Induction and Science

That seems dishonest. In the circumstances, I have no interest in further discussion.

Your step 2 simply asserts the result of measurement as a premise. Your three steps do not include the actual act of measuring.Sure, that's a deduction, but the actual act of measuring was not part of that deduction.

Big mistake there, crashfrog. Comparison is a very difficult problem.The reason they use bar codes in the grocery store, is because they haven't solved the problem of doing the comparisons that would be needed to directly recognized the items you are purchasing.

But then you appear to be resorting to magic to get to step 2.There seems to be an assumption that measuring is trivial. It isn't.

That's what seems obvious to me.

My comment was a response to crashfrom "Comparing the same characteristic of two objects is trivial,..". That could include comparing a small green apple with a big red apple, or a small green apple with a green plum (of about the same size as the apple). Object comparison is difficult.Admittedly, crashfrog was mainly concerned with the comparisons required for measuring. But even then, you have to know what you are measuring in order to know what you are comparing. We find it easy, but if you try to automate general purpose measuring with a robotic system, you will discover that it isn't at all easy.

Whether it is an apple or a plum is a characteristic. My answer was responsive. Easy for you, sure. That's because you have a lot of experience. It isn't easy to automate. This doesn't work very well if the object dissolves in water, reacts chemically with water, or soaks up water. It won't be easy to measure the inertia of something that is soft and squishy. That's because you have never tried to design a general purpose robotic system that could do it.

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This doesn't work very well if the object dissolves in water, reacts chemically with water, or soaks up water.

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Who said anything about water?

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If you have to be careful about what fluid you use, then it is not trivial.

That's because one of the roles of the theory is to suggest the type of evidence to seek. It is why it is sometimes said that data is theory driven. This is part of the inventiveness of science, and a major reason for science's effectiveness.

Theories don't come out of a vacuum. They are attempts to account for evidence. I agree that inkorrekt made some confused and misleading comments about that.Still, it is true that theories usually lead to a search for new data. In the case of ToE, most of the evidence has been found since Darwin proposed his theory. And I think you would agree that the current ToE differs from what Darwin proposed, due to the evidence since uncovered. He had evidence that called out for explanation. He offered a rather bold theory, which went well beyond what you could derive from the evidence he had at the time. But that's the way science often advances.

This is mostly confusion between ordinary language use of "theory" (where the word means hypothesis), and the scientific use of "theory" where the word refers to the underlying structure of a body of study.

If you thought I was arguing that measuring is deductive, you were mistaken.

That book is under discussion at Critique of Ann Coulter's The Church of Liberalism: Godless.

Probably. But we would have to wait a week to find out.

If gravity suddenly fails, we shall probably all be dead. Since we can't do anything about it, there's no point in worrying.I'm not doubting that we use statistical evidence in a variety of ways. I'm saying that Newtonian physics is not simply a matter of induction.