Induction and Science

The explanation cannot be deduced from the definition. However, if you would like to try, I would be interested in seeing that. I gave you a link the first time. There's no point in your repeated demands.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

That's the claim of some of Popper's critics.I'm still waiting for the citation to a peer reviewed scholarly article that decisively demonstrates that Popper was wrong about induction. The evidence does not support Popper's falsification thesis.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I see that you omitted quoting this part: Should I take that as an admission that you are unable to provide such an argument?

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Just go back and read the whole discussion.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

When I started this discussion, I knew that most people disagreed with me. So I expected disagreement in this thread.What I did not expect, is the large number of bogus arguments that would be presented.So sure, many people believe that we use induction. But they cannot actually demonstrate that. Induction is a core assumption of AI and machine learning research, where they call it "pattern induction." However, machine learning has not produced anything at all comparable to human learning. That ought to count as evidence against induction, but people don't look at it that way.The basic argument for induction is of this form:

• It sure looks as if science works by finding patterns in nature;
• I can't think of any other possibility;
• therefore they must be using induction.

But that is really the argument from ignorance. It is the type of reasoning that we often see coming from ID proponents, and they are criticized for such arguments.There's nothing wrong with forming a hypothesis that induction is used, and then setting out to find evidence for and against that hypothesis. I view the pattern induction research in machine learning to be just such a research program. But to assume the conclusion before the program has has completed is just bad reasoning. To repeatedly use an argument from ignorance is just bad reasoning.Why can't people just state that they disagree with me, but admit that they have no proof that I am wrong? That's what should have been the response.I won't be responding to all of the replies to my earlier posts. It is getting too repetitious. I'll comment on only a few.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I'm a realist. But I happen to not agree that scientific theories are descriptions of reality. However, the evidence does not support falsification. I'll agree that Popper's claim to having solved the induction problem rests on his falsification thesis. But his claim that scientists don't actually use induction does not rely on falsification.I'll grant that Popper was mistaken about having solved the induction problem.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

That's a good example of using the argument from ignorance. You can't think of an alternative, and therefore you assert that it must be true.That you can't think of an alternative is not evidence. It might be a reason for hypothesizing that induction is used. Whatever happened to the idea of subjecting hypotheses to critical testing?

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I am still waiting for the proof that they can be derived by no method other than inductive reasoning.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

If a peer reviewed article were to publish 1000 data point, and then assert "therefore, by induction, statement x is always true", that would seem to be a clear use of induction. At least it would if statement x applied to many more than 1000 possible cases; otherwise it would be proof by exhaustion (exhausting all possibilities).

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Agreed, but I don't see the relevance.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

That reads more as a proposed hypothesis, rather than as an inductive conclusion.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

It's an interesting paper. It aims at making a persuasive argument, but it is not a refutation.It does correctly point out some problems with Popper's thesis, particularly in the way it uses corroboration. But it doesn't address the reason that Popper disagrees with induction (the reason is already in the text I quoted from SEP in Message 600, though it seems that reasoning is invisible to most of participants in this thread).

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I have actually been doing that in several of my posts. But it seems to be invisible to people reading the thread.In any case, it doesn't matter. That you don't know of other possibilities does not prove that there are no other possibilities.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I'm not insisting that it is the only thing. However, it is hard to think of alternatives that would count as induction. My view is that science develops methods that work in a particular area of study. The presented theory can be said to be the propositional face of the science. But the core of the scientific knowledge is in the methods, not in the propositions that constitute the theory. There's a lot of pragmatic support for the methods (as in "they work very well, even with intensive testing"). "Induction" is the name of a way of getting propositions from propositions. And I don't see the core of science as being a propositional investigation.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

I consider that kind of statistical inference to be deductive. It is done, after all, in accordance with some mathematical theorems in the field of probability theory.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie