Induction and Science

So what?
Well, that is the definition of deductive reasoning - it increases our knowledge.
To quote yourself: "it helps to reveal information already in the premises that had not been previously noticed".
That is actually an inadequate definition of deductive reasoning, but it at least acknowledges that new information is produced. By definition: you cannot make general/universal rules/laws using deductive reasoning.

Replies to Message 494 & Message 495: I've never claimed that our additional premises/axioms were necessarily of any specific quality. The axiom 'all Crowes wear the same color shoes' is, indeed, a pretty crappy axiom. Its claim is simply too extraordinary for any sane human to take it for granted. But, the quality of our premises is a separate issue from the quality of our argument form. We can have good form with crappy premises; voodoo premises don't entail voodoo form. Our logic is fine; it's our starting points that suck. True. But I never said Science only works with observations. Good, honest (non-voodoo) Science works with axioms and suppositions as well. Part of that conclusion is supported by observation, part by supposed axioms. If not, it's voodoo. S'pose that'd make Newton is a witchdoctor, eh? Actually, that is not precisely what I was getting at. The probability of our conclusion being true is related to many things, for example, the quality of our premises. If we take an inductive argument and 'bridge the gap' to make it deductive, we do not have to alter the probability of our conclusion being true. What we do alter, however, is the probability of our conclusion being true given the presented premises. With the induction, it is <100%; with the deduction it is 100%. But the probability of the conclusion being true as a matter of fact remains the same. If this is how you define 'induction', then indeed. But I see this as identical to my conditional conclusion mentioned earlier. Can you spot a difference? Or, are we indeed just arguing semantics? By 'weaken' I merely meant the conclusion's ability to say something about the world: 'All Crowes wear black shoes' says more than 'If all Crowes wear the same color shoes, then all Crowes wear black shoes'; and 'If three Crowes wear black shoes, then if all Crowes wear the same color shoes, then all Crowes wear black shoes' tells us nothing useful about the world. Agreed? That would explain a lot! Bullshit. 'If all Crowes wear the same color shoes, then all Crowes wear black shoes' tells us more that just 'three Crowes wear black shoes'. There is no way to honestly claim that it doesn't. Then Science is guilty of dishonest voodoo; like nwr says. It is not what Science does that I'm after; it is what it admits to not knowinghow honest it is. The following two things produce equally-useful conclusions, one is just more honest than the other:P1: The Sun rose today
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Pn: The Sun rose on day n (long time ago)
C: The Sun will rise tomorrowP1: The Sun rose today
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Pn: The Sun rose on day n (long time ago)
C: If the Sun behaves the same on every day, the Sun will rise tomorrowCan you spot the more honest one? Do you think either conclusion is more useful? One certainly makes a stronger claim, but so what? They are both useful; I'd set my alarm clock whichever one I accepted. I'd say the second one is good science; the first is sloppy voodoo science. That such sloppy science is the science that actually gets done is all too sad and all too shameful. But; s'pose you're right: it is what we live with . Of course not; but we've been over this before. An assumption is weaker than a premise because there is no reason to accept its truth. This is not a premise supported by inductive reasoning; it is an assumption supported by the audience's goodwill to accept it as proposed. It's flimsy, but it's honest. I thought I had cleared it up before. The statement you quoted was sloppily-written by a hungry man with noodles cooking on the stove. I used 'certainty' in two different ways. So let's not dwell on that quote; I retract it on grounds of its confusing wording. Indeed! But, and here is the kicker, whether with or without the 'patch' premises, the actual probability of the conclusion being true is the same.¹ The difference is that with the 'patch' premises, the probability of the conclusion being true given the premises goes from <100% to =100%. It's a stronger form, and doesn't hide anything.Remember, I have never argued that adding the extra premises alters the truth of anything. My argument is only about form. In the broader sense, it is indeed a premise. That's all malarkey. Nothing says we can only make an assumption if it is only 'assumed true to see where it leads' or 'self-evident'. The difference between an axiom and a premise is purely formal: one is derived, the other is not. It is an assumption because it's assumed, and that is all that is needed for it to be an assumption. Hence its placement as the antecedent or the axiom (depending on which form you take). It's not an observation, and I honestly make no attempt to claim it as such. You've yet to show why that is the case. Science is mostly pragmatic; if our assumption gets us somewhere useful, then there is no reason to avoid using it. You are confusing things. I am talking about the probability of a conclusion to be true given its premises; you are talking about the probability of a conclusion to actually be true. In either argument (the inductive-form one or deductive-form one), that latter probability will be identical. Thus, we will say that, 'it is 100% true that given our premises, Mod might die' in the first case and 'based on the probability of our premises being true there is a 90% chance Mod might die' in the second case. Changing to deduction doesn't alter the actual truth of our conclusion, it just alters the degree to which our conclusion rests on our premises, changing it from <100% to =100%. Your 'confidence' and 'tentatively' in this argument is the probability of actual truth, as far as I can tell. The probability that the conclusion is true given the premises is <100%. We can make it 100% by adding premises; but this will not change the probability of actual truth (of our 'confidence' and 'tentatively'). Wouldn't it be great if it were!! Jon
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¹ After all, the patch required will be equally 'stupid' as the inductive leap required, thus our values stay the same.

