Nick, > I sent this response at 9.39. did you not get it. I think the server > throws away one in five of my messages, just for fun.
FWIW, I also didn't get it then. Do you know Auden's "Domesday Song"? It begins, Jumbled in the common box Of their dumb mortality, Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie. Time that tires of everyone Has corroded all the locks, Thrown away the key for fun. Now, back to your (of course very standard) definition: > Inductive reasoning consists of inferring general principles or rules from > specific facts. I wish to use this discussion to give another brief push to a new item on my agenda, viz., plugging my new catchphrase "evolutionary ontology" (which is supposed to be part of a matched pair with the "evolutionary epistemology" that has been getting a bit of a run lately, and which was arguably presaged by Konrad Lorenz in that hard-to-find article on "Kantian A-Priorism in the Light of Contemporary [i.e., c. 1944] Biology" that I sent you--in the vain hope of eliciting a response--months and months ago). One of the traditional problems in justifying "inductive reasoning" (sometimes explicitly observed to be a problem, sometimes hidden under the rug) is that (seemingly) to have *any* hope of *validly* (even in the sense of "it's a good bet") "inferring general principles or rules from specific facts", the (necessarily, I think, several) "specific facts" have to be recognized (by the inferring agent) as "specific facts" that are 'of the same kind' (or 'about things of the same kind', or 'about events of the same kind', etc.). But it is very, very hard (which doesn't stop some philosophers and others from trying) to make serious sense of any notion of 'sameness of kind' (or 'kind' itself) that is at all independent of an observing/inferring agent. The simple-minded solution (which I am entitled to propose because I am *not* a philosopher, or even trying to do philosophy) is to embrace the observing/inferring agent and declare that 'kinds' (and 'sameness' or difference thereof) are properties, not of 'things' or 'events', but of a *system* that comprises 'things'/'events'/'environments' together with an observing/inferring agent. The "evolutionary ontology" slogan now comes in as a catchy way to summarize a hypothesis (which seems eminently reasonable to me) that, in an uncatchy and confused way, should run something like "an organism recognizes [or tends to recognize] *as* 'things'/'events' that which it has evolved to so recognize; it recognizes *as* 'things'/'events' 'of the same kind' those collections of 'things'/'events' which it has evolved to so recognize; etc." In the William James version of pragmatism, this is a sort of converse to the notion that "a difference that makes no difference is no difference"--that is, it says "differences are differences because they make differences". Theories of "reasoning by induction" then begin to look like, at worst, _post hoc_ rationalizations of the favorable outcomes of evolved behaviors, and, at best, as attempts to emulate (and if possible improve the ratio of favorable to unfavorable outcomes) such behavior in a (more or less) formal, or formalizable, way (that might possibly be performed by an artificial agent or algorithm). Coming back to Auden, "orchid, swan, and Caesar lie" "jumbled in the common box of their dumb stupidity" only because Auden (disguising himself, as he often did at that period in his poetic career, as Time) has put them their: they are not (absent his agency) members of a 'natural kind'; no one would apply "inductive reasoning" to them (until Auden has provided the prompt). Lee Rudolph ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
