Ha ha ha. I love Hempel's Paradox. I bring it into the Math Concepts class that I teach when we do symbolic logic.
In my opinion, that is exactly the essential difference between crows and Crowes. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we have never seen a non-black crow, then we can assume that, over recorded history, we have seen a significant fraction of crows -- enough to come to a definite conclusion that crows are black.
On the other hand, without knowing how many Crowes there are, the fact that all the Crowes we have seen were wearing black shoes could be due to the statistically small sample that we have observed.
Added by edit:
By small, I mean not only the small number of Crowes relative to the total number of Crowes, but the small fraction of the lives of each one where we have seen them wearing anything at all.
This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 04-Feb-2006 11:41 PM
"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt