow, or that there is something amiss with inductive reasoning?
I hope you will agree that we can be more confident about the sun coming up than about the theory surrounding induction.
A weaker theory cannot support a stronger. So the theory of induction does not help us reach the conclusion that the sun will come up tomorrow.
I wouldn't put it that way. I would say instead that " an inductive inference is sometimes an inference from a premise of the form "all observed A are B" to a conclusion of the form "All A are likely to be B" or "All A are possibly B".
As you know, though, false premises do not entail that deductive arguments are invalid, just that are unsound.
But any reasoning that says that the Sun is likely to rise tomorrow is, by definition, inductive reasoning.
What I did is I made induction more explicit.
But there is no need to reason to the conclusion that the sun will come up tomorrow. What would need reason is if the sun were not to come up tomorrow.
Interesting that Banno pretended not to hear this.
Apparently reason don’t care about semantic truth. Only syntactical correctness matters.
All you need to know is the bishop moves on the diagonal. The reason why it moved to that particular square is of no interest.
Sound move, unsound move? Banno no bothered.
The validity of statistics is ultimately proved by the occurrence of the empirical event it references. Certain empirical events occur with apparent mathematical precision and are thus predictable deductively, but the gold standard proof is the observation. The odds of 100 heads in a row is easily proved with a calculator, but best proved by flipping coins. Only if the coin tosses match the calculator will the deduction be inductively proved true.
You have reason to believe the Sun will rise tomorrow because you have reasons to believe in the existence of gravity and the more or less invariant motions of the planets, reasons to believe in nuclear fission and electromagnetic radiation and so on. All of these are inductive, not deductive, reasons.
That raises an interesting question I hadn't considered: is validity merely a matter of syntax, or must it also involve semantics? I'll have to think on that one...
Hmm. You mean like ...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#logic
You are talking about metaphysical systems, surely? Because scientific systems (with the possible exception of some highly theoretical fields) are the opposite of self-contained: they are directly engaged with our senses. They may not pass Hume's very strict and literal understanding of empiricism, but they are a helluva lot better in that regard than metaphysics.
Quoting Perplexed
Well, my question was open-ended: I do not insist that all metaphysical questions are pseudo-questions. But take a look at the literature on just about any contentious metaphysical question, such as determinism, and you will find conceptual challenges.
But it is not self-undermining. It is entirely compatible with the situation where the world ceases to be orderly some time in the future (Goodman's grue scenario).
In time exceptions can be found, and depending upon certain arbitrary rules, a sub-species may be created or a whole new species within an arbitrary created genus may be created. And in time more exceptions will be observed and the process continued. The whole scientific process is arbitrary and approximations subject but to constant modifications depending upon the similarities and differences being observed.
As one may expect, these observations, classifications, overall observations (can animals communicate in ways more "intelligent" than humans?) and conclusions, are highly susceptible to all kinds of biases.
And from this rather eclectic accumulation of knowledge are we to find "truths" in logic, both deductive and inductive? In my observations, such a case is highly improbable. Logic, of any sort, is more or less a game for academia, most especially to imply am aura of superiority to certain disciplines, where none really exists. An average person is not only able to derive similar knowledge without resorting to logic, but in all probably will make more sense because it admits to the approximations and changeability associated with the world (universe) we live in. The better the observer the more like likely the approximation will be admitted to (there are no Laws).
Hence, the answer to any syllogism it's always maybe - with a different feeling of likelihood depending upon experiences (memory). Memory (the observer) is always a participant in judgement - science or otherwise.
I wasn't trying to pit science against metaphysics, I was making the point that its a worthwhile endeavour to asses the foundations of any system as well as its connection to other fields, rather than just saying shut up and calculate. Why engage in philosophy at all if science seems to work and one can just get busy with that?
I think I will take your advice and look at the literature since I am rather new to all this. However, if you can elaborate some of the conceptual issues with regard to determinism that might be helpful.
The compatibilist position finds that all acts are determined. "Free" acts are determined by the self, which is itself determined.
So - no.
The determinist position is that there is no choice. Everything is determined. (If you are not a determinist, just go on believing otherwise, because that too is determined).
Thus, anything that a determinist says can be ignored (if you believe that you have the choice to ignore). Whatever a determinist tells you is meaningless, unless one believes that the Laws of Nature and the wave-particles that they govern have some kind of built-in mandate to reveal something about themselves.
Maybe there is a God that forces the Laws of Nature to provide insight to those who aren't determinists - as a matter of playing fair?
The self is not static. Like all things it changes and evolves. The physical world is matter in motion; action and reaction.
This is not the case. Determinism is an explanation of choice which is completely lacking from those who propose free-will.
'tis not. When you bring your white swans down here they stay white. I saw one in a zoo.
I'm not familiar with Goodman's grue scenario. In any case I was referring to the past, not the future. I don't see why, if it is based on an understanding of evolution, it would not rely on the assumption that the invariances of nature were in the past as they are today. And that assumption is as much irrationally inductive as the assumption that the invariances of nature will be in the future as they appear to be today.
That hows its applicability. Its validity is in the mathematics underpinning it, which is deductive.
I can't see how this addresses any point relevant to the discussion. You ask what reason we could have for thinking the sun will not rise tomorrow. Well, if induction is totally irrational then we have no reason for thinking the sun will or will not rise tomorrow, there would just be the normal human tendency to expect the same; to expect that it will rise (although even the belief that there is such a human tendency is itself an inductive one).
All our experience shows us that there are regularities in nature, and cumulative human experience and thought has come to weave a remarkably coherent and consistent picture of nature's invariances understood in terms of laws. All of that came about because of inductive and abductive thinking which hypothesizes that there are laws of nature. The idea that there are laws of nature cannot be derived deductively. Nothing at all that says anything about the actual world can be derived by pure deduction.
Inductive and abductive reasoning is analogical. I offered the example of gravitational lensing earlier, but it seems as though you chose to ignore it.
Are you suggesting that the Laws of Nature work in such a manner that they give the real scoop about the nature of choice is to only certain people (determinists) while the rest of us are given some delusional ideas of Choice? In other words, are the Laws of Nature playing favorites in revealing the truth?
Anyway, I wasn't speaking of the nature of choice as revealed to determinists, I was speaking of REAL choice. The one that non-believers are forced to believe in by the Laws of Nature.
Single celled organisms probably.
What's the "free will" guys answer?
Are you suggesting that humans are able to act against the laws of cause and effect when the rest of the universe has to comply with it?
As you know full well the sun does not rise, has never risen and never shall. Inductive knowledge has furnished us with the truth that the appearance of the sun rising is the result of the earth's rotation.
And it is that persistence, not only of the patterns of nature but the persistence of human observation and recording of those observations that has painted or knowledge with what we like to call laws.
There is no such thing as the laws of cause and effect for the rest of the universe. I guess it is something determinists just make up for the heck of it. And why not?
But then again, if there was this mystical Law that governed the universe (sounds remarkably similar to God), it would be kind of strange that they reveal the Truth about themselves to only a chosen few. Is there a special prayer that the Laws of Nature are particularly fond of that non-determinists can abide themselves of in order for the Truth to be revealed to them also?
I don't know. But its not me that believes in magic. That would be you.
I can't see any point of disagreement here; other than the pedantic one concerning the idea of the sun rising.
Nope. And such a point of view has no theory for variation in the universe. Quantum theory does.
The only way determinism works is if the Laws of Nature assume all of the authority and possibilities of gods (God). It is absolutely the silliest metaphysical theory I've ever come across and more correctly should be classified as a religion.
This is not correct. Prior to knowledge of the Sun being the center of the solar system, the Sun was understood to be a wandering God whose path like those of the other planets (gods) circumambulated the celestial sphere. Each night the Sun traversed the underworld and emerged victorious the following morning. It was possible (since the Greek Gods were not omnipotent) that the dark forces of the underworld could defeat the Sun; which would mean that it would fail to rise.
On a Christian perspective the Sun could fail to rise tomorrow if it turned out that Judgement Day had arrived or if God so willed it.
We believe that it could not fail to rise on account of our understanding of gravity and thermodynamics; our world is actually much more stable and certain in a way than the ancient world which was subject to the fate of the gods or the will or whim of God.
When you talk of certainty that the Sun will rise tomorrow you are referring to a feeling and arguing that that feeling is stronger than our feeling of certainty regarding celestial mechanics or physics. In a way this is true; but the modern feeling of certainty only exists on account of either mere habit or else our understanding of science. This understanding may not be possessed by many people but within our culture scientific understanding filters down to alter common feelings about the world.
And you still haven't addressed my point about the analogical nature of inductive and abductive thinking and the inappropriateness of applying the criterion of deductive validity where it doesn't belong, in order to dismiss the importance of its role in human inquiry into the nature of the world.
Less certain to you? To me? To everybody? How can you be certain of that except perhaps in your own case? This is still a deflection in any case; so I give up.
It's a matter of how he defines words. If he defines validity narrowly to mean truth-preserving validity, i.e. that an argument is valid if and only if its conclusion being false means some of its premises are false, then yes, induction is invalid because it can have a true premise and a false conclusion. But if you're like me and you define the concept of validity broadly to mean that an argument is valid if and only if it logically follows from the premises (i.e. if it does not violate the rules of reasoning) then induction is by definition valid.
Really, what he's saying is that induction, in the narrow way that he defines it, is not truth preserving. I think it's strange to say it's invalid because it suggests there is something wrong with it. If an argument is not trurh preserving that does not mean it's wrong. Sometimes, with some kinds of arguments, it does. But that does not apply to induction
Only if it is framed in deductive form, though and like you I have already presented an example of an inductive argument framed deductively. The inductive parts in that case form the assumptions in the premises which are obviously not themselves demonstrated by the argument itself; but which are also not subject to judgements of invalidity, as is the case with the premises of any deductive argument.
The premises of deductive arguments may be unsound, but unsoundness cannot be deduced, and is actually judged inductively (on the uncertain basis of experience and inference to the best explanation; in other words plausibility).
What is relevant is knowledge is acquired by a combination of personal observations, group consensus, and periodic moments of intuition and inspiration. Such knowledge can be used in a formal manner using some symbolic logic, but the root of knowledge is in observational pattern recognition of various sorts.
Not really. If I define logical validity broadly to mean that an argument is valid if and only if it logically follows from the premises (i.e. if it does not violate the rules of reasoning) then induction is by definition valid. Note that I corrected myself? I initially said that it can be valid but then I realized that induction is defined so narrowly that it cannot be other than valid.
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Therefore, all Ps are Qs
If there is a conditional rule between the premise (the independent variable) and the conclusion (the dependent variable) which states that the P and Q in the conclusion must be the same P and Q in the premise, then it is impossible for this sort of argument to be anything other than logically valid. It is not necessary for the argument to be truth preserving to be considered valid i.e. if its conclusion is false it's not necessary that some of its premises be false.
The problem is that logical validity is poorly defined. Look at this:
Quoting Wikipedia
This suggests that logical validity and truth preservation are one and the same thing. They are not. Truth preservation is merely a symptom of logical validity and even then not always.
Here's an argument that is truth preserving but nonetheless invalid:
1. Donald Trump has an orange hair
2. Melania Trump is Donald Trump's wife
2. Therefore, 2+2=4
Truth preserving but not valid. The conclusion does not follow from the premises.
The reverse is also true. If an argument is not truth preserving that does not mean it's not valid. The following is perfectly valid:
1. All observed swans are white.
2. Therefore, all swans are white.
Logical validity simply means that the conclusion logically follows from the premises. It means that it does not violate the rules of reasoning. It means that the structure of the argument, the combination of the premises and conclusion, is legal.
The problem is that two distinct concepts have been confused: one broad (logical validity) and one narrow (truth preservation.) I believe the mistake stems from the initial observation that logical validity is always coupled with truth preservation. People will always make such mistakes so as long they focus on narrow concepts first and broad concepts second.
Reasoning isn't merely about making observations. A mass of observations will mean nothing to you if you cannot generalize from them. Logic is the study of this process of generalization. This process of generalization can take any of form but there is one form that we consider "rational" or "valid" and numerous other forms that we consider "irrational" or "invalid". Logic is the effort to discriminate between the two. More generally, it is the effort to discriminate between different patterns of reasoning and analyze their consequences, their pros and cons, under different circumstances.
If an argument is such that its conclusion follows necessarily from its premises then it is an deductive argument, end of story. That is how a deductive argument is defined.
Induction and abduction really consist in inferences not.
Take the example I gave earlier of graviataional lensing. The abductive/inductive reasoning is analogical.
The conclusion does not follow logically from the premises, the premises could be true and the conclusion false, but with additional premises involving laws of nature it could be framed in deductive form, and then the conclusion would follow logically from the premises.
The argument in its inductive form is neither valid nor invalid, though; because the "likely" makes that indeterminable. If it had said instead "therefore refraction of light will be observed", then it would be purporting to be a deductive argument, but would be invalid.
Observations together with pattern recognition combined with inspiration/intuition that gives new meaning to these recognized patterns.
A child builds a sandcastle.
Every time the ocean waves come in, it destroys the castle. (observation and pattern recognition).
Something must be done to avoid or redirect the water. (inspiration).
This is how knowledge is acquired.
Not true.
Here's an inductive argument:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Therefore, all Ps are Qs
The conclusion necessarily follows from the premise. You cannot conclude something like "Therefore, no P is Q". It is necessary that you conclude "Therefore, all Ps are Qs". Note that we're talking about logical necessity and not objective necessity.
That's my point: observations together with the process of generalization which you call "pattern recognition combined with inspiration/intuition". That process is not arbitrary. It unfolds according to some set of rules. Logic studies the rules of that process.
I think that inspiration is irrelevant to understanding how reasoning works. Intuition, on the other hand, is a poorly defined term that for the most part means nothing other than "knowing something without being able to explain how". That's not very useful.
What is important is how the set of known particulars (i.e. experience, past observations, etc) is mapped to the set of unknown particulars (i.e. predictions and retrodictions.) It might not be appropriate to call this process "generalization" since high-level concepts (i.e. laws, rules, patterns, models, universals, etc) are ignored. Instead, we map directly from known particulars to unknown particulars. We go directly from observations to predictions. In some cases, we go straight to actions.
Logic is the study of this mapping. This mapping is initially intuitive in the sense that we cannot explain how it works. But through time, with careful introspection, we gradually become aware of its inner workings. The intuition, in part or in whole, becomes formalized. It acquires a memetic existence which allows us to employ it mechanically i.e. by simply following its written instructions.
I'm actually talking about knowledge acquisition. I believe this is what Hume was also interested in.
Intuition is not only poorly defined, it is impossible to define because it pops out of the experience of living. It just happens. However, the more one practices observation and pattern recognition, the more one is likely to have moments of inspiration because it is sharp observation skills that is the mother of inspiration. With such a process, one is merely traveling on the same path of knowledge forever. I guess one can rely on the inspiration of others
It makes sense to me to say that objects that are defined to be infinite in scope are impossible to be described in entirety. It makes sense because it is true by definition. You defined the object under your scrutiny to be infinite in size, so it's impossible to fully exhaust it. If you define a human body to be infinite in complexity, you cannot hope to describe it completely. No matter how much of it you include in your description, there is always something about it you have yet to describe. Though you cannot describe such phenomena in entirely, you can nonetheless describe it in part. Your descriptions can be more or less exhaustive. The same thing about intuition. Regardless of whether you define it to be finite or infinite in complexity, you can always describe it to a higher or lower degree.
What I am trying to understand is why do you think that intuition is impossible to describe. I can describe my intuition no problem. All I have to do is make an effort to do so. Again, intuition is merely defined as a process of decision making that is outside of our awareness.
My intuition moments just happen. Something may trigger the moment of epiphany. Something some someone says. Maybe a passing scene. Maybe a dream. It just happens for unknown reasons. It springs out and things all of a sudden makes sense. I've had situations where everything didn't make sense and all of a sudden the mist clears and every piece of the puzzle becomes clear. That moment of inspiration is write undefinable for me. It is as did the deeper soul is speaking.
I am myself in a (leisurely) process of reading up on such issues, although at the moment I am more focused on causation.
SEP provides an overview of the topic in Causal Determinism.
An accessible introduction to determinism (or lack thereof) in physics can be found in the works of John Earman (he has written a number of articles, as well as a book). Here is his article in a book Freedom and Determinism (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy):
Quoting Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know
Determinism is bound up with other topics. Philosophers find issues with the concept of the laws of nature. Reductionism is also a very controversial issue. The failure of either of these concepts threatens the very cogency of the question "Is the universe deterministic?"
The theory of evolution, like any theory, is based on what we already know. Induction is a way of inferring what we don't know, whether it occurs in the past or in the future. Having evolved in a regular environment (regular enough for practical purposes), we are conditioned to trust in induction, because those who in the past could best exploit those regularities had a fitness advantage. But all that was in the (known) past. Our shared inductive instincts owe everything to the past and nothing to the future, which is why it is not right to appeal to those instincts for validating inferences of future observations.
