On a wider level the inductive of catholic way of thinking leads to nothing new, as you are moving from a generality to express or understand a particular. With induction you can derive new laws from the evidence of particularities; from the particular to the general. Clearly there is big problem with induction as it is only as good as your evidence. All swans are white due to the mass of evidence that is available until you find a black one which destroys your induction. You can respond in two ways; change the definition of swan to either include black swans or change your conclusion to include black swans. Good science should always recognise phenomena derived from induction and treat findings with skepticism. A statement such as CO2 causes GW is bad science if it is treated as a law and imposed deductively to explain all warming phenomena. This is where the trouble starts; on man's induction becomes another's deduction tomorrow.
On Oct 28, 4:52 am, Scott Mayers <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
