Induction and Science

What does it even mean to be 'applied inductively'?Jon

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No.
It is because you have no actual arguements to make.
Equivocation is your best attempt at debate.I pity you.
You are obsessed with posting on a discussion forum when you have nothing to say.

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

And yet you are still confused. Amazing.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Ahh... but don't we all .Anyway, back to the topic. I've already explained how a 'law' about everything can arise from a few observations, a couple of assumptions, and some intro-level deduction:

quote:

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Jon in Message 388:

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Newton observed some shit happening; saw it all happened in a certain way; assumed everything worked like the things he saw; concluded everything happened in that same certain way.

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You're welcomed to address this.Jon

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Check out Apollo's Temple!

When Marie Curie discovered radioactivity, that seemed to be energy from nowhere. Instead of being taken to refute conservation of energy, it was decided to say that there was nuclear energy.I put it to you that the principles are not about the world, but are about us and how we should interpret things in the world. See also the Duhem - Quine thesis. Apparently, I was not clear enough. I'll say it again. Scientific theories have nothing to say about how nature behaves.Suggested reading: Nancy Cartwright, "How the laws of physics lie". She makes the case that the laws of physics are not descriptions of reality, but are idealizations.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

No, I am simply not talking about application. I'm just talking about the derivation.Back in the Peanut Gallery thread, you replied to this from nwr:

quote:

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Specifically, I do not agree that Newton was making a generalization based on limited specific observations.

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by asking what he was doing.Now, in this thread I see this from you in Message 347: It stems back to Message 327: I brought in F=ma to show that you can have something like a universal principle without having to use inductive logic to get it. I thought you were simply overlooking something and did not intend to argue much about it. That's beside the point I wanted to raise here. But now, with your other post on what you're talknig about as universal principles, I'n not so sure that F=ma is really a relevant example of that.

The swan example is real.
It is used as an example because it is real.
People used to think that all swans were white and the term 'Black Swan' was even used to describe things that didn't exist. This seems like a reasonable definition of swans.
I agree that all swans have a beak of a certain (specific) shape.
I agree that all swans have feet of a certain (specific) shape.
I agree that all swans are white. But you are not deducing that all swans are white, you are just repeating the definition.
Premise: "A swan is (by definition) white."
Conclusion: "All swans are white"
You present only one premise and then repeat that premise as your conclusion - that is not deductive reasoning.Saying "A swan is white" is exactly the same as saying "All swans are white".
There is no deductive reasoning required, all you have to do is rephrase the statement. The initial definition that "A swan is a white bird" is achieved through inductive reasoning.
The statement that "All swans are white" is simply a repeat of the initial definition. When defining what a swan is - you inductively apply your observations to all swans.
When you say "All swans are white" then that is inductive - as you have not looked at every swan.
(The fact that you have not looked at every swan becomes apparent when you meet your first black swan.)By definition: you cannot make general/universal rules/laws using deductive reasoning.
Deductive reasoning cannot get from a limited set of facts to a general statement.
That is part of the definition of deductive reasoning.

But certainly all inductive reasonings are simply deductive reasonings with missing premises. And, I am not even sure nwr is arguing for deduction; I think that's my take your addressing here.Jon

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Check out Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

That's made up to. I keep wondering why people believe these obviously made up stories. Of course it is deductive reasoning. It is rather trivial deductive reasoning, but it is still valid logic. No, it is achieved through the adoption of a naming convention. There is nothing inductive about it. Until you have defined "swan", there are no such things as swans and observations of white birds are not observations of swans. A definition is a general statement. It depends on zero facts and does not require deduction. It becomes, in effect, an axiom that can be used in future deductions.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Yes, it is weird that people believe stories that are self evidently true. Please show the deductive reasoning.
What new information is deduced? Your definition said: "A swan is..." - so the name is established.
Then it said "...white".
This means that you have said that all swans are white.
Have you inspected all swans? No.
Therefore it is inductive. So, why did you define all swans as being white, if "observations of white birds are not observations of swans"?
Why not say all swans are green? What the hell are you replying to?

You are confusing convenience with compatibility. Mean solar time is convenient because it is more constant. But true solar time is compatible with Newton's laws if you account for the elliptical orbit of Earth, the tilt of its axis, and other causes of fluctuations in the length of the day. What point are you trying to make here concerning inductive reasoning and Newton's laws? In fact, both the deceleration of Earth's rotation caused by the Moon and the acceleration caused by earthquakes can be explained with Newton's laws.Edited by Stephen Push, : No reason given.Edited by Stephen Push, : No reason given.

"Swan" in not an abstract entity that you can define any way you like. The term refers to a group of species of birds. You could not have seen all individuals of these species, so any statement that "all swans are white" is necessarily based on induction. A 1997 study that involved 231 paired observations of crows in Davis, California, was titled, "Crows Do Not Use Automobiles as Nutcrackers." Please note the study was not titled, "231 Crows in Davis, California, in 1997 Did Not Use Automobiles as Nutcrackers." The authors used inductive reasoning to make the claim that their conclusion applies to all crows, everywhere, all of the time.This type of inductive reasoning is typical of scientific studies. I could cite hundreds of examples if I thought you would take them seriously. The ideal gas law is used every day by scuba divers around the world to avoid a potentailly fatal buildup of real nitrogen in their blood. They trust their lives to inductive reasoning.

Sure, it's self-evidently true. Never mind the evidence. Don't worry about facts. It fits your creationist way of thinking about the world so it is self-evidently true.When explorers reached Australia, they did not discover any black swans. What they discovered were some black water fowl that had a somewhat similar appearance to swans. They were not of the same species as swans. They were not even of the same genus as swans. They were just distant relatives of swans.I spent the first 23 years of my life in Australia. We never called them "swans." We called them "black swans." That is, we used a two word composite name.So it is self-evidently true that the "black swan" refutation of an alleged induction is a made up story. Deduction does not produce new information. At most, it helps to reveal information already in the premises that had not been previously noticed. The definition says that if it isn't white, it isn't a swan. No induction is needed.Your problem with this is that you are thinking like a creationist.

In the beginning God created the world. And he created the swan kind, and the swallow kind. So the swan kind exists on account of the creator, and at best we have to try to work out what that means.

Forget the creationist thinking, and what you get is:

The world is a mess. There's all kinds of stuff there. So lets try to organize that stuff. We will try to find ways of seeing differences in the stuff that is there, and then use those difference to name various types of stuff. So we name one type of stuff "swan". And what makes it a swan isn't that it is part of any natural kind, isn't that it has some mystical swan essence. No, what makes it "swan" is that it fits the characterization that we have used to classify it as "swan". So if part of that characterization is whiteness, then it is a necessary truth that swans are white, made necessary by the way that we have organized the world into different types of stuff.

There's no induction about it.You are seeing induction involved because you are not accepting the definition as a definition. You are insisting that "swan" is actually defined by the creator in the creation of those "natural kinds", and you are insisting that what I called a definition is merely a description of what was defined by the creator.Science doesn't work with that type of creationist thinking. If you want science to work that way, then you will need to abandon much of our scientific knowledge.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie