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 
The problem of induction is only a problem (in the ordinary language sense of ‘problem’) if you believe absolutely every belief must be justified or jettisoned.
“Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there it will lie.”
Unless the tree falls to the snorth, defined as south until time t and north after that.
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Actually there are a couple of practical implications to the PoI. I think that, as usual, we all mean slightly different things by it and are all talking at cross purposes.
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Probably there are some subtleties to it that I’m missing. In any case, it’s always useful to unbury buried assumptions, and that is what I understand the ‘problem of induction’ to be doing.
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Socratic,
“I noticed that he says he’s primarily a philosopher of the biology of evolution. Do you know him personally?”
No, unfortunately, nothing to add in that respect.
Robin,
“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.”
Hmm. I always thought that Popper thought he had solved the problem of induction because he shifted away from the idea that theories can be proven to be true to the one that they can be proven to be false (falsification), thus securing progress in science by an application of modus tollens in logic. Of course, he was incorrect.
“[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!]
I think you are kind of missing the point there.”
Bigly!
Markk,
“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?”
To the extent that you expect the match to lit the paper, yes. Even if you derive your expectation from knowledge of physics, rather than simple experience, that knowledge also comes by way of inductive means.
“The problem of induction is only a problem (in the ordinary language sense of ‘problem’) if you believe absolutely every belief must be justified or jettisoned.”
No, Hume didn’t believe we should jettison our beliefs or our science. The problem is simply that there is no logical justification independent of further induction. We use it, it works, but we can’t justify it. (And no, “it works” isn’t a justification, because it would invoke induction.)
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To concede a couple points on induction…
I agree that Coel’s bet misses the point. Nobody seriously doubts that induction works. The disagreement is over whether this belief in induction is actually justified.
Similarly, I think the author is wrong to assert that we must all acknowledge that Hume has to be wrong somehow. Induction could happen to work without our having any justification for our faith in it. It might be something like a Gettier case — something that we believe to be true and actually is true but we don’t have a justification for our belief. That is all Hume is trying to show.
At the moment, where I’m at in this problem is that
1) I think induction can be justified with probability theory
2) I don’t see that probability theory requires induction to justify itself, though this has been asserted by Massimo and others.
So the vicious circle is broken. Furthermore, basic probability seems almost as self-evident to me as deductive logic, so I don’t see that there is really a problem of induction.
Or can somebody explain to me how (1) or (2) are incorrect?
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Hi DM,
Let me reiterate:
“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.”
and:
“When they talk about a ‘fair coin’ in probability 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.”
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The notion that your bed is an object with an existence independent from you, undergoing permanent changes even in your absence, changes that you can discover later, is an induction that relies entirely upon your previous experience. And the same is entirely true of every single aspect of the reality you encounter. The problem of induction is the problem of “proving” that there is in fact any outside reality at all, that I’m not just imagining it all. The thing of course is that the consistency and detail of reality are not random. It is the contention of Hume that the consistency can be illusory or temporary or limited. This is substantively the same as Descartes’ suggestion of a Deceiver who created this apparent consistency. The only difference is an imaginary personage.
Antoine de Lavoisier conducted an elaborate series of experiments to measure the masses of reactants and products during a chemical reaction. Finding them to be equal, he formulated the law of conservation of mass. Descartes was consistent enough to admit that his philosophy could not prove the existence of the balances, while Hume would have been inconsistent enough to accept the measurements as facts. But Hume, like Descartes, would agree when being consistent that the law of conservation of mass was no law. Therefore one could not properly resort to it as a causal explanation, neither in experiments nor in daily existence. In practice, I think, Descartes resolved his problem by being inconsistent, imagining a dual world of matter and spirit, while Hume simply went to sleep at night, ignoring it. The philosophical repudiation of induction is the repudiation of science. Happily the fruits of science and technology are generally available for money, without any certificate of belief required.
This being the problem, Earnshaw seems to think philosophy should conform itself to reality, rather than the other way round. He explicitly notes there is no general justification for induction in the abstract. (I’m not sure induction is even susceptible to a satisfactory abstract description.) But he offers a counterexample to the general argument against induction offered by Hume. Personally I would have thought a single counterexample should at least have caused any self-respecting philosopher to at least pause. Oseroff regardless dismisses Earnshaw (and Stove and Williams) for 1)being rude about philosophers 2) ignoring Goodman’s “new riddle of induction” and 3) as offering a statistical sampling argument, which fails because it makes unjustifiable assumptions. Oseroff’s own words are largely about item one but of no real interest. I can only observe that popular invocations of Popper and Kuhn are indeed quite often highly objectionable, something Oseroff doesn’t seem to care about.
Skipping ahead to Oseroff’s citations on item three, he writes “In sum, the sampling principle cannot be used to justify any inductive inference, for there must be further assumptions made about randomness and uniform distribution of the total population (Nagel, 1947).” The assumptions about the randomness and uniform distribution of samplers are expressed in science by its commitment to collective procedures, with multiple researchers in different places and times confirming observations, with conscious efforts to make sampling random. As for the problem of non-random sampling of the “outside” world by an individual, the reliance on measurements and instruments addresses that difficulty. This objection appears to reduce to the claim that if you do science stupidly, then that proves doing science doesn’t prove anything. Oseroff actually cites Nagel for the claim that seeing a man live sixty five years, or twenty four thousand days, means inductively that he should live forever! Yes, sure, if you insist on a non-random “sample” of one man and ignore all examples of other people dying, and ignore the aging and ignore any sicknesses and ignore the occurrence of accidents to other people. Induction means examining it, not ignoring it. It does not inspire confidence in Oseroff’s judgment that he thinks this observation by Nagel supports his case.
But it’s not clear that Nagel (and the others Oseroff cites) are even talking about the randomness and uniform distribution of the total population of samplers and samples. They may be talking about the randomness and uniform distribution of the total population of entities in the world outside the philosopher’s mind (if they accept there is one, that is.) Here, the thing is, if you’re going to talk about statistics and non-random distribution, then you need to address the question of how reality seems to be so consistent and non-random. If you reject the idea that you can prove the existence of an outer reality by the fact that it doesn’t go away even when you stop believing it, you need to provide some explanation of it. The Humes, the Nagels, the Oseroffs don’t. (To my knowledge.) If you reject inductive generalization like Lavoisier’s conservation of mass, you need to at least sketch out some way for this to be so. This kind of philosophical objection is very much like a creationist finding logical flaws in evolutionary science. Is it really any wonder when lay people who accept these kinds of philosophical principles espoused by the Humes and Oseroffs are consistent enough to reject the philosophically unsound evolutionary science?
At this point, one can only guess as to what’s really going on in these people’s minds. The statistical sampling of reality produces conclusions of varying probabilities apt to change as new data is incorporated. If the unspoken assumption is that justification requires definitively final certainty, or it doesn’t even count as justification, then none of this addresses Hume/Descartes’ Deceiver. The thing is, again, it is not clear that holding tenure in a philosophy department gives you the authority to require this. Even worse for the philosophers, their standard of knowledge would actively hamper scientific research if taken seriously. Bad philosophy unquestioningly assumed by working scientists I think has caused many, many more errors than the folly of believing induction can provide knowledge. It remains to be explained how rejecting induction leads one to do better science.
Going back to Goodman’s new riddle of induction, Oseroff writes “Take for example the inductive inference, ‘All observed emeralds have been grue, therefore the next observed emerald will be probably grue’: it is identical in form to statistical sampling arguments that produce the inductive inference, ‘All observed emeralds have been green, therefore the next observed emerald will be probably green’.” If grue was an inductive generalization about the existence of an emerald, this would be true.Neither is a generalization from experience. It is not clear how expressing the process of induction in deductive form, then substituting a meaningless term says anything about induction. Of course it’s deductively valid. I thought this kind of thing is exactly why logical validity is no guarantee of truth. Judging from the wikipedia article, Goodman may intended “grue” and “bleen” to highlight the question of why we judge some things to be causal (“projectible” in the jargon of the wikipedia article.) I don’t know if it’s the article that doesn’t understand Goodman or Oseroff.
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It may be me who is misunderstanding.
Let me give my understanding of the problem of induction.
Say we always observe A to be true whenever B is true for a certain number of observations and see no exceptions and we conclude that A is true whenever B is true. This is a conclusion that has been reached by induction.
The problem is that there is no reasoning or rule by which you could have come to that conclusion. Sometimes that can be a perfectly good conclusion, sometimes it can just be wrong. Other times it is true within a certain scope. It is just a matter of judgement or intution.
If you say that, by probability, A has been true whenever B is true so many times then it is probably the case that whenever I next encounter B being true then A will be true, then you might be right, but you had to use intuition to know that this was a case where you could apply probability. And it still does not mean that A is true whenever B is true.
In any case, that is my best effort at explaining how I understand the general problem of induction.
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PS If one must criticize Earnshaw to be taken seriously as even-handed, you really must observe that his comments on evolution are gibberish.
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DM, the Scii Chickens hypothesis was scientific. I could be (and was) falsified.
Probabilistic, it usually gave a correct prediction.
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Hi DM,
I don’t think my bet misses the point. Its purpose is to highlight that people are being inconsistent. If they genuinely thought that there was no justification for thinking that induction will hold in the coming August (and thus no reason at all to suppose my prediction will be correct), then they’d be willing to take the bet.
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Actually, it misses the bet of human psychology, Coel, as expressed by Hume himself with his “I just go to sleep” comment when asked about the problem of induction. We all “act as if,” just as he does. The actions of human nature, if they should be called inconsistent in such places, would certainly fall in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “foolish inconsistency” category.
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Hi Robin,
But this is much more general than induction. Let’s suppose I want to justify claim A, where A is any claim about the world at all. I can only do that in terms of B, C and D. Yet, I then need to know that it is ok to apply B, C and D. In other words, “justification” can only ever be distributed in the Quine-style web of beliefs; we can never know anything securely from a priori foundations.
Regarding induction, the probabilistic argument would be along these lines: There is a time period of stability. The period of stability is of unknown length and may end at some unknown time. Since there are many days in the middle of the time period and only one “last day”, it is unlikely that we’re on that last day.
If one rejects such arguments on the grounds that we haven’t justified the use of probability, then ok but one should then also adopt such skepticism about any and all claims about anything.
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Few people who discuss the problem of induction seem to have noticed that Hume himself gave the solution, in the chapter immediately following the one in which he stated the problem! (“Sceptical solution of these doubts”)
Markk wrote:
Exactly. I think the reason many people don’t see Hume’s solution as a solution is that it doesn’t consist of a justificatory argument for induction. Hume’s solution is to see that we just get on and make inductive inferences because it’s in our nature to do so (as it is for animals too). We don’t need no stinkin’ argument!
Here’s a post I wrote on this subject a couple of years ago:
https://barbedsextant.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/the-problem-of-induction-and-does-science-have-presuppositions/
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Socratic, are you intentionally misquoting Emerson? It’s “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I’ve never been a big fan of “Self-Reliance,” but Wikiquotes has a delightful selection of quotes on the subject of consistency, such as this one:
“Of course I’m inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!” — Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1976); spoken by the character “The Chink”.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Consistency
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Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds…
When my mother developed dementia, she remained logical. Her deductions made sense, her inductions did not. By the nature of the illness, there’s no way to know whether you have it.
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From the article:
“the philosophy community today still treats Hume and Hume’s argument seriously in a way that it just does not treat Descartes. So although Descartes is probably even more useful for installing intellectual humility in undergrads, he doesn’t pose a huge, looming, unresolved problem that people try to ignore hanging over their head while it makes everything they do and say pointless nonsense. That’s pretty much just Hume.”
I don’t always agree with Coel but I think he has hit the nail on the head. However I won’t enter that debate. Instead I want to ask – what is the significance of this debate?
Science ignores it and get on with the job perfectly well, churning out jolly good results all the time. I don’t see any science papers with Humean disclaimers 🙂 The man in the street ignores it and get on with his life perfectly well as if the problem never existed. He needn’t even know that Hume existed! The public transport will still work.
I grant that the problem has some academic interest to philosophers somewhere in academia but is that the sum of its significance? So this then is my question. Is there any real significance to the problem, outside the circle of philosophers in academe, or is this just another good reason for science to scoff at philosophy?
I acknowledge that enquiry has no boundaries and therefore we should push at the borders of understanding. We have pushed at this border for more than 250 years and nothing has changed except that science has grown more impatient with philosophy. So what is the point?
Have you got some practical answers that will pass muster with the hard nosed physicists at my local university?
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Welcome back labnut, we missed you! 🙂
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Thanks Coel, I will do my best to provoke some dissension!
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Thomas, I meant “foolish consistency,” so the misquote was not deliberate. That said …. “foolish inconsistency” does have a Trumpian ring, no?
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Richard: IMO, this also may relate to interpretations of what type of skeptic Hume may have been — and how well he actually understood original Skepticism and the difference between the two schools.
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Deduction is distillation. Induction is projection.
Yes, we frequency make erroneous projections, but unless physical inertia has ceased, the future will happen.
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frequently
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What I find odd about Hume is that he implicitly uses induction in his argument. He start from the idea that we use induction. Where did he get it? By observing regularities in our behavior, I suppose, and turning them in a general statement. He uses certain rules of inference, logic etc. Why these rules and not others? Probably because he observed that they worked in the past to arrive at correct conclusions and assumes that they will work in his argument as well – induction.
