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aletheist

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That would be the nominalist view; by contrast, a realist would say that a "law of nature" is a real tendency or habit that governs actual things and ...
February 07, 2017 at 17:21
I already acknowledged that I am swimming upstream on this. I think that "probability" should be reserved for when we are making predictions about pop...
February 07, 2017 at 15:31
No, again, at that point the correct answer is 1 if it came up heads and 0 if it came up tails. Someone's personal ignorance of the result is irreleva...
February 07, 2017 at 15:17
Again, my issue is not so much with doing the kinds of calculations that you are describing, it is with calling this "probability" rather than "confid...
February 07, 2017 at 14:33
I obviously disagree, but I see no point in arguing about it. There is a reason why the scientific method is also called the hypothetico-deductive met...
February 07, 2017 at 01:43
You are the one who insists on defining retroduction as "inferring from data." I describe it as "formulating an explanatory hypothesis," which is exac...
February 07, 2017 at 01:28
These were both retroductions (experience to hypothesis), not inductions (hypothesis to experience). Inductive experimentation requires a retroductive...
February 06, 2017 at 23:07
Einstein hypothesized it (retroduction), he and others worked out some of its experiential consequences (deduction), and then various scientists condu...
February 06, 2017 at 23:03
Not at all - retroduction (or abduction) is a distinct type of reasoning that provides explanatory conjectures for deductive explication and inductive...
February 06, 2017 at 22:22
Thomas Jefferson's answer in 1776 still rings true to me.
February 06, 2017 at 19:37
Again, nothing about B has any bearing whatsoever on what you can claim about A. They are two different statements.
February 06, 2017 at 15:03
Repeating the exact same argument is not an explanation, and it is certainly not any more convincing. This is not a statement about A at all; it is a ...
February 06, 2017 at 14:52
As others have been pointing out, the liar statement (A) is not equivalent to B. At the very least, you have to provide an argument for why the two st...
February 06, 2017 at 14:35
That is not one of the two options in this thought experiment. I was hoping to avoid debates about which (if either) is correct, and instead focus on ...
February 03, 2017 at 23:09
Turn that around - if it does not hold when there are a trillion things to consider, then it does not hold when there are just two things to consider....
February 03, 2017 at 17:27
Only in deductive reasoning. Retroductive reasoning is valid when it produces an explanatory hypothesis that is capable of experiential testing. Induc...
February 03, 2017 at 16:56
I do not consider the observation of a green apple to be relevant to either of these propositions. Bayesian plausibility somehow counts it as evidence...
February 03, 2017 at 16:52
This is simply what person A calls it when person B ignores something that person A counts as evidence, but person B does not. Is there some objective...
February 03, 2017 at 16:23
Your premiss here is that anything that increases the Bayesian plausibility of a proposition should count as evidence for its truth. Only someone who ...
February 03, 2017 at 16:04
My point is that someone's actual confidence or degree of belief is not objectively measurable. Again, most people will never do this calculation, and...
February 03, 2017 at 15:21
Lots of different people have lots of different ways of counting something as evidence, and then weighing it with other evidence. Very few people have...
February 03, 2017 at 15:13
I raised no objections to what you said in the post that you linked about the probability of all ten eggs being white before they are produced; or eve...
February 03, 2017 at 15:06
Yes, although there is more to the frequentist view than what you quoted. As its own Wikipedia article states: Personally, I think that even the "obje...
February 03, 2017 at 14:37
Not fallacies per se, but rather types of reasoning other than deduction - e.g., retroduction (hypothesizing a plausible antecedent from an observed c...
February 03, 2017 at 14:13
Objectively or subjectively? :D Yes, but I would prefer not to say that probability has anything to do with it, since we are clearly talking about one...
February 03, 2017 at 13:59
, , As I have stated repeatedly, probability does not apply to individual cases - only to populations (P) and samples randomly taken therefrom (S). Pr...
February 03, 2017 at 02:30
Or as Peirce succinctly put it, "A particular proposition asserts the existence of something of a given description. A universal proposition merely as...
February 02, 2017 at 22:26
The calculation is fine as far as it goes; the interpretation is the problem. The last marble in the bag is either black (p=1) or non-black (p=0), we ...
February 02, 2017 at 21:34
You did not stipulate any knowledge of how the marbles got into the bag. All we knew was that the first 16 marbles that we took out were black. This i...
February 02, 2017 at 21:02
Fair enough, but what you are really saying then is that nobody in your house right now is American. No, but I can see why you misunderstood me. The u...
February 02, 2017 at 20:47
I think you are, unless you qualify it somehow. You are saying that anything taller than 9 feet cannot (ever) be human. Then this is a universal propo...
February 02, 2017 at 19:46
I am fine with this common-sense approach for everyday living, especially if we substitute "one is confident" for "it is probable." What bothers me is...
February 02, 2017 at 18:52
Not really. Why would you think that? The contents (or lack thereof) of the first 16 pockets have no bearing whatsoever on the contents (or lack there...
February 02, 2017 at 18:26
One more point - you also have to stipulate that this was true when the observations occurred. Even then, it is only strictly true if those observatio...
February 02, 2017 at 18:22
The difference is that you actually observed all of your pockets. The OP is claiming that a single observation provides evidential support for a unive...
February 02, 2017 at 18:04
This is a deductive fallacy, but it is a textbook case of retroductive (or abductive) reasoning. "There's a lion" is a hypothesis, a plausible explana...
February 02, 2017 at 17:58
Why do you keep addressing this to me? My statement that you quoted has absolutely nothing to do with universal propositions. Observation of a green a...
February 02, 2017 at 17:29
You used universal propositions, not singular propositions, in the OP. Now you are claiming that the two propositions of interest are both singular - ...
February 02, 2017 at 17:26
Please read what you quoted from me again. I said that the observation of a green apple only supports - in fact, proves - the particular proposition t...
February 02, 2017 at 17:01
You were quoting someone else here, but it expresses precisely why I take exception to using the term "probability" in this way, rather than "confiden...
February 02, 2017 at 16:45
Indeed - when working with random samples, not individual cases. Returning to the deck of cards, if we anticipate drawing one from a truly random loca...
February 02, 2017 at 15:23
To clarify, the model (often called a "world") in which these two propositions are consistent is one in which ravens do not exist; hence X is not a ra...
February 02, 2017 at 14:26
Truth is not a matter of probability. It is either true (p=1) or false (p=0) that if something is not black then it is not a raven. The observation of...
February 02, 2017 at 14:21
No, I am just taking exception to using the term "probability" for subjective confidence or degree of belief - as did Peirce, if I remember right. As ...
February 02, 2017 at 01:23
Now you are losing track of the quantifiers. Given the observation of a green apple, the probability that some non-black thing is a non-raven is 1. It...
February 02, 2017 at 01:06
If by "vagueness and propensity" you mean what Peirce called 1ns and 3ns, then yes, that is the working hypothesis that I have currently adopted and c...
February 01, 2017 at 22:45
Only if we embrace a sloppy usage of "probability." You refuse to acknowledge the objective/subjective distinction. There is nothing strange about it.
February 01, 2017 at 22:21
I have (repeatedly) explained the error in this reasoning - successful observations have no effect whatsoever on the (objective) probability of the st...
February 01, 2017 at 22:15
Sigh, I thought that we had made a breakthrough. Your math fails right here: Observation has no effect whatsoever on the probability of the claim bein...
February 01, 2017 at 21:15
My objection was that probability is not the same thing as epistemic uncertainty. At last! If we observe a green apple, then I suppose we can be very,...
February 01, 2017 at 21:00