Induction and Science

I haven't seen any persuasive argument. That you consider it a strawman does not make it so. There is a substantial literature on problems with induction. Hume said there was no basis in reason. Goodman gave us the "grue" problem. Hempel gave us his raven paradox. Carnap, when studying degree of confirmation, concluded that for laws of physics the degree of confirmation is zero. Both Kuhn and Feyerabend made strong cases against traditional induction-based philosophy of science. False. My second point references two messages. One was by me, and the other by you. Yes. Of course not. The charge is ridiculous. I have not suggested such a thing. That's like asking "when did you stop beating your mother?".Why ask such loaded questions? Dishonest. That's a gross distortion of what I wrote. Since it is so obviously absurd, why do you falsely accuse me of that absurdity? We finally get to it. An actual argument for induction. This is about the only actual argument that I ever hear.It is, of course, argument from ignorance.How scientific laws are developed ought to be a topic of interest, worthy of investigation.It seems that, at present, anybody who questions whether induction is the method is attacked by inductionists, using arguments similar to those we hear from creationists. We see bare assertions, with no actual evidence. There is just the argument from ignorance. It is induction-of-the-gaps. Induction-did-it.What's wrong with saying that you don't know how laws are formed? At least that leaves it as an open subject. You said much the same in Message 62. You have misunderstood my comment on mechanisms. I corrected that in Message 64. Are you actually reading what I post? The obvious fact is that you don't know what I am talking about. You might try reading more carefully.

Psychologists often claim that people make inductions on only one or two observations. That's a bit silly. My example used three observations. I could have expanded that. But doing so would only make it tedious. The point would still be there.It was a thought experiment. Most of the published literature on induction is in the form of thought experiments. It isn't at all obvious why you think that would indicate induction was heavily used in science. Carnap was a philosopher, not a scientist. That's a reasonable comment on Hume. It isn't so obvious that it applies to Goodman's "grue" problem. I really don't know why you see a contradiction there. But I guess I will have to explain it to you.Among other things, Kepler's laws were part of the evidence Newton used. My statement about Cavendish's observation was with respect to specific observations of which the law of gravity could be considered a generalization. Kepler's laws are not such specific observations. The observations that Kepler had used were also not specific instances of the law of gravity.It is very common, that the evidence that leads to a scientific law is not direct evidence such as could be considered specific instances of what the law asserts. Your own definition of induction from Message 59 rules out that induction is being used in such cases. I did offer an alternative in a brief comment that I could have expanded if you had asked.Insults are unwarranted. You should have read what I wrote, instead of jumping to conclusions. I have not said any of those things. Can you stop making these false allegations. No I haven't. Rather, you have changed which unwarranted conclusions that you have jumped to. No, I have never said that.

At first glance, abductive reasoning seems to better describe what science does. However as far as I can tell

• no inference procedure is given;
• there is no guarantee that there is a best explanation;
• even if there is a best explanation, that might not be the one that science comes up with.

I am arguing against induction. There is no point in repeatedly asking me for an example of a valid induction when I am skeptical that there are any.And apparently you still are unable to count to three. The number of observations was not the point.If you thought that disqualified my example, you could have just said so, as some others did. That might be a fair conclusion if the literature on philosophy of science actually had clear evidence of induction being used. It would be pointless. You have been consistently failing to respond to the parts of my posts that were relevant to such a discussion.

I agree with that.

Your harping on this is an unnecessary diversion. If my thought experiment was a strawman, then most of the literature on induction consists of strawman arguments. We were not discussing statistical sampling. But if you want to include that, then most ordinary measurements consist of a statistical sample of size one that is taken as valid. Stick to discussing the issues, instead of making accusations against the person. The fact is, that for many scientific laws, those laws are themselves prerequisite to the possibility of making the observations that the law is alleged to inductively generalize. If that is what you mean by "bootstrapping problem", then it is enough to demonstrate that induction could not possibly be the correct explanation. Stick to discussing the issues, instead of making allegations about the person.

You are still not responding to the problem. Newton's law of gravity is a statement about forces of attraction between bodies. None of the astronomical observations used for evidence was about forces of attraction. Therefore Newton's law of gravity was not a generalization of those observations, so it could not be a case of induction.

Deduction is an abstract symbolic process. Measurement is a physical process.

I have been asking and you have avoided answering this question since Message 60. I just reworded it. In order to derive statements about force of attraction, statements of the form that the law of gravity is said to generalize, you would first require

• Newton's law of gravity;
• The results of the Cavendish experiment done about 111 years later.

The law of gravity could not have been merely an inductive generalization from the observations available to Newton.

You have allowed yourself to be misled by Rrhain's argument.I can do deduction in my head. I can't tell the temperature in my head - I need a thermometer to do that.

Yes, I agree.Einstein was, of course, informed by experimental data. But deriving GR was mainly theoretical. For Newton, there was a large theoretical component, too. He had good reason to have invented calculus.

Readers can decide for themselves whether those are different wordings of the same question. In order to get forces from acceleration, you need to know the mass. The mass of the planets and the mass of the sun could only be determined by using Newton's law of gravity. The Cavendish experiment, sometimes described as "weighing the earth" was an important step in determining those masses.There is another interesting point here. If induction had been used to form the inverse square law, then in essence you would have only 6 obvservation - one for each of the planets known at Newton's time. Yet you have been arguing that you cannot do induction with a small number of observations. My claim is that many of our scientific laws are inventions, not descriptions.Scientists are concerned with getting data. But data does not come for free. You need an organized system of concepts in which to express the data, and a system of conventions on how to collect data. My contention is that many scientific laws serve the purpose of introducing these new concepts and presenting the measuring conventions to collect the data that uses these concepts.

What's point are you trying to make? You seem confused. Using scratch paper doesn't change the point. Deduction is still abstract. Scratch paper might be used for convenience, but you could replace it with something else (marks in sand, chalkmarks on the road, computer records, etc). It is one of the aspects of deduction, that it is arbitrarily representable.By contrast, measuring temperature requires equipment suitable for that job. We cannot arbitrarily change that the way we can change how we carry out an abstract deduction. Try throwing away all of your thermometers, and then see if you can still measure temperature.Sorry, but you are mistaken about this.I'm not to get into a dualing match about this. Readers can determine for themselves who is right.

Agreed. That's a complete fabrication on your part.I agreed that Newton used the data. I never agreed that Newton's law was a generalization of that data. These are only evidence of the acceleration due to gravity. They are not evidence supporting an inverse square law. There were still only 6 planets, and 6 distances from the sun to be used in the supposed induction to an inverse square law.It is my impression that Newton had the law of gravity pretty well worked out on a theoretical basis, and Kepler's laws provided the additional confirmation that led him to announce his law. Newton had been studying circular motion, with the use of his calculus. Kepler's laws are not a specific case of Newton's law of gravity. There is no easy route from Kepler's laws to the law of gravity. The other direction (deriving Kepler's laws from the law of gravity) isn't trivial either, although it can be done with a knowledge of calculus. Right. And that is what was needed to determine the mass of the earth, sun, planets. Without those masses, the astronomical data could not be used to form specific statements of the form that the law of gravity is said to generalize. I am not understanding this. How is it using induction? Of course I disagree.What did Ohm's law describe, at the time Ohm first proposed it?

However, getting the external information is not part of the deduction. The deduction does not begin until the data is available. Getting the axioms is not part of the deduction, either. The deduction does not begin until they are available.