Induction and Science

Remember Bill? Before Bill was tragically killed (by a fast moving bus that he believed would pass harmlessly through him) Bill told me that based on his epistemology he knew that inductive reasoning was the opposite of that which you have described. I am glad you think so highly of Bill's epistemological methods and conclusions.So who is right? You or Bill?Or both of you simultaneously?

This has nothing to do with this topic, Straggler. Bring it to the other thread.Also, are you planning on laying out your deductive argument with all its premises?JonEdited by Jon, : ABE

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Check out Apollo's Temple!

I have, in this thread, adopted Bill's epistemological model.Thus we have come to two mutually exclusive conclusions based on deductive logic alone starting from different premises.Deductive logic will only ever tell you what is already contained in your starting assumptions.Thus we are faced with the question of how we are to derive the point from which we launch our deductive logic.I would suggest that science uses inductive reasoning to arrive at these launch points for deductive reasoning.From where do you think they are sourced?

Too bad this thread is about science, and so Bill's epistemology is irrelevant. Okay; I'll prompt again: lay out your argumentpremises and conclusions. Good suggestion; why not bother backing it up? (As you've been asked to do twice now.) Huh? Does it matter?Jon

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Check out Apollo's Temple!

Hi, nwr. The "natural law" of gravity is the natural phenomenon that these three "scientific laws" of gravity were attempting to explain.----- Why not? Some phenomenon are random. Incidence of mutations during replication would be a phenomenon that could be considered inconsistent.----- I think the conclusion to be drawn here is that the people you refer to are using inductive reasoning to argue that "scientific laws" are part of nature. Although I'm a relative novice in the scientific community, I can state with a fairly high degree of confidence that this is an integral part of the Discussion section of typical scientific papers.Edited by Bluejay, : grammar

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

If you are going to say that everything is induction, then the word "induction" loses all meaning.In Message 200 you seemed to imply that Newton's third law was a case of induction. I'm challenging you to provide actual evidence to support that. However, statistical inference is largely deductive, and it gives confidence intervals. Scientific laws such as Newton's do not give confidence intervals, so cannot have resulted from that kind of statistical deduction. They are also far more precise than anything that you would ever get from statistical inference.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

The topic is supposed to be about the use of induction in science, not about whether or not I can be said to use it in my private life. I am quite certain that we will still have the same theory of gravity tomorrow as we have today. However, I have no basis at all for judging whether the phenomena of gravity will continue to be much as they are today. I was quite clear when I said that was a guess, rather than a conclusion. If you don't know what Platonism and nominalism are, and if you don't understand why they were highly relevant in the post where I used them, then why not just admit your ignorance instead of trying to turn it into an insult.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I'm not sure that science has a conclusion about that. I expect that many individual scientists have opinions. But I don't think that there is anything that can be called "the scientific conclusion."

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

My evidence is that there is evidence to support Newton's laws. In science, when we check our laws and theories against the evidence we grow confident that the laws and theories are at least somewhat true. As the evidence builds, so too does our confidence. Despite the fact that we don't actually know deductively that Newton's laws are a true description of the areas of motion and impulse they are treated as tentatively true. It is as if we make a less-than-certain inference that they are true, with enough confidence to justify strapping some people into a rocket fueled machine and shooting them at the moon. But our evidence that Newton's laws describe motion is acquired with confidence intervals, and the inference that Newton's laws are true enough is uncertain and has potentially calculable confidence intervals. As the article I raised earlier puts it:

quote:

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One of the most important applications of a formal inductive logic is to the confirmation or refutation of scientific hypotheses. The logic should explicate the notion of evidential support for all sorts of hypotheses, ranging from simple diagnostic claims (e.g., the patient is infected with the HIV) to scientific theories about the fundamental nature of the world, like quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity. We'll now look into how support functions (a.k.a. confirmation functions) represent the logic of hypothesis confirmation. This kind of inductive logic is often referred to as Bayesian Confirmation Theory.

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Science doesn't have anything to say about gravity next week? Are you serious?Science does make predictions yes?How can science predict the position of the moon or any other celestial object next week without inductively concluding that gravity will behave in the future in accordance with how it has been observed to behave thus far?How can science make any conclusions about any future event without invoking a degree of inductive reasoning from which further logical deductions can then be made? Predicting when eclipses will occur (for example) is not a scientific conclusion?

Okay. I certainly agree that there are natural phenomena. I'm a bit puzzled as to why the term "law" would be used for them, but I have seen that usage elsewhere. And yet I'm pretty sure that many evolutionists would say that the random occurrence of mutations is a consistent feature of replication.I raised the question, because I'm not sure that "consistent" is all that meaningful. Or, to say it differently, people are quite inconsistent in the way that they use "consistent."When we say X is consistent with Y, then we are saying something that is at least a bit clearer. And when we say that a logic system is self-consistent (with "self" often being dropped), we are being quite precise. But it is often hard to make sense of other uses of "consistent." That's about what I thought they were arguing, until I questioned their conclusion. But now it seems that they all want to twist the discussion into something else. Thank you for being the exception, and actually sticking with the topic. I'll grant that. For the most part, scientists don't try to analyze how they do science. They just do it. So when asked about how they are doing it, they just use what philosophers of science often say. I'm not questioning the science, but I am questioning the claims of philosophy of science.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Not only does your entire epistemological stance necessarily result in contradictions your notion of non-inductive science makes absolutely no sense in terms of making predictions.How can scientific predictions be made without being based on the inductive conclusion that natural phenomenon will behave in the future as they have been observed to behave thus far?How can science make any conclusions about any future event without invoking a degree of inductive reasoning from which further logical deductions can then be made? Except that you accepted it as valid and now I am applying it. As per Bill's epistemology: My premise is that what I believe is true. I believe that induction is not deduction without the premises being stated. Thus my conclusion is that induction is not deduction without the premises being stated. Thus I conclude that you are wrong.Now I think Bill's method of knowing is silly. But you said it was as valid as any other merely because it is internally logically consistent. So I am going to apply Bill's epistemology to demonstrate to you that simply picking ones internally consistent axioms to derive the conclusion one wants is not a very useful method of finding out anything at all.And this, of course, is exactly what you have done in your little logic exercise. How do we predict if not by applying deductive logic to conclusions inductively derived from necessarily incomplete evidence? Deductive logic will only give you outputs that are consistent with your inputs. Nonsense in = Nonsense out.So we have to have some way of deriving our starting point for deductive logic. In science those starting points for deduction are inductively derived conclusions. It is of the utmost importance. Because purely deductive methods mean that - Nonsense In = Nonsense Out

Your entire notion of non-inductive science makes absolutely no sense in terms of science being able to make predictions.How can scientific predictions be made without being based on the inductive conclusion that natural phenomenon will behave in the future as they have been observed to behave thus far?How can science make any conclusions about any future event without invoking a degree of inductive reasoning from which further logical deductions can then be made? Let's hope we don't launch any satellites or fly any aeroplanes or do anything else that relies on us "guessing" correctly then huh?Your position on this is a shambles.

Scientists and engineers make predictions. Science doesn't.Acceptance of a scientific theory is a consensus acceptance by a large body of scientists. However, predictions are made by individuals and not by the body of scientists at large.I'll note, also, that predictions can turn out to be wrong. If it is made using scientific theories, then it is a scientific conlusion as contrasted to "unscientific conclusion". But it is still the conclusion of individuals rather than of science.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

You have excelled yourself this time. How is that not true of all scientific conclusions predictive or otherwise?You seem to have just put yourself into a position of arguing that science isn't scientific because it is can only result in conclusions derived from individuals.How hilarious.If you are going to dispute this please provide an example of a scientific conclusion that is not derived from individuals and is thus considered (by you) to be more scientific than a predicted eclipse. Of course. Science is tentative.