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Author | Topic: Induction and Science | |||||||||||||||||||||||
ohnhai Member (Idle past 5191 days) Posts: 649 From: Melbourne, Australia Joined: |
All Boeing 737 passenger aircraft have arrived safely at their destination. By induction, all such aircraft will arrive safely. Oops, one of them crashed, so the induction has failed. Send in the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) to investigate. Sure, Inductive reasoning often will fail to give the answer you finally submit as ”the truth’. It’s a tool to allow you to ”guess’ the ball park based on a limited set of data. “hmm, the data we have leads me to think that X will be what’s happening. Lets test that . .” In your example of the Crowe’s and their shoes, it would be reasonable to expect some coloration between Crowe’s and black shoes, as all the Crowe’s you have observed have indeed been wearing black shoes. That gives you a ”valid’ starting point to expand the data further. If in later investigations you learn that it was those three and only those three who have ever worn black shoes then, even though the inductive reasoning was wrong, you have indeed learned a very curious and interesting ”fact’. To pick holes because inductive reasoning can and does fail to deliver solid, well supported ”facts’ on the first swing of the bat, just goes to show a lack of understanding of what it is and how it is used. And in the 737 example I would replace the word ”will’ with ”should’, but that’s nitt picking. The fact is one 737 crash doesn’t invalidate the value initial conclusion. After many, many, many thousand successful landings leading to the conclusion that they shouldn’t crash, a crash will lead to a very specific question. “Why?”. If the result of that question is that “the hydraulic hoses on the primary flight controls can perish if repeatedly exposed to certain conditions” then you modify the inductive reasoning conclusion. I,e, “as long as the hoses on the primary flight controls have not perished then all 737s will arrive safely”, and you add regular checks of said hose to the maintenance schedule to make sure they don’t perish. Next time a 737 crashes (inductive reasoning doesn’t exclude the possibility) you repeat the process, and so the list of caveats grows. But with aviation, by the time we get to the 737 we have found a vast number of things that will cause an aircraft to crash, and because of that we check for them. Because we check for them 737s tend not to fall out of the sky on a regular basis, leading to the inductive conclusion that a 737 should reach its destination safely. This message has been edited by ohnhai, 08-02-2006 03:54 PM
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
I'm ASSUMING that a scientific law is a generalisation ? By definition a scientific law is a geneal statement. It is meant to apply generally, and not just in the specific instances tested.
Newton's law of gravity is a general rule giving the atttactive force between two masses. Newton himself used celestial mechanics as his main observations. And we are still not certain of the underlying mechanisms.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1496 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Which specific observations were generalized by Darwin, in his "Origin of the Species"? You're not familiar with Darwin's observations at Galapagos, and aboard the Beagle?
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
I'm ASSUMING that a scientific law is a generalisation ? By definition a scientific law is a geneal statement.
That a statement is general does not make it a generalization. There can be general statements that are not generalizations. In fact, I just made such a general statement. That a statement is a generalization does not make it an inductive generalization. Mathematicians are often generalizing, but they are never making inductive generalizations.
And we are still not certain of the underlying mechanisms.
You may have misunderstood my comment about mechanisms. I do not suggest that scientific laws are mechanisms of reality. There might not even be such mechanisms. I am saying that scientific laws are empirical mechanisms, part of the empirical machinery we use to effectively manage our interactions with reality.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1496 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
There can be general statements that are not generalizations. In fact, I just made such a general statement. Right. You just generalized the first statement from the second, proving Paul's point.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
Which specific observations were generalized by Darwin, in his "Origin of the Species"? You're not familiar with Darwin's observations at Galapagos, and aboard the Beagle?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1496 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
He did not observe any species originate. Nor did he explain origins in his book. (It's not a very good title.) What he did do was generalize the principle of natural selection from the specific instances of selection he observed.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
Nor did he explain origins in his book.
He certainly thought he was accounting for the succession of species. He wasn't explaining origins in the sense of abiogenesis.
What he did do was generalize the principle of natural selection from the specific instances of selection he observed.
As far as I know, the specific instances of selection he observed were of artificial selection, and were not on Galapagos. But his theory was based on far more evidence than that. It just was not an inductive generalization of the particular observations.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1496 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
He certainly thought he was accounting for the succession of species. I'm not familiar with any passage in his book where that's the case. Darwin's model explains the development of form, not the origin of populations. Like I said, it's not a good title, by our modern understanding of "species"; Darwin attempted to explain changes in morphology over time by generalizing from the changes he saw pigeon breeders inflect by selection.
But his theory was based on far more evidence than that. Right. He generalized from that evidence, as well. When you explain specific evidence via a statement of a universal trend, you're generalizing.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
He certainly thought he was accounting for the succession of species. I'm not familiar with any passage in his book where that's the case. When you explain specific evidence via a statement of a universal trend, you're generalizing.
If it is an inductive generalization, then the specific evidence ought to be particular cases of the general statement, and not just something that can be inferred from the general statement.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1496 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
He doesn't talk about speciation, as I recall. The formation of the species concept as one of reproductive isolation postdates Darwin. Indeed, the Mendelian model of discrete genetic inheritance and sexual recombination was unknown at the time, Mendel's paper languishing in an Austrian library. So, indeed, Darwin doesn't talk about the idea of speciation as an event because the formation of species as a function of population genetics was unknown. As far as Darwin was concerned, he merely needed to explain how organisms became morphologically suited to their environment, because that to him was the origin of what he thought of as "species."
If it is an inductive generalization, then the specific evidence ought to be particular cases of the general statement, and not just something that can be inferred from the general statement. I guess I don't understand. Darwin inferred universal natural selection by generalization from specific cases of selection, recognizing that the only difference between a breeder plucking out the bad pigeons from the coop and mother nature plucking the less-fit pigeons from the jungle was a matter of who was doing the plucking. The specific evidence that Darwin generalized selection from were specific cases of selection.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
Scientific laws are general statements derived from particular instances. That makes them generalisations.
And since you are now saying that your comments on understanding the mechanics were not intended to deny that scientific laws were derived by induction it seems that you have run out of arguments.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
Based on this thread, there seem to be several principles used to argue for induction.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1496 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Based on this thread, there seem to be several principles used to argue for induction. Based on your posts, there seems to be only one two-step process to challenge induction: 1) Get asked a bunch of questions.2) Never answer any of them.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
Oh come off it.
You're ignoring the argument for induction. You've presented strawman arguments against induction. The messages you present in your second point are yours and I agree that you do not deal with evidence and rely on bare assertion. FOr instance to deal in detail with your claims about Newton's law of gravity. Do you really think that Newton's law of Gravity is not a generalisation derived from specific instances ? Do you really think that it has been empirically derived by measuring the attractive force between every possible pairing of masses in this universe ? Or do you think that Newton derived it solely from first principles or more basic laws without direct reference to empirical evidence ?You manage to write astronomy out of existence by insisting that the first experimental test of Newton's law was the first relevant observation. It;s rather an absurd idea - no scientific law would last for over a century unless it had a solid basis in empirical evidence - whcih must involve induction, since there is no other way to universalise a finite set of observations. Yiu say that scientiifc laws are derived from machanisms - but neither Newton nor Cavendish knew the meachanisms underlying gravity which are still not understood. And you have offered no way in which these mechanisms of yours could be discovered. The simple fact is that you don't know what you are talking about. Yet you insist that you must be right and won't hear the arguments against your view.
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