By the way, to return to the topic of the thread, one can read Hume as mounting a similar argument, only he believed that our causal and inductive beliefs are shaped by observing "constant conjunctions" of similar events. Hume's psychological explanations may be too simplistic for our age, but the idea here is basically the same: induction's seeming self-evidence is not enough to justify it when you consider why it seems to be self-evident.
Sometimes posts are designed to agree.
Surely it does not always have to be confrontational.
Since we are discussing induction it is worth pointing out that the common sense perception that the sun rises was thought to be true for thousands of years, yet clever application of skepticism and induction has given us the heliocentric hypothesis.
So far from being flawed, it is worth pointing out the value of the scientific method.
Perplexed by name; perplexed by nature. Seems you want to keep your deterministic cake but want to eat the free will topping too.
Who or what decides when determinism leaves the room?
The problem is that everything is constantly changing. Induction is only approximated. There is no evidence of the unchanging nature of the universe and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Determinists are determined but have no evidence to support its preferences. And Hume was quite on target with his analysis of the psychological effect on induction. There are not only biases galore in all human activity, but in addition fundamental to quantum theory is the notion that the observer cannot be divorced from the measurement of the system.
1) the Earth moves around the sun or
2) the ontology of space-time.
Any such stance is purely metaphysical in nature and an unwarranted one at that.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/general-relativity-the-sun-revolves-around-the-earth.245334/page-2
"Cleonis, you seem to also be confused on the purpose of the theory. Is Heliocentric system more convenient, and therefore, more useful? Absolutely. Does it give you any predictions you could not acquire in Geocentric system? Absolutely not. And when I map coordinates on Earth, is it more convenient to keep inertial frame of reference, or one that is fixed to rotating Earth. The later, of course. But does that mean that the Earth suddenly stopped rotating? No. Convenience of one model over the other does not imply any sort of physical truth. It's just that, a convenience. In order for one thing to be true and for another to be false, the two models must provide disagreement in predictions. Are there any disagreements in predictions? No. Then it is no more wrong to say that Earth is the center of the universe around which all else rotates, than it is to say that Earth rotates around the Sun.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/general-relativity-the-sun-revolves-around-the-earth.245334/page-3
"The purpose of GR, as you put it, is to consolidate SR with newtonian gravitation, from what I've read. It's achievement is being a good physical theory with accurate predictions. In newtonian gravitation, you have mass acting on mass. I can't recall ever reading or hearing that there is any significant mass-space coupling in newtonian gravitation. You seem to be discussing the philosophy of GR rather than its physics. Whether you choose to beleive that there exists a curved 4-D entity called spacetime which couples to matter, or whether you believe spacetime is a convenient mathematical tool for GR is completely up to the individual phycisist."
There are scientists who are completely reworking the theory of gravity based upon the notion of quantum entanglement and a holographic universe which will yield a mathematics that will be in approximate concordance with GR but with a completely new way of viewing gravity. One such scientist, Erik Verlinde, spoke at a symposium where he stated that he began looking at this new approach because he wasn't at all philosophical comfortable with the Big Bang Theory of the universe.
I don't know of any logic where this would be the case. Induction is, generally speaking, plausible reasoning. So normally you would conclude that any P is probably Q, with the strength of this inference depending on how many Ps have been observed and perhaps other considerations.
By deductive reasoning we usually understand the application of something like Aristotelian or Classical logic. The rules of inference are fixed; even when we reason informally, if the reasoning is deductive, it can be straightforwardly translated into a formal logic without the loss of accuracy.
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the inductive logic. There is informal plausible reasoning, which can only be loosely approximated by some of the formal statistics, such as Bayesian inference.
Definitely! :) Yes I would seek to find some sort of compromise. Are you saying you'd be happy to give up free will?
Truth-preservation is a very deceptive concept because it suggests that if you know the past that you can predict the future with certainty. That's not true. A much more careful definition is required in order to avoid that but that is a non-trivial task.
Every logical conclusion is empirically uncertain. This means that even if you know all of the past with perfect accuracy, your predictions can still turn out to be wrong. Thus, it makes no sense to emphasize that inductive conclusions are probable since deductive conclusions are no less probable.
There is no compromise. Just one choice, one probabilistic (or random choice), no matter how small, destroys determinism. Compatibilism attempts to compromise but any reading of it yields a contortionist mess. Something like you can will want you want, but if you want what you will, you'll end up with wants but no will ... or some silliness like that.
In any case, no compromise. However, since what you think is determined (if you are still a determinist at this reading), it should be of no mind to you. When the Laws of Nature get around to allowing you to believe in something else, they'll let you know. I hope you are happy with whatever decision that had been already made for you.
https://www.researchgate.net/file.PostFileLoader.html?id=59ae71f3ed99e178ec7dd8b6&assetKey=AS%3A535179471343618%401504608137511
Ssssh. They don’t want to know.
1. Some men are bald
Do you seriously believe that this logically entails that all men are bald?
Wow, man, if you really believe that then I'm not sure there is any point conversing with you further.
Evolution is based on the assumption that the invariances of nature have been consistently the same during the past as we find them today. I am pointing out that this assumption is as just as warranted or unwarranted as the assumption that the invariances of nature will be the same in the future as today. So, my point was that inductive inferences are essential to the theory (Evolution) that you were purporting to use to undermine the justifiability of inductive reasoning. I'm surprised you cannot see the problem with this.
No problem. I guess it was how I perceived your tone that led me to believe that you wanted to disagree but apparently I was mistaken. :)
Maybe you should start paying attention to what other people are saying.
I've already said that every conclusion is empirically (or semantically) uncertain. Even if you knew everything there is to know about the past, your predictions can still turn out to be wrong. The future is under no obligation to mimic the past.
The problem is that you do not understand what logical consequence is.
No, the problem is that you apparently cannot explain what you think logical consequence is. You also need to explain what you think the difference between logical and objective necessity is, and for that matter what you think objective necessity could even be.
The logical consequence of 2 + 2 is 4. That's what you get when you follow the rules of addition. In the same way, the logical consequence of "Some Ps are Qs" is "All Ps are Qs". That's what you get when you follow the rules of induction. Very simple.
It's just not so; and I doubt anyone would agree with you. Have you studied logic at all?
In predicate logic
( '? x' means "all x" or "for all x". '? x' means "there exists x").
There is a clear logical distinction between these two types of propositions, but in your understanding they are conflated, and the distinction is discarded.
You seem to think that if the logical entailment of "Some P's are Q's" is not "No P's are Q's" then it must be "All P's are Q's". this is simply mistaken; the only logical consequence of "Some P's are Q's" is that some P's are Q's.
Odd, that you find yourself arguing my case against Magnus.
That's exactly what logical consequence is in the broad sense of the wrong.
[Quote]This is simply mistaken; the only logical consequence of "Some P's are Q's" is that some P's are Q's.[/quote]
And here you're defining the concept of logical consequence narrowly.
I am left wondering what that even means.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Logical entailment is a very precise ("narrow" if you like) concept.
I don't know...I hadn't formed the opinion that we disagree when it comes to logical entailment. :)
An argument is valid in the general sense of the word if it does not violate the rules of reasoning.
This is valid:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. All Ps are Qs
This is invalid:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. No P is Q
This is also invalid:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Half of Ps are Qs, half of Ps are not Qs
It's all relative to the rules of reasoning.
OK, I think I see where you are coming from now. It may be consistent with "some Ps are Qs" that all Ps are Qs, but not that no Ps are Qs. So, you are thinking of logical consequence, not in the sense of logical entailment, but of semantic consistency.
I don't see why
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Half of Ps are Qs, half of Ps are not Qs
is counted by you as invalid by this criterion of consistency, though, because it seems perfectly consistent with "some Ps are Qs" that half of Ps could be, and the other half not be, Qs.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Where I disagree with Banno is that it is appropriate to submit inductive reasoning to the criterion of logical validity; which belongs to only to deductive reasoning. I also may disagree with him in thinking that all inductive reasoning can be reframed in deductive form and that it then does become subject to what you would call the "narrow" notion of validity.
I am not sure we are on the same page. I don't think that the argument is valid because the two sentences are consistent. I don't even know what that means. I am saying that the argument is valid because it does not violate the rules of that particular type of reasoning. In induction, the rule is "if most Ps are Qs then you must conclude that all Ps are Qs." The rule is implicit in the narrow definition of induction making inductive reasoning necessarily valid (i.e. it cannot be invalid.) I covered this in one of my previous posts.
Here's a general form of probabilistic argument:
1. X out of Y Ps is Q
2. Therefore, this P is R
I intentionally define probabilistic reasoning to be of this general form in order to make it possible for it to be invalid.
Here's a valid probabilistic argument:
1. 3 out of 5 men are alcoholics
2. Therefore, this man is an alcoholic
Here's an invalid probabilistic argument:
1. 3 out of 5 men are alcoholics
2. Therefore, this man is not an alcoholic
Why is this argument invalid? Because it violates the rules of probabilistic reasoning. The main rule of probabilistic reasoning is that if most Ps are Qs then you must conclude that a particular P is also a Q. If you don't, the argument is invalid.
If you define validity the way he does, as truth-preservation, then yes, he's right, induction is invalid because its conclusion can be true and its premises, defined restrictively, false. There is no arguing with this. The question is: why is that relevant? The answer is probably that it isn't relevant. The "problem" with induction is that there is no problem with induction but with deduction. The problem is our understanding of logical necessity. It's a very deceptive concept. We say that a deductive argument is valid if it is impossible for the premises to be true and for the conclusion to be false. This suggests that there is such athing as absolute certainty. And this is caused by the fact that we are confusing two different types of premises: low-level premises (such as observations) and high-level premises (such as general statements.) Put simply, we are confusing observations with assumptions. That's a problem. Induction operates on low-level premises (observations) whereas deduction operates on both low-level premises (observations) and high-level premises (generalizations.) Observations cannot contradict other observations. What observations can do is they can contradict our generalizations or assumptions. This is because generalizations are derived from observations. So if the base of observations from which a generalization is derived changes, it's very possible for the generalization to change as well. Take a look at the following argument:
1. All men are white
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore, Socrates is white
Insofar the second premise is a raw observation it cannot change if the conclusion turns out to be false. However, the first premise can because it is a general statement. Such a general statement is derived inductively from previous observations. It's an open system. If it is possible for the set of observations on which it is based to change, for example by making a new observation, then it is possible for the statement to change as well. If the conclusion turns out to be false then we'll have a new observation in our set of observations and this observation, telling us that there exists a man who is not white, would require that we change our conclusion. On the other hand, exceptions do not disprove the rule, they merely make it weaker. So if a thousand men are white and a single man is black then we can preserve our general statement. But if we reach a point where a thousand men are white and a ten thousand of men are black, then we'd have to change it. This is, of course, a simplification of what's going on in reality. Our conclusions need not be this simplistic in practice. We can let exceptions influence our actions. But describing in words how this process works is a chore.
Both deductive and inductive arguments are adaptive it's just that deduction adapts through contradiction whereas induction adapts through observation. The second might also be true of deduction but it's usually not the case because most people see deduction as distinctively negative (or eliminative) process. In fact, they think of it so negatively that they think that every contradiction requires a change in one of the premises. Which is sort of true but is also sort of insane. As Einstein said and Popper thought, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; however a single experiment can prove me wrong." The question is, of course, how precise you want to be. Most people are fine with ignoring exceptions. Within that sort of mindset, falsification/negation is not so different from verification/affirmation. Many deductionists also think that deduction can only tell you what's wrong and never what's right. Think of Socrates, think of his dialectic, think of his famous statement "the only thing I know is that I know nothing."
Ah! Magnus might think that because both can be true, it is valid.
but unfortunately these can also both be true:
1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Not all Ps are Qs
Anyway, he's a newbie, and will probably realise his error eventually.
I understand what you are saying. I am granting, for the sake of an argument, one half of your "invariances of nature," so to speak: those that lie in the past. This is not so unreasonable: all the evidence that we have of such invariances is in the past.
Will these invariances persist into the future? You gave a kind of transcendental argument (correct me if I am wrong): our shared inductive intuitions provide us with a reason to believe the affirmative. But, as I have argued, the fact that we have those intuitions is not independent from the (already assumed) fact that nature exhibited invariances in the past. So what I am saying is that shared intuitions do not provide you with a reason to believe that invariances will persist into the future, over and above the assumption of invariance in the past.
Quoting apokrisis
I am struggling to understand what you mean when you say "constraint". The way I understand it, and the only way I can sensibly interpret it, is that the word "constraint" means nothing other than pattern, regularity, law, order, etc. However, as it appears, that's not what you mean by the word. Instead, you mean something . . . else. What this else is I don't know. I think it has something to do with "downward causation". Which is another obscure term that is often thrown around. Perhaps I should start a new thread dedicated to this concept? Just to see if someone else can elucidate it for me. Or maybe someone here can help me with it?
Constraint is, as I understand it, simply a limit to what is possible. The opposite of it is freedom. It is that which allows us to discriminate between those possibilities that are more likely and those that are less likely. It's a very simple concept. But your exposition is generally quite obscure and complicated (as is that of Charles Sanders Peirce.) This suggests to me that we might not be on the same page.
You say that "history builds constraints on free possibility". The only sensible manner in which I can interpret this statement is in the sense that the world we live in is relatively constant. The universe is flux, i.e. it is constantly changing, but it is doing so at a rate that is sufficiently low to make induction successful in most cases. The world we live in, in other words, is stable enough to make induction good at making predictions. This makes perfect sense. But the fact that you do not express yourself in such simple terms suggests to me that your point is a different one. In fact, it suggests to me that you find this type of process philosophy, the one championed by Heraclitus and Nietzsche, deficient in certain regards.
Yep. Simple really.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Yep. You got it again.
"Truth-preservation" is really just consistency, which means not having premises which contradict one another or the conclusion. The validity of deductive arguments is independent of the truth of premises, maybe that's where you're becoming confused; I don't know.
Yes, but even counting written records of the human past as knowledge relies on the assumption that those written records have not themselves changed; that they are the same as when they were written. When it comes to the pre-historic past all bets are off. If the laws of nature could change in the future then why could they not have changed innumerable times in the past? How could we know? All of what we count as knowledge is based on the assumption that they have not changed, just as all our predictions of the future assume that they will not change. Even out trust in our own memories assumes that they have not changed. Once you open the Panodra's Box of radically questioning belief in natural stability and invariance the logical conclusion is chaos; the total undermining of all our supposed knowledge. Hume just didn't go far enough; he didn't see where his questioning would logically lead.
Hume was an empiricist, not a skeptic. He believed that perceptions were the ultimate source of truth. He also apparently believed that at least some understanding of the world could be firmly grounded in perceptions and thus be validated. Of course, a thoroughgoing skeptic could destroy this worldview without breaking a sweat.
So what can we do? Well, if you seek the ultimate grounding of your beliefs in rules - be they the rules of deduction or some other epistemic rules, such as the wisdom of the crowds - then you are setting yourself up for disappointment. I think that induction is normative, not unlike ethics, which similarly resists grounding in something external to itself. You believe in it not for any reason, but because you can't help it.
Maybe I'm not the one who's getting confused ;) I understand very well what truth-preservation is. My point is that it's a concept that is 1) narrow, 2) complicated and 3) deceptive. Don't tell me it's not complicated. It is. There is a much simpler and a much better way to define logical validity. Validity in general, outside of logic, means "the state of being legally acceptable". We can define logical validity in the same exact way, as the state of being legally acceptable. This means that a logical argument is one that abides by the rules of reasoning (whatever they are.) This is broad enough to cover all the different types of validity (not only truth-preservation), it is not unnecessarily complicated and it is not deceptive. It fits every single need perfectly. If we need specific concepts, we can use those too, but we don't have to rely on them all the time. They are, in many situations, inappropriate. Again, that's how I define the concept of validity and that's how I think validity should be defined. It's not how most people think. You don't have to accept it if you don't want to though you can argue against it.
I would have to first understand what you mean (and you haven't explained it in any way that makes it all clear to me) before I could agree or argue against it. So, best leave it, I guess. :s
You don't understand what it means for a logical argument to abide by the rules of reasoning?
I would not put it that way; I would say that we follow inductive reasoning for the practical reason that there is no alternative, and I would also say that it is reasonable to have faith in it, because, leaving aside (what I would consider unreasonable) radical skepticism, all our experience and understanding confirms that nature is indeed replete with invariance. There seems, on the contrary to be no good reason, beyond a certain kind of carping logic, to question that.
No I can't comprehend your eccentric account of the rules of reason.
I don't think that's eccentric. I think that what they teach you in school is eccentric. The rules of reasoning, or inference, is a very intuitive idea.
You know what a mathematical function is, right? It's a relation between two sets where every element from the first set is associated with exactly one element from the second set. Now, I think that this is too strict. Instead of thinking in terms of mathematical functions, I tend to think in terms of partial functions, since these are more relaxed; or better yet, in terms of relations. But even these are kind of strict . . . The basic idea is that you have two sets which may or may not be related to each other. It's sort of like a system except we're not talking about variables, parameters, etc. Well, we can, if you want; we can say we have two variables or two parameters but no more and no less than that. That's what every logical argument fundamentally is. Can we agree on that? We have a set of premises on one side and a set of conclusions on the other side. And we also have connections, or associations, between the two sets (which may also be absent; again, we love general concepts because they give us more freedom.) We need some basic rules to limit what kind of premises and what kind of conclusions are permitted. Once these are set, we need to determine what kind of associations are permitted and/or expected. This is where "the rules of reasoning" kick in. This is what determines whether any given argument is valid or not. No notion of consistency whatsoever. Just associations and rules that determine what kind of associations are legal and what kinds are not. You can't just associate any kind of premise with any kind of conclusion, right? Reasoning is a process that works according to a set of rules. So if you note that "All men are mortal" and that "John is mortal" you cannot conclude that "John is a man". You can't associate these two premises with that conclusion. It's against the rules.
Magnus clearly has a simplistic and ill informed understanding of logic, and you have pointed out how his examples of induction are invalid. A valid argument is one in which if the presumptions are true, then the conclusion must also be true.
And it is also I hope clear that on this definition of validity, induction is famously not valid. (x)f(x) does not follow from any number of instances f(a), f(b), f(c)...
Do you agree with this so far?
Yes, I do agree that inductive arguments cannot satisfy the criterion of validity. I have also said that any inductive argument can be re-framed as a deductive argument to which that criterion can then be applied, but I acknowledge that this requires the addition of an extra premise or premises. And I would say that these additional premises would generally consist in the assumption that nature is invariant.
Could we also proceed not by introducing invariance, but instead by introducing a measure of probability?
Yes, I think modern physics makes it seem plausible that invariance is not deterministic, but instead probabilistic; yet it seems that invariance on macro scales does look, for all intents and purposes, deterministic.
So invariance is a conclusion reached after observing the evidence?
It seems that cyclical repetitions of patterns in nature are observed everywhere. The inference that there is either rigidly or probabilistically determined invariance of the microphysical constituents of physical nature seems natural once the idea of supernatural determinants have been rejected.
I agree, but I don't think of explanatory inferences as conclusions, but rather as conjectures.
You don't need invariance. You just need a limit on variance. And probability theory models limits on variance.
Quoting Banno
A better "hinge proposition" - as it is gives its own founding reasons - is the view that invariance is the emergent limit to variation.
And from that metaphysics, the reasonableness of inductive inference follows quite naturally.
Induction only needs extra metaphysical bolstering if invariance is taken as the metaphysically fundamental condition. But if your complaint against the invariance of induction is that nothing prevents nature varying, then a view of induction based on the fact that variation itself can suppress variance means induction has no case to answer on that score.
Deduction, on the other hand, has a metaphysical problem once you grant that nature is fundamentally variable.
If by "no alternative" you mean a sort of psychological compulsion then that is just what I was saying.
Quoting Janus
Aaand... we are back to circular reasoning. There is no good reason, other than an epistemology that is already shot through with induction, to conclude that "nature is replete with invariance." You could take that not as a conclusion but as an assumption and try to ground your epistemology in that assumption*, but that seems like a strange move. An epistemology is something you already have and would find very difficult to let go. Why chuck it out in favor of a less intuitive, less psychologically secure assumption? Pragmatically, this would seem like the less favorable option.
*Or you could do something even more convoluted and put your faith into some religious or metaphysical narrative (a la @apokrisis) from which the regularity of nature would then fall out.
That is, we see f(a), f(b), f(c)..., propose the conjecture that (x)f(x), and actively seek to find an example of E(x)~f(x)?
So you are saying that the problem of induction doesn’t hinge on the metaphysical assumption that causality may not be invariant? Curious. What other motivation does it have?
And so I simply say go with that same assumption. Permit nature to vary. And then understand it’s apparent invariance in terms of the self organisation of limits.
After all, that is the world as science has found it to be, if you’ve been keeping up.
Alright. That might be the case. But I think that you're saying a bit more than that. I am not sure. Your insistence that you're not interested in narrow subjects such as logic, epistemology, conceptual analysis, etc suggests to me that your interest lies in devising a theory of everything i.e. a theory that explains how everything in the universe works. And I belive that's what you mean when you talk about metaphysics. Metaphysics = a theory of how everything works. You also talk about how your metaphysics is not reductionistic but instead holistic. How do we interpret this? I interpret it to mean that you are in fact a monist. A dialectical monist. Yin-yang philosophy. You want to unite the opposites. Uncontrolled interaction is not enough. There must be a central force, some kind of God, controlling the antagonism. Hence your focus on trichotomies, triadic conceptual structures. Very reminiscent of Aristotle's theory of golden mean. You have a center and two extremes. Left, middle and right. So in the case of order~chaos dichotomy, you want to subsume the two to a third category which is basically that of order (which explains why you make a distinction between constraints and patterns or regularities which you say are merely observable.) So you're acknowledging the dualism and then reducing it to monism under the guise of trialism. There is chaos but this chaos is subsumed to order. I think that Perice said something along the lines that there is no absolute certainty but that there is absolute truth. That would make him a very clever absolutist in my book. But is he? I am not sure. Further investigation required.
Peirce said: 1) there was Chance Tychism and from this came 2) Mind and from this came 3) Matter, matter being effete Mind.
Now compare this to Daoism:
First came 1) The Dao (Mind) then came 2) Opposites as waves (Yin/Yang) as a manifestation of the Dao then came 3) Creative energy (Qi) as a inner manifestation of the waves.
What so both have common? The Mind. And was does the Mind do? It explores and learns. Induction, as some may call it is fundamental to experienced life. It is not a question of logical validity.It is what life does.
No, I am pretty sure that's not what I was saying. I am not even sure what that means.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, circular reasoning again. Induction -> Science -> Fanciful metaphysics -> Induction.
What's wrong with a circular argument if it takes the form of the scientific method?
The circle is that of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. So "induction" gets split into the assuming of some hypothesis and then the assessing of the evidence in favour of that hypothesis (or the lack of good reason to doubt it).
The metaphysics is then informed by that. In Peirce's case, it led him to challenge the prevailing ontic determinism of his day. He argued that the logic of how we reason is in fact the logic of how nature itself must develop its regular habits. So that revised metaphysics - one that sees probability and chance as fundamental in nature - becomes then the new hypothesis.
And what do you know? Shortly after, quantum mechanics was born.
No, I just mean that there is no viable alternative method.
Quoting SophistiCat
Not really. We have to make assumptions to get started. As I have shown if you make the assumptions explicit inductive reasoning can be framed in deductive forms. Science bases itself on the assumption that there are "laws of nature" that determine the invariances that are observed everywhere. At the most fundamental level we have the Strong Nuclear Force, the Weak Nuclear Force, the Electromagnetic Force and the Gravitational Force. Then there are the laws of thermodynamics.
Science theory at every level is based on the presumption that these laws hold. Of course there is no merely logical reason why they should hold. But these are the premises of the whole 'argument' of science, and just like the premises of any argument; their soundness cannot be demonstrated by the argument itself, but must be taken on faith. We take these premises on faith simply because there are no viable alternatives; we cannot even begin to imagine what an alternative could look like.
Its utter pointlessness? I mean, if you've already helped yourself to induction, what's the point of circling back to "justify" it via one of its purported consequences?
No controlling hand is needed. The dichotomy or symmetry breaking just goes freely to to its equilibrium balance. It finds its own eventual rest state where it is evenly broken across all scales of being. Hence the final state of a natural system that is just forever freely growing in evenly-paced fashion is going to be fractal. It will have the structure of a scalefree hierarchy.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Yep. The triadic structure is the balanced hierarchical relation that emerges from the symmetry breaking.
A hierarchy represents a state of maximum local~global asymmetry. You have opposing limits of scale appearing as a system develops its own history. It becomes a world organised into the general and the particular, the global constraints or laws and the local degrees of freedom.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
No. The dichotomous extremes are the local and the global. The middle is then the spectrum of scales that span the space (and time) inbetween.
So for instance, the Universe is bounded at one end by the Planck scale, at the other by the cosmic event horizon. Then we humans sit about exactly middle.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Well now this is talking about how the whole thing develops.
So in the beginning - as Peirce describes - it starts with the symmetry of a Firstness or Vagueness. There is just the purest kind of chaos. Unbounded fluctuation.
Then you get secondness as fluctuations start to collide or react with each other in deterministic fashion. You get local events happening.
Then, after some time, you get enough local events happening to start to sort things out and create some kind of common history. You get regular patterns or habits emerging. The system develops a memory. A bunch of random local events start to add up in ways that build a general regulating pattern.
This situation is modelled by scalefree hierarchies. Take a case like the network of world airports. An airport could be freely built anywhere. But as the network starts to grow, it becomes convenient to begin to hub them. You will get certain airports becoming very large as the critical node in larger network. The airport system will develop a clear stratification - a hierarchy of airport sizes that is optimal in terms of achieving a total flow of air-traffic through the system.
So in the beginning, there are just a random scatter of airports all around the same size. By the end, there is a stratified and organised system that emerges in a random fashion to satisfy the general constraint of needing to maximise the flow.
No controlling hand is needed. Just a general constraint of having to optimise the dynamics.
Quoting Magnus Anderson
Nothing is being hidden. But one of the difficult mental changes in gear needed to understand Peirce is that Thirdness is the third stage that incorporates the other two stages. So Thirdness is not monistic but irreducibly triadic. As it says on the box. It is only "monistic" in the sense of being holistic - speaking about the oneness of an irreducibly complex whole.
Monism is usually a substantialist's ontology. It is all about a metaphysics of a single stuff - whether that be materialist stuff or spiritual stuff. So quite different from a Peircean metaphysics where all stuff is the emergent product of an irreducibly triadic process.
Likewise, vagueness of Firstness may sound like a monistic stuff, but it ain't. It sounds like some kind of material being, and yet it can't be that. It is just an unformed potential. Substantial being is what it starts to become - once we get to the dyadicity of Secondness, or brute reaction.
You are not making sense. How does inquiry even get started unless you are willing to hazard the concrete guess that you are then committed to checking via measurement against the reality you are modelling?
What is it that you are attacking here? I can hear your angry noises, but the target of your unhappiness is very unclear.
Even Hume said we reason inductively because that is what is natural to our psychology. So we only "help ourselves to induction" in the sense that we find ourselves already the products of an evolutionary process. We were born to be pragmatically successful at predicting our worlds.
In Hume's day, there wasn't a lot of science to back up that evolutionary view. But now our best models of neurocognition are explicitly Bayesian. We took the hypothesis and ran with it. The results confirmed the guess.
I would say not quite. The Newtonian breakthrough involved a metaphysical presumption about invariant laws. And now the modern presumption is that all such invariances must be emergent regularities. All the forces of nature are patterns that emerge in self-organising fashion from collective action.
So Newton talked of transcendent laws. Modern physics is aiming at a story of immanently self-organising constraints.
And the two different ontologies map fairly obviously to a generally deductive or computational and deterministic metaphysics, and generally inductive or probabilistic and developmental metaphysics.
So we do have two alternative metaphysics in play. And each would generate its own particular kinds of hypotheses when it comes down to scientific theory.
You cannot replace induction with deduction salva veritate, since induction is plausible reasoning and deduction is certain reasoning. If you assume "invariances of nature" of a certain sort, then you can make a case for the viability of inductive inference in general, but you cannot thereby turn any specific inductive inference into a deduction.
As for starting assumptions, I think that induction itself makes for the most natural starting assumption (since we are already strongly predisposed to it) - more so than the rather complicated cocktail of assumptions that you are proposing.
Quoting Janus
The basic inductive intuition is more local, more restricted than that. Yes, induction implies that we can perceive persistent patterns in nature, but that's it. And that's all the "assumption" that science requires to get going. It does not require us to assume from the start that all of nature is completely subject to laws, much less that these laws form a reductive hierarchy with a fundamental theory of everything at the bottom. Such ideas are viable, but they are not basic, nor are they necessary. Science happily proceeds with local laws and "special" theories.
Yes, I acknowledge the differences between a deterministic and a probabilistic explanation for the laws of nature; my point was only that we have no alternative to the laws themselves to focus our investigations; whether we think of them as ultimately transcendent or as immanently emergent.
Firstly that is exactly what I was proposing to do "make a case for the viability of inductive inference in general". Determinism can be framed deductively as:
1.There are immutable laws which determine every event down to the minutest detail
2. Therefore every event must occur exactly as it does occur and the immutable laws are its sufficient reason
You can also put specific inductive inferences into deductive forms by adding extra premises which insure that you must end up with the result that is observed. It doesn't matter how ad hoc these extra premises might be, you can still produce a deductively valid argument. The argument may be wildly wrong, completely unsound; but from the point of view of validity that doesn't matter. All you need is a little imagination; and this is supplied by abductive reasoning.
Quoting SophistiCat
Science could do that but it would not be the comprehensive science we have today; which does base itself on the foundation of the four forces and the three laws of thermodynamics. The mistake in your interpretation of what I have been arguing seems to be that you think I am claiming that science must presume these forces and laws to be absolute; I don't say it has to do that; but I do say it needs to take them provisionally; and that is just what the inductive method today consists in. These forces and laws were not the premises in the past, to be sure, but other things were premised in the past that have come to be thought as dis-confirmed, and to have been superceded by current premises. Very few people would argue that no progress has been made in science, surely? And it is all based on inductive and abductive reasoning.
The conclusion that inductive reasoning is a product of our evolutionary development comes at the far end of a long process of inductive inference. So that cannot be the sense in which we help ourselves to induction: we did that long before we had any inkling of such far-reaching conclusions.
Agreed. We have to identify the invariances as the essential features of the landscape. They start as the surprises in need of an explanation.
Which again gets back to the fact that brain's operate inductively. For nature's regularity to be such a surprising fact - something we could even notice - we would have had to have been expecting something rather different.
You will have to explain why this "helping ourselves" is some kind of problem. It might be if you believed that deduction is more fundamental than induction or something. But how can it be if it is the other way around?
When I make a decision, or act in any way it is determined by who and what I am; and through my needs, motivation and volition.
I would rather I determined my own fate than be free of myself, as that makes no sense whatever.
Rubbish.
This is just poor logic. A broken deduction, pretending to be something. Nothing to do with induction at all.
An inductive argument is more like X happens after Y all the time. So maybe X is caused by Y.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is only fallacious if it is wrong.
That could be a way; but I was thinking of conjecture just as the 'creative imagination' part of science which then gets worked into hypotheses that make predictions as to what we would be likely to observe if our conjectures were correct; predictions which can then be tested by further experiment and observation to see whether they actually obtain. I think Pooper was right that no amount of such verification ever absolutely proves a theory. On the other hand could we say that any number of counter examples could ever absolutely refute a theory? This doesn't seem to make sense, because surely to falsify one judgement is to verify another; that the first judgement is wrong, no?
That's an intriguing, yet puzzling, statement: could you flesh it out a bit?
No one "expects."
We get born and learn.
And shit, if that rock was just like the last one. I drop it and it falls!!!
I hit the cat and it runs away! I fall over and it hurts.
The sun keeps on appearing every morning.
That's what a deterministic universe looks like.
Maybe tomorrow the sun will be shaped like a turnip?
This is a very good point. Deduction being a derivative puristic formalization of inductive reasoning can hardly arrogate to itself such a priority. Without its ancestor it would never have existed in the first place. And without its living relatives, it could tell us nothing whatsoever about the world.
LOL, I'm not really sure what you're wanting to say here. That's twice in a row now, so maybe the problem lies with me. Here's an abductive/ inductive inference: not enough sleep maybe? :-O
At the risk of not causing more confusion....
By "expect" I was responding to the statement "For nature's regularity to be such a surprising fact - something we could even notice - we would have had to have been expecting something rather different.", which you asked apokrisis about.
In pre-scientific thinking, the world as a whole was understood animistically. It also operated like a mind. So the idea that physical events had no essential choice was a surprise given that context of expectations.
We can't induce generalities from particulars unless we already have some general reason to notice those particulars in the first place. Nature has to falsify some already extant mental prediction - one held implicitly at least. The facts have to be drawn to our attention by failing to fit.
That is why I keep stressing the other neglected side of the story - the principle of indifference that then becomes our tolerance for exceptions to the rule. No constraint on the accidental can ever be total (in the way that the deductionists/absolutists/mechanists dream it). So any "law of nature" has to be fundamentally a probability statement. And it becomes an informal judgement - part of the act of measurement - where to set a reasonable threshold on that.
Banno always likes to argue from a trancendental absolutist perspective - that there is a fact of the matter.
But Peirce kicked that logicist's nonsense for touch. Reality itself is probabilistic. Our modelling of that reality is self-interested. Those are the fundamental constraints in play when it comes any putative "theories of truth". We can draw lines across reality - such as where we feel that differences cease to make a real difference. But the lines are essentially informal and pragmatic. They are justified subjectively in the end.
But if we can also then define what would be maximally subjective, we do have a shot at defining what the maximally objective would be in contrast. Which is of course the stall that science sets up.
I'm not sure where you are going with this Banno; could you elaborate?
All good points!
You're being pedantic. It's what people to do in order to feel superior (when they are actually not.) See Banno for example.
Here's an amendment to my argument:
1. Some Ps are Qs (e.g. all of the observed ones)
2. Therefore, all Ps are Qs (in my opinion, so yeah, maybe I'm wrong, it's not certain)
Basically, what we have here is people who do not think ob their own but parrot. So when someone comes along and does not repeat the popular narrative word-by-word he's subjected to pathetic pedantry.
I am not sure why you bring up determinism at this point. Are you saying that inductive/deductive split is equivalent to indeterminism/determinism? The laws of nature could be deterministic, but we don't know that (we don't even know that there are laws of nature). And even if we did somehow know that with certainty, that knowledge alone wouldn't have removed the need for inductive inference, since we still wouldn't have had sufficient information to deduce everything we wish to know.
Quoting Janus
That wouldn't be the same inference - it would be a different inference with the same conclusion. But I in any case, I am not seeing the significance of this observation.
I am not saying that helping ourselves to induction is a problem - quite the opposite. Or if it is a problem, any "cure" that has been proposed so far - any putative justification for induction - is worse than the "disease."
I don't think that deduction is less fundamental than induction; deductive reasoning seems to be at least as fundamental as inductive. But that doesn't mean that one can subsume the other.
Quoting charleton
GTFO
No it would be the same inference with the premises made explicit. And the point is simply that inductive arguments can be rendered in deductive form in order to be presented as valid arguments.
If you don't see the significance of that to refute the claim that inductive arguments are not valid then I guess that would be to your detriment, not mine.
You problem is that you just don't know what you are talking about.
If you don't find out, people are just going to laugh at you.
lol
This is more of a tautology.
Tsk. You're being a fool.
Deduction is about definitions. About figuring out a fact from a generalised law.
Induction is empirical. It seeks to offer provisional laws FROM observations.
All Ps are Qs, and such arguments have no bearing on induction.
If you can't work that our you need to run along.
I was responding to Banno.
Quoting Banno
Basically, the encyclopedia is saying that inductive arguments have the following form:
1. All observed As are Bs
2. Therefore, all As are Bs
You must be smarter than this encyclopedia because it says nothing about the conclusion being "merely" probable. Right?
I generalized this to:
1. Some As are Bs
2. Therefore, all As are Bs
The premise is no longer restricted to observations.
Now I have to ask: what exactly is your point?
If a probabilistic determinism allows space for free will then that enough of a compromise for me.
That's OK, but it is no longer determinism. The only aspect of determinism that is being maintained is the word. Why the infatuation with the word? I think it lies in a religious-like faith in the Laws of Nature. But then we need to discuss the overall human condition and the desire for outside forces to rule one's life.
If who I am at a given moment is completely determinate then is any choice possible?
Could you give a bit more info, in what respect do you regard them to be wrong?
Yes and the point is that insofar as the conclusions are contained in the premises of all valid deductive arguments they are all, in a certain sense, tautologies.
Basically Hume's criticism of inductive arguments amounts to saying they are not rationally justified because they are not tautologous in this sense.
However by making explicit the implicit premises in inductive arguments I.e. regularity, invariance, you can render them as tautologies.
Example:
1. All observed swans have been white
2. There is a natural law that ensures that swans must be white
C. Therefore all swans are white
A more truly tautologous form which basically says the same thing would be:
It does depend on the definition of 'tautology' though. Are tautologies simply true by definition?
But this puts it all back to deduction, since you are not drawing out a generality from the particularities. You are using a generalism -point 1 (above) is redundant, C the conclusion is a tautology of 2.
FYI there are black swans BTW.
Yes, all choices are determined by antecedent conditions. What makes them different from the automatic consequences of inanimate cause and effect is that outwardly the choice emerged from an agent whose condition is unknowable to an observer. Each of us (agents) are a universe unto themselves, a black box of complexity.
This just reduces free choice to a roll of the dice.
I prefer to determine my choices. They have more meaning that way.
Do you say that the condition is unknowable to the agent themselves?
Then this hasn't allowed space for free will and is not the compromise I was speaking about.
Quoting charleton
What role do you play in determining them?
And in doing so two things happen. The first is that it is no longer an inductive argument, but an deductive one. The second is that the premise used is itself dubious.
Quoting Janus
The second premise is not just dubious, but wrong, as is the conclusion. And indeed, at least in my case, so is the first premise.
Really? :-}
The first premise is deductively redundant, but there would not be any motivation to make the assumption that forms the second premise if no white swans had ever been observed.
It is true that the second premise does not deductively follow from the first, but the first does deductively follow from the second. It is not essential to the validity of a deductive argument that premises follow from one another; the important criterion is that they cannot be inconsistent with one another, and that the conclusion cannot be false if the deductively salient premises are true.
It could be better put into this simpler form:
If it is a consequence of natural law that all swans must be white, then all observed swans will be white.
What a dreadful creature is Banno! Speaking things that cannot be spoken, such as "it is true that there are black swans"! He says that some statements can be true!
See him use the trancendental absolutist perspective! "It is true that this sentence is in English"! "It is true that I have two hands"!
Quoting apokrisis
Do you gather together for Sunday worship?
Exactly, that is just the point I have been trying to drive home! Your second point is irrelevant, though, because the dubiousness of premises is irrelevant to the validity of deductive arguments.
Quoting Banno
Yes, I know; I am Australian, after all. I go drawing in Centennial Park most Saturdays and every swan I see is black (or grey in the case of the young ones).
But, again, I am only addressing the issue of validity.
It is either invalid or it reduces to deduction.
Is that right?
On the other hand why not simply: "there are black swans" and "this sentence is in English"?
Yes, indeed. "there are black swans" and "It is true that there are black swans" are truth functionally equivalent. You and I can say either. Apo is restricted to one but not the other by his metaphysics.
I would rather say that there is a rational discourse that might reasonably be called induction, a rational discourse that is valid because it can always be framed in deductive form.
Deduction by itself tells us nothing about the world. Some valid deductive arguments have premises that are considered to be self-evident (like mathematics), some have premises that are motivated by inferences to what might be thought to be best explanations (like abductive conjectures and inductive inferences), and others have premises and conclusions which are simply nonsensical. (All glorps are purple. All twaddlewhackers are glorps. Therefore all twaddlewhackers are purple). Deduction is merely a form; a deductive argument is only as good, when it comes to soundness, as its premises.
I think apo could say that his metaphysics is true is he were to assert that his metaphysics fairly represents what the community of enquirers will ultimately come to believe at the culmination of human metaphysical speculation.
So, "there are black swans" is true iff "it is true that there are black swans" is true?
Think about that for a bit. Mathematics tells us nothing about the world?
Which is to say he could claim it was true if he changed the meaning of "true".
OK, bottom line is I could not put my faith in any of the grand philosophical schemes of the nineteenth century. The analytic turn - which is now ubiquitous - offers instead a set of rational tools with which to take philosophical issues apart, in marked contrast to the fake grandeur of sandcastle pragmatism or transcendental realism.
I've never been decided about that question; it can depend on what you mean by "tell something about the world". It does seem as though mathematics must tell us something about the world or about ourselves. But it seems to be more the fact that we can do mathematics that seems to tells us something, rather than the math itself. Would you say mathematics per se tell us anything empirical about the world?
What about phenomenology or process philosophy? Have they nothing at all to offer to increase our overall understanding of human life and the world in your view? I tend to think that all possible avenues of intellectual enquiry and speculation should be explored; if possible without prejudice.
Deductive Logic is a bit like grammar. It gives a structure to what can be said.
Mathematics does much the same. So the answer to Zeno’s paradoxes are provided by the grammar of integral calculus, which sets out how we can talk about motion.
Least, that makes sense to me.
But your spoken truths always rely on unspoken ambiguities.
Are we talking about adult black swans or their fluffy white goslings? Are we talking about "swans" as being generically Cygnus atratus, or Cygnus olor and Cygnus cygnus? Are we talking about black swans that include albino Cygnus atratus?
So we can resolve some of these ambiguities with more careful speech. We can say that is a member of the genus Cygnus. It is black.
Yet ambiguity is in principle irreducible in speech acts. We can only hope to constrain it. Which is where pragmatism comes in as it then only make sense to put so much effort into constraining the semantics of our utterances. The truths we tell turn out to have as least as much to do with our intentions as they do with "the facts of the world".
As a biologist, you could have a hearty debate about the genus Cygnus. Are geese really so different? Are they not just chubbier members of the tribe, Cygnini? Or perhaps we need to be more restrictive about the true swans. There are grounds to rule out the coscoroba swan as a proper member of the subfamily, Cygninae.
So as usual, you make your simplistic statements about objective truths and pretend to be amazed when sensible folk roll their eyes. Of course we can say that's just Banno, taking his furtive pleasure in waggling his naive realism in public again, hoping to scandalise.
Pragmatism is for serious grown-ups. But you play in the corner with your little thing if you want to.
The interesting point for me here is whether grammar, or calculus, are themselves deductively or intuitively derived. I think they as much the result of imaginative insight (abduction) than of sheer deduction. Even in analytical philosophy of language it ultimately comes down to what is intuitively obvious to us, no?
So, can we say it is deductively certain that grammar gives a structure to what can be said? Could we not equally say that analysis of the structure of what can be said gives us grammar?
And what can be said. We can talk of infinitesimal motion.
But yes, imagination and creativity are paramount. Look at Kripke’s modal Logic.
Odd, also, that from what I understand Apo rejects the body of modern logic. But perhaps I misunderstand him, since that seems so absurd.
You mean like ... scientific inquiry. :D
Quoting Banno
You mean like whatever came after logical atomism sunk without trace as AP's grand philosophical scheme? >:O
And yet the argument is valid. Curious.
Perhaps semantics is the basis of truth-telling more than syntax?
So you have changed your position on hinge propositions all of a sudden. Curious.
That is why Peirce was concerned with the proper grammar of reasoning. You need to wrap the deductive bit in the preface of an abduction and the conclusion of inductive confirmation.
Banno adopts the transcendental view of the naive realist. Or at least his speech acts are identical to a naive realist. So same thing.
Deduction is syntactically close and so of course can't introduce semantic novelty. It can only rearrange the facts it is given. So deduction can't know about the truth of the world - even the kind of pragmatic truth that is the truth of a semiotic relation between a self and its world.
Therefore "truth-telling" needs some way of introducing the underlying semantics in a sensible fashion. The inductive side of the equation needs to be formalised as possible - even if in the end it is going to be still irreducibly an art.
And that is Peirce's innovation - later sort of recapitulated by Popper. He didn't bother trying to make induction work as inverse deduction (even if it sort of does work that way). He broke induction into the complementary steps of hypothesis formation and hypothesis confirmation. And deduction stood inbetween as a fully formal connection. Deduction turns general concepts into particular predictions.
So as much as possible, human thinking was cast as a formal and grammatical habit.
I realise you understand this. I just wanted to sum up the critical gist of the thread again. :)
To deal with this one last misrepresentation, the logic you are talking about is designed for dealing with the particular or individuated. So of course it is part of the body of logic. It just ain't the whole - or holistic - story.
The whole story is triadic. It includes the logic of generality and the logic of vagueness.
hm
Trichotomies = hierarchical causal structure. Simple, innit?
Yeah. It would be useful if you could decide how you approach hinge propositions given your comments about me. But I fully expect you to take rapid evasive action as usual.
Quick, start waggling your naive realism again. That always attracts an inquisitive crowd.
Do you dispute the correctness of what I say here? If so, make a case.
Quoting apokrisis
So even if one entertains your view of ambiguity, pragmatism is one possibility among many.
And even then, that whole reply does not address the criticisms I set out.
There is here a failure on your part to commit. Do you have a partner? Is your affection for them only probable? Is your respect for rationality based on certainty or just what suits your purpose? Do you have hands or are you only partially confident In hand utility?
It's hard to be sure how to interpret this bizzarely incoherent sentence. But how would it be a problem if there were some transcendental argument in play, and what are you saying that argument is?
My post was about the irreducible ambiguity of speech acts and how that is indeed exactly what we would expect of a constraints-based view of logic. In the end, it is up to us - in informal fashion - to decide what counts as the "truth" in terms of some act of measurement or observation.
You seem to be talking about something else now. But then you don't even seem to be talking English anymore. And is that a half-empty bottle of red I spy on your kitchen counter?
Quoting Banno
So what is the alternative that you are championing here? And what flaw is there in Pragmatism. Be as precise as you like.
Quoting Banno
Again you are choosing to talk past the case I've already made. Not very charitable, hey?
I've said Pragmatism is making the choice to believe. Indeed, the choice to ignore exceptions to the rule is part of the constraints-based deal. Uncertainty is irreducible. But also, we can find reasons for thinking that after a certain point - one defined in terms of our interests or purposes - any further differences fail to make a real difference.
So goose, swan or duck? Sometimes it doesn't matter. And sometimes it might.
There are always going to be differences. Is the three-legged rabbit still a rabbit? If Bonzo the dog's arse is a hair off the mat, is Bonzo still sat on the mat? But to the degree our semantics are aligned - and the semantics include our intentions - then we can all draw a line across reality with enough agreement to make translation second-nature rather than an arduous process of exegesis.
You keep relying on this easy translatability to speak like a naive realist. Who can deny the Cygnus atratus is a black swan? Who can deny the dog is on the mat? Who can deny your first sentence was in English? But as I am saying, you are relying on a principle of indifference to dismiss any skepticism. You are making a choice in terms of some concept of a self with its intentions. And that is not a formal thing. But Pragmatism gets us as close to formalising this epistemic state of affairs as epistemology can get. Hence science is pragmatism in practice. The proof is in the application.
I note that you try to divert the conversation to the red herring that pragmatism = Jamesian utility. And this is after I've already cited Russell's rightful dismissal of James ... and quiet praise for Peirce.
Just another example of how dismally you argue your case. Every time you get caught out, just pretend it never happened.
We can never have full knowledge of all the causalities, but no I am not saying that. On the most basic level, we are not aware of all the chemical pathways that make us hungry for example. Low blood sugar ,balance of hormones etc... we just feel hunger and that informs our motivation to seek food.
I am what determines my actions. My life, my experience, my emotion, my volition, what my body tells me. Free will is simply not being constrained by external forces - it is not some magical ability to act against what makes me determined.
I am a determinist. I am determined.
But all this is deduction, not induction, as I was trying to point out.
FYI, but not particularly relevant....
But then we still get to choose to follow these instincts or not. Obviously we are still constrained by external forces. I don't get to chose to suddenly appear upside down six miles above the earths surface. But clearly my choices allow for the possibility of diverting determinism in more than one possible direction. Is this a roll of the dice, or do I have the power to load the dice in my favour?
Describe how you make that choice, please!
Are you now telling me that you are not a Peircean because you prefer to be a Kantian? :D
True; a good philosopher is able to understand a novel philosophical approach at a gut level, and yet still step away from it so that they can criticise it.
For me the private language argument shows the limits of phenomenology, and process philosophy has not yet shown its potential. At the moment I have become more interested in exploring belief and its variations, following on from the thread Sam started.
This thread has served to reinforce my rejection of induction as a rational process, recognising the ad lib nature of scientific enquiry. Belief, conviction, certainty and so on are best understood as decisions rather than the forced result of some algorithmic scientific process.
Yes, I agree with this. The point of all rational inquiry is really critique it seems. I mean the rational part is to keep check on the intuitive part. Analysis should aim to find the inconsistencies and incoherence in philosophical proposals and approaches.
Quoting Banno
Good phenomenology is an inter-subjective project, though. It's true that we can never have certainty that our private experiences are more or less the same, but why should they not be if we share the same culture and biology; the same public expressions? This expectation seems reasonable; although to return to the subject of the discussion, it can never be deductively certain. So, again, it is an inductive expectation; where would we be without them? It seems that deduction alone cannot be any more than 'pouring from the empty into the void'.
Quoting Banno
Again, I agree. The notion that our beliefs are completely deterministic leads to the conclusion that they are not freely acquired and held. If that were true, there would be no point...
The inquiry into the nature of belief is interesting; but it seems that any such inquiry must be phenomenological, which means descriptive (I think the Wittgenstein of the PI is pretty close to being a phenomenologist), rather than scientific, in the sense of proposing hypotheses. That's why I think current attempts to explain human behavior, ethics, aesthetics and belief in general in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory are wrongheaded.
I can go along with this; but discussions of phenomenology very quickly turn into effing the ineffable. At that point the discussion becomes mystical.
I'm increasingly drawn to externalism with regard to knowledge, belief, and other aspects of mind. Remove private mental language and it becomes evident that they are somehow things in the world. That's badly expressed, but that is the area in which I am reading at present.
So if it ain't inductive and it ain't deductive, then how is the decision "rational"? Surely the whole bleeding point of epistemology - a theory of truth - is to have some actual theory about the best process for arriving at that destination?
What does a no-process system of belief look like, anyone?
But that's not for your benefit. You don't do philosophy, you just preach the Good Word of Peirce.
Those are just your misreprentations of what I have said. And I’ve corrected you on them often enough.
