Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
Why the phrase “late Capitalism” is suddenly everywhere.
Mathematician talks about the known unknown and the unknown unknown, seriously.
There’s a green card holder at the heart of Greek philosophy.
Did someone solve Hume’s problem of induction, and nobody noticed?
The true expert does not perform in a state of effortless “flow.”
BONUS: My new book, How to Be a Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living has been published in the UK!
Footnotes to Plato 
DM: Yes, the author is as confused about Hume’s problem of induction as you are. And no, I won’t try to explain it again. The effort I exerted in the Scientia thread was more than enough.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Perhaps I don’t understand what the problem of induction is. I thought that it was that in Hume’s time, it was accepted that we gain knowledge through induction; i.e., we observe singular instances and derive true ideas about the world from them. Hume showed that there is no logical justification for this. Thus, the problem of induction is that it seems evident that our knowledge has grown with experience, but the method we use (induction) shouldn’t be able to do this. I thought Popper solved this quite completely by pointing out that our knowledge doesn’t grow through induction, first by pointing out that truth is not a necessary condition of what we commonly call knowledge and then by drawing attention to the creative aspect of hypothesis formation. We come up with hypotheses perhaps not out of thin air, but out of some creative process we don’t understand, and then our knowledge grows by investigating things that arise deductively from these hypotheses. Obviously, hypotheses involve attempted explanation of a string of past observations; you can call this an inductive process perhaps, but I don’t think that that is the same use of induction as in the problem of induction. Am I missing something here?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi all,
I don’t think anyone is saying we can get away from assumptions. As I said, we need to make assumptions even to believe that the deductive process works. The question is how self-evident the assumptions are. Questionable assumptions are problematic. Self-evident assumptions are a more satisfactory basis for any argument.
It isn’t really self-evident that nature is uniform and that it will continue to be uniform forever. It may not be. But the laws of deductive logic are self-evident. I can’t seriously doubt them. So they are less problematic thn the assumption than that nature is uniform, and this is why we don’t have a problem of deduction — not because deductive logic does not rest on assumptions.
Similarly, it seems to me that the laws of probability are somewhat more self-evident than that nature is uniform, although perhaps less so than the laws of deduction. So if a defense of the assumption that nature is uniform can be reduced to a defence of the assumption of the laws of probability, it seems to me that a lot of the significance of Hume’s problem is deflated.
LikeLike
Hi Robin,
Nobody thinks anything of the sort. The original article pointed out that this solution was published 70 years ago. Plenty of people have thought of this resolution of the problem. The only issue is that it hasn’t been accepted by mainstream philosophy for some reason.
LikeLike
Hi again, Robin,
As I understand it, Hume concedes that we have observed the universe to be regular in the past. That’s all you need for my argument to show that we should expect it to continue to be regular, because it is very unlikely that the day it will suddenly cease to be regular is tomorrow or the day after. All you need to justify this is basic probability, which is sufficiently self-evident (in my view at least) to justify induction, while the bare assumption that the universe is uniform is not.
LikeLike
Hi DM
Deductive justifications of probability are on objects axiomatically assumed to be regular, not just to have been observed to be regular in the past but constantly regular.
Drop that assumption and none of them work.
So the assumption that probability can tell you anything about the validity of induction is to include the assumption, not only that the Universe was regular in the past, but that it will continue to be so in the future.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi August
I dont know what distinction you are making between induction as Popper used it and induction as Hume would have understood it.
We have known since Aristotle that knowledge about the world is gained through a combination of inductive and deductive processes so Popper was saying nothing new.
I don’t see how Popper has addressed the problem at all, never mind satisfactorily.
LikeLike
When they talk about a ‘fair coin’ in provability they don’t mean a coin which has previously been fair but about which no assumptions of fairness are made about the future.
They mean that whatever example, calculation or theorem that is being made about it only applies insofar as it continues to be a fair coin.
LikeLike
Probability, not provability.
LikeLike
The case of the famous scientific chicken
Once there was a chicken with scientific inclinations. He liked to form hypotheses and test ‘em against experience.
He was a free range chicken. He noticed that ever morning a man game out of a nearby house and spread delicious food on the ground. When the man game out the chicken ran happily up to him.
He had the hypothesis that the man was a robot that a feed chickens. The hypothesis was confirmed as the man feed the chicken as regularly as the sun rose each morning.
Then one morning the man game out, grabed the scientific chicken by his legs, twisted his head off.
LikeLike
synred (regarding your comment )
<it’s my impression that most current ‘illegal’ imprecation though Mexico is from Central America and consist of refugees from the drug wars. It is a humanitarian crisis, but not from from the middleat. >
U.S. foreign policy has screwed up not only Mexico, but all of Central America. In 1823, the Monroe doctrine was born, which stated that the U.S. would not tolerate further colonization or puppet monarchs in countries in the western hemisphere.
The point being that the U.S. wanted to colonize and set up puppet monarchs favorable to U.S. imperialist interests throughout the western hemisphere. How ironic. Guatamala, Honduras, and El Salvador have particularly been devastated by U.S. funding of right wing groups, either in power or as opposition parties to a socialist leaning government. The U.S. drug war has not been kind to these countries.
In general, see Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: United States, Latin America, and the Rise of the New Imperialism: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0805083235/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=K9QEZYLNPR5J&coliid=IW6IN0L08ADO8
LikeLiked by 1 person
To consider a stage of “late capitalism,” it might be useful to first describe “Capitalism.”
Capital is accumulated wealth or value. Capitalism is the process of using that store of value to create or accumulate more value. What is otherwise known as a positive feedback.
It is doubtful economic positive feedback loops are ever going to be outdated and the presumed alternative to Capitalism, i.e. Socialism, most succinctly explained as; “From according to ability, to according to need,” only really works in small, organic groups, without some effective means of accounting and renumeration, or the society breaks back down into small groups.
The real problem for Capitalism is when it goes from positive feedback, to negative feedback. That more value/wealth is being lost, as in debt, resource depletion, etc, than gained and as a civilization, we are definitely in that stage, even if particular individuals and groups are parasitically increasing their personal wealth, at the expense of the larger system.
As my father, an old cattle and horse dealer put it; “You can’t starve a profit.”
Economics is the foundation on which society is built. A solid foundation is essential for a stable society.
Keynes may have been right that in the long run we are all dead, but that’s not a good principle on which to build a society, because eventually all terms are up.
What goes round, comes round.
LikeLike
Further reading Earnshaw, near the end, he muddies the water between “inductive” and “deductive” arguments, as far as argument strength, within informal logic. It’s a nice sleight of hand, but sleight of hand it is.
Massimo, I noticed that he says he’s primarily a philosopher of the biology of evolution. Do you know him personally?
LikeLike
Valerian: Tis true. In fact, Mexico recovered from the Great Recession more quickly and more readily than the US. Its agricultural economy took a pummeling post-NAFTA, but has moved on as best it could.
Side note — the general hypocrisy of both “main” US parties on decries agricultural subsidies elsewhere while ignoring such in the US (the ongoing brouhaha with Canada over timber while the US Forest Service charges pennies for cutting south of the border is the latest example) needs to be pointed out.
Back to the main point. From what I’ve read, probably a full quarter of undocumented Latino immigrants to the US are from further south than Mexico, and that’s on a conservative estimate.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Additional note: Valerian, you forgot to mention Hillary’s support for the 2009 coup in Honduras. Side note to that: In the one Democratic debate, Sanders “conveniently,” in listing coups, or attempted coups, covered only the ones under Republican presidents. Bay of Pigs, Diem, Trujillo in the Dominican and others (not to mention Woodrow Wilson’s ongoing meddling in Mexico long ago) are among examples of Democratic-induced coups.
LikeLiked by 1 person
EJ — I might just have to take your comment as stimulus for a New Devil’s Dictionary entry.
LikeLiked by 1 person
On the known, versus the unknown, Chaos Theory led into Complexity Theory. That we exist on that edge between order and chaos. Which when I first read it many years ago, seemed an apt analogy of time. That of the present as this knife’s edge between the order of the past and the chaos of the future.
In trying to develop this idea through conversations with others, I invariably run up against the brick wall of physics having settled the issue of time as another dimension, on which all events exist and time’s flow from the order of the past to the chaos of the future is simply an illusion. (Or events consolidating out of the chaos of the future, into the order of the past…)
That this system cannot even explain why time is asymmetric, before entropy is apparent, or why the point of the present is so precise, while space is so much more nebulous, or any number of other issues, is as beside the point as asking why Jesus was born of a virgin.
Sometimes the problem is in the unknown knowns. What we know, but ignore.
LikeLike
Socratic,
You might add Vietnam as an attempted coup, initiated under Democratic administrations.
LikeLike
According to SEP Popper declared the problem of induction insoluble but said that it does not apply to science because science makes no claim whatsoever about the future. Science just tells us what has been observed so far, which models best describe it and what experiments have worked etc.
Well, OK, have it that way if you will but it seems an unnecessary contraction of what science is just to avoid saying if one of its aspects that it works and works beautifully but we can’t say deductively why.
LikeLike
I don’t agree with everything in the Polemarchus piece … in part since Kaufmann’s “Without Guilt and Justice” has influenced me on some of this. That said, this part is good overall:
The first piece has been a statement of all the world’s religious traditions. Of course, most of them then go on to muck that very idea up elsewhere.
The second? And the third?
Well, Hume! And not for induction.
That said, let’s remember that Hume wasn’t kicking reason to the curb.
Per SEP:
But, again, that doesn’t mean reason is kicked to the curb:
Massimo may try to hoist me on a Humean petard, that of the is ≠ ought, and tell me (and maybe even David himself!) that we can transcend those passions, even if Hume himself says they don’t govern all.
But, not all “is’s” are necessarily bad. I think at times, we run the risk of viewing H. sapiens through a shadowy (I see what I did there) Platonic filter, thinking the “real human” (or the real Gadfly, or Massimo) is “out there,” transcending the wormbag that I actually am, passions and all. (And yes, on my pathway to and through divinity school, I did have just such a Platonic understanding of Paul’s “spiritual body” of post-resurrection life in I Corinthians.)
We’ve got passions.
So do other animals.
Our passions, just like our intellect, are far more deep and complex than that of a cow, or even a chimp.
LikeLike
EJ, thanks for the link. Oseroff nicely nails Earnshaw’s hide to the wall with what, or whom, I mentioned — Goodman. Earnshaw then gets butt-hurt in comments. No other way to put it, in my book.
LikeLike
Socratic,
It is our passions that push us on and reason is the feedback from what we encounter.
Passion and consciousness move onto the future, while thought and logic consolidate what we acquire from this process, necessarily receding into the past, as new is constantly added.
Cows and chimps just don’t hold onto as much.
LikeLike
valariansteel
Greg Grandin’s book is very good, that’s all I’ll say other than of course I align with what you have said.
LikeLike
Agreed. The CIA ‘army’ left Guatemala with 40 years of machismo over a few cents on the price of banana’s …
Somaza,Pinochet, Noriega, etc. Iran at least had oil … something worth stealing …
We love dictators despite all the talk about our core values of democracy and human rights …
LikeLiked by 1 person
In any case the problem of induction doesn’t just refer to ‘past=future’ type of assumptions and so the probabilistic approach, even if it worked for those cases would only address a portion of the problem of induction.
LikeLike
Hi Robin,
Nothing at all about the world can be known a priori. Everything needs to be justified in terms of other things (including deductive reasoning). It is wrong to look for a foundational starting point. Thus one justifies induction using a probabilistic analysis, and then one justifies the use of probabilistic analysis using other things in the Quine-style web of beliefs. And the overall web is validated by its success in modelling the world.
Thus one cannot produce some lines of logic sufficient to justify induction (Hume was entirely right on that), but induction is indeed justified to the same extent (or not) as many other things in the web. It’s not sense to pick on induction as peculiar in this regard, since anything else (including deductive reasoning) is just as suspect (or not).
None of this gives absolute certainty, but once you’ve accepted that you cannot have that regarding anything, there is no more reason to doubt the “induction” aspects of the web than any other aspects of the web. None of them can be arrived at by a priori reasoning either.
Indeed, for such reasons, from a “web” perspective, dividing reasoning into “inductive”, “deductive”, “abductive” et cetera is of limited utility — all reasoning uses aspects of all of those.
[PS I see that none of the people asserting that we have no justification for induction are taking me up on a bet over whether there will be a solar eclipse in August, despite me offering rather good odds!]
LikeLiked by 2 people
Hi Coel
I think you are kind of missing the point there.
LikeLike
But I will take the bet as long as you promise not to assume the axiom of identity for the purposes of the bet.
So if the solar eclipse can be shown to be a solar eclipse you win, otherwise I do.
For the purposes of paying up the axiom applies.
LikeLike
Anyway, I am pretty sure the problem of induction is not “Science doesn’t work”
Nor is it “You can’t justify statements about the future using observations about the past”, so the bet is irrelevant.
LikeLike
Is it really true that if I believe that setting a match to some newspaper will light it on fire, I am assuming that the future will be like the past, because the future has always been like the past in the past? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that I believe the newspaper will catch on fire because it and the match have properties such that the newspaper will catch on fire if I set a match to it? Of course, the only reason I think the match / newspaper will act like that is because of past observations … oh dear.
LikeLiked by 1 person