If we believe his argument shows that induction is not justified, then we have to accept to that it is inconsistent, because it rests on the implicit assumption that induction is justified. If we work with rules of inference, logic etc. that don’t allow to deduct from a premise the negation of that premise (as Hume thought he did, I assume) then the argument is inconsistent. It isn’t difficult to spot the inconsistency – it’s right there from the beginning. Perhaps Hume believed there are “good” inductions (the apparently justified ones he uses) and “bad” inductions (the ones that are not justified).
If Hume merely wanted to point out that deduction cannot justify the premises on which we apply the deduction, then I’m puzzled why his argument generates so much activity. That’s not exactly new. Perhaps he wanted to point out that much of our intellectual activity starts from the premise that there’s regularity in the world (but how did he know without deduction?). Or perhaps he wanted to argue that we never can be certain that the supposed regularity really exists – it’s always possible that the sun won’t rise tomorrow and that all those sunrises were a giant statistical fluke – but then I don’t understand why somebody would get excited about that. It’s obviously possible. It’s also possible that there are unicorns living on Saturnus, or that Trump actually is a very good president. The logical space is huge.
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That should have been “without induction”.
Edit function now, please!
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Well, I came back to this a day later, and there’ve been so many posts that it seems hopeless to deal with them all. I’m still trying to get a handle on how people are using “induction”. Popper’s argument, as I remember it, is that we don’t actually use induction at all in the advance of scientific knowledge. I thought he was speaking about explanatory hypotheses. Thus, predicting that A will follow B because we’ve always seen A follow B in the past is not an example of scientific knowledge. What scientists do (or, at least, what I did in my career as a biologist) is to try to come up with an idea that explains WHY A follows B. That is, what explanation could I come up with that would allow me to deduce that A will follow B? You may call that induction, but it seems to me that that is a creative process, that has no logical justification. Once you’ve done this part, then you can make all types of deductions from it that can be tested against the world. But even if you are saying that you expect the sun to rise tomorrow, it seems unlikely that that is because it always rose in the past; it seems to me that you have in the back of your mind an hypothesis that explains why the sun will rise tomorrow. That explanation is not inductive; someone (or you) conjectured it in the past.
The problem seems to be, then, that if scientific knowledge can not be justified as true, how is it that our knowledge has obviously grown through history (in the sense that we are able to predict and control natural phenomena better with time)? Popper’s answer lay in the asymmetry of the logic between verification and falsification. That is, there is no logical way to verify an hypothesis as true, but for some hypotheses there is a logical route to falsification. Note, I am not talking about falsification in practice, which is largely impossible, for reasons that Popper himself pointed out. It is strictly a logical situation. But, this opens the possibility of advancing knowledge by letting go of those ideas that don’t work. I think that is the logic of scientific discovery. It is this explanation of how knowledge could grow that I think Popper got right. His methodological suggestions were hopelessly off the mark (as Kuhn and Feyerabend argued), and the whole attempt at a theory of verisimilitude was a failure. But I think he explained the logic, and why induction is not an issue, correctly.
Now, as should be blatantly obvious, I’m not a philosopher, and have had very little exposure to philosophy in any systematic way. My knowledge of Popper comes from exposure in a few biostatistics courses in grad school back in the ’70s. I posted here in hopes that I might find some clarification. I find though that people seem to be speaking about induction in ways different from me, and from each other. Is coming up with an hypothesis to explain certain observations and example of inductive logic? I’ve been thinking no, but I’d like to be corrected if that’s not the case.
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Hi Coel
“But this is much more general than induction. ”
No that is basically what induction is. Certainly we usually use induction in concert with a number of other methods as I said earlier, but when we accept something on the basis that it has always been observed to be the case then we are doing induction.
The PoI is about induction in general, you are talking about a special not very interesting case. All the same the probability argument is stll wrong for reasons I already gave and they have nothing to do with skeptcal about probability.
But, as I say, we appear to be at cross purposes about what the PoI is or what induction is, for that matter.
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Hi August
For example how did people decide that there was a first law of thermodynamics if not using induction?
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It is a cycle of expansion and consolidation.
“That is, what explanation could I come up with that would allow me to deduce that A will follow B? You may call that induction, but it seems to me that that is a creative process, that has no logical justification. Once you’ve done this part, then you can make all types of deductions from it that can be tested against the world.”
Project. Distill.
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I think it would be useful if everybody stopped trying to think of it as an attack on science or on the validity of scientific discovery, it would br very useful.
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