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Check out Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

Hi Jon.
Let's simplify.In science we require evidence to support our conclusions. Our conclusions are general, our evidence specific. A general conclusion that is only supported to some degree by the premises (in science this is our observed evidence, we don't get to make shit up like 'all humans are mortal').Your 'conditional conclusions' are just ways of sneaking in the inductions. If there is no sneaky inductions, then your conditional conclusions are just set theory mathematics, not science which is about the real world not a hypothetical world were we have complete knowledge.In a deductive argument if the premises are true, the conclusion is necessarily true.This does not happen in science. We can never say a general conclusion is necessarily true unless we're just talking about maths or logic. There is always tentativity, there is always the possibility of an observation overturning our general laws.We're talking about real science, that makes real general laws, theories and conclusions about the real world based on a subset of evidential support. This is inductive. You might say that this is logically invalid - and we would all agree. But, as you say, it works and science is nothing if not pragmatic.You have failed to use deductions and observations to generate predictions, create general laws etc. Rather than argue incessantly over your unusual logical terminology - I take this failure as tentative support for my thesis that induction exists within science. For instance: Your conclusion could be worded as "If an inductive logic leads to a true condition here then it is necessarily also true that the sun will rise tomorrow". You've worded the argument so that this conclusion is necessarily true - but you've simply snuck the induction in under the table. You can try adding the word 'if' and bunging the proposition into the conclusion - but it still doesnt stop it being a premise to the deductive conclusion 'the sun will rise tomorrow'.I should also point out that the correct form isP1: The Sun rose today
P2: the Sun behaves the same on every day
P3: Tomorrow is a day
C: the Sun will rise tomorrowYou don't need lots of repetitions P1...Pn as you did unless you are trying to 'lend support' to P2, which would be induction. If this was a science paper - we'd have to say that P2 might be false, but it is supported by some evidence which gives us a certain confidence of its truth. This is science in the real world, Jon, not Platonic ideal empirical deductive rationalism or something. As nwr said:

quote:

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It is how philosophers claim that science works. But most philosophers do not actually do science,

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I'm talking about the actual doing of actual science - not the hypothetical ideal method of extracting absolute knowledge from an ideal data set.In real science as done by scientists not philosophers - our general conclusions can in principle be false even if all of our observations (premises) are true.You seem to think that science shouldn't make general statements from specifics and that doing this is 'sloppy'. This is nonsense. Your computer, your car, the Apollo rocket, the agriculture that provided your bread, all rely on this sloppy science. Indeed there is nothing that doesn't. You are stuck with it. Get used to it. Learn why it isn't as big a problem as you think it is. Read this - it is far from 'sloppy', even if it isn't logically valid. Ultimately, it does the job even if it cannot be proved that it should be able to the job.We're talking about the challenge of observations and saying anything about the world other than 'we made an observation'. You might observe some parent blackbirds feeding their child blackbirds. This is just an observation, it is not science. Nor is it science to rearrange this and say that some blackbird chicks are fed by some blackbird adults.It would be a scientific to say 'With some degree of support that is less than 100% - Blackbird parents care for their young"So - moving ourselves away from Platonic science and to actual science, Induction not only exists, but must be done if we're going to call it science rather than 'looking at something'. My argument trivial to prove false. Just show a single example of a predictive deductive argument that doesn't involve making stuff up. You have failed to do this. Everyone, in the history of the world since Hume first made the challenge has failed.Induction is with us as long as we don't make shit up to suit our purposes.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Can you be more specific about these constraints? What is an example of a scientific axiom and what is an example of a non-scientific axiom? I have asked lots. But I have asked this one repeatedly. You have yet to answer it.Jon — How is an assumption derived from nothing different to a blind random guess?

Doing calculations that pertain to future events (e.g. landing the rocket before you actually land it) indisputably rely on nature (i.e. gravity and suchlike) actually operating in accordance with previous observations and complying with thos calculations.The conclusion that nature will behave at some point in the future as it has been observed to behave thus far is based on inductive reasoning.How cannit possibly be otherwise?

