All Boeing 737 passenger aircraft have arrived safely at their destination. By induction, all such aircraft will arrive safely. Oops, one of them crashed, so the induction has failed. Send in the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) to investigate.
Sure, Inductive reasoning often will fail to give the answer you finally submit as ”the truth’. It’s a tool to allow you to ”guess’ the ball park based on a limited set of data. “hmm, the data we have leads me to think that X will be what’s happening. Lets test that . .”
In your example of the Crowe’s and their shoes, it would be reasonable to expect some coloration between Crowe’s and black shoes, as all the Crowe’s you have observed have indeed been wearing black shoes. That gives you a ”valid’ starting point to expand the data further. If in later investigations you learn that it was those three and only those three who have ever worn black shoes then, even though the inductive reasoning was wrong, you have indeed learned a very curious and interesting ”fact’.
To pick holes because inductive reasoning can and does fail to deliver solid, well supported ”facts’ on the first swing of the bat, just goes to show a lack of understanding of what it is and how it is used.
And in the 737 example I would replace the word ”will’ with ”should’, but that’s nitt picking. The fact is one 737 crash doesn’t invalidate the value initial conclusion. After many, many, many thousand successful landings leading to the conclusion that they shouldn’t crash, a crash will lead to a very specific question. “Why?”. If the result of that question is that “the hydraulic hoses on the primary flight controls can perish if repeatedly exposed to certain conditions” then you modify the inductive reasoning conclusion. I,e, “as long as the hoses on the primary flight controls have not perished then all 737s will arrive safely”, and you add regular checks of said hose to the maintenance schedule to make sure they don’t perish. Next time a 737 crashes (inductive reasoning doesn’t exclude the possibility) you repeat the process, and so the list of caveats grows. But with aviation, by the time we get to the 737 we have found a vast number of things that will cause an aircraft to crash, and because of that we check for them. Because we check for them 737s tend not to fall out of the sky on a regular basis, leading to the inductive conclusion that a 737 should reach its destination safely.
This message has been edited by ohnhai, 08-02-2006 03:54 PM
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