I just wrote this post in sci.logic and thought this would be a good
forum to discuss it too. It seems that many people are
highly invested in the idea that induction is not only a certain means
to gaining truth but that it is somehow superior to deduction. The
reason for this seems sensible. Deduction only asserts that the
conclusion of an argument certainly follows from its premises whereas
it cannot guarantee that the premises themselves are initially true.
An argument can be deductively true yet, in reality, be false.
P1: Amy is male
P2: All males have a Y chromosome
Con:Amy has a Y chromosome [Deductively Valid]
Deduction is actually a term implying that the conclusion is entailed
from the premises. So you can think of deduction as always requiring
the conclusion in the argument and that you work backwards to
determine the premises. This is just what a detective does when he
solves a crime for which he already knows the conclusion. The
detective would ask what 'caused' the conclusion, say, that so-and-so
is dead, for instance? (Of course, this doesn't rule out working from
the evidence to draw conclusions that turn out to be deductive as in
seeking for the criminal)
Induction, on the other hand, can only be absolutely true when the
premises are first known to be completely sampled AND that all the
premises are identical instances AND the conclusion formulates or
generalizes the instances to any new instance. Anything less than 100%
guarantees that the conclusion is NOT ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN.
Generally, only in math and logic dialectic, does induction prove to
show absolute certainty. Technically, I think there is another place
that this can be shown to exist too. But it is subject only to
oneself. Things like being certain of your existence is your truth to
claim absolutely in this way without being denied. This is our
personal undeniable empiricism.
I am skeptical of today's dependence on induction in physics with
contrary and contradictory views on deduction and normal logical
method, how and when proponents choose and choose not to use it. Most
are definitely against arguments based on premises founded on either
logic itself or apriori intuition. Personally, in regards to
mentioning oneself as a perfect observer, you can begin with "I
exist" (no need to determine whether you think or not; if you didn't
then you have no business in the argument) and build your foundation
by creating premises regarding reasoning from your experience. If one
can establish the information sufficiently and correctly, they can
come to draw real conclusions about the real world. [P.S. For those
who are familiar to the critical argument that ended the age of
foundationalism, the "Incompleteness Theorem" by Geodel, he was wrong!
But for
another post.]
Scott Mayers.
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