On 6/27/2021 1:56 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 2:34 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 6/27/2021 2:49 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:
On Sunday, June 27, 2021 at 3:53:18 AM UTC+2 Brent wrote:
Notice that they don't exist in the sense you mean. Newton's
laws aren't around anymore.
By laws I mean regularities in nature. The apple still falls down
and not up or in random directions, so the regularity exists like
it did in the days of Newton although Einstein's theory can
describe this regularity more accurately than Newton's theory.
So there's no guarantee they will continue without change,
but they will apply to the past. How do we know? We don't,
but it's supported by induction. Induction is a
self-supporting form of inference. If there is any effective
form of empirical inference, then induction will do as well.
The problem is, why does induction work? Solomonoff tried to
explain it with his theory of induction and that's what Russell's
book refers to.
Yes, I've read Russell's book. Solomonoff's idea is interesting
but whether his assumptions are more fundamental or believable
than just saying induction works and we know that by induction, is
questionable.
By chance I was just reading this:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286624424_My_8_Big_Ideas
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286624424_My_8_Big_Ideas> by
Zuboff, and in it he shows how to justify induction through a priori
reasoning:
"By the same reasoning
as above, if all the first beads randomly drawn are blue, it is
becoming more and more
probable that the beads in the urn are generally blue. (Otherwise
something improbable
would be happening in another colour not appearing; and what’s
improbable is improbable.)
It is therefore probable also that the next bead drawn will be blue.
This is induction. As Hume
would have said, we could not know a priori, given this evidence, that
the next bead will be
blue. But, as he overlooked, we can know a priori, given this
evidence, that it is probable that
the next bead will be blue. In neither urn example has the belief
regarding the beads been
formed as a Humean habit of expectation after many observations of
beads. (In the first case
there is only one observation. The second could be modified to have
all the beads drawn out
at once.) Rather the belief is a product of a priori reasoning about
probability."
But notice that this depends on an assumption that there are only a
finite number of beads and that the drawing is random (which is hard to
even define). In considering regularities of nature I find those
plausible, but not really any more compelling that just saying nature
has regularities because we've observed regularities in the past. It's
just a kind of "just so" story to make regularities seem be explained.
Brent
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