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Author | Topic: Induction and Science | |||||||||||||||||||
nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
quote:Your initial statement is trivially true in the sense that we cannot observe something that does not exist. It may even be true in the sense that the observer could not exist or would be unable to make observations in many cases. However neither of these would help your case. We are not talking about the existence of a "law", we are talking about how we can know that it applies.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
That said, measurement is a deductive process, not an inductive one.
Deduction is an abstract symbolic process. Measurement is a physical process.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17827 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
How can I not be responding to a "problem" that you have only just brought up ?
And your "problem" is easily answered by anyone who has a basic knowledge of the physics involved. An orbit involves continuous acceleration towards the centre of the orbit - Newton's laws of motion tell us that. So if one body orbits another there is a force attracting the orbiting body to the body that it orbits. Indeed I have to ask if you actually considered the question of how the astronomical data was relevant in the first place you would have to realise that gravity was involved somehow and that any claim to the contrary could not be true. So now I've responded to the non-problem that you raised, why don't you produce your alternative method ?
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1494 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Measurement is a physical process. ...which proceeds from comparison to an assumed, axiomatic standard. In other words, when we measure, we're taking it as a given that a meter really is a meter, etc. It caught me off-guard as well, but Rrhain is right on this one. Measurement is deductive, as it is a form of reasoning to the specific - this object is 1.2 meters in length - from a general axiom assumed to be true - a meter represents such-and-such distance.
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Son Goku Inactive Member |
Well to take the case of General Relativity. Einstein deduced it from symmetry arguments and facts about Riemannian geometry as well as general thoughts about the inertial quality of orbiting frames.
From this he deduced the Field Equation, which was then confirmed experimentally. Nowhere along the way was there anything I'd truly call induction, or at least solely inductive reasoning. Similar cases apply to QED, QCD and the Standard Model. To a lesser extent than GR though. Most of physics, particularly condensed matter physics, in the last fifty years has been what I'd call deductive.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17827 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
A lot of it may be largely deductive now, but I thnk that you will find that it requires a basis of empirical evidence to start from and further, confirmation will still be inductive in nature.
There is no theory in science that does not involve some givens that have to be derived from empirical evidence. And how can we say that these givens truly apply to the whole universe, without some use of inductive reasoning ? Indeed it should be pointed out that somce scientists are working on revising GR as an alternative to "dark matter" theories to explain gravity formation. Or we could simply consider Einstein's irea of a csomological constant, his abandonment of the idea and the recent revival of the concept. Abduction and induction play a part even in GR.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
How can I not be responding to a "problem" that you have only just brought up ?
I have been asking and you have avoided answering this question since Message 60. I just reworded it.
And your "problem" is easily answered by anyone who has a basic knowledge of the physics involved. An orbit involves continuous acceleration towards the centre of the orbit - Newton's laws of motion tell us that. So if one body orbits another there is a force attracting the orbiting body to the body that it orbits.
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
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
Measurement is deductive, as it is a form of reasoning to the specific - this object is 1.2 meters in length - from a general axiom assumed to be true - a meter represents such-and-such distance.
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.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
Nowhere along the way was there anything I'd truly call induction, or at least solely inductive reasoning.
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.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17827 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
On rereading your Message 60 that specific question is not there. Therefore your claim that I am dodging it is false.
Your attempted response also fails to deal with the issues I raised. Nor do you provide any reason why Newton would have needed to work out the law of gravity before considering the observational results available to him and certainly no reason why the Cavendish experiment was required. Both claims are unsupported assertions. Nor do you provide any way in which Newton could have justifiably claimed a universal "law". In short you offer no alternative to asserting that Newton used induction, and no reason to suppose that he did not. So what about the question you are still dodging. What is your alternative to induction ?
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Son Goku Inactive Member |
PaulK writes:
Without a doubt. I think science was almost purely inductive during its formative years and modern areas of science are founded on these earlier, inductive discoveries. A lot of it may be largely deductive now, but I think that you will find that it requires a basis of empirical evidence to start from and further, confirmation will still be inductive in nature. There is no theory in science that does not involve some givens that have to be derived from empirical evidence. And how can we say that these givens truly apply to the whole universe, without some use of inductive reasoning ?However I think that science now is more a deductive process. You can't ever truly get pure-induction or pure-deduction and there is a history of both in the past of science, but I would still say that what’s done today is deductive science, rather than the inductive science of our academic forefathers. In essence we no longer experiment until we find a pattern, we now the deduce a pattern and do experiments to see if our deduction was correct. Science still uses induction and relies on a past foundation of inductive work, but I don't think it's the main tool anymore.
Or we could simply consider Einstein's ire of a cosmological constant, his abandonment of the idea and the recent revival of the concept.
The Cosmological constant was always present in his equations, it's impossible to derive them without it. His "mistake" was assuming it had a non-zero value.
nwr writes:
Essentially because most people have "read science not done science" and still have a Francis Bacon/Benjamin Franklin impression of it. Why do people still cling to the myth that science uses induction?A bunch of people continuously experimenting to figure something out. In turn philosophers of science inherit this view and write a philosophy of science based on an old romantic notion of science. This image of science is a far cry from the kind of work done by Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga and Dyson in the 60's on QED, as well as other works in modern science.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17827 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
I note that you agree that science uses induction still and then apparently agree with nwr's assertion that it is myth to say that science uses induction (and nwr means that science has not used made significant use of induction since the time of Newton - perhaps never) It might be an idea to clear that up.
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Son Goku Inactive Member |
Edit: I see what you meant.
I should say that the image of science as purely or largely inductive is a left over from our impression of science from previous centuries and this bears little resemblance to the science of today. I do believe that science still uses and did use induction. This message has been edited by Son Goku, 02-15-2006 06:42 AM This message has been edited by Son Goku, 02-15-2006 06:43 AM
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1494 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I can do deduction in my head. Oh? You've never read a book on it? You've never opened a math textbook and read Euclid's axioms? Or Russel's? You recreated his entire Principia Mathematica, ex nihilo, starting from a basis of absolutely no training whatsoever? You've never taken notes? Used scratch paper?
I can't tell the temperature in my head - I need a thermometer to do that. The thermometer is meaningless - literally, the expansion of the mercury indicates nothing - absent the fact that one degree Farenheight has been assumed to have a certain value. Our units of measure are axioms. Reasoning from those units - taking measurements - is deduction because it's the application of general axioms to specific cases. By definition, deduction. I know of no definition of deduction that requires that it be a process you can do all in your head.
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nwr Member Posts: 6412 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 4.5 |
On rereading your Re: Axiomatic principles (Message 60) that specific question is not there. Therefore your claim that I am dodging it is false.
Message 60: Which specific observations did Newton's law of gravity generalize? As far as I can tell, the first specific observation, of which it could possibly be said to be a generalization, was the measurement made by Cavendish in 1798. That's 111 years after Newton proposed his law of gravity.
Readers can decide for themselves whether those are different wordings of the same question.
Message 91: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. Nor do you provide any reason why Newton would have needed to work out the law of gravity before considering the observational results available to him and certainly no reason why the Cavendish experiment was required. Both claims are unsupported assertions.
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.
What is your alternative to induction ?
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.
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