If our scientific theories "have nothing to say about how nature behaves" how can our scientific theories tell us (tentatively) what is physically possible or impossible?Indeed how can they tell us anything that allows us to manipulate nature in the ways that we indisputably do?On what principles do you think your computer was constructed? Ones that tell us nothing about nature?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

No, that is not the definition of deductive reasoning. That was never intended to be a definition, and it is quite explicit that no new information is produced. Who came up with that absurdity? It is refuted on just about every page of a mathematics book.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Doing calculations depends only on the mathematics being correct.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

A lens has nothing to say about grass. But I can still mount the lens in a camera, and use it to take a photograph of the grass, and then I can use information from that photograph to plan where to plant a tree in the grass.You are completely missing the point. The principles are not design specifications, and the design specifications are not the principles.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

So you continue to deny the existence of universal scientific principles or the ability of science to draw conclusions about the future behaviour of the world on the basis of these principles?Newton’s universal law of gravitation has already been discussed (the name is the clue here). Conservation of energy. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The second law of thermodynamics. All are examples of scientific principles which are considered by science to accurately describe the behaviour of nature universally. Not just here and now. Not just that which has been observed. But (tentatively) that which will be observed and even those things unobserved. Induction.I am holding my pen in the air. I am going to let go. What is the scientific conclusion regarding the actual bahaviour of my pen that will be observed when I let it go? You have invented a form of "science" that is unable to comment on what it is that a pen will do when dropped. Go figure. I object to you equating the demonstrably reliable conclusions of science to "guesses" and "opinions" because they are demonstrably superior in terms of reliability to guesses and opinions. E.g. the timings of eclipses or the behaviour of as yet undropped pens. Then you can't read. You have (at best) loosely described how it is that science works as an explanatory framework for already known observations.Your view of science (like so many others we are confronted with here at EvC) is utterly unable to account for the fact that science does not only explain. It also enables us to accurately predict the behaviour of nature. Certainly a position that asserts "Scientific theories have nothing to say about how nature behaves" is not going to be able to explain how it is that science does constantly tell us how nature almost certainly will behave from one moment to the next.Until you can account for the ability of science to do that without invoking induction to conclude that nature will continue to operate in a way that is consistent with the way it has been observed to behave thus far - You have no position.

Whether the calculations actually manage to physically land the rocket or not is utterly dependent on reality operating in accordance with those calculations. The calculations could be done perfectly but if they don't describe nature to a decent extent the rocket landing will fail.Why would we possibly expect nature to operate in accordance with our calculations unless we are inductively concluding that nature will continue to behave as it has been observed to behaves thus far?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

I haven't actually said that. I prefer that you don't make stuff up. My view is similar to that of instrumentalism:

In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that a concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality.

As you can see, instrumentalism holds that theories are not descriptions. Then you have badly misunderstood what I said.

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

Thanks for the link.
This is a quote from it:

quote:

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Deductive Reasoning is a method of gaining knowledge.

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Deductive reasoning moves from a general premise to a more specific conclusion.Method of reasoning from general to particularinference by reasoning from the general to the specific.reasoning from the general to the particular (or from cause to effect)inference in which the conclusion is of no greater generality than the premises.These are just some from the first page when googling "Deductive Reasoning Definition".Could you give some links describing what you think the definition is?
If not, then:
By definition: you cannot make general/universal rules/laws using deductive reasoning.

Yes you have. You said "Scientific theories have nothing to say about how nature behaves". You have also described scientific conclusions regarding the timing of future eclipses as "guesses" and "opinions".If you have changed your mind on that just say so and then explain how a scientific theory can accurately predict the behaviour of nature without first concluding that nature will behave as observed to behave thus far.I predict that you will not be able to without invoking inductive reasoning But instrumentalism doesn't answer the question I asked you. When making predictions why would we possibly expect nature to operate in accordance with our theories unless we are inductively concluding that nature will continue to behave as it has been observed to behaves thus far? It would aid everyones understanding if you both stopped contradicting yourself and didn't rely on irrelevant broad philosophic terms as answers to specific questions."I am a post-modern anti-Popperian instrumentalist with constructivism tendencies" is a parody of the sort of meaningless philoso-babble answers you repeatedly give.Cut the horseshit and answer the questions.

Instrumentalism denies that science can make valid inferences about unobservable phenomena. The view you have been advocating in this thread would deny science the ability to make inferences about unobserved phenomena. There is a huge difference between these two positions.