Banno

Is the argument that abduction can be used to pick out which theories are conspiracy theories? Then what counts as a conspiracy theory is which "concl...

Yes, and there's plenty more here to unpack. "Why" questions presume intent, in some aspect, and so all that goes with intentionality.

That nicely frames the incipient circularity in explaining causation in terms of evolution. To make use of evolutionary explanations, we are already t...

Let's see what @"Ludwig V" says, but it's clear Hume rejected the Aristotelian idea of causation, replacing it with habit and custom.

This is what I at first took T Clark to be saying, here: But perhaps not.

, a compelling line of thought. Good stuff. Ludwig rightly emphasizes that Hume rejects the idea of causation as a metaphysical reality. For Hume, cau...

Pathetic. "My daddy's a policeman..."

That's part of the problem... the idea is equivocal. Any way, back to the insults and misrepresentations from our friends.

Yep. On this we agree.

You've put up a few posts, to which I have not replied. That's becasue they appear to be addressing something very different to what I have actually s...

A philosopher worthy of attention in regard to conspiracy theories is Melina Tsapos. Maybe start with Who is a Conspiracy Theorist?, in which she sets...

Good. Feyerabend is mistaken, but in interesting ways. Perhaps the most important aspect of his writing is his drawing attention to how the normativel...

Go right ahead. Just don't conclude that such an explanation is true, which is what is needed if we are to overcome Hume's objection.

This was a side-kick at Aristotle's causes. Perhaps for Aristotle "fire is hot" is a description, but "fire is hot because heat is its essential natur...

If that's all it is, then fine. Add the word "best" - "creating the best explanatory hypotheses" - and it falls apart. So where you say "plausible" ad...

I'll accept that, if you will accept that the explanation is no more than a more usable description. :wink:

Ok, so what is it?

Noether’s theorem links symmetries to conservation laws - is that were you would go? Isn't describing things in terms of symmetry still describing the...

:wink: And is that better than "Be-cause it is the will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster"? I think not. What makes gravity a better account is F=Gm?m?/...

Seems to me you missed the argument. Oh well. Let's look at conspiracy theories. The classic analysis for my eye comes from Watkins, in his Confirmabl...

Good stuff. ...happens a lot more then it perhaps ought, around these fora. A favourite grump of mine. But if I may advocate for the devil, let's look...

there's a lot in that, a fair bit of it being quite agreeable, some less so. Here's, I think, the first use of "abduction" in this thread: Leaving asi...

Well, much appreciated. Kind of you to say.

Perhaps, but given it's abstruseness, I'm not sure we should even grant that.

Sure, science involves hunches, guesses, paradigm shifts — all the messiness Feyerabend loved. But dignifying that by calling it “abduction” is a mist...

This is a simple logical truth - a hypotheses being unfalsified does not make it more likely to be true. On this we agree. We could take a Bayesian ap...

His work is a bit broader than just that. His classic formulation, "anything goes", is of course mistaken; but the interesting bit is how it is mistak...

Please, disagree. Science is a human enterprise, and as such is communal. A picture of how science works must include the social aspects, looking at t...

Thanks for the notification. I hadn't seen this. A shame the focus is on his last few years rather than on his contributions to philosophy of language...

A neat example that supports the hypothesis that "abduction" - understood as accepting the best hypothesis - is central to scientific method. That's w...

Quite right. We need pay close attention to that last bit. We may indeed support one hypotheses over another, but the "why" cannot be based solely on ...

Should. But should it? We have before us quite different notions of abduction. Sometimes it is talked of as the process of forming an hypothesis. We k...

Well, yes - Conformation of the current scientific theory. Feyerabend would have a party here.

Cool. Nice and clean. Good stuff. A few issues. "Better" - an improvement on "best", but suffering the same ambiguity. If abduction is going to tell u...

Same here. To general disgust and annoyance. It's still large enough to make a difference, and the point - that labour may be divorced from government...

you really haven’t given a validation of abduction. If you really believe that the whole of abduction is just brainstorming, then you’re missing quite...

Pretty much. Abduction was perhaps an attempt to form an algorithmic method for science, back in the days when such things were thought important. Whe...

That's not what was said. But if you can set out what you think abduction is, and how it works, just go ahead and do so. I don't think anyone here can...

:wink: I wish you would think. Here's a thing - what does "abduction" mean? Even the SEP article can't say. So now you claim it's just making up an hy...

Indeed, and my reply was to reaffirm that the testing of an hypothesis is not part of performing an abduction. Abducting is choosing the "best" hypoth...

Yep. Just so. Do you? Ok, that's it's proposed use - how does it manage to do this? But there is no method for doing this - only what someone claims t...

Of course not. A rejection of one way that philosophers have claimed science works is not a rejection of science. That scientific theory is developed ...

That's a pretty clear account. You are waving words around as if they were arguments. What is abduction, and how does it help? And the answer is quite...

I took your point to be about the development of those countries - Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan. As in, not about the population emigrating to Europe o...

While it's true that on balance China is a net creditor, so is Japan, along with Germany, Singapore, Taiwan... The USA is again outstanding in being a...

Chinese debt is about 75% of GDP.

All the data I see points to a 1% growth, decreasing steadily. Population is predicted to peek at 10.3 billion in 2084. The relation between labour an...

I think you were distracted away from a quite valid point.

Albo is streets ahead of the Libs. They are cutting each other up over "zero emissions" legislation. Australia recognised Palestine the other day, pis...

Yep. It's entropy all the way down. Old. I am surprised that Apo was reduced to name calling so quickly.