Induction and Science

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if a physicist states a new law or a new theory as a system of laws on the basis of experimental he has found, he makes an inductive inference. So does a scientist who assumes an unknown single fact on the basis of known facts; for example, the meteorologist who predicts the weather for tomorrow, the physicist who assumes a certain distribution of the velocities of gas molecules which he cannot directly observe

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When I was talking about induction, I was talking about the above. Are you saying the above is wrong? Do you think the above doesn't happen? Would you be fine calling it schminduction and accepting that scientists do it?

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The statistical concept, for which a very elaborate mathematical theory exists, and which has been fruitfully applied in many fields in science and industry, need not at all be abandoned in order to make room for the inductive concept

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I'm just arguing that the more modern view that has emerged in which the statistical and the inductive have been merged.

No - I don't think so: Stastical reasoning can be used to make inductive inferrences and can be used to justify the confidence levels of our inductions. See the article I linke to in Message 76:

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This article will primarily focus on the kind of the approach to inductive logic most widely studied by philosophers and logicians in recent years. These logics apply classical probability theory to sentences to represent a measure of the degree to which evidence statements support hypotheses. This kind of approach usually draws on Bayes' theorem, which is a theorem of probability theory, to articulate how the implications of hypotheses about evidence claims redound to the credit or discredit of the hypotheses. We will examine the extent to which this kind of logic may pass muster as an adequate logic of evidential support, especially in regard to the testing of scientific hypotheses. In particular, we see how such a logic may be shown to satisfy the Criterion of Adequacy

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My evidence is that there is evidence to support Newton's laws. In science, when we check our laws and theories against the evidence we grow confident that the laws and theories are at least somewhat true. As the evidence builds, so too does our confidence. Despite the fact that we don't actually know deductively that Newton's laws are a true description of the areas of motion and impulse they are treated as tentatively true. It is as if we make a less-than-certain inference that they are true, with enough confidence to justify strapping some people into a rocket fueled machine and shooting them at the moon. But our evidence that Newton's laws describe motion is acquired with confidence intervals, and the inference that Newton's laws are true enough is uncertain and has potentially calculable confidence intervals. As the article I raised earlier puts it:

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One of the most important applications of a formal inductive logic is to the confirmation or refutation of scientific hypotheses. The logic should explicate the notion of evidential support for all sorts of hypotheses, ranging from simple diagnostic claims (e.g., the patient is infected with the HIV) to scientific theories about the fundamental nature of the world, like quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity. We'll now look into how support functions (a.k.a. confirmation functions) represent the logic of hypothesis confirmation. This kind of inductive logic is often referred to as Bayesian Confirmation Theory.

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Not really. I didn't think the claim would be disputed. Sure - I offer 'rockets have worked as we have expected them to when we assume it is approximately true'. Induction is pragmatic. It allows novice birdwatchers to discount black and brown birds if they are looking for a swan.Pragmatism is a possible justification for using induction, but I wasn't doing that. I was talking about growing confidence in a hypothesis based on increasing supporting evidence. This is induction in science, and it is a pragmatic decision to allow it.

I've no idea what your qualifier 'explicitly' means in this context and how it differs from plain old scientific support. That's just wordplay. We use it, not because it is perfect but because it works often enough to justify using it. That's pragmatics. And it is far more pragmatic to be occasionally wrong (as long as you admit it ahead of time (principle of fallibilism)), than to not be able to make any general scientific statements based on limited evidence.It also ignores the methods used by science to minimise the frequency of erroneous inductions: statistical reasoning. (Again, a very pragmatic thing to do) Fine - but to deny that they are general statements would be foolish. And in science - we only have specific evidences to support those general statements. If we have 1,000 predictions that have gone positively, and 0 that have gone negatively, we have a 100% success record so far. It is an induction if we say that we have discovered a law or theory that applies to 100% of cases when in fact it only applies to 100% of tested cases - where the tested cases are fewer than the actual possible cases (as is mostly the case, in practice).As you said, we could be wrong. Just like we might stumble upon a black swan - It could turn out that in some small number of cases of macro objects in low energy conditions things work completely differently and our next rocket will accidentally escape the Moon-Earth gravitational influence. This possibility leads us to falsification. Indeed - every test from tomorrow onwards could completely contradict the relationships Newton described, or at least show them to only cover a small subset of cases.While it is something we can have more confidence in:

