Induction and Science

Not at all. It seems pragmatic to me.Pragmatic is doing what works, and the natural selection is basically eliminating what doesn't work. If you want to say that doesn't count because the evolving populations aren't actually thinking about whether it works for them, then I suppose you have a point. But that seems excessively fussy.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I agree with that. But my point still holds, that science needs a lumpy world, not a highly patterned world. However, the weather does not work consistently in different places and different times.I'm saying that science does not require such an assumption. Well, now you will have to explain what "laws of nature" means to you. When that came up in Message 215, I was told that it refers to natural phenomena. You seem to mean something different.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

You entirely missed the point.I am saying that I no more need to be looking ahead than evolution needs to be looking ahead.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Okay. But then, when used that way, I have already said that I don't consider them "natural laws." I see them as human constructs, not a part of nature.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Perhaps you might consider the possibility that I do have reasons for offering a different account.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I have seen only vague claims that something unspecified is a pattern.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Quite the contrary. But perhaps you misworded that, and intended to apply it to yourself. You cannot get to universal principles via induction. You can at most get to observed patterns. If anything, you have that backwards. With induction, we can only make conclusions about the data used in the induction. Well, for sure, the Earth is closest to the Sun when it is midwinter in these parts. So I guess you are saying that we can make an induction and claim that planet Mercury is colder than earth because it is closer to the sun. Yes, induction surely is great, and especially so when it results in such important principles. No, that is not induction. The normal understanding of induction, is that it is deriving a general statement from a number of specific observations. By your own admission, there are no specific observations of planet formation on which to base such an induction. I don't believe I have ever made such an argument. That it is a guess or an opinion does not prevent you from saying it. It is a forward extrapolation, beyond known data. There is always uncertainty about such extrapolation. That does not imply that it isn't worth doing. But one should be aware that uncertainty is involved. Prediction does not lead to discovery. If anything, it is discovery that leads to prediction.As for the rest of that - I might comment in another post. It doesn't fit well with this post.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I don't have a problem with that. But I think we have wandered away from whatever point it was that you were originally trying to make.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

You missed my attempt at irony. Ask Straggler, since he's the one who kept insisting that I had to be looking ahead.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Let me try a fresh start. Level 1: At this level we have the world, or physical reality, or whatever you want to call it. We presume it to exist independently of humans, except to the extent that we change it (building roads, for example). Level 2: At Level 2, something generates data about the world. For the moment, it doesn't matter much whether by data, we are talking of neural impulses, descriptions, observations. Level 3: At this level we use the data. All of our ordinary conversations are made at this level.Presumably, the point of science is to learn more about level 1.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. This is most apparent with AI (artificial intelligence) and with talk of the form "the brain is a computer".My view is that much of science actually takes place at level 2. Roughly speaking, you can think of it as tweaking the mechanism in that "black box", adjusting some of the levers, or occasionally doing some major reconfiguration of that mechanism. That leaves level 2 as not fixed after all, and therefore we cannot ignore it.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. However, pragmatism can apply to level 2 - adjust the mechanisms at level 2 so that the descriptions at level 3 work better.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. Somehow, the people debating with me have been completely oblivious to that, probably because they are strongly committed to the conventional wisdom.Back to your question - Omphalism does nothing at level 2, except argue that it can ignore some of the data. That's why it is not science.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

In that text, he appears to be only talking about something broad and imprecise, not about his precise mathematical laws.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

False.To know whether scientists actually use inductive reasoning would require mind reading. Neither of us has evidence on that. I'm well aware that many scientists believe that laws of nature are universal. I don't think I have ever attempted to refute assertions about what scientists believe. I am not confusing anything. I have been pointing out that "consistent" was being used in a very vague fashion, and I have been giving examples to illustrate that vagueness.I can't answer vague arguments, for those arguments metamorphose into something different from what I thought I was answering.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

You seem to have missed the word "there" in what I wrote. I have emboldened it this time, to make it easier for you to find.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

False.However, if you would like to make a purely deductive argument, using only things I have said as premises, then I shall attempt to find the flaw in your argument (a flaw that perhaps involves smuggling in additional unstated assumptions). I already answered that in Message 513 of the Peanut Gallery thread. I suspect we are talking past one another here.

• Do individual scientists notice apparent patterns in the world, and can that noticing of apparent patterns be called induction? Yes.
• Does science, itself, depend on induction? No.

If the individual scientist got his idea in a dream, or in a surprise package he found under the Christmas tree, instead of from observing an apparent pattern, that would make no difference as to whether science incorporated that idea. It's the value of the idea that matters, not whether the individual scientist came up with that idea via induction. I am denying that the law of gravitation was derived from observations. It might have been partly inspired by observations. But there is no amount of deriving that can get you from reported observations to any of the scientifically asserted laws of gravitation that have been used.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

And it makes that case quite well.If you want to say that we use induction, but only after pruning out all of the absurd cases, then that is at least closer to what we do. But "induction", as usually described, does not include any filter for pruning out absurdities.If you want to have something like induction that is actually useful, then it would need to include suitable absurdity pruning as part of the definition of that "something like induction".Science is systematic. If we use an induction on the color of crows, at least part of why that seems to work is because of the systematic nature of our naming conventions for birds. We are not nearly as systematic in our naming of people.Part of what I am arguing in this thread, is that a lot of what is credited to induction should instead be credited to the systematicity of science.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie