My word for today is "woebegone." - looking sad, pitiful. — T Clark

That's a word that sounds right, but a naive parsing suggests a meaning that is the opposite of what it actually means. Woe - be gone! But, according to Dictionary.com, the etymology is "Middle English wo begon orig., woe (has or had) surrounded (someone); wo woe + begon, past participle of begon, Old English begān to surround, besiege".

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon...

Tenebrous.

Came up regularly in a book I once edited and I had to look it up. It still sounds to me to be the opposite of what it is. But maybe that's just me. — Baden

To speakers of Slavic languages it should sound just right: the first syllable stands of "shadow" or "darkness."


A word that I often encountered in Falkner, and practically nowhere else, is susurrating. Now that's a word that doesn't even need an explanation.

du
1. Contraction of de + le (of the)
2. Contraction of de + le; forms the partitive article

My entry ;)

I think that's not a bad definition, but what is it that you think people find so odious about that viewpoint? I mean, they're just saying that no other type of claim is valid, not that no-one can hold or talk about any other claims.

Obviously you might not agree with them in that, but I would commonly expect such disagreement to take the form "claims made using method X are valid because...", whereas all I hear in connection with the term Scientism, is the complaint that it denies claims of any other sort. Well, why shouldn't it? Surely, if one has at least a reasonable argument about epistemological claims, one is entitled to make it? — Pseudonym

Perhaps (contradicting what I've just said - I am large) "scientism" is perceived as a certain philosophical obliviousness. It is when someone prejudges science to be the right tool for the any job without giving the question any critical thought - i.e. precisely without having a reason for it.

Curious contradiction I can't quite unpick, in the first half of the paragraph you say I'm over-thinking it, in the second half you advise asking the users of the term to elaborate. Is that not exactly what I'm doing here? Where is the line you think I've crossed between asking for elaboration and over-thinking? — Pseudonym

I mean that the term by itself expresses more of a speaker's attitude than a motivated stance, which is what you've been demanding. If you are after reasons and arguments, then ask your counterpart to give you that, instead of just giving you the attitude.

I think perhaps you are looking for something which doesn't exist. You ask for a neutral, non-polemical definition of Scientism. I don't think there are any philosophers who willingly accept "Scientism" as a description of their views. Usually "Scientism" is used as a name for views which, in the eyes of the critic, elevate science into an unacceptably special position. — PossibleAaran

Yes, exactly. @Pseudonym, you are overthinking this. There is no such philosophical school of thought as Scientism. It is just a pejorative label; it expresses a subjective attitude. If someone throws an accusation of "scientism" in a conversation, don't agree or disagree, but ask to elaborate.

I don't know how old you are, so I don't know what perspective you are judging from. Let me make a list of major events in the course of liberal democracy since the end of WWII:

Reconstruction and rise of Europe. End to centuries of conflict
Reconstruction and rise of Japan and Korea
The United Nations
The breakup of the Soviet Union
Democracy in Eastern Europe
Independence of former European colonies
[*} Democratization of formerly authoritarian regimes
The end of Apartheid
The European Union
The Arab Spring
The rise of second string and third string economic powers - Brazil, China, India — T Clark

Your outlook seems to be stuck sometime 20 years ago. I remember, it felt like a hopeful time then. The fall of the Communist empire, the end of Apartheid, old seemingly intractable conflicts, like the one in Northern Ireland, finally dissolving, peace in Cambodia, the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Israelies negotiating with Palestinians, Pinochet's regime winding down... Of course, I was young then, and fortuitously situated to experience some of those events first-hand. But even accounting for the changes that advancing years bring to one's outlook, it's hard to deny that times have changed, and we are not living in the same period any more.

However, for China, Luce states that two prized historic events for modern China are "China's detonation of the Hydrogen bomb in 1964," and "Britain's transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997." Both examples, "show China's deep-rooted desire to be treated with respect and dignity." — Maw

A curious thing about China is that the historic events they tend to most dwell on are not of great victories and achievements but quite the opposite: defeats and humiliations - at the hands of foreigners, of course. Ressentiment is strong in traditional ideological propaganda, and the people seem to take well to it.

(This is gotten second- and third-hand, so take this with a grain of salt.)

That Einstein quip about the Moon should not be taken too literally (or at all literally). Its context is a scientific debate about quantum physics, which is wide-ranging and in large part philosophical in its own right, but since this is a metaphysics & epitemology section and your line of questioning doesn't seem to engage with that specific debate, we can leave it aside. Suffice it to say that in the context of the historical debate, indirect observation most definitely counts as an observation. If you can observe indirect effects of the Moon, that means that its wavefunction has long since "collapsed" (to use Bohr's preferred interpretation), so the question is moot.

Reading your glosses of Cartwright's attacks on the laws of nature (as well as one of her shorter papers), I have to wonder who is she arguing with? And just what exactly is she attacking?

To the extent that the positions that are being attacked are not vague generalities, here is what I can make out:

1. As a preliminary observation, what is meant by "laws of nature" in this context are specific statements, rules, equations that have traditionally been so called. So Newton's Law of gravitation is one such law.

2. And the criticism seems to come down to this: No one law of nature specifies the behavior of everything, ever, in all domains and all contexts.

Well, duh? How is that a criticism? Yes, a scientific "law" usually describes a particular regularity in a prescribed context and against the background of a specific theoretical framework. Or even just one principal component of what may be a superposition of regularities. How is that controversial?


Also, to better understand where Cartwright is coming from, it would help to note that she belongs to a powers/capacities/dispositions school of thought as regards causation. Things exercise their natural capacities in certain circumstances, and that is how everything happens in nature. You can see how the view of the "dappled world" comes about. While every given thing has a specific nature, a world filled with a bunch of different things with no overriding organizing principle (since all principles are local and attached to particular things), on the whole it's going to look "dappled."

There is a wide variety of views on causation, and no one of them dominates - indeed, different views do not necessarily exclude each other. I lean more towards causal pluralism myself (which Cartwright also advocates), but the powers-capacities view is perhaps my least favorite. It has a homely, intuitive appeal, but as an analytical tool I think it is very limited, and science does not sit well with it.

You mention assumptions and I suppose this could be the key to this, I have a horrible feeling that we must make assumptions about the nature of justification itself before we can apply it to anything, and that makes it seem feasible that we can make assumptions about the nature of reasoning and thereby develop a system of logic. Perhaps assumptions like, that we can know justification as a concept exists automatically without it itself requiring justification. This then makes me wonder if logic also doesn't require justification, though it also makes me wonder how I can, or whether I need to, justify those assumptions. — hymyíŕeyr

Yes, I think that's the right idea. However we structure our beliefs, ultimately the whole thing hangs free, so to speak: inevitably, some beliefs will not be grounded in any other beliefs, or else the structure of justification will have to be cyclical. So, taking the first option, if perforce some beliefs have to be ungrounded, why not logic? (Here I mean not mathematical logic(s) but the logic(s) that we routinely employ in reasoning.) A more natural choice would be hard to find. The second option is exemplified by the already mentioned pragmatic justification, which, as has also been pointed out, is ultimately circular.

Funny how you say that morality does not have to be grounded (any more than anything else), then immediately go on to posit a ground for morality. It doesn't work, of course. You can join anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists in proposing an explantion for morality, but that does nothing to justify moral beliefs.

But there exist theories as well that make the claim there is an objective universal morality. How are the theories that make a claim but then don't claim that claim to be objectively true different? — BlueBanana

Depends on what "objective" morality means - as others have pointed out, that is a fraught term.

Any moral theory that wishes to state what is a morally right thing to do should ground this claim on something. — BlueBanana

You are taking theory to mean more--or-less what it means in science, where theories are indeed descriptive and are (supposedly) grounded in publicly accessible, verifiable observations.

Just as a matter of language use, an ethical theory can be nothing more than a teaching - a cohesive system of beliefs that are accepted by way of persuasion or authority. In this case there is no requirement for the theory to be grounded in anything "objective," in the same sense in which objectivity is claimed for empirical theories.

More often in philosophy an advocate of an ethical theory will not ask you to accept it in toto on faith or authority, but will instead attempt to ground it in some truths and methods that are taken to be self-evident, and develop the theory from there. Which makes it basically no different from any other philosophical theory.

That said, I am also skeptical about normative - and even descriptive - ethical theories. I think they tend to unjustifiably simplify and "mathematize" a subject whose messy and complicated nature does not easily lend itself to such treatment.

The immediate answer is that controls already exist, although differing in different places. — tim wood

For context: How to Buy a Gun in 15 Countries

• I am not America or The West.
• I did not bomb Hiroshima or invade Iraq.
• I can - and should - have my own opinion about world events regardless of what I or anyone else has been doing.

Well, that was a random response to what I wrote, considering that I was talking about former Warsaw pact countries joining NATO.

You do understand that was Russian land right before Ukraine absorbed it, right? You are attributing me a propaganda group of the Russian side, when I made it clear that I was not for either side. — yatagarasu

And yet you are hitting all the usual propaganda bullet-points. Historical claims and grievances are always brought up to justify wars and invasions. Crimea was not Russian land before it was absorbed by the Russian Empire (with help from Ukrainian Cossacks), and it was not majority Russian until Stalin's ethnic cleansings. We could go back and forth like this endlessly - but what's the point? None of this justifies Russian aggression in this particular instance. Taking advantage of the turmoil in a neighboring country to stealthily invade part of its territory with troops, special forces and civilian thugs, overthrow the local government, close down or take over non-compliant media, intimidate or kidnap dissidents, hastily stage a "referendum" with fabricated results - I say that is wrong, whatever else may have been the case historically or contemporaneously.

But of course it's America birthright to invade and occupy nations and steal their oil or make them capitalist. — René Descartes

Talking about carving up the world, USA is leading by example. — CuddlyHedgehog

Ah well, if America is doing something wrong, then Russia can do no wrong. (Or something like that. The "logic" of tu quoque is hard to grasp.)

American neo-Imperialists — René Descartes

LOL. I am not even an American, let alone "neo-Imperialist."

As has been already stated, if you are willing to read, Russia has the 12th largest GDP, so I would not go on to call it impoverished. — René Descartes

Russia ranks 71 for per capita GDP, and half of it comes from selling its natural resources.

I see that putinverstehers are out in force :roll:

From a Russian perspective they see America as an adversary. (as they should) The Warsaw pact fell apart and NATO has reached all the way around Russia. — yatagarasu

Right, because it is Russia's birthright to dominate and subjugate and occasionally dismember its smaller neighbors, which the West should respect (or else!) It needs that security blanket of dependent states to insulate it from the West. Never mind that no one forced the former Communist nations to join NATO; they were clamoring to join as soon as Russia loosened its grip - and boy are they now glad they did! Montenegro couldn't get in fast enough. But who cares about them? Only nuclear superpowers are entitled to carve up the world as they see fit, right?

Putin's and Kim's rhetoric are getting more and more alike. Both autocrats preside over impoverished nations and demand respect by threatening to destroy the world in a nuclear Armageddon.

That said, despite the outward form of his appeal ("You didn't listen before - listen up now!"), Putin's rhetoric was probably intended more for domestic consumption. (The reception of those fabulous super-weapons of his was rather incredulous outside Russia's tightly controlled mass media.) Which is, if anything, even more disturbing. The traditional narrative preferred by Western leaders is to portray a people suffering under the thumb of a hated dictator; they just need a little help and encouragement to topple him - and then a bright liberal-democratic future beckons. But Russians love Putin, even as they suffer and grumble. And they lap up all this militaristic rhetoric.

And it's not just Russia. Eastern Europe is rapidly sliding back towards authoritarianism, much of the rest of Europe and even the US are being engulfed by right-wing populism... It feels like 1930s all over again, only this time on an even more global scale.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Interesting discussion, I haven't read all of it yet, but here's one little comment:

Prosaically, the perspective of a photon or of a (pathologically) distant motion is just as valid a reference frame sub specie aeternitatis as ones which preserve our causal orders. — fdrake

There is no such thing as the perspective of a photon. The perspective of a photon would be in its "own" reference frame, i.e. a reference frame where the photon is at rest. But there is no such reference frame.