Truth is what we believe in the long run following a process of reasoned inquiry.
Acts of measurement are informal and so always reflect the embeddness, the intentionality, of the person(s) seeking the answers. Accuracy is a pragmatic thing, not an absolute one.
I don’t reject predicate logic or deductive syntax. I place them within a more holistic view of logic that is triadic.
My scientism is hardly concealed. Nor the fact that I am a holist or systems scientist rather than a reductionist or atomistic scientist.
So your complaints are just bullshit. You’ve heard me say these exact same things many times. It is not me who bottles it when the discussion gets detailed and your general lack of a choherent position is exposed.
If you want a debate, you’ve got one right here. But you don’t really want a debate where you have to give a position and then a proper defence. We’ve all seen that time and again.
You confuse truth and belief. Yep, I've pointed that out before. You do not have a theory of truth, you have a theory of belief.
Quoting apokrisis
So, then, what is the height of the Eiffel tower? Is it 324 metres? When I ask you questions like this you seem to need to add some sort of explanation when a simple yes or no would suffice. Why the added
complexity?
Quoting apokrisis
An oddly eccentric view of logic - since it has been shown here that induction and abduction are invalid.
Not a problem. That's what I say. Pragmatism is a theory of justified belief - as well as a theory of how the notion of objective truth is a naive realist pipedream.
Now maybe you want to define truth as tautological truth. But I just call that a theory of tautology. If you have a syntax closed in a way that prevents any possible semantic leakage, then sure, it is "truth preserving" in its grammar.
But only logic wonks would call syntactical water-tightness "truth". It's not what we really mean by truth, is it?
Quoting Banno
Well given that I like to be as careful as possible about epistemology, then of course I can't just accept the idiotic simplicities of a naive realist answer.
So if you don't like "complicated" answers, that's your tough shit. Don't pretend to be an epistemologist.
Quoting Banno
Wow really! >:O
I'm not too sure what objective truth is. Are there subjective truths, to oppose them? And if so, are they amenable to the same pragmatic analysis? Or are there subjective truths but no objective truths?
You again didn't directly address the question of the height of the Eiffel Tower. Is it 324 metres, give or take a bit? It's actually an important point, because it has odd implications. If you say that the tower is 324m heigh, then it seems you are committed to it being true that it is 324 m heigh. Whether you like it or not, that tautology is hard to shake.
After all, we also agree that we need to be as careful as possible with our epistemology.
I don't accept that there are two types of truth - subjective and objective. I think it best to take the notion of truth as unanalysable, as fundamental. Truth is introduced as soon as a language becomes able to talk about itself or another language. Of course an language that can talk about itself by that very fact includes a semantics. So it seems to me that your comments regarding syntax and semantics are a bit odd. I do not, for example, understand what you might mean by:
Quoting apokrisis
What is semantic leakage? Will it stain?
Let's go over validity and induction again, and let me know if we agree.
An argument will be valid just in the case that, if the assumptions are true, then the conclusion will also be true.
We can set out induction as follows. We have observations f(a), f(b), f(c)... for some limited and incomplete interpretation of a,b,c... and f.
An induction would have it that from f(a), f(b), f(c)... we can conclude (x)f(x). This is clearly invalid.
So you can either offer a different definition of induction, or you can re-define validity to include such an induction.
Which will you choose?
That could depend on how you are defining truth, Banno. So how are you defining truth?
Quoting Banno
If you think I am not offering a theory of truth, how could I possibly answer that? So evidently - despite what you just said - you agree that I'm offering a theory of truth.
Quoting Banno
Ohh. Suddenly it's "give or take a bit". Is that the bit that doesn't matter - a difference that doesn't make a difference?
So is this question now still the same as your earlier version? Or has the ground shifted?
While you are at it, how does your theory of truth deal with the issue. From what you said in this thread, your theory is....
Quoting Banno
So we have: "The Eiffel Tower is 324 metres high, give or take a bit" is true IFF The Eiffel Tower is 324 metres high, give or take a bit.
Fine. But how do we get from that truth condition to a belief that is in fact justified and therefore true? What is the reasonable thing to do to validate the proposition? How do we establish the truth or falsity of this statement in practice?
I shouldn't have to ask really. But you always go oddly silent when called on to explain the grounds why one would assent to such a statement as if there were an unassailable fact.
I'm sure that is because you would have to sound pretty Peircean in your answer. But surprise me.
Quoting Banno
Those would be the complementary limits on pragmatically justified belief. So all actual belief would lie within those opposing extremes.
Thus you could say all belief is just belief. And yet also there is the standard distinction between belief that is at one extreme, just an individual's idiosyncratic view - their personal truth - and at the other end, the kind of truth that aims to be as impersonal as possible.
What there isn't is your naive realist truth - a truth in which no person is involved as a believer with a purpose giving shape to that truth.
The naive realist is a representationalist. S/he looks at the world and sees facts. A Peircean realist looks at the world and see signs. The facts are already part of a semantic structure. That is how we can know anything. We are looking at meaning from the get go.
That explains why the naive realist feels both so convinced by the transparent simplicity with which they just look and "see the world", and why naive realism is so wrong as an epistemology.
Quoting Banno
So you are banging on about something you can't even bang on about in your own admission?
Unanalysable! Give me a break. You are just making excuses for why you haven't got a theory yourself. What a cop out.
Quoting Banno
Where have I claimed that abduction or inductive confirmation are "valid"? Why do you harp on about something which is not an issue anyone is disputing?
Hanover put it very neatly. But in typical fashion, you just blanked his inconvenient truth.
Deduction may be valid but it produces no new knowledge. It is syntactically closed and, by design, can't. And that is why the species of induction are so much more important in the end - if you actually want to create new knowledge. You have to be able to go beyond the known to improve on what you've got. Scientific reasoning then ensures that error-minimising feedback is built into that loop of thought.
Induction is why deduction even has a job.
I'm not really much familiar with externalism, beyond a passing acquaintance with Putnam's
'twin-Earth' argument which featured in an undergrad course at Sydney Uni I participated in about 10 years ago. I remember I didn't find it very convincing. Somebody posted a link to a series of interviews with Riccardo Manzotti recently. I read some of those, and I seem to remember you were commenting favorably on them. Is that the sort of thing you have in mind?
In the context of this thread, having such-and-such a belief becomes having such-and-such an approach to the world. In philosophical jargon, beliefs are doxastic shorthand to explain actions.
A work in progress, of course.
That's just what induction is though; the assumption that things will be as they have been observed to be, and the underlying assumption is that there is a lawlike regularity in nature that determines that such invariances will obtain. Laws could be deterministic or statistically probablistic; it doesn't matter, the point is that invariance is assured if there are such laws; and if we don't presume such laws, then we have no principle to guide our investigations.
How do I define truth. That you still ask that question is curious.
You, I and whoever else is reading this are most probably competent users of English. As such we show that we can use "...is true" correctly. Now providing a definition is providing synonyms, and hence leads to circularity - words defining more words.
You might recall Wittgenstein mentioning that the meaning of a term is its use?
Quoting apokrisis
It follows that pragmatism is not a theory of truth, although of course it re-defines the word "truth" to its own ends. Not being a theory of truth, it is also not a theory of justified true belief - not a theory of knowledge. Hence your Quoting apokrisis
Well, no, it isn't. Truth is quite distinct from belief. Pragmatism leaves truth unaddressed.
Quoting apokrisis
Being justified does not make a proposition true. This is a fine example of the sort of confusion that enters into the discussion when you change the meaning of the word "true". Justification leads to belief, not to truth.
Pragmatism, together with other substantive theories such as coherence and foundationalism, offer neat ways of justifying our beliefs. But they do not explain what truth is. That's right - I am saying that pragmatism is a good thing. But not as an explanation of truth.
Subject/object
Quoting Banno
Quoting apokrisis
There is also the possibility that the distinction between objective and subjective, and pragmatism, are incoherent. The issue here is that despite rejecting the notion of truth, you continue to speak of objective truth.
Grounds for belief
Quoting apokrisis
One can assent to whatever one likes. The question is how reasonable that assent is.
What would be wrong would be to assert that there is only one method that can be used to decide. As if the way one decided the height of the Eiffel Tower were the same as the way one decides the declaration of human rights or that one loves one's partner. Pragmatism does not answer all such questions.
The Eiffel Tower
Still unanswered. Is the tower 324m tall, give or take a bit?
I say that it is, and further that it is true that the tower is 324m tall.
But you can't. All you can do is say that you believe that it is 324m tall.
It's a failure to commit on your part.
Now let's analyse and see how different it really is from what I would say.
As I understand the distinction you want to make, it seems to be that only a statement that is both crisply definite and an actual possibility is a truth-apt proposition. The semantics have to have a real world basis. There must be here an actual present king of France, and baldness must be an actual state a head could have.
I guess my question is then whether you are making this distinction simply in the spirit of "good practice", or whether you think it is a black and white distinction with no pragmatic wiggle room.
For instance, I would claim that there is always irreducible ambiguity or vagueness in any such proposition. How do we define "bald". That in itself is a standard Sorites paradox example.
And how do you handle fictional or modal possibilities. There are books or logical worlds where there are French kings that are variously bald or hirsute in ways that give propositional meaning to the statement.
So I can go along with this distinction as a target if what you are stressing is that a well-formed logical assertion is about some actually possible state of the world - because "truth" only really applies to the relation that we pragmatically have with a world. It becomes silly to even talk about truth or falsity except in a context where there is a world to determine that truth or falsity to the propositioner floating the proposition.
OK. The idea of beliefs now brings that pragmatic relation between a self and its world into focus. It highlights that there is the larger thing of a relation. There has to be a causal coupling such that beliefs drive actions, and then those actions feed back to impact the beliefs.
This stresses the embedded and ecological nature of the reasoning relation we have with the world against other possible approaches to truth. Understood this way, it just is pragmatism. Where it might fall short is that it doesn't seem to continue on to the semiotic consequences of a modelling relations view of the mind and what it can know of the world.
The semiotic view of course adds that the "mind" in fact only deals in signs of the world. The psychological goal is construct a self separate from the world. And so the world - as some set of physical energies - must be filtered in a way that transforms it into an Umwelt. It must be experienced in terms of a set of signs that are readable at the level of automatic habit. We don't have to think about an apple being red - even though redness is already a qualitative interpretation by the brain. We just "see" the apple as red. That is the Umwelt we experience - our map by which we navigate the territory.
Of course, this triadic semiotic view of our relation to the world is more complex. The usual way to frame things is dyadic and representational. There is just us (with our experiences) and the world that our sense-data are representing. However - for a theory of truth that aims to be realistic in terms of the actual psychological structure of human conception - we do need to follow through from simply asserting a practical embeddedness in the world to an understanding of the relation that is fully (bio)semiotic.
But in general, I take this to state that - contra to idealist theories which might want to found themselves on impractical doubts about the world even being there - you are asserting that theories of truth start with the world already being in play. So hard dualism is out. Some kind of physicalism is the case. A psychological machinery of some kind is assumed to be involved in the whole affair.
I of course agree with that basic pragmatic stance. In the end, it is silly to doubt there is the world out there - in some sense. And so epistemology's job is to understand the more fundamental thing of the "modelling relation" that connects "minds" and "worlds".
However, the semiotic view says it would then be dangerously like naive realism to take the "agent" for granted in some fashion as a "real thing" - a fundamental and unanalysable bit of ontological furniture. The semiotic view is that the self emerges from the modelling as well - as the necessary distinction that is producing the counter-concept of "the world".
So Banno might want his drink of water. And his actions might achieve that as the drink is really there to be had. But a truly rigorous semiotic analysis would have a lot of questions about this reified "Banno". As well as about the "world" that this Banno reifies as some set of interpretable signage.
Hmm. Do you mean we put a narrative spin on the actions we find ourselves involved with? We can concoct any number of "reasonable" stories for why A led to B?
I think this again is just getting into the real world mechanics of cognition. The self that concocts such explanations is just that part of "us" that has the learnt and cultural skill of inductively framing hypotheses that are concrete in ways that make them testable. And then the actual holistic nature of forming intentions and making decisions defies complete capture by simple reductionist causal statements.
We want to say that A led to B as that is the "proper form" for analytic thinking. But the brain operates in a fashion that is more like Bayseian induction - holistically constraints-based processing. It doesn't have to do the one right thing. It just has to eliminate as many of the things that might go wrong as possible. So I can want to hit the tennis ball cleanly out of the centre of the racket to hit a spot two inches from the line. But all I can really do is limit the amount of miss-hit to an acceptable degree so that the ball winds up near enough to an aiming point to do the damage.
The shot is overdetermined in the sense that there is some general envelope of miss-hits that still do the job. And it is not a logical problem as a constraints-based logic says all you can aspire to do is limit the uncertainty of our actions in the world. Pragmatically, we show we already believe that to be the case by building in an error margin by aiming just inside the line rather than right at it.
And the same ought to be the case with any theory of propositional truths. A statement can't point straight at the facts. It can only constrain matters so that we minimise our uncertainty that "the truth" lies within the bounds we have picked out by our assertion. And it is not a problem as we can always tighten up the constraints if the accuracy seems an issue. We can measure things more closely and report on the results of that.
Right. So now we want a version of JTB. And the justification bit ought to involve generalised conceptual coherence, not just a representational correspondence based on particulars matched to particulars.
That is certainly my view, if so. That is holism at work. That is how a self or agent would emerge to be the stable centre of things. As Peirce said, you can doubt anything, but not everything at once. There is that backdrop ground of belief - those "propositional hinges" we've been talking about - which is necessary to the whole business.
But again, justified beliefs seem enough for a theory of truth. Truth - as some absolute transcendent reality - drops out of the picture because there is only, in the end, the relativity of a modelling relation. Absolute truth is replaced by minimal reason to be uncertain.
And semiotics would make an even stronger statement. Our experience of the world couldn't even be noumenal as that runs counter to the very logic of a modelling relation. A map mustn't be the territory - as how the hell are we going to fold up a landscape of mountains and rivers so that it fits neatly into our back pocket? We want to reduce our knowledge of the actual world to a system of easily navigated signs. And this crucially changes the very notion of what "truth" aspires to be about.
This is where you are guilty of sleight of tongue I would say. You use "to know" in a naive realist sense that presumes the world to be some "state of affairs". The facts are just the facts. But they can never be that as to be meaningful, they must become interpreted signs. They are only facts in the sense of being already part of an ongoing habit of interpretance.
So yes, when we assert we know, we mean that our belief is really justified. The true bit does drop out as what we are speaking about is our confident certainty.
And your own earlier stab at coherence or holism seems to argue against you here. That says we can't "know things that are false" - but on the grounds of conceivability. Your over-determinism accepts we could have understood the world in many lights - depending on our intentions, even if those intentions were constrained by the "facts of the world" to which they then were exposed by acts of inquiry.
You can't have it both ways. If all we ever know is the result of pragmatic inquiry, then falsehood and truth both drop out due to generalised coherence - until there is some reason that we find our backgrounding state of belief to be inadequate for some reason and set about inquiring further.
There is no point talking about the truth of the thing-in-itself as truth, as a property, is a property of the modelling relation and not of the "world" - the world being just that aspect of the relation which we know in a background interpretive way, just as we also know about the "we" that is meant to be the agent, the self, that is the stable centre of all this knowledge business.
Externalism doesn't fly. Epistemology has to find its rigour in developing an internalist discourse that does the best possible job.
Or near enough.
Well, summing up, I see a lot of pragmatism in your counter to idealism. Truth-telling doesn't even make sense without some world out there anchoring things.
Yet then this fails to continue on. Recognising that there is a modelling relation brings up the reality of the self that anchors the other side of the equation. And also, if there is a real world out there, it is not even in our interests to see it nakedly for what it is. We need to be able to look and see a world that has us in it. We need a world that is already transformed into a system of signs, an umwelt. Our perceiving of the world has to include the division that produces us as the "self" doing the perceiving. And that degree of meaning has to be built into the "simple facts" - like that the apple is "red".
So in my approach, a theory of truth has to fit with the facts of psychology. And if the psychological story is pretty complex, new and unfamilar, that's just how it is. It is still the foundation.
But your approach does still seem mired in a naive realism. It starts to make the pragmatic case against idealism. But then reverts to a naive realism framing just as soon as it has put a little distance from the foe. The world is some set of actual and definite facts. The mind just reflects that facticity in direct fashion - re-presenting the external in some internal theatre of private experience.
And then some kind of behaviourist epistemology becomes the "rigorous" way to deal with private experiences at a communal or philosophy of language level. We can speak objectively about how people act. We can assert propositions and use behaviour as evidence that there is generalised coherent agreement among a community about the way the world truly is. Or at least the degree to which a belief is not being doubted.
So yeah, I'm still feeling your account falls way short because it targets a level of objectivity that is not just functionally impossible, but not even in fact functional. It is an account that by-passes the central psychological realisation that we don't even want to see the world as it really is, but the world that has us in it, and so the world that is already transformed into a "private"* set of meanings.
