Induction and Science

I withdraw the "calling foul" and apologize for that. I was careless in my checking back to the preceding argument.

He probably noticed that it was an unstated assumption in several previous centuries of practice (such as when weighing things). And that he stated it, rather than leaving it unstated, was possibly because he needed it in his mathematics to prove the conservation of momentum.

You want to weigh some apples at the market. So you place them on the scale. Then you have:
(1) The force of gravity acting on the apples;
(2) The force of the apples acting on the scale;
(3) The force of the scale pushing up against the apples.Newton's third law asserts that the force in (3) is equal to the force in (2), but acting in the opposite direction.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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Jesus was a liberal hippie

However, it was still really about concepts and not about facts. Most of what we take to be forces today, would not have been considered forces before Newton's time. Newton had to persuade people to use his concept of what to consider a force, and his laws are all about defining that concept.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

If you were to start with people who were unfamiliar with Newton's science, and ask them about Newton's first law, they would tell you that it is obviously wrong. Nothing is more obvious than that moving things just slow down all by themselves.Newton's science, partly built on Galileo's science, involved a profound change in how we conceptualize the world. We had to start calling things forces (things such as friction), which were previously seen as just the ordinary slowing down of moving things.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Of course, I don't say that. It is a gross misunderstanding of my position.Newton was very much concerned with facts.However, we very much disagree on how science works. We very much disagree on "fact".At this stage, we should probably just agree to disagree.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I must have missed this message. If gravity suddenly stops tomorrow, that just means that predictions for anything beyond that time will be wrong. The possibility does not stop us from making predictions.As I see it, evolution is a pragmatic system - selecting what works. If you are going to insist that pragmatism involves making inductive predictions about the future, then you are implicitly saying that evolution depends on inductive predictions of the future. That agrees with the ID position that it would require intelligence so is not explained by natural selection.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Facts (as representations) do not exist independent of humans. If science worked by just picking up facts that existed independent of us, it would not work.Just a moment. I'm asking Straggler to close his eyes for a moment.Okay, there.Whether facts can be said to exist independent of humans, depends on whether you are a Platonist or a nominalist.It is okay to reopen those eyes now.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

We use the word "prediction" very loosely, and apply it to what are not really predictions.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Sigh!I give up.

Actually, they are not. It gets hotter in the summer and colder in the winter, which is not constant. I just had a cup of coffee. It quenches my thirst and I like the taste. I guess it will still quench my thirst in a weeks time, and I will still like the taste. But why should that guess matter to whether I drink coffee now?We use scientific laws because they work and are useful. Why should we worry about whether they will still be useful next week, when we are concerned with using them today?It seems to me that you are projecting an implicit prediction, but most people are not actually making that prediction. Where have I said that we cannot say anything about future events. I only say that we cannot know. That doesn't prevent us from following what seem to be best practices. You are changing the subject.The point is that evolution is a natural pragmatic system that works quite well without making predictions of the future. And sure, occasionally there are failures, as when a species goes extinct. But, for the most part, it works.If tomorrow turns out to be hotter than today, I'll skip wearing a sweater. If tomorrow turns out to be colder, I put on a coat. We take the world as it comes, and adapt to change. Sure, some things seem to change very little, so we don't have to do much about those. But it doesn't require that we are making predictions about everything. If you think I am suggesting that science need only produce internally consistent theories, then you are hopelessly confused.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Varying between hot and cold is still change, and change is not the same as constant.If you had been paying attention to the news on global warming, you would know that even the pattern is changing.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

The question asks whether a variable has some constancy.The question does not make a lot of sense.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Sure. But what does "consistently" actually mean.If I tell somebody that the weather is consistent, they will probably agree with me.
If I point out that some summers are a lot hotter than other summers, and that the weather is inconsistent, they will probably agree with me.Used that way, I suggest that "consistent" is just a "feel good" word that doesn't mean much.If our world were totally homogeneous, then that would make it perfectly consistent (in some sense). From a mathematical point of view, it would be highly patterned. It would look the same no matter how you looked at it. That's a case of multiple symmetries, about as ideally patterned as you can get.In such a world our science would be useless. It would be as if we were in a very dense fog all the time, unable to see anything. What we need is contrast. Science needs a lumpy world, not a highly patterned world.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I haven't tried reading Newton's actual writings.It is up to a scientist to do the science. It isn't required that a scientist be able to present the philosophical principles behind how it works. Many scientists think they are doing induction, but that does not prove that they are.Edited by nwr, : typo

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Jesus was a liberal hippie