A couple of references on the topic:

John Norton's "opinionated assessment of what we can learn about the ontology of space and time from the special and general theories of relativity":

Also, since causality has been brought up repeatedly, it is perhaps worth mentioning that there are nomologically possible violations of causality both in special and in general relativity. John Earman has written about it a number of works, such as Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know.

What does this mean though? What is right is what has to be done? Is it about rules? — Πετροκότσυφας

It is about what ought to be done (or avoided). I doubt that "ought" can be adequately reduced to something that is more basic.

So if you are willing to think of moral behaviour as that which promotes the best solution for the community — unenlightened

But that is not what moral behavior is in reality.

You will have to explain why this "helping ourselves" is some kind of problem. It might be if you believed that deduction is more fundamental than induction or something. But how can it be if it is the other way around? — apokrisis

I am not saying that helping ourselves to induction is a problem - quite the opposite. Or if it is a problem, any "cure" that has been proposed so far - any putative justification for induction - is worse than the "disease."

I don't think that deduction is less fundamental than induction; deductive reasoning seems to be at least as fundamental as inductive. But that doesn't mean that one can subsume the other.

I hit the cat and it runs away! — charleton

GTFO

Determinism can be framed deductively as:

1.There are immutable laws which determine every event down to the minutest detail
2. Every event must occur exactly as it does occur and the immutable laws are its sufficient reason — Janus

I am not sure why you bring up determinism at this point. Are you saying that inductive/deductive split is equivalent to indeterminism/determinism? The laws of nature could be deterministic, but we don't know that (we don't even know that there are laws of nature). And even if we did somehow know that with certainty, that knowledge alone wouldn't have removed the need for inductive inference, since we still wouldn't have had sufficient information to deduce everything we wish to know.

You can also put specific inductive inferences into deductive forms by adding extra premises which insure that you must end up with the result that is observed. — Janus

That wouldn't be the same inference - it would be a different inference with the same conclusion. But I in any case, I am not seeing the significance of this observation.

Even Hume said we reason inductively because that is what is natural to our psychology. So we only "help ourselves to induction" in the sense that we find ourselves already the products of an evolutionary process. We were born to be pragmatically successful at predicting our worlds. — apokrisis

The conclusion that inductive reasoning is a product of our evolutionary development comes at the far end of a long process of inductive inference. So that cannot be the sense in which we help ourselves to induction: we did that long before we had any inkling of such far-reaching conclusions.

Not really. We have to make assumptions to get started. As I have shown if you make the assumptions explicit inductive reasoning can be framed in deductive forms. — Janus

You cannot replace induction with deduction salva veritate, since induction is plausible reasoning and deduction is certain reasoning. If you assume "invariances of nature" of a certain sort, then you can make a case for the viability of inductive inference in general, but you cannot thereby turn any specific inductive inference into a deduction.

As for starting assumptions, I think that induction itself makes for the most natural starting assumption (since we are already strongly predisposed to it) - more so than the rather complicated cocktail of assumptions that you are proposing.

Science bases itself on the assumption that there are "laws of nature" that determine the invariances that are observed everywhere. — Janus

The basic inductive intuition is more local, more restricted than that. Yes, induction implies that we can perceive persistent patterns in nature, but that's it. And that's all the "assumption" that science requires to get going. It does not require us to assume from the start that all of nature is completely subject to laws, much less that these laws form a reductive hierarchy with a fundamental theory of everything at the bottom. Such ideas are viable, but they are not basic, nor are they necessary. Science happily proceeds with local laws and "special" theories.

What's wrong with a circular argument if it takes the form of the scientific method? — apokrisis

Its utter pointlessness? I mean, if you've already helped yourself to induction, what's the point of circling back to "justify" it via one of its purported consequences?

So you are saying that the problem of induction doesn’t hinge on the metaphysical assumption that causality may not be invariant? — apokrisis

No, I am pretty sure that's not what I was saying. I am not even sure what that means.

And so I simply say go with that same assumption. Permit nature to vary. And then understand it’s apparent invariance in terms of the self organisation of limits.