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To some actions there are sometimes equal and/or opposite reactions

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is unfortunately useless as far as science is concerned. Maybe this is what you mean by 'explicit'? Maybe you'd say the evidence explicitly supports this law and implicitly supports Newtons law as he worded it. But we can accept that it is a generalisation that science justifies by supporting it with a smaller set of specific cases.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

If you'd like evidence of what pragmatism means I suppose you could look it up. I know you have the capacity to do that, so I didn't want to patronise you too much. Fantastic - I'm not claiming that because they are general therefore they were arrived at by means of induction. Newton could have seen them in a dream for all I care for the point I'm making. That's not an empirical claim, its tautologous, so is not relevant to a discussion on science. Unless you claim that scientists take the third law of motion on faith, I don't think I need to. But the methodology of science strongly suggests that before a law can be accepted, it must have evidence of being true.

The quoted section which you called apologetics and demanded evidence was about induction and pragmatics. Next time you ask for evidence - try specifying what it is you are asking evidence for, it'll help avoid these issues. Apparently I do get it. As I said, Newton could have derived them from a dream, or indeed a bag of scrambled letters and numbers. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that's where the science gets done.In science as it is actually done we make use of evidence. Whether the evidence leads to the formulation of the law, or the law is supported by the evidence afterwards does not matter. It is the evidence comparison to the law that involves the inductive leap whichever order that comparison happens to occur in.Deriving a law can be done empirically in science - whether or not you believe Newton's laws were not.

Newton used pendulums, rather than scales:

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Thus trying the thing with pendulums of ten feet, in unequal as well as equal bodies, and making the bodies concur after a descent through large spaces as of 8, 12, or 16 feet, I found always, without an error of three inches that when the bodies concurred directly, equal changes to the contrary parts were produced in the motions, and, of consequence, that the action and reaction were always equal.

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...{cut some specific examples of this}

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But to prevent an objection that may be perhaps be alledged against the rule, for the proof of which this experiment was made...

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{From Principia}As for the source of his Laws - Newton cites Galileo's observations of projectiles and pendulums as well as Christopher Wren, Dr Wallis and Mr Huygens. As Newton said at the start of the section, the partial quote above comes from, "Sir Christopher Wren discovered the truth of the thing before the Royal Society by the experiment of pendulums".Discovered the truth, by experiment? Sounds like induction being employed in science as its done, no?Edited by Modulous, : deleted "From what I recall" since I looked it up.

I propose that part of his persuasion involved pointing at the experiments that supported his position and asking people to make the inductive leap from something like 'the pendulums at my house over the past few years' to something like 'every object past, present and future.'This is what people are saying when they say science uses induction. They are talking about actual science as carried out by actual scientists. They aren't talking about some philosophical idealistic concepts that are nothing to do with facts.Generally they talk about taking the results of some experiments (looking at swans for example) and coming up with a law (all swans are white) and then testing that (by examining more swans, swan feathers, swan photos, swan videos all over the world) to increase confidence in the law. And that's where the induction is.You can, if you like, try to tell us that Newton wasn't talking about facts and was just engaged in some philosophical conceptual idealism. You can try and say his laws are just a self-consistent framework of concepts that he was defining (rather than describing (limited) observed facts mathematically) - but if that's the case, it wasn't science so is off topic.

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Newton was very much concerned with facts.

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it was still really about concepts and not about fact

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What was really about concepts and not about facts? Why is 'it' relevant to a discussion about Newton and science and induction (which is very much about facts)? You initially stated that

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Which of those forces is being measured by the scale? How do you independently measure the other one so as to get an actual observation that could be used in the alleged induction?

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I said Newton did the measuring using pendulums. You retorted "it" was really about concepts not facts and then 1 post later tell me that Newton was all about facts. I think my 'gross misunderstanding' of such a confusing thread of discussion is entirely warranted. We'll have to if you insist on remaining so mysterious. Could you for example, explain what evidence is for in science and how it isn't employed with induction in the same way that 'all swans are white' is (based on the evidence that all known swans are white)?