* The meanings aren't literally private of course as they are going to be biologically shared across a species with a common neuro-evolutionary heritage, as well as being shared across humans by a culture of linguistically structured conception. So we don't wind up back in solipsistic territory. As said, the "self" is also recognised as part of the "truth-producing" business here.
I don't so much disagree with this as find it off target.
Seeing the world as consistent already requires a certain selectiveness; an awareness of the consistencies and a blindness to the inconsistencies. the world changes from day to day, but we choose certain patterns out of the chaos.
My position is that we do not believe that there are patterns in reality because we apply an inductive method.
But rather that we see and become certain of the patterns themselves.
And induction was made up by philosophers as an excuse for that certainty, but that it doesn't really work.
Again, what do you mean by "true"? You want to make a naive realist point without having to defend doing that. So that is the dodge I always pull you up on.
I am happy to commit to the justification of belief in pragmatic fashion. Truth is just another way of saying I can show I have no good reason to doubt.
If you want to defend your own naive realist framing, get on with it. Quit bottling the challenge. :)
But for fun, do you believe the tower is 324m tall yourself? Just tell me yes or no! And how.
And when during the day is it so exactly 324m tall? Are we now talking about the hot Eiffel tower that is 15cm taller in the heat of the midday sun, or the one that is 15cm shorter when night falls and its cools down?
Do we in fact now have two Eiffel towers. Or a vast ensemble - one for every nanometre of variation.
Oh goodness, how do we measure the height as it expands/contracts unevenly as the sun hits only one side. It can bend 18cm away from the sun. So which is its true height now - the actual distance to the ground or the full distance if it were standing up straight?
Of course, Banno the tourist guide doesn't need to care. He just reads his facts off Wiki. But Banno the scientist might want to rely on some more careful process of inquiry. A hand-waving approach always makes for poor philosophy.
???
Straw Banno writes your profile?
So I have to provide definitions and you get to hide behind commonsense usage?
Seems legit. :)
Quoting Banno
Again, how could that be the case in your world of no definitions?
Some modicum of consistency please. If it works for pragmatists to have adopted their behaviouristic "redefinition" as a community, then it works for them. You yourself have taken away your own grounds to criticise.
Sometimes I really can't believe your apparent lack of embarrassment as you loudly scrape the bottoms of those barrels.
Quoting Banno
It treats it as the limit of inquiry. That might be a different answer to the one you have in mind - not that you could have a definition in mind! - but it is still the issue being addressed.
Quoting Banno
As you seemed to want to believe, justified belief leads to a generalised coherence. Things become "true" as they become so fundamental in that fashion.
This is the difficulty of arguing against you. You do a better job of constantly contradicting yourself. You are revealing what happens when you eschew the goal of a unitary metaphysics (well, at least a unitary view that is slightly more complex than naive realism). You praise generalised coherence. But your epistemology sadly lacks that very advantage.
Quoting Banno
So again, what is this "truth" you keep referring to? Apart from a naive realism about the world being a collection of facts.
Sure, you will say it is something unanalysably fundamental. And why it is sayable - you keep mentioning it - it is also to be consigned to the metaphysically unspeakable. You mustn't explain it.
But bullshit is a pretty obvious thing to. It's obvious when someone is bullshitting their way through a discussion.
Quoting Banno
I can't both redefine truth and reject truth. Especially when you are saying truth is undefinable. So you are both misrepresenting me and also talking illogical bollocks again.
I can speak of objective truth as a limit. And that is what I did.
If you have a counter argument, great, that is what you then tap out into a wee post in reply. But if your only defence is to lie about things I've just said, that makes your position truly hopeless.
Quoting Banno
Again, pragmatism can still have the aim of covering all the epistemic ground between the opposing limits of the objective and the subjective.
So it starts with rejecting both naive realism and idealism. But then accepts that knowledge is indeed framed by those two complementary epistemic limits.
And it is engaged with the challenge of finding an epistemic method which does span the whole gamut.
So while you may take a view that it fails in its goals (having told me you have deliberately read no Peirce at all), at least there is nothing wrong in the way it sets out its grand metaphysical project.
I mean what do you think "a theory of truth" would be? A whole bunch of different theories, depending on whether we are talking of towers, politics or partners?
While you are carefully avoiding the challenge of defining truth, you certainly seem to be claiming that there is some unified theory of truth to be had.
So once again, your story is full of holes and self-contradictions. A very poor effort when all is said and done.
So again, there is an internal inconsistency you need to address.
If you are happy with the fundamentally probabilistic metaphysics of pragmatism, then you ought to come clean and say so. A degree of ambiguity or uncertainty is part and parcel of any constraints-based ontology. It is not a problem for my approach, and indeed its an epistemic advantage.
Among other things, it gives an even deeper justification for induction as a method. We have no choice but to talk about the generality of an average, a mean, that is our reasonable leap beyond any available evidence.
We never see "the average" in observing a probabilistic world. We only see a variety of particular instances when we get out and measure. And yet we happily treat the average as the reality, the truth. You are doing that too - and perhaps you have dropped mention of the "give or take a bit" for that reason?
It reveals that scratch a nominalist and you find a realist. Generality is not just an idea, an arbitrary product of inductive argument, but a real fact of the world. Apparently. :)
Quoting apokrisis
X-)
No, you re most welcome to use common sense too, if you like.
The real joke is instead how you keep claiming to want a debate before bottling it yet again.
I will get back to your bottle later.
Quoting Banno
Quoting apokrisis
Yes; let's say, for the sake of argument, 324m plus or minus a metre. That ought to account for the possible errors you mention.
And I will add: it is true that the Eiffel Tower is 324m tall, give or take a metre.
So, can we agree on this?
No, because you can say it is 324m tall, but weirdly not that it is true that it is 324m tall.
A world without definitions is not a world without meaning.
Your pragmatism changes the meaning of "...is true" to suit itself. A fair move, so long as you recognise that you are no longer talking about what other folk mean by "...is true".
Quoting apokrisis
No; although they might be justified.
Again, the issue is that your probabilistic, limited definition of truth is not what we mean by truth. It does not apply to our relationships with our partners and friends; to the rules of the road; to art; to music.
That's right; we see the patterns and make the abductive/ inductive inferences to laws and forces that explain the patterns. 'Abduction' and 'induction' are just names for two discernibly different kinds of thinking that we do. It is the system of abductively and inductively inferred different forces and laws, and the way they cohere that constitutes the body of discourse and discipline we call science.
Yes, you can - and do. You reject the common notion of truth, and re-define the word "truth".
And them you fail to acknowledge the obvious consequences.
And that is what I am objecting to - the notion that there is something called 'induction" that is the same in all cases.
It's not a method; its not algorithmic. It's just seeing the pattern.
I think it's more than that. It is seeing the patterns and inferring their relations to other patterns in terms of universally active laws (laws which may be thought to be either deterministic or probabilistic; supernatural or natural, transcendental or immanent; it doesn't matter in regard to the genesis of abductive and inductive thinking).
Apo's having a field day with Banno. Made me giggle.
What you're saying, probably without realizing it, is that pattern recognition is an entirely random process.
So we see, or we used to see, a pattern of birds of a feather - a white feather - with long necks, webbed feet and quite big, and come up with a word 'swan'. I suppose the word might have an ostensive definition in the first instance(s), "a bird like that one", but pedantic classificationists eventually come up with a specification of 'likeness' that constitutes the natural kind -'swan', a definition.
"A (adult) swan is a big white bird with a long neck."
From which we can deduce, 'All (adult) swans are white'. And that is a necessary truth, according to the definition.
Then captain Cook, or whoever it was, rocks up with stories about big black birds with long necks that look remarkably similar to swans, except for the colour. And it seems to me we have a choice; either we can invent a new word, 'naws', to signify these strange colour-inverted creatures, or we can change (widen) the definition to include them as swans.
But if this is a true account of how it goes, then on the one side the claim that all swans are white is not an induction, but says nothing about what Captain Cook might or might not find on his travels, and on the other, neither is it an empirical fact that what he found were black swans. The truth of the matter depends on how we choose to use words. We decided to call them swans, and changed the meaning of the word. The decision confers certainty either (contradictory) way, and the facts (of there being long-necked black birds) are not decisive after all.
And does the Eiffel tower not have foundations, too?
C'mon Banno. This is laughably awful.
Remember, it is me who is putting forward a "theory of truth" that explains why language games have this kind of pragmatic looseness. I am arguing against strict definitions on the semiotic grounds that words can only constrain semantics in useful, purpose-serving fashion. There is always then a creatively open freedom when it comes to interpretation, coupled to the principle of indifference that allows us to limit the interpretive freedom on the grounds that it ain't being helpful.
So you are trying to hide behind precisely the thing that my semiotic approach explains.
Yep. And thank goodness our brains can work like that. There is a natural way to reason, as evolution shows.
The question is why for a minute would you expect actual humans to be algorithmic?
Again you are showing that there is just no joined-up, consistent position you are defending in this thread.
One minute, you are all about the absolute certainty of grammars, heights and the rules of chess. The next you are all about the mysterious truths of love, art and breakfast. You claim you yearn for the discipline of a formal debate and yet call even your own profile post a "straw man".
You chop and change for rhetorical purposes and oddly expect no-one to notice. Curious.
Here is part of your writing that makes sense; although written it in such a constipated fashion. Yes, we need only define words so far as is needed for the task at hand.
One does not need to take on the whole pragmatic doctrine for this.
Yes - exactly right. So the anatomy of the black bird was sufficiently similar to the white bird called "swan" for that word to be used in the new case. Those similarities in anatomy are real, if not decisive.
If you like, we can take the foundations into account in our measurement. And sure, the units we use are conventional. We can set up conventions for the measurement of the height of the tower. HTe conventions are part of our language, not part of the tower.
What Apo's position leads to, although he will not say it, is the conclusion that the tower has no height apart from the measurement.
I don't agree with that. The tower has a specifiable height. To say otherwise is to fail to have language engage with the world.
But that process did not involve induction.
Of course it did. The imaginative hypothesis that the two patterns are related by an unseen structuring principle or force (law or force of gravity) is abductive reasoning, and the thought that if this is true then the same invariant patterns will always be observed is inductive reasoning. According to inductive reasoning apples will always fall, and the motions of the planets will be predictable as long as the current balance of natural laws and forces holds..
Continuing the effort to flush out the contrasting epistemic positions here - not being one to bottle a debate - we can see that Banno is channeling the metaphysics of Wittgenstein circa the Tractatus here.
So there is the reasonable belief that: “The great problem round which everything I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?”.
Inductively, we can sense that reality does have a deep pattern. There is a rational, logical or mathematical structure at the heart of existence. And so "a theory of truth" becomes philosophically fundamental. It is not merely an epistemic issue. It is potentially ontological. Understanding rationality is understanding nature.
Wittgenstein famously came up with his own metaphysical position on truth. As a property, it belongs to the class of statements that are either tautological or empirical. The logical positivists loved that bit. But then Wittgenstein added there are also all the unspeakable truths that "manifest" as life's "mysteries".
Some folk feel that was a brilliant insight. It gave philosophy a reason to continue to be, safely separate from the utilitarian concerns of science. Philosophy could be the study of ineffable values. It could become a democratic and pluralistic exercise in which everyone could have their own truth systems, even pretty irrational ones.
Other folk might instead think that this was a gigantic cop-out. Natural philosophers for instance. Rather than truth being cosmopolitan and PoMo, or Biblical and "obvious" (Banno's version), truth would be still unifiable under a common metaphysics.
Natural philosophy would take the view that all Wittgenstein's dichotomy was doing was enshrining the distinction between the observer and the observables - the truth-teller and the truths told. And this is the motif that runs through all Banno's replies. The observer can be taken dualistically for granted. Banno doesn't even want to deal with the difference between the objective and the subject. He doesn't want to deal with the way purposes must shape inquiries and therefore what can count for the answering "facts". By dividing truth in terms of the empirical vs the axiological, value judgements are made safely transcendental and disconnected from the natural world.
Science is tied to the world by the strictness of a method. But then "philosophers" are free to just get on with being naive realists, simply assert their beliefs about what is real and certain as far as they are personally concerned, without needing to defend whatever opinion just came to mind. When pressed for justification, they can hang up a notice on the door - "out to lunch".
Anyway, my natural philosophy approach - the systems science or holistic approach that traces back to Aristotelean four causes metaphysics - is different in an important way. Apart from it just presuming the unity of nature.
The problem for a logicist's approach to metaphysics is that it presumes that reality is a structure. The hidden order of reality is some closed, eternal, fixed sort of pattern. It exists.
By contrast, a metaphysics that arises out of the natural view is that of emergent process. Things develop. They begin vague, formless, chaotic. But regularity or habit emerges to reduce this initial boundless variety. Reality becomes structured with time. It settles into a coherent and rational pattern.
As said, this is induction in a nutshell. A chaos of the particular becomes formed into definite and regular being via its own emergent self-regulation. Generality emerges to turn the particular into local actions that serve an ongoing weaving of a pattern. Constraints create reality as an average of what was possible.
So induction - in that general sense of being how probability works - is metaphysically basic. And deduction - as the mechanical story of classically absolute constraint - is then how the process of self-organising development looks once it has become so highly developed that it is almost completely formed by its general laws or habits.
At the end of time, a process manifests a mathematical-strength structure. Logical necessity finally appears to rule. And we can measure that in the lack of spontaneity or surprise to be found in the system. By the last stage, reality might as well be deductive or computational as any continuing action in the system has been ruled random, meaningless or entropic by the principle of indifference. All that remains once a system hits equilibrium are differences not making a difference.
So what we have here is a clear clash of ontologies. It is a metaphysics of existence or being against a metaphysics of development or becoming.
And Peircean semiotics then slots in as the holistic view of logic as a general semiotic mechanism - the trick by which development and the emergence of regular habits could even take place.
That process view is then logically robust enough - in terms of being a "theory of truth" - to unify the empirical and the axiological. We don't have to tolerate the debate-avoidance tactic of those who want to say there is scientific truth but then also - just as ontically - whatever is my own personally obvious subjective truth. The one that is unspeakable and manifests in private revelation. Often when I'm out to lunch and doing some serious unbottling.
No. That's again Straw Banno.
To which you have added a Straw Wittgenstein.
Sufficiently similar for whom?
Again, the world does not arbitrate in the absolute way you want to suggest. There has to a self with a purpose at the other end of the semantic relationship. And that is the holistic deal that a "theory of truth" needs to deal with.
So again, you point at the world in a bid to deflect attention from the other half of this story. Someone had to make a judgement about "yes, similar enough vs no, much too different". And epistemically, that judgement would have to be secured by being able to point at a reason - a general intention - that was served in this particular instance.
Quoting Banno
Keep misrepresenting. My position is that "height" is a theoretical quality or generality that we can then quantify or measure in particular instances.
So going around measuring heights is a simple everyday pragmatic affair. Peirce's job as a scientist was doing just this at the level of international bureau of standards work. He was responsible for creating practical definitions for your standardised ruler or clock.
A mountain doesn't "have" a height. Height is an abstract or theoretical notion that we can go out and measure for a reason.
Jeez, you rail often enough against metaphysical realism - the existence of universals - and yet you talk way more realist than me. :)
So yes, I will always make the distinction that height is a theoretical construct when you come lumberingly along, talking naive realism about these things.
Straw is all there is. You described you own profile statement as straw Banno. Lordy.
Wikipedia is still good for a general introduction that's fast to read, though. Just thought I'd note it. (I'm enjoying your exchange w. Janus)
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
So again, for you a mountain does not have a height until it is measured.
For me, we measure the height of the mountain.
Your account fails to be about the world.
That's why I am not keen on it.
Although the emphasis changes sporadically, this is the basic framework. Peirce is too perfect to be subject to analysis, let alone critique.
Quoting Janus
But let's not pretend that calling it "abduction" suffices to show its rationality. It's not the case that abduction is universally accepted. I invite you to read the SEP article on abduction and on Peirce's view of abduction. For a start there is the distinction between generating an hypothesis and justifying that hypothesis. If you want to call generating an hypothesis abduction, well and good. But I think that more is needed to justify the hypothesis. Induction and abduction are insufficient to justify a claim.
Again, the difference is that my approach speaks about "the world that has us in it". It makes it explicit that "truth" applies to a modelling relation.
So for example, did Uluru have a "height" for the Anangu people before the white fella arrived with his Cartesian notion of a co-ordinate space?
An aboriginal form of life would measure Uluru in terms of the time it would take to scale it. Within that culture, what makes obvious sense is to speak about a degree of personal effort.
This keeps the two sides of the modelling relation front of mind. There is of course a big fat rock with a waterhole on top that is a significant landmark. But if you showed up back then, belligerently demanding of everyone you met, "deny that it is true that Uluru has a height of 863m", then you can appreciate what a crass move that might be.
Any notion of a measurement has to be motivated by a reason, a point of view. Measurements are not an objective feature of the world. They are a theory about the world that can be used to form statements which we can then confirm or challenge by some suitable act of observation. We can imagine the world in terms of a systems of signs - like a metre ruler, a ticking clock, an ergometer - and then read off a number that tells us about the quantity of some quality.