After all, that is the world as science has found it to be, if you’ve been keeping up. — apokrisis

Right, circular reasoning again. Induction -> Science -> Fanciful metaphysics -> Induction.

You're going to have to specify - a lot - as to what kind of "whole" you mean, and as well "expressed." For example: do you mean that any text can always be expressed in terms of the letters that constitute it? Music in notes? Sense from mere sounds? Without further qualification and explication, I'm afraid the notions in the OP are too vague to respond to. — tim wood

It's not so much vague as artificially restricted. If there is only one system, one language, one ontology, then there is nothing to be emergent. And you are right, there is no "whole" here either - in order to have a "whole" one would have to introduce something over and above a system of particles. Without that something extra, the system of particles is, trivially, all you have.

An example of a whole emerging from particles could be continuous medium, such as a fluid, emerging from molecular interactions. But here we have two different ontologies, two different languages, two different sets of properties - one pertaining to the particulate system and the other - to the continuous one. For example, there is no such thing as "pressure" in the particulate system (but one can link pressure to molecular dynamics via a bridge law).

And yes, read the article that @Akanthinos linked. "Emergence" is a complicated topic (in part because there is no common view of what it is).

I would not put it that way; I would say that we follow inductive reasoning for the practical reason that there is no alternative — Janus

If by "no alternative" you mean a sort of psychological compulsion then that is just what I was saying.

and I would also say that it is reasonable to have faith in it, because, leaving aside (what I would consider unreasonable) radical skepticism, all our experience and understanding confirms that nature is indeed replete with invariance. There seems, on the contrary to be no good reason, beyond a certain kind of carping logic, to question that. — Janus

Aaand... we are back to circular reasoning. There is no good reason, other than an epistemology that is already shot through with induction, to conclude that "nature is replete with invariance." You could take that not as a conclusion but as an assumption and try to ground your epistemology in that assumption*, but that seems like a strange move. An epistemology is something you already have and would find very difficult to let go. Why chuck it out in favor of a less intuitive, less psychologically secure assumption? Pragmatically, this would seem like the less favorable option.

*Or you could do something even more convoluted and put your faith into some religious or metaphysical narrative (a la @apokrisis) from which the regularity of nature would then fall out.

Oh sure, inferences of past events are as vulnerable to skepticism as inferences of future events, and at some point, when you come to question your cognitive abilities, you immediately undercut your own line of reasoning.

Hume was an empiricist, not a skeptic. He believed that perceptions were the ultimate source of truth. He also apparently believed that at least some understanding of the world could be firmly grounded in perceptions and thus be validated. Of course, a thoroughgoing skeptic could destroy this worldview without breaking a sweat.

So what can we do? Well, if you seek the ultimate grounding of your beliefs in rules - be they the rules of deduction or some other epistemic rules, such as the wisdom of the crowds - then you are setting yourself up for disappointment. I think that induction is normative, not unlike ethics, which similarly resists grounding in something external to itself. You believe in it not for any reason, but because you can't help it.

This is one of those papers where the results are probably more interesting and surprising to the researchers in the field than to laymen - which is probably why Newsweek had to go to Sam Parnia to spice up the story. That in a multicellular organism with many differentiated tissues and organs "death" does not instantaneously halt all biological processes does not sound at all surprising. How could postmortem organ transplantation could be possible if all organs began decaying at the instance of death? And the fact that some gene expression continues for a while after death should not be surprising either: after all, we've always known that hair and nails continue to grow after death, and that requires gene expression (as we later realized). I am surprised that the authors don't acknowledge this, and instead write in the introduction:

While much is known about gene expression circuits in life, there is a paucity of information about what happens to these circuits after organismal death. For example, it is not well known whether gene expression diminishes gradually or abruptly stops in death—nor whether specific gene transcripts increase in abundance in death. — Pozhitkov et al.

I suppose that the most interesting result here is that some gene transcription does indeed rev up for a short time after death.