I still have no idea what 'it' was that was not about facts but about concepts or why it is relevant. Or why you decided to start talking about 'facts' and 'concepts' in the first place. I just pointed out that Newton used pendulums as evidential support for his laws - could you explain what your point here is?Assuming it isn't really relevant (just to type something else as a response), do you accept that Newton's Laws have empirical support? That this support relies on a sequence of observations that are in accord with the laws? Do you agree that to suggest that "All the swans I've ever seen are white" supports (with some degree of uncertainty) "All swans are white"? Do you agree that 'all the pendulum experiments Newton had ever seen" supports (with some degree of uncertainty) "Every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction"'? Great. But we're talking about using pendulums. What relevance does the nature of facts or concepts have to do with anything?

I had been talking about that 'broad and imprecise' thing that Newton called 'experimental philosophy' throughout this thread - we call it science today. Have you been talking about mathematics all this time? That would explain a lot.

I'm going to assume that what you just said made sense. We can worry about the rough edges later. We're not being completely oblivious nwr, you are just being a patronising asshole that believes we're being oblivious and translating what we are saying to help preserve the myth that we're being oblivious.. Actually, we were just using normal English. Translating into nwr philosophical bibble babble:Newton 'reconfigures' level 2 (observes stuff and has neural impulses about those observations), then moves to level 3 to put that reconfiguration to use. That use is to make universal statements about level 1. Scientists actually use the data, so they must use level 3, and since the entire point of science is "to learn more about level 1.", I think we've established your deduction that science cannot be inductive is invalid.If you are only doing stuff at level 2, you aren't doing science.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

I missed nothing, but nice attempt to avoid the issue again. Not.. "When science" but 'if science'.Would you like to deal with my argument? You know the part where science is never just operating at level 2. That to be called science you need to include Levels 1 and 3. And it is at this point induction comes in. You can keep pointing at parts of science where you think induction doesn't take place - but other than as a case of confirmation bias it isn't really useful; the rest of us are talking about the part where it does and you are steadfastly refusing to address it.Let's look at your comments again about level 2:

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The conventional wisdom seems to assume that we can treat level 2 as a fixed mechanical black box that we can ignore (because it is fixed), and thus does not pay any attention to it other than to assume it is there. Everything important seems to be assumed to happen at level 3.

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The conventional wisdom is that the important bits are treating the three levels in a certain way. Do it one way, it's science. Do it another, it's not science.

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My view is that much of science actually takes place at level 2.

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We don't disagree. But, once again by focussing on level 2, by your own admission you are necessarily ignoring the parts where induction might come in. Let's focus on 3 - which is the topic of the debate, yes? Have you wondered why we've been giving you examples of USING the data? Like using the data of observed swans to inductively conclude that all swans are white.

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By definition, induction is something done exclusively at level 3. So if science is acting at level 2, then what it does there cannot be inductive.

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But your clause 'if science is acting at level 2', is false. Science is not acting at level 2 - science is a process that utilises all three levels, only doing 1 of them and we're not talking about science. Your dogged insistence of evading this concept is quite startling - but isn't helping you beyond rhetoric.And we're talking about the stuff that connects level 2 to level 1 by way of level 3...where induction comes into play. And you keep insisting we should talk about level 2 and not about 1 and 3.Let's talk about level 1 and 3.

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What I have been consistently saying in our discussion of Newton's laws, is how they are being used as a reconfiguration of level 2.

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They maybe a 'reconfiguration of level 2' (incidentally aren't you the guy that said "It is how philosophers claim that science works. But most philosophers do not actually do science, so have no basis for making such assertions."? Newton was a philosopher that did science and he disagrees with you - will you not take the hint?) but when Newton went beyond that reconfiguration and said that this his reconfiguration is a universal principle that applies to level 1 - was he not applying level 3 thinking to the level 2 stuff to draw a universal conclusion about level 1?

You're still avoiding it, the gist of my post was about the importance of level 3 in science and yet you still focus on the bits about level 2. I am perfectly comfortable that you think science operates outside of level 2 - but when I try and discuss those parts of science, the parts where induction is used - you avoid it and focus on something about level 2 - like you just did.So let's talk about how science uses levels 1 and 3, I've been doing it for some time now but you keep repeating over and over again that at level 2 there is no induction. This is true by definition, so let's move on from that, neh? Since when did I claim it was part of science? I was using it as an example of induction. I tried talking about pendulum interactions but you carefully avoided that line of thought. If you're ready to address any of the issues I have raised about a small set of observed pendulum interactions being used to generate a mathematical relationship (level 2) which is inductively reasoned (level 3) to apply universally to novel circumstances in the realm of objective reality (level 1), until proven otherwise - let me know. You gave up last time I tried.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.