So in pressing me to confess that some tower or mountain has some measured height - in the naively realistic sense that height is an actual property of the world rather than a property of a modelling relation with the world - you are just making the same kind of cultural faux pas.
You are belligerently demanding that I bow to your ingrained white man Cartesian rationalism, saying that I have no right to the view that these kinds of "truths" are all relative to some purpose, some point of view.
Now of course, not just a couple of posts backs, you were trying to argue for that kind of socially constructed or PoMo notion of truth. You wanted to say that music, love and breakfast are so tied up with values that measuring them is more art than science.
Again, I can't make excuses for your inconsistencies. You lurch from one side of the debate to the other because you just haven't succeeded in thinking things through in a unified way.
But eventually you may start to see the point of actually having a modelling relations approach to epistemology. You will see that naive realism fails utterly. Just as does dyadic representationalism. You have no real choice except to up your game and understand "truth" as an irreducibly triadic epistemic relation with the world.
Quoting Banno
It's more subtle than that. Or at least you find this surprisingly difficult to understand.
What we are trying to arrive at is not a re-presentation of the world - the noumenal view - but instead a world, an umwelt, that is the world as it is useful for us to understand it. That is, the phenomenal view.
So if it is useful to see a tower in terms of height, then that is how we learn to see towers. And clearly, for white men with a grand project to rule the world, understanding reality in terms of Cartesian co-ordinates was a real plus.
But would you deny the Anangu chap his truth when he puffs out his cheeks and replies he doesn't know about your metres of elevation, but the Eiffel Tower looks a bloody effort to climb. Better start now before the day gets too long.
Again, that is not to say that science can't have the goal of a rigorously objective epistemology. There is a world out there, as well as whatever theoretical image we form of it.
Despite your attempts to make that the issue, a modelling relations approach is quite explicit that it believes there is a world - the Kantian thing-in-itself - to be modelled.
However then what is justified, what is believed, what is certain, what is true, is the image we form - the image that is the "world with us in it". Between the interpretance and the world stands the sign - the umwelt. And it connects both sides of the deal in fixing the idea of the "observing self" along with the "observable world".
The world may be recalcitrant. But it "has" that property only in the light of the fact that it refuses "our wishes". And in your naive realism, your white man cultural supremacism, you are failing to acknowledge that knowledge of the world is grounded in the third thing of the umwelt, the system of sign, that arises in the middle to fix some particular "truth" relation.
Epistemology must always recognise that fact
It is great to have the goal of complete scientific objectivity - or alternatively, to want to have the complete subjectivity of the poet, gourmet or lover. However to justify belief properly, we have to understand why complete objectivity and complete subjectivity are themselves impossible. They are the limiting extremes of a common mediating relation.
Get that straight and all the naive epistemic nonsense and inconsistency will just melt away.
Quoting apokrisis
I doubt that, since the Rock is sacred and climbing it is something contemptible that German tourists do.
Doubtless its height has changed over time; the stomping of German tourists may have reduced it somewhat over the last few years. And yet, if its height has indeed changed, then by that very fact, it has a height.
I can't begin to contemplate how you would go about saying in pragmatic terms that Uluru is not as heigh now as it was two hundred years ago.
Was the term "An aboriginal form of life" meant to be insulting? or just gratuitous?
Models. I'd refer you to Davidson again, but it is apparent you can't squeeze him into your Peirce-shaped hole either. Again, in Pragmatism all you have is the model; it never links to the world. Whereas the ordinary folk talk of chairs and cars and rocks, you understand that they are really talking about models-of chairs and models-of-rocks. The best way to deal with someone who thinks there are no rocks might be to stone him until he is more agreeable.
Quoting apokrisis
Thank you. Yes, I am making it up as I go along. I find such creativity preferable to blandly spouting doctrine.
Read what I actually wrote and try again.
Are you able to read other philosophies with any sympathy?
I had a quick look through the diatribe you wrote contra the notes from the profile page. I entirely agree with you that they are different from Peirce. I don't think you have made any significant effort to understand Wittgenstein or Davidson or Searle or any of the other thinkers I use - or indeed, any other thinkers. You've found the answer and that's that.
First year philosophy classes consist in exposing novices to a wide range of ideas, working with those ideas until they really feel the bite, and then forcing them to criticise those ideas. You missed all of that by coming to philosophy sideways, through engineering. You are not a philosopher.
Well, good for you. Enjoy your intellectual retirement.
I also admire your continued parlay with apo. Not that I'd do it in the same way, or even agree with your arguments -- but simply the fact that you continue to argue. It's actually helped me to understand apo a bit more; not just your commentary but also apo's responses. Something I didn't have the patience for, but really should (philosophically speaking).
In the end I will have to walk away. I don't have the time he has.
This is deduction. not only is it NOT induction but it is wrong, indcutively
"Swans" are what we call some birds. There is no natural law defining human speech.
If we define swan as a type of white bird then black swans are not even swans. Nature does not give a hoot what we want to call things.
What are you talking about? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_life_(philosophy)
So you are a pain realist? It exists in the physical world? Throw the rock at a wall and pain is also going to occur as a consequence?
Not a lot of thought goes into your posts.
You really need to make up your mind. Either I'm guilty of being dogmatically Peircean or I in fact acknowledge where the later Witti recapitulates the essential epistemology of Peirce.
As you know, aborigines had a very different relation to their landscape than the one you are insisting upon as the rightful and uncontradictable ground of signification. They didn't look and see objects they needed to measure with rulers so they could give legitimate answers to questions about "height".
Sure they lived in the same world as us. But they had their form of life, and we have ours. And why would we insist in some crude fashion that ours is the correct conception of the world.
It might certainly be the appropriate one for a modern western way of life dominated by engineering of course. Engineers are meant to be able to be measure the world with your unambiguous Cartesian certainty. :)
In the end, you can attempt to justify your white man/Cartesian rationalist language game in terms of its "scientific objectivity". But as I keep reminding you, that very objectivity derives from an epistemic cut that makes a break between "the mind" and "the world" - ie: the observer and the observable - in dualistic fashion. You are relying on the very Cartesianism that you claim to have put behind you.
And that is what we keep seeing in all your posts on the issue. You keep trying to trap people into speaking with white man/Cartesian rationalism. You point at the Eiffel Tower - an engineered object being obviously your best example - and demand I acknowledge it has "a height". Either I play your elitist language game, share your cultural form of life - conform to your "wisdom" - or else I "other" myself, demonstrate that I won't play that game and so can be treated as some crazy dark-skinned sub-human pagan outsider. A Peircean worshipper, in your words. ;)
It is this attitude of yours that I find (amusingly) offensive. By claiming that language games/forms of life are essentially unanalysable truths, you then assert a hegemonic right to have yours treated as the correct cultural representation of reality.
If someone won't simply just answer the question in the form in which you present it - say it is true that some edifice or other "has a height", as the height is a notion that has been "actually measured" - then they are part of the out-group, not part of your in-group, and rightfully get everything they deserve for that.
Is it not at all disturbing that you failed to acknowledge the semiotic right of first Australians to their own authentic form of life when given the opportunity? For some reason, you think that to be a "gratuitous" point?
Directing us away from the debate.
We had agreed that induction was (deductively) invalid. You didn't see that as an issue.
We agreed that your Pragmatic doctrine suffers an extreme anti-realism, to the extent that it can only talk about measurements, and certainly not rocks or towers or such.
We agreed that I was making it up as I went along, while you believe you have all the answers.
How's that?
But it was you who made a fuss about my use of "form of life". You asked - confusingly - whether that was an insult (to aborigines?) or gratuitous (so in what possible sense gratuitious?).
For once take some responsibility. You directed the conversation to this new focus. But nicely, it reveals the essential problem I have with your standard "othering" rhetorical strategy. You simply try to bully people into submission by constructing an in-group/out-group dynamic.
You will go on and on about apo - some mythical apo - who is an engineer with no philosophical background, who is "religious" about some mystic figure whom you distain to actually read, who seems to have too much time on his hands to have a worthwhile life.
I'm not objecting to this game playing. I really enjoy it from an anthropological point of view. It is very revealing about the exact issue we are discussing.
But I will still point out that you do use the rhetorical strategies that are basic to colonialist and racist attitudes. Your form of life might be that of a white middle-class Aussie liberal, but here in this thread you are choosing to employ a different language game.
I just gave you the chance to explain yourself - to backtrack on your dog whistle appeals to rally against the "alien" in the group. It is interesting that you now very swiftly want to move away.
And of course that is how the net functions. You can rely on the fact people have forgotten anything posted three or four posts after it was said. When in trouble - instantly re-direct. It looks like you are engaged in a debate when really your only interest is in establishing who is in, who is out, in your little circle of friends.
Well I made my arguments. I also commented on what you had to say about yours, even though I had to pull it in from elsewhere. You have said nothing substantive against my position as far as I can tell. Now I'm commenting on your rhetorical strategy and the reasons behind it.
Quoting Banno
No. That is your construction. And it is a deliberately obtuse one for rhetorical effect.
You already have all my arguments concerning why that is a misrepresentation of my position - if you want to actually engage in a debate and not merely a pissing game.
Quoting Banno
More dog whistling.
Look at poor Banno. One of us. Look at nasty apo. One of them. Boo, hiss. Etc.
Rhetorical strategies - you overuse this one, the pretence that you have already answered the question when you haven't.
Quote my reply and show how it didn't answer the question you posed.
Did you just make a joke?
You mean like the way I keep going on about "Form of Life"?
In what sense is "height" real?
Sure there is a world out there - even if just noumenal. So this is not about idealism. It is about epistemology in the light of the practicalities of being in a modelling relation with that world.
In that light then, in what sense is "height" real?
Use the example you suggested and which I am happy to run with. We have aborigines and their relation to landcape features like Uluru. We have white europeans and their relation to feats of engineering like the Eiffel Tower.
Compare and contrast what "real" means in such differing "forms of life".
Hmm. Maybe you really do have a problem that I haven't picked up on?
Yes, Sir!
X-)
Enjoy your lunch. I can't decide between poached eggs or some Thai chicken and tofu soup for breakfast. But I am going to make a zucchini slice for lunch.
In the sense that Uluru has a certain height, regardless of our measuring it. But that your Pragmatism cannot admit this; and so is fraught with anti-realism.
What's the relevance of stating the obvious fact that induction is not a deductively valid method?
What's the relevance of stating that induction is not truth preserving?
What's the relevance of stating that the following argument . . .
1. All observed As are Bs
2. Therefore, all As are Bs
. . .is such that its premise can be true and its conclusion still be false?
Noone disagrees with that.
Noone disagreed with that.
The subject has been the relevance of making such a statement.
Does it imply that there is something wrong with induction?
What does it imply?
Does it imply anything at all?
Yep. It implies that induction is invalid.
Not the answer that I was expecting. But it does justify every single post I wrote in response to your claim. For I was right: you do think that the fact that induction is deductively invalid (i.e. not truth-preserving) means that there is something wrong with it.
I was expecting you are going to say something along the lines that induction does not adequately represent the manner in which we naturally reason. For reasoning is, as you claim, something that cannot be captured by words, something that forever transcends them. To which I would have responded with something along the lines that every model of reality is grounded in a subset of reality and is therefore always a good candidate for being a simplification of the said reality. So there should be nothing strange when we discover that our models are not perfectly accurate; for in most instances, they were not even expected to be perfect.
Rather than just answer with the same repeated misrepresentation, answer the question as it was posed. Or show where the literature of Pragmatism supports your contention of it being anti-realism as such.
So again. How is height "real" in your book. How is "height" to be understood when you are not imposing a concept involving Cartesian co-ordinates - and one presuming the Earth to be the Copernican centre of that inertial reference frame? What should "height" mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life?
Drop the evasions and misrepresenations. Just try to answer my questions honestly and directly.
To say it is true that the Eiffel Tower has a height, and that the height is 324m, is already admitting that "height" is a theoretical construct. An answer in metres - above some "foundation-line" - is only "true" because we agree that it would be a suitable response in terms of some ontological story we share through a common language, a common form of life.
Why are you not prepared to admit to this obvious epistemic fact?
So yes, we could then go on from there to discuss in what sense a model of reality based on Cartesian co-ordinates might be better than an aboriginal model that treats distances more in terms of notions of the duration of an effort.
Rather than being racist, a Pragmatic view says we can at least ask this question because "truth" in the pragmatic conception is what reason will arrive at in the fulness of time. It is what Nozick called the invariant view. We can see that some views are more subjective or observer-dependent than others. And so epistemically, we can have the goal of arriving at the view with is the most objective, or least observer-dependent as possible. Enter the justification or the scientific method.
So Pragmatism can both speak to the right of folk to construct the view of the world that they find most useful, and also still hold out the goal of moving towards a view of the world that is the most mind-independent or ontically abstracted. You can recover the Cartesian co-ordinates that you seem so attached to in the long run perhaps.
But now, once again, I'm answering my own questions, showing where there could be some agreement with your half-baked naive realism that poses as some kind of philosophical quietism.
A good student needs to have a go at giving an answer himself. So forget what I just said. Tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life - given that we are not talking about idealism but the indirect realism of pragmatism.
1. All observed As are Bs
2. The future mimics the past
3. Therefore, all As in the future will also be Bs
Note that this is still a form of induction. I am saying it is not induction to make Banno and others, such as Janus and that autistic boy who calls himself chester-something, happy. When they use words in a formally precise manner, i.e. when their words align with the manner they are defined by Google, Wikipedia and other established sources, they are happy. Nothing makes them happier than using words in a formally precise manner. So let them have their happiness, let us concede that the above argument is not a form of inductive argument but a form of deductive argument. We lose nothing by doing so, that's for certain. But despite our best efforts, despite our concession, the above argument won't make Banno happy. He will argue, desperately, that the second premise is wrong and that the entire argument falls apart because of it. The premise is wrong, he will claim, because there are moments in our past that were not doing their best to mimic the moments in our past that preceded them. Apparently, not every point in time mimics the set of points in time that preceded it. This, my friends, is supposedly an argument against the second premise. Of course, Banno is full of shit because Banno, like pretty much every single human being on planet Earth, routinely makes decisions by taking this premise for granted. Otherwise, Banno would never be able to eat his breakfast and make love to his girlfriend. He wouldn't be able to so much as compose a forum post. Nothing can function without induction. So an attack on induction is an attack on intelligence itself. What we have here is a form of schizm. Banno says one thing but does another thing. He says induction is wrong but his actions say it's not wrong. So what exactly is wrong? Is it induction? or is it something with Banno?
The future does not have to mimic the past all the time. It is enough that it mimics the past most of the time. Exceptions do not disprove the rule.
Sure, the measurement is a construct. We can agree on that.
The issue is that for your Pragmatism there is only the measurement. Hence for you height must be a measurement.
But Uluru will be 863m, whether you measure it or not.
How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us.
Your criticism is no more than saying that we can't talk (and that includes measuring) without the social constructs of language. Sure. But our social conventions have no influence on the height of Uluru.
In order to name something, there must be something to name.
I am not your student. I am a mere mosquito. Bzzz bzzz.
Squish, squish. ;)
I don't have enough time to read that article now. In any case I have been reading Peirce on and off for many years now, and am pretty familiar with his ideas of abduction and induction. Abductive reasoning generates hypotheses, and inductive reasoning (if anything) justifies them.
The idea that things have invariant natures which reliably determine how they can behave, interact with others things, and so on is an example of inductive thinking.
Hypotheses that consist in schemes that give accounts of posited mechanisms that determine the natures of things, and their consequent interactions and relations are examples of abductive reasoning. Such hypotheses cannot be derived from pure deductive thought (although they can be set out in deductive forms where the premises are the parts that are not deductively given, as with all deductive syllogisms), and they cannot be justified by pure deduction either, but can only be justified, if at all, by empirical observation or plausibility. Plausibility itself is not deductive but is based on experience and imagination, which again is induction and abduction.
Actually, f you measure it in situ you will get about 348 m. I couldn't believe it was 863 m high, so I looked it up. 863 m is its height above sea level.
To return to the argument: that judgement is not deductively validated, though. It is justified by inductive reasoning which tells you that it is plausible to think that what is presented as official geographical knowledge is trustworthy.
You could put this reasoning in deductive form.
What is presented as official geographical facts and figures is always trustworthy
The figures given for the elevation and prominence of Uluru is trustworthy are official geographical figures
Therefore the figures given for the elevation and prominence of Uluru are trustworthy.
This is valid reasoning, but it may not be sound.
Why mention the three things of the world, the sign and the interpretant then?
Is this why you don't get triadic ontologies? You struggle with the counting?
Quoting Banno
Oh dear. White man speaks patronisingly again. Cartesian co-ordinates exist whether that is a theory by which you make useful sense of your world or not.
Quoting Banno
And now throw in some slap-dash relativism to show reality in fact has no preferred co-ordinate frame.
Height may be what you measure as a vertical distance from the ground ... until you throw in the next metaphysical twist of the co-ordinate frame tale. Keeping up wee black fella at the back of the class?
Quoting Banno
They are what make the notion of "a height" meaningful - a proposition that would be truth-apt within a certain form of life.