The research in question has nothing to do with consciousness. "Life after death" is a journalistic flourish. This is the article in Open Biology:

Tracing the dynamics of gene transcripts after organismal death

The Newsweek article, as quoted in the OP, fairly summarizes the research. What the researchers found is that "a step-wise shutdown occurs in organismal death that is manifested by the apparent increase of certain transcripts with various abundance maxima and durations." Here is their own take on their findings:

What do the increases in postmortem transcript abundances mean in the context of life?

Since increases in postmortem transcript abundances occurred in both the zebrafish and the mouse in our study, it is reasonable to suggest that other multicellular eukaryotes will display a similar phenomenon. What does this phenomenon mean in the context of organismal life? We conjecture that the highly ordered structure of an organism—evolved and refined through natural selection and self-organizing processes [215]—undergoes a thermodynamically driven process of spontaneous disintegration through complex pathways, which apparently involve the increased abundance of specific gene transcripts and putative feedback loops. While evolution played a role in pre-patterning of these pathways, it probably does not play any role in its disintegration fate. However, one could argue that some of these pathways have evolved to favour healing or ‘resuscitation’ after severe injury, which would be a possible adaptive advantage. The increased abundance of inflammation response transcripts, for example, putatively indicates that a signal of infection or injury is sensed by the still alive cells after death of the body. Alternatively, these increases could be due to fast decay of some repressors of genes or whole pathways leading to the transcription of genes. Hence, it will be of interest to study this in more detail, since this could, for example, provide insights into how to better preserve organs retrieved for transplantation. — Pozhitkov et al.

Sam Parnia was not involved in the research. He is known for running the AWARE near-death experiences study and for advocating highly speculative ideas about consciousness.

Evolution is based on the assumption that the invariances of nature have been consistently the same during the past as we find them today. I am pointing out that this assumption is as just as warranted or unwarranted as the assumption that the invariances of nature will be the same in the future as today. So, my point was that inductive inferences are essential to the theory (Evolution) that you were purporting to use to undermine the justifiability of inductive reasoning. I'm surprised you cannot see the problem with this. — Janus

I understand what you are saying. I am granting, for the sake of an argument, one half of your "invariances of nature," so to speak: those that lie in the past. This is not so unreasonable: all the evidence that we have of such invariances is in the past.

Will these invariances persist into the future? You gave a kind of transcendental argument (correct me if I am wrong): our shared inductive intuitions provide us with a reason to believe the affirmative. But, as I have argued, the fact that we have those intuitions is not independent from the (already assumed) fact that nature exhibited invariances in the past. So what I am saying is that shared intuitions do not provide you with a reason to believe that invariances will persist into the future, over and above the assumption of invariance in the past.

Here's an inductive argument:

1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Therefore, all Ps are Qs

The conclusion necessarily follows from the premise. — Magnus Anderson

I don't know of any logic where this would be the case. Induction is, generally speaking, plausible reasoning. So normally you would conclude that any P is probably Q, with the strength of this inference depending on how many Ps have been observed and perhaps other considerations.

By deductive reasoning we usually understand the application of something like Aristotelian or Classical logic. The rules of inference are fixed; even when we reason informally, if the reasoning is deductive, it can be straightforwardly translated into a formal logic without the loss of accuracy.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the inductive logic. There is informal plausible reasoning, which can only be loosely approximated by some of the formal statistics, such as Bayesian inference.

I'm not familiar with Goodman's grue scenario. In any case I was referring to the past, not the future. I don't see why, if it is based on an understanding of evolution, it would not rely on the assumption that the invariances of nature were in the past as they are today. And that assumption is as much irrationally inductive as the assumption that the invariances of nature will be in the future as they appear to be today. — Janus

The theory of evolution, like any theory, is based on what we already know. Induction is a way of inferring what we don't know, whether it occurs in the past or in the future. Having evolved in a regular environment (regular enough for practical purposes), we are conditioned to trust in induction, because those who in the past could best exploit those regularities had a fitness advantage. But all that was in the (known) past. Our shared inductive instincts owe everything to the past and nothing to the future, which is why it is not right to appeal to those instincts for validating inferences of future observations.

