Induction and Science

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The above is an example of the "reasoning" principle known as inductive logic. It is absurd.

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And yet, that is how science works. Is there a theory in any field of science that did not come about in that manner?

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

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For every action there is a an equal and opposite reaction.

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I also like the "Law" of Conservation of Energy, which we accept only because we have never seen it violated.

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

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It is how philosophers claim that science works.

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It's also how most scientists claim science works.--

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You might enjoy reading "Against Method" (book by Paul Feyerabend).

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Yes, I did enjoy it.-I would also like to know what you mean by "empirical methodology".

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

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Rather, I was pointing to such discoveries as that homo sapiens can find a viable niche on this planet, apparently without using induction in that process of discovery.

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Because we are not discussing how a species finds a viable niche, nor how people live their day-to-day lives, nor how I find my house keys when I have misplaced them. We are discussing how scientists practice science.

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

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By contrast, the people named "Crowe" are expected to be relatively inhomogeneous, and thus we would not expect interpolation or extrapolation to be useful.

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But the fact that all of the Crowes observed wear black shoes seems to suggest that Crowes are somewhat homogenous after all.

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

Ha ha ha. I love Hempel's Paradox. I bring it into the Math Concepts class that I teach when we do symbolic logic.In my opinion, that is exactly the essential difference between crows and Crowes. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we have never seen a non-black crow, then we can assume that, over recorded history, we have seen a significant fraction of crows -- enough to come to a definite conclusion that crows are black.On the other hand, without knowing how many Crowes there are, the fact that all the Crowes we have seen were wearing black shoes could be due to the statistically small sample that we have observed.Added by edit:By small, I mean not only the small number of Crowes relative to the total number of Crowes, but the small fraction of the lives of each one where we have seen them wearing anything at all.This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 04-Feb-2006 11:41 PM

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

I realize that this is getting off-topic, but I thought the following warranted a reply:

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Evolution presumes more order arising form less order...

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Actually, the theory of evolution presumes no such thing. I wrote a post some time ago listing all the presumptions of the theory of evolution; as you can see, there is nothing about "order" arising. If you accept that actual "presumptions", then "order arising out of disorder" may be a logical conclusion, but it is not a presumption. That is, if you can explain what you mean by "order"; but judging from the recent "morality" thread, I suspect that you might not have an idea of "order" that is precise enough to warrant making any definite statements about it.And since we see "order arising from less order" all the time, there doesn't seem to be anything amiss in presuming this anyway.

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline