PaulK writes:
A lot of it may be largely deductive now, but I think that you will find that it requires a basis of empirical evidence to start from and further, confirmation will still be inductive in nature.
There is no theory in science that does not involve some givens that have to be derived from empirical evidence. And how can we say that these givens truly apply to the whole universe, without some use of inductive reasoning ?
Without a doubt. I think science was almost purely inductive during its formative years and modern areas of science are founded on these earlier, inductive discoveries.
However I think that science now is more a deductive process.
You can't ever truly get pure-induction or pure-deduction and there is a history of both in the past of science, but I would still say that what’s done today is deductive science, rather than the inductive science of our academic forefathers.
In essence we no longer experiment until we find a pattern, we now the deduce a pattern and do experiments to see if our deduction was correct.
Science still uses induction and relies on a past foundation of inductive work, but I don't think it's the main tool anymore.
Or we could simply consider Einstein's ire of a cosmological constant, his abandonment of the idea and the recent revival of the concept.
The Cosmological constant was always present in his equations, it's impossible to derive them without it. His "mistake" was assuming it had a non-zero value.
nwr writes:
Why do people still cling to the myth that science uses induction?
Essentially because most people have "read science not done science" and still have a Francis Bacon/Benjamin Franklin impression of it.
A bunch of people continuously experimenting to figure something out.
In turn philosophers of science inherit this view and write a philosophy of science based on an old romantic notion of science.
This image of science is a far cry from the kind of work done by Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga and Dyson in the 60's on QED, as well as other works in modern science.
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