Hi Stephen Push,
I apologize if I misinterpreted your post.
May I apologize?
If the latter is what you meant, then your argument is inductive rather than deductive, because you have drawn generalized conclusions from specific observations. The terms "any new dog species" and "any new canine species" may seem specific, but those terms are synonymous with "all dog species" and "all canine species."
I came in late to the discussion, and my initial responses on this thread were a little muddled. Subsequently, I have been putting some time\effort into reconciling what I see as problems with them. As I see it, there are both deductive and inductive elements involved in the scientific process, and that they are easily confused if care is not taken with the semantics.
Initial phase - deductive: evaluate the available evidence and deduct common traits\elements, things that are true\fact about the available evidence, hopefully organized into some new perspective that leads one to wonder if it is true in a more general sense.
Second phase - inductive: make a generalization\hypothesis from the (re)structured available evidence based on the deduced common traits\elements to predict what should be observed if true and not observed if false.
Third phase - deductive: evaluate the results of testing to see if the results (a) invalidate the inductive generalization\hypothesis or (b) adds new evidence to the group of available evidence with the original common traits\elements (increases the pool of true\fact elements of available (now including new) evidence that is the foundation for the generalization\hypothesis.
In this regard, only the elements of the first and third phase can be considered as factual\true (the deductive contribution) while the second phase can be either falsified or possibly true (the inductive contribution).
No matter how well established a
theory is, it can never be more than
possibly true, because inductive logic does not give you a conclusion of true\fact. This holds even when a theory is called a law. I believe that this is, in essence, your argument (or a major portion thereof) in this thread, yes?
In this regard, the inductive element in science is not to determine what is fact\true, but to show what should be tested to see if it can help define what is fact\true.
The important thing, as I see it, is that this process sifts evidence and concepts and eliminates falsified concepts while organizing facts into an explanatory framework -- our "best guess" or "best known explanation" of the evidence -- and that the pool of known evidence\facts is increased whether a theory is falsified or not. In this way the process is an incremental approximation of truth that continually gets closer to reality, even if it can't arrive at a definitive conclusion.
In this regard it is not important what the theory states, or what your presuppositions are, as what is important is what is determined in the course of the process to be false (and discarded) and what is determined to be additional facts to incorporate into the fund of knowledge to use in the process of making more tests and theories.
(By the way, I don't know why you included the third premise. It seems unnecessary.)
It was intended as an observation of new evidence that had not yet been evaluated - in essence a prediction. The kind of new evidence that is provided by the dog-like foxes.
Reply to
Message 682
I agree. The point I am trying to make is that this evidence-based and highly tested theory has been developed largely with non-deductive methods. Your deductive syllogism seemed to take that prior work for granted and thus appeared to give deduction credit for knowledge that had been discovered non-deductively.
Is it? As we see above, the facts\truths that we can know are determined deductively from the original evidence and the added information from the testing. This knowledge is discovered by the testing and deductive evaluation parts of the process, not by the inductive process. Let's try an analogy:
I have a rifle set up on a fixed mount 1000 yards from a target. With the gun-sight I make my first approximation of aiming the rifle at the target. I take 10 shots with that setting, then measure the results. The scatter in the shots from their mean value determines how effectively the rifle reproduces the same results from a test, the difference between the mean value and the target center determines the accuracy of the initial approximation. I make a vertical adjustment in the rifle setup in the direction that the mean value was vertically off from the target center and repeat the shots and measurements, then make another vertical adjustment towards the center in proportion to the remaining delta to the center and the difference in the two shot patterns. I do the same thing in the horizontal adjustments. All else being equal, and not having any other variables that are not controlled by the rifle setting (variable cross-wind etc), I should be able in fairly short order to reach a reasonable accuracy within the ability of the rifle to reproduce the same results in repeated tests, regardless of where my initial shots ended up.
It is the deductive process in the evaluation of the evidence that brings the pattern closer to the target center. If I just relied on induction then I could go back and forth with varying degrees of success, but never approaching the center in the way that deductive analysis does.
Imagine that one of these dog-like foxes escaped and you found it without knowing what it was or where it came from. How would you determine its origins? Could you do so by a completely deductive method? I think not. You might look at morphology, behavior, biochemistry, and genetics. You might try to breed it with other canids to see with which species it produced viable, fertile offspring. I submit that you would be using induction and/or inference to the best explanation more than deduction in this research.
Good question.
Looking at it morphologically, we should determine that it had many elements of foxes (bones, skeletal proportions, teeth, organs, etc) and several elements of dogs (tail shape, skin & fur coloring). By behavior we should also see a mixture of fox and dog behaviors (as evidenced in the videos), while genetics should show that it had many elements of foxes (homologies) but some of not-foxes (derived), and that elements consistent with dogs would also be consistent with wolves and wild foxes, and more elements should be shared with wild foxes than either wolves or dogs. In biochemistry we should see lowered levels of adrenaline (again as documented in the studies) compared to wild foxes, and that dogs would have similar (analogous) lowered levels of adrenaline compared to wolves (this apparently - though not confirmed - is one of the effects of domestication on domesticated species according to the study) and that this affects the development of the fetus\young to produce the changes in morphology observed (again as shown in many domesticated species, according to the study, showing that this is an analogous element rather than a homologous element between dogs and dog-like foxes).
{phase one}
From the morphology you could conclude that the dog-like fox could be a hybrid between fox and dog. From the behavior your could also conclude that the dog-like fox could be a hybrid between fox and dog or that the dog-like fox had been raised in a dog-like environment. From genetics you could conclude that the dog-like fox is a descendant from wild foxes. From the biochemistry you could conclude that the dog-like fox is a descendant from wild foxes with development modified by lower adrenaline.
{phase two}
Using cladistics to compare all the common and different elements you should then find that the most parsimonious explanation was that the dog-like fox was a descendant of wild foxes.
{phase three}
This would be a statistically deduced most likely answer:
Cladistics - Wikipedia
quote:
Cladistics is also distinguished by its emphasis on parsimony and hypothesis testing (particularly falsificationism), rather than subjective decisions that some other taxonomic systems rely upon.[3]
This is the kind of rigorous empirical testing and deductive evaluation used in biology to validate common descent in the larger picture.
There it is again. A facile deductive argument is given credit for the really interesting work that was done to establish (a), (b), and (c) using mostly non-deductive methods.
If we were to start by assuming special creation of the dog-like fox, then we would test for elements that are not consistent with dogs, foxes, canines or mammals. Not finding any we would conclude that there is no evidence of any process other than common descent from existing species. This leaves special creation as god-directed evolution causing what we see as natural processes, and that still results in the most parsimonious explanation being that the dog-like fox was a (directed) descendant of wild foxes. As such
your complaint is irrelevant.
Please forgive me if I didn't explain my position clearly. I never meant to imply that presupposition is a good way to do science. By "presupposes" I meant that your deductive argument assumed the truth of the premises without explaining why that assumption was justified.
Yet it is the deductive evaluation of the evidence that either invalidates the theory or shows that we have additional evidence that is consistent with the evidence used to formulate the theory. The deductive analysis of the results of testing brings us closer to reality, and this refines the inductive hypothesis for the next round of testing.
Enjoy.
Edited by RAZD, : )
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