Owen, As I understand it: Doug announced his ordination. After a bit of banter, Doug made some generalizations about religious and non-religious people based on his past experience.... but... the ability to draw conclusions from past experience is a bit philosophically mysterious. The seeming contradiction between Doug's disavowal of faith and his drawing of conclusion based on induction set off Nick. Nick attempted to draw Doug into an open admittance that he accepted the truth of induction as an act of faith. But Nick never quite got what he was looking for, and this lead to several somewhat confused sub-threads. Eventually Nick just laid the problem out himself. However, this also confused people because, 1) the term 'induction' is used in many different contexts (e.g., to induce an electric current through a wire), and 2) there is lots of past evidence supporting the effectiveness of induction.
The big, big, big problem of induction, however, is that point 2 has no clear role in the discussion: If the problem of induction is accepted, then no amount of past success provides any evidence that induction will continue to work into the future. That is, just as the fact that I have opened my eyes every day for the past many years is no guarantee that I will open my eyes tomorrow, the fact that scientists have used induction successfully the past many centuries is no guarantee that induction will continue to work in the next century. These threads have now devolved into a few discussions centered around accidentally or intentionally clever statements made in the course conversation, as well as a discussion in which people can't understand why we wouldn't simply accept induction based on its past success. The latter are of the form "Doesn't the fact that induction is a common method in such-and-such field of inquiry prove its worth?" Hope that helps, Eric On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 10:05 PM, Owen Densmore <o...@backspaces.net> wrote: >Could anyone summarize the recent several thread that originated with this one? >> > >>I'm sorry to have to ask, but we seem to have exploded upon an interesting stunt, but with the multiple threads (I Am The Thread Fascist) and the various twists and turns, I'd sorta like to know what's up! >> > >> -- Owen ============================================================ >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 > Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================ 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