By the way, to return to the topic of the thread, one can read Hume as mounting a similar argument, only he believed that our causal and inductive beliefs are shaped by observing "constant conjunctions" of similar events. Hume's psychological explanations may be too simplistic for our age, but the idea here is basically the same: induction's seeming self-evidence is not enough to justify it when you consider why it seems to be self-evident.

I think I will take your advice and look at the literature since I am rather new to all this. However, if you can elaborate some of the conceptual issues with regard to determinism that might be helpful. — Perplexed

I am myself in a (leisurely) process of reading up on such issues, although at the moment I am more focused on causation.

SEP provides an overview of the topic in Causal Determinism.

An accessible introduction to determinism (or lack thereof) in physics can be found in the works of John Earman (he has written a number of articles, as well as a book). Here is his article in a book Freedom and Determinism (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy):

One might have hoped that this survey would provide an answer to the question: If we believe modern physics, is the world deterministic or not? But there is no simple and clean answer. The theories of modern physics paint many different and seemingly incommensurable pictures of the world; not only is there no unified theory of physics, there is not even agreement on the best route to getting one. And even within a particular theory— say, QM or GTR—there is no clear verdict. This is a reflection of the fact that determinism is bound up with some of the most important unresolved foundations problems for these theories. While this linkage makes for frustration if one is in search of a quick and neat answer to the above question, it also makes determinism an exciting topic for the philosophy of science. — Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know

Determinism is bound up with other topics. Philosophers find issues with the concept of the laws of nature. Reductionism is also a very controversial issue. The failure of either of these concepts threatens the very cogency of the question "Is the universe deterministic?"

Note that this explanation that you are taking to undermine induction is itself inductively derived. It relies on that which it purports to undermine. — Janus

But it is not self-undermining. It is entirely compatible with the situation where the world ceases to be orderly some time in the future (Goodman's grue scenario).

One could imagine any number of self contained systems that can articulate itself without the need for external verification but sooner or later its relationship to other fields of endeavour must come into question. — Perplexed

You are talking about metaphysical systems, surely? Because scientific systems (with the possible exception of some highly theoretical fields) are the opposite of self-contained: they are directly engaged with our senses. They may not pass Hume's very strict and literal understanding of empiricism, but they are a helluva lot better in that regard than metaphysics.

Can you give any further details of such a conceptual analysis? Perhaps this would extend beyond the boundaries of science. — Perplexed

Well, my question was open-ended: I do not insist that all metaphysical questions are pseudo-questions. But take a look at the literature on just about any contentious metaphysical question, such as determinism, and you will find conceptual challenges.

Of course one could just get on with the business of science without any need for contemplating its foundations and why it works but this always strikes me as avoiding the most interesting questions. — Perplexed

Well, the very fact that science gets along quite well with little or no metaphysics - and in particular, without ever needing to resolve the question of metaphysical determinism - is suggestive. Are such questions really meaningful, or are they spurious pseudo-questions that a conceptual analysis can dissolve?

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that induction is justified by its universal acceptance and seeming indispensability - apparently, on the general epistemic principle that universal acceptance and indispensability provide an ipso facto justification. But here is how this justification can be undermined.

A plausible account of our inductive instincts is our evolutionary history as creatures that emerged in a relatively orderly, stable environment. Our instincts were thus shaped by our past, since evolution is not forward-looking. As with other adaptations, they will serve us well, as long as things continue as they have throughout our evolutionary history. But, of course, making that assumption begs the very question: will things continue as they have in the past? (This counter-argument echoes the standard charge of circularity leveled on those who seek to justify induction by past successes.)

I suppose 18th century science could be said to "assert determinism". The question is, does our modern science allow for non-deterministic events to take place? — Perplexed

Of course. There are both deterministic and indeterministic models in science. As for metaphysical determinism, science as such does not take any position on it. If, for instance, you are a population geneticist, you work with probabilities, and it does not matter to you as a scientist whether those probabilities originate from some fundamentally chancy process or whether they are merely epistemic (or whether there actually is a distinction). It takes a lot of philosophical posturing to get from science to metaphysics. For example, you will probably have to take a stance on reductionism. And once you do, you may also have to bet on future physics. None of this is part of science.