You are wanting to talk about some notion of height that is "mind-independent true" - not grounded in a form of life. I am pointing out that all such truth talk is dependent on some communal, language encoded, point of view.
You are welcome to try to justify your leap from the pragmatic view to an epistemology of naive realism. But so far you haven't done that.
Again, address the specific question I put to you.
Tell us in your own words what "height" should mean within the language game of a first Australian form of life.
Quoting Banno
You mean like the way God has a name? Or unicorns? Or Hesperus and Phosphorus?
I really think something must be broke about the way you reason. Some kind of agnosia going on.
LOL. But Banno covered that already.... "How we measure that, from base or sea level or your nose or whatever - is up to us."
So apparently the number of metres in question is both utterly arbitrary - choose any reference point - and also a physical, mind-independent, fact.
Live with the contradiction!
I could accept abduction as creating hypotheses. But if so, i don't see any advantage in using the term abduction. Why not just talk about creativity? Is it only to place it in the Peircian holy trinity with deduction and induction? Then forget it.
And I continue to fail to see how an invalid induction can be used as a justification. Consider an alternative - coherentism, for example. A belief is justified if it coheres with our other beliefs. Isn't that a superior account of justification than an invalid half-argument such as {f(a), f(b), therefor (x)f(x)}?
More weirdness. Banno is told how it works. Inductive thought is about the creative leap from the particular instance to the general rule. Peirce then came along to argue that the scientific method - which had by then proven itself pretty successful - was in fact based on a three-step process of reasoning.
Rather than a dyadic opposition of induction and deduction - which of course wasn't really working out - Peirce made it explicit that "truth" is arrived at via a three step logic.
It starts with abduction - the leap from some particular surprising fact to some guess about a general rule. So this is broadly an inductive step in going from the particular to the general.
Then the next step would - quite logically - be to use the generality to make particular predictions. If the hypothetical rule were true, consequences could be safely deduced. Particular facts could be derived with syntactical certainty. They couldn't be logically wrong - given the truth of the general premiss.
Banno likes the sound of "valid" as the description of a deductive inference of this sort. It somehow suggests that induction is the faulty and shameful part of the deal if you are new to the game of critical thinking. It's a neat rhetorical strategy.
Then third we get the inductive confirmation to close the loop. Deduction gives us a prediction about particular observable facts. The presence of those observables then allow a second completing move from the particular back to the general. The general is shown to be true in the light of the available evidence.
So induction - going from the particular to the general.
Deduction - going from the general to the particular.
Put the two together in the right logical order and you have a holistic relation that can be used in recursive fashion to approach the natural limits on rational inquiry.
Note the inclusion of the straw word "utterly"?
More intelectual dishonesty.
Choose any point you like as the origin, choose any units you like. They can be translated into metric or imperial or cubits or whatever.
What would be living with a contradiction would be to assert that we can measure the height of the rock, and yet also to maintain that the rock has no height. That there is only the measurement.
Sure. If you have a theory of abstract reference frames then you can add the further constraint that it’s distances are ruled off in terms of some arbitrary unit. But so far you haven’t shown how that mental construct relates to someone’s world as a useful fact.
As I say, the aboriginal form of life is said to want to think about spatial distance in terms of duration of effort. The Aussie education system is suppose to recognise that cultural difference in its attempts to teach basic mathematical concepts in a way that don’t continue to favour the later white settlers.
So is a reply not in metres, or any equivalent notion of counting a unit of distance, going to get marked wrong by you? Does everyone have to conform to your Cartesian conception of reality?
Speak clearly now. You have probably used up your last chance.
For me it fits because there seem to be basically three modes of being led in thought.
The etymology for 'deduce' is "lead down, derive" (in Medieval Latin, "infer logically"), from de- "down" (see de-) + ducere "to lead," from PIE root *deuk- "to lead." ; which seems appropriate since a deduction is an abstracted form of thought.
The etymology for 'induce' is "to lead by persuasions or other influences," from Latin inducere "lead into, bring in, introduce, conduct; persuade; suppose, imagine,"
The etymology for 'abduce' is "to draw away" by persuasion or argument, 1530s, from Latin abductus, past participle of abducere "to lead away, take away," also in figurative senses, from ab "off, away from" (see ab-) + ducere "to lead," from PIE root *deuk- "to lead." Related: Abduced; abducing.
The prefixes 'ab' 'in' and 'de' seem to give clues to the character of each mode.
'De' is "Latin adverb and preposition of separation in space, meaning "down from, off, away from," and figuratively "concerning, by reason of, according to;"
'In' is an "element meaning "into, in, on, upon""
'Ab' is a "word-forming element meaning "away, from, from off, down," denoting disjunction, separation, departure; from Latin ab (prep.) "off, away from" in reference to space or distance, also of time"
Etymological source: The Online Etymology Dictionary
A belief "cohering with other beliefs' just is validation by abduction and induction as well as deduction, when you think about it. I think the problem is that you are looking at induction as Hume did, as something that somehow must rely on immediate perception or else amount to nothing. It relies rather on cumulative perception. Humans have always posited causes for observed events, different types of causes for different types of events, and at least since the Enlightenment a nature which consists in a unified concatenation of causes (laws and forces). This is what has evolved into science considered as a whole interrelated system of understanding. All of this has been arrived at by inductive (observational), abductive (speculative) and deductive (logical; for the parts contributed by mathematics and geometry) reasonings. It is that scientific (in the broadest possible sense) body of understanding that determines what is considered plausible; i'e' what "coheres with other beliefs", I would say.
Ha ha, looks like I was just being pedantic then, wanting to say that the height of the Rock would normally be thought of as its height from the surrounding desert.
I'm not sure what Banno has in mind; but in general I would agree that some mountains do project up more from the Surface than others, regardless of whether anything has been measured or where you are looking from and so on.
I had a similar argument with Wayfarer once about one pair of things being closer to each other, than another pair. He wanted to claim that it was a matter of perspective, but I think he was thinking about whether they looked closer or not. Even then, I don't follow Nagel in thinking the "view from nowhere" is unattainable. It is if you think it is truly a view from no perspective at all, but when you realize it is actually a view from no particular perspective, which means from every perspective, then it becomes apparent that it is not incoherent and is, at least in principle, attainable, even if not absolutely attainable (whatever that could mean).
That's more or less it.
The extension of the view from somewhere is not the view from nowhere, but the view from anywhere.
We find it by talking to each other.
I can't find much here to disagree with you on.
There remains a special place for deduction. If one has true premises and a valid argument then the truth of the conclusion must follow. This is not the case with induction and abduction (the word puts me in mind of alien experiments...)
If one grants abduction and induction, then their place can only be in justifying belief, not in finding truth. Unless one follows @apokrisis in rejecting truth altogether.
Yes, I think that's right. Science does not give us truth but speculative understanding. Truth (in the propositional sense, at least) is a rather pedestrian affair to do with official facts and figures, and the obtaining of states of affairs.
Yep. It is an interesting exercise to imagine seeing any object from every perspective possible. So Ayers Rock from the inside, from every distance outside, then over all timescales as well. Any notion of its substantial being would become dissolved in some truly panscopic view that built in no preference.
And then contrast that with the kind of scientific view we aim for where we instead see Ayers Rock in terms of natural laws and initial conditions. More like a wire frame computer simulation.
Don’t be such a sook. If you agree with Janus, you agree with me. Get over it.
Ok, then - let's go back a few steps. Picture Newton universalising gravity, apples and all.
Was that an act of induction? Can you explain how?
Led by repeated observations of objects invariably falling to Earth and the rising of Sun, moon and planets, to believe that such events will always happen (induction) he imagines that there is a natural law that determines these events, and in a further leap of imagination (abduction) he thinks that these seemingly very different events may be manifestations of a single law or force.
If this thought process is not essentially deductive (even it can, although not exhaustively, be framed in deductive form) then what would you say it could be other than inductive and/ or abductive?
I would say that it is inductive in the sense that experience naturally induces us to think that way, and abductive in that our imaginations abduce (which means they lead us away) from concrete instances to generalities and analogies. It's like the abductive thought I mentioned before that if spacetime is curved then it might be expected, analogously to curved glass and other transparent materials, to refract light. I mean this thought is not deductive in the sense that curvature of spacetime logically entails that light will be refracted. So the observed refraction of light does not prove that spacetime is curved.
Perhaps you could give an account of your thoughts on these specific examples.
Cool, it's a very interesting thought experiment. From any possible viewpoint it would still be larger (and more enduring and endurant) than an apple, though, it seems.
Yes, it's hard to imagine Uluru slowly emerging out of some very different milieu, and where in that process we would locate the "initial conditions".
It is hard to find in that description events that take the inductive form. So again I suggest that induction is a post hoc account. As such I do not agree that it takes a centra place in science.
What exactly do you mean "events that take the inductive form" and which description are you referring to?
I would say that all accounts of human activities and thought processes are "post hoc" so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make in pointing that out in this particular case.
Apparently Newton thought he was doing inductive reasoning. From the Wiki article you linked:
"This is a general physical law derived from empirical observations by what Isaac Newton called inductive reasoning."
So does that account instead describe deduction as being central to the development of the thinking involved? I think not.
Newton's theory of universal gravitation has of course become a classic test case for philosophy of science. Newton himself rejected a simple hypothetico-deductive model in favour of "the Newtonian style" which endorsed an abductive approach able to take the leap from complex particulars to simple generalities.
Inference to the best explanation involves a back and forth where the world as it is seen, and the laws that might explain that, swim into view together as the two halves a modelling relation. So the particular is extrapolated to discover some general - motivated by the reasonable metaphysical principle that lawful simplicity underlies all the messy real world complexity. And then the truth of that generality is checked against what it then predicts. It is tested by whether it seems to predict the particulars that were used to predict it.
So abduction is a mix of the inductive and deductive - but at a still vague level. All it needs is the start of what feels like it is going to become a good fit. Things are starting to snap together. A pattern is beginning to emerge.
You can try to formalise abduction as an if-then habit of thought. It is a species of induction in attempting the "invalid" thing of going from the particular to the general. And it is also "invalid" in that it accepts vagueness as a suitable grounding. Nothing actually has to be crisply or definitely stated at the beginning. That is instead the desired destination. Meanwhile a loose fit is good enough if it is a fit that seems to be growing tighter as work is done to clarify the direction being revealed.
Anyway, it is if-then reasoning. If this general rule were the case, these kinds of particular results would not look surprising. These kinds of particular results do exist. Therefore the general rule is probably the case. And historians show that this is the way Newton moved in his reasoning to develop a mathematically-definite theory.
So all reasoning involves this two-way interaction. We need to go from the particular to the general, and from the general to the particular, in as secure a way as possible. Obviously, deduction is more secure than induction because it introduces no new semantics. But then the cost of that is that deduction can introduce no new semantics.
Then the sense that this is a real jump, not some gradual change, is explained by the complex world of messy particulars being the state of broken symmetry in nature. And what we are trying to recover - as the trick that makes scientific models work - is the deeper symmetry that got broke.
We have a smashed up lot of glass bits on the floor. And a lot of bits are probably missing. We theb want to know whether it was once a glass vase or a glass dish, or whatever.
So the move from the particular to the general is seeking a hidden symmetry that is believed to lurk behind a messy complexity. We can't see that symmetry directly as a further thing to observe - symmetry-breakings tend to be thermally irreversible and so the past is gone. But we can imagine it mathematically. We can recover it as a mathematical idea.
Any amount of observables can't add up inductively to reveal the hidden whole. What's broke is broke when it comes to our available view of reality. But we can leap imaginatively to the kind of symmetry that could be broken to yield the kind of fragments we see all around.
So reasoning itself is an irreducible coupling of the inductive and deductive directions of thought. And then abduction goes to the fact that this self-organising loop has to start off as a seed and then grow into full and definite flower.
Abduction has both flavours of thought coupled together - as it must to be capable of growth towards a definite understanding. But it is that possibly successful thought still in its tentative stage - one where a loose fit is still acceptable. We are in a state of mind where we are allowing ourselves to be guided by some general principles - like that simple symmetries lie behind every messy and complex broken symmetry - and then looking backwards retroductively to see what generalisation can in fact predict the particulars we seem to identify as being suggestive or significant.
The peculiarity of an elliptical orbit could be explained if it were composed of an inertial straightline motion coupled to a centripetal accelerative force. The inertia is a symmetry, so falls out of the story. You now just have to account for the symmetry breaking which is the centripetal force exerted by a planetary body.
But why should only planets have gravity? Right, let's again find the symmetry. All masses attract. It is not something special but something which is the same for all. The symmetry of the force is broken only by the accident of the locally differing quantities of mass involved. There is the universal principle - the further inductive leap of imagination - needed to get a proper theory going.
And so a sharp picture of this thing called gravity swims into theoretical view. Eventually we can crank out predictions and begin to support the theory's newly acquired, strictly deductive, form with a sufficient weight of inductive confirmation.
Induction and deduction are initially entwined so closely as an if-then inference to the best explanation that the lines are blurred. The mind abductively has to juggle both at once in loose fashion.
But the goal - as a scientist - is to arrive at a clean separation between a theory and its truth. In the end, you want the deductive bit to stand alone as some mathematical grammar that encodes a symmetry and its symmetry breaking. And then the inductive bit becomes the evidence that supports that theoretical structure in terms of the observables that are close enough to whatever was predicted not to count as an unwanted surprise.
I do not think of you as "outsider"; just thought that was worth mentioning with some of your posts I read here.
Quoting SophistiCat
(I am just quoting the last post of an interesting conversation between @SophistiCat and @apokrisis. This topic is also somewhat related to a recent thread on intuition (link).)
I don't know if either of your thoughts have changed on this in the last few years. It seems to me that SophistiCat's objections are weighty for anyone who doesn't accept the approach of pragmatism, but I think it is equally clear that there must be some tertium quid that is being overlooked. I tend to think this tertium quid is Aristotle's notion of induction which was then helped by the metaphysical justification that Christianity provided for it. In the Medieval period the genus was referred to as intellection, a sort of direct knowing as opposed to discursive knowledge.
Usually when we think of induction we think of observing a series of regularities and then forming a probabilistic guess that the next event will also adhere to that regularity. For example, calls induction "probable reasoning" as opposed to the "certain reasoning" of deduction. For Aristotle and the Medievals (and probably also Plato) it was different. There is a kind of certain knowledge in induction/intellection, distinct from probabilistic reasoning.
But there is a more recent and more accessible entry point to the topic, and it is found in the language acquisition of children. Walker Percy was a doctor, novelist, and semioticist:
Quoting Walker Percy and the Magic of Naming, by Karey Perkins (English Dissertation)
A number of Percy's books relate to this subject, but especially The Message in the Bottle and Signposts in a Strange Land. Section 2 of that dissertation is a quick introduction to the topic, "2. The Children: The Magic and Mystery of Naming" (again, an English dissertation). The standard case, which Percy also focused on, is Helen Keller.
In a nutshell the idea is that when you train a dog to sit you are doing something fundamentally different than when you train a child to use language. This is particularly obvious in cases like Helen Keller, where the transition from dyadic to triadic activity is so stark, beautiful, and hard-won.
Or rather, when Helen finally understood the symbol 'water', something fundamentally different occurred than when the dog finally responded to the sign 'sit', even though the stimuli presented were not overly different (children manage symbol acquisition even in spite of parents who approach the task the same way they might approach the training of a dog). At some point Helen crossed a mysterious threshold and understood that 'water' is a symbol, not a sign, and her mind was opened to the entirely new reality of symbols. This, I claim, is intellection (induction), or at least something very close to it. 'Water' changed from being a mere lever which was pulled whenever Helen was thirsty, to a symbolic reality that existed on a plane distinct from stimuli and conditioning and utility.
This is the sort of qualitative 'jump' that Aristotle means by induction. It is the act of seeing a truth in a way that is 'spiritual' and not merely mechanical (for lack of a better word). It also applies in a variety of different contexts. Sometimes we intellect/induct the nature of some reality from frequent exposure, like Helen. Sometimes we require a variety of different arguments before the truth of a conclusion finally "clicks" for us. But even the terms, propositions, inferential rules, and inferential steps of formal arguments require a sort of direct intellectual perception, similar to Helen's symbolic association between 'water' and the physical stuff she was so familiar with via her senses.
Helen's "jump" was not deductive reasoning; it was not abductive reasoning; it was not inductive reasoning (a la Hume); so what was it? The "jump" doesn't occur with dogs or cats or llamas. It isn't predictable or controllable; Helen's teachers often despaired that it would ever occur. "Magical" is not a bad word for it, but in any case it is entirely foreign to our modern mechanistic approach to reality.
Whatever the case, it seems to me that could be right in his claim that "helping ourselves" to inductive reasoning may not be a problem, so long as it is understood in this very rarefied sense. If intellection really is a tertium quid, then it is not bound by the rules of deduction or Humean induction. The only reason we can't help ourselves to it is because it doesn't wait on our beck and call in the way that deduction or Humean induction do, but this is a rather different problem than the one that SophistiCat complained of.