Induction and Science

Whether scientists say that they use inductive reasoning, and whether they actually use inductive reasoning, are two different questions.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

What's to deal with? I never claimed that science is only operating at level 2. Can't you tell that the alleged "swans" induction is a made up story? When was "all swans are white" ever a part of science?

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I guess you don't understand the meaning of the word "standard". Because that's what a standard is.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

You only confirm that you don't know what standard is.Suppose I go out and perform an experiment, but I choose not to follow standards. My experiment refutes Newton's laws of motion. Will you conclude that Newton was wrong? Or will you conclude that my evidence is no good because I failed to follow the standards? Irrelevant. The standards apply to us. We don't expect nature to observe our standards. We expect ourselves to follow the standards.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

The standard applies to existing observations, as long as we followed the standard in making those observations. The standard will apply to future observations as long as we follow the standard when making future observations.Are you from Mars, or from somewhere outside of the Milky Way galaxy You are pontificating about science, but sounding as if you haven't a clue as to how science is actually done.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

You are thinking like a creationist.

In the beginning God created force, mass and acceleration. And God saw that it was good.

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When Adam ate the apple Newton was bonked on the head by the apple, his eyes were opened. And suddenly he knew force.

You are quite clueless as to how science works.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Nature isn't being required to comply with anything.Take a class in science, maybe a freshman physics class. Be sure to include the lab class. Maybe you might learn something.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

No.Well, okay, some of our theories might partly reflect reality. However, the best of our theories do neither. Nature doesn't give a damn about our standards. Standards are not about nature. Standards are about us. New observations will be in accordance with the standards, as long as we observe the standards when making our observations. They are called standards because they standardize how we make our observations. That's bullshit. The standards have nothing to say about how nature behaves. They are about how we should behave, in order to make observations.You really ought to learn something about science before you pontificate about it.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Are you always this absurd?I'll restate my previous answer as "Nature isn't being expected to comply with anything." I answered the question. You are apparently too ignorant to be able to see that.So, okay, I have given a reworded answer.Now go learn something about science. Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I recommend the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, but I don't know whether it is available online. There's probably a copy in the reference section of your local library.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I'm going to use the metric system, except I will use local time instead of internationally standardized time. That is, I will take noon to be the time when the sun appears to be at its highest point (or in a direct north/south direction). I will take the time interval between two consecutive noons, and divide that into 24 local hours. I will then further divide those local hours into local minutes and local seconds.With careful measurement, and using that local time as my standard, I should be able to show that the rotation of the earth is speeding up and slowing down, but there is no known force that would explain such speeding up and slowing down.Should Newton's laws be rejected, or should my data be rejected?

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I have a very very old edition (1960s vintage).There should be a section where it defines physical properties such as force.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Usually "standard" is used for defining particular units of measurement. I'm just using the same idea in a unit free sense. New Cat's Eye seems to be understanding the word in the same sense, so I don't think there is anything particularly confusing about that. If you prefer the word "definition" instead of "standard", that's a different way of saying the same thing. Definitions are standards.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

You are probably correct, but it isn't actually relevant. His laws are not descriptions of a falling apple. No, I don't think that, and I haven't suggested that. The swan example is made up, so it is artificial. However, I'll use that to try to explain more clearly. But since it is an artificial example, I will be artificial in how I use it.What first would have happened, is that people observed a bunch of white birds. They didn't observe any swans, because at first "swan" was not a word used for those birds.Perhaps, after seeing those white birds, they decided to name them "swans". And maybe they gave a precise definition of swan, something like:A swan is a bird which

1. has a beak of a certain shape (specification goes here);
2. has feet of a certain shape (specification goes here);
3. is of a white color.

Now with that definition, we see that "all swans are white" can be deduced from the definition. So no induction at all is being used to conclude that "all swans are white". The observations that were made prior to defining "swan" were part of what motivated the definition, but they were not part of an induction, and at the time the observations were made they were not even observations of swans, since "swan" was undefined at that time.Suppose, instead, that they did not include the third requirement in that definition. If they then concluded that "all swans are white", it would be reasonable to say that it was an inductive concusion. And they could even go back to the observations made before "swan" was thus defined, and count them as evidence for the induction (provided that the observations were of birds that meet the new definition of "swan").The problem for inductionists, however, is that scientists do not seem to have any inclination to make such inductions. As best I can tell, there is not a single conclusive example of an actual induction that has been presented in this discussion.Science mainly works by making precise definitions, by using those definitions as standards for observations, and by using those definitions as premises in deductive reasoning. And, yes, they make observations before they come up with those precise definitions, with those preliminary observation being used to guide them in how they formulate the definitions.We can look at a non-artificial example. I'll suggest Boyle's law. It could be said that it resulted from an induction, though I personally suspect that it came from a theoretical analysis with a few observations used to back up the analysis. The thing about Boyle's law, is that as applied to ordinary gases it is false and well known to be false. It is important because, although false, it is actually a pretty good approximation. It is one of the "ideal gas laws", meaning that it mainly treated a true statement about imaginary ideal gases.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

If we measure using standard time, then the length of a local solar day is not 24 hours. It changes throughout the year, by around 1%. So if we were to local solar time to measure the rotation speed of the earth, then that speed would vary throughout the year by around 1%.The point to notice here, is that you cannot have laws such as Newton's without basing them on precisely defined standards. And in this case, the natural standard for time (i.e. local solar time) is not compatible with Newton's laws. It isn't changing by anything close to 1%, and earthquakes can actually cause it to speed up.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie