Induction and Science

And yet you are still confused. Amazing.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

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

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

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

Once you account for those things, you no longer have true solar time. Instead, you have mean solar time.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Do pay attention.As I said, the swan example is artificial, so I will feel free to use it artificially to illustrate the point.If you don't want to use it artificially, then you are stuck with the fact that there has been no evidence given that scientists are inclined to make any such induction as "all swans are white." I'm calling "bullshit" on that.

quote:

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Although crows can be extremely resourceful and appear to behave as optimal foragers when eating walnuts and other hard shelled food, their putative exploitation of moving cars is not adequately documented and should not be cited as an example of avian intelligence or adaptability.

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There's no assertion there about "all crows". There's no induction. The only conclusion made is that the original research was of poor quality and should not be cited.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

That reads like word salad. You are way off.I see science as being about getting precise information about the world, in order to be able answer questions (and make predictions). Precise definitions and precise standards are part of what is required for precise information.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

That seems to be an unlikely theory. I have never seen documentation for that alleged induction. The fact is, that the black water fowl discovered in Australia had only an aboriginal name at that time, and were of an entirely different species from the knows swans. So what you are saying is that you have no actual evidence of induction, you just think that there must have been one. That is to say, you are relying on the good old fashioned argument from ignorance. It does not follow that they are using induction. They are examining a range of behavior, and usually not asserting that all behave in the same way. Using sampling methods to estimate ranges actually has a deductive basis.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Indeed, we could. And we would probably miss the target.That's why actual space missions involve continual measuring of position, and adjusting the flight with small rocket firings, in order to keep it on target.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I have not said anything which would have that implication.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

You assert that as "indisputable fact", yet you have not produced any evidence to back that up. I think you would have to be able to read the minds of those "real scientists" to know whether or not they could be said to be using induction. Whether some scientists actually use induction (a possibility that I have acknowledged) does not address the question of whether science as an institution depends on induction (which is what I have questioned). I don't know what objection you could have to guesses and opinions. The future is inherently unknowable. The best we can do is make conclusions of the form "if nature continues to behave as it has in the past, then ...(prediction)... That the conditional part of that is often not made explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly there. You word that as if you are expressing a disagreement. But I do not see that it disagrees with anything that I have said. I disagree with the often expressed view that theories are models.If you hire a contractor to do some major work on an old tall building, the first thing the contractor will do is erect a scaffolding to give better access to the building. The scaffolding will have roughly the shape of the building, but it won't be a model.I see a scientific theory as a kind of scaffolding that we construct to give us better access to reality. We do have to make sure that the scaffolding fits well enough to be useful, but we don't have to make it a model. In fact, it is often better for the scaffolding to have a rather simpler and more mathematical structure that the reality to which it provides access. That scaffolding not only is not a model of the building, but it also is not a description of the building (i.e. it says nothing about the building). Likewise, I suggest that our theories, as a scaffolding that we erect to access reality, are neither models nor descriptions of reality. What they do is provide us the access we need to make very precise observations of reality. I think I have just done that in the preceding couple of paragraphs.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

There is none. So what? It a completely irrelevant point. The information comes via making observations. The definitions are preliminary ground work such as is needed for making such observations. Not so, given the assumed definition. It is trivially deducible from the definition.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

That's interesting, but does not seem relevant. The often told story that explorers spotted a black swan in Australia, and thereby refuted an alleged induction.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Quite right. And that's why real scientists don't actually make such inductions.Incidentally, the crows I was familiar with in my youth in Australia where pretty nearly pitch black. The crows that I see around here (surburban Chicago) are more of a gray - and that's assuming that there are any crows left. The crows around here fell victim to West Nile virus, and I rarely see them now. Because if you are sufficiently systematic, then you don't need the induction. The systematicity gives you are rather homogeneous group that you are studying. And if it is sufficiently homogeneous you can use statistical analysis (which is actually deductive) for reaching the kind of conclusions that you want.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Perhaps I have been too busy responding, to state it clearly enough.The point is that we make precise definitions, and then use those definitions as the basis for observations. Those observations are where the precise information comes from.Before we settle on particular definitions, there's a lot of pragmatic testing as to whether it works and whether the resulting information is actually useful.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie