I am most impressed by Erik Verlinde. — Rich

Perhaps you could explain his entropic approach to gravity for our benefit? In your own words now, what is he saying?

deflection. Again. — Banno

Yeah. It would be useful if you could decide how you approach hinge propositions given your comments about me. But I fully expect you to take rapid evasive action as usual.

Quick, start waggling your naive realism again. That always attracts an inquisitive crowd.

the obsession with trinities is another odd thing about your scripture. — Banno

Trichotomies = hierarchical causal structure. Simple, innit?

Odd, also, that from what I understand Apo rejects the body of modern logic. But perhaps I misunderstand him, since that seems so absurd. — Banno

To deal with this one last misrepresentation, the logic you are talking about is designed for dealing with the particular or individuated. So of course it is part of the body of logic. It just ain't the whole - or holistic - story.

The whole story is triadic. It includes the logic of generality and the logic of vagueness.

I would rather say that there is a rational discourse that might reasonably be called induction, a rational discourse that is valid because it can always be framed in deductive form. — Janus

That is why Peirce was concerned with the proper grammar of reasoning. You need to wrap the deductive bit in the preface of an abduction and the conclusion of inductive confirmation.

Banno adopts the transcendental view of the naive realist. Or at least his speech acts are identical to a naive realist. So same thing.

Deduction is syntactically close and so of course can't introduce semantic novelty. It can only rearrange the facts it is given. So deduction can't know about the truth of the world - even the kind of pragmatic truth that is the truth of a semiotic relation between a self and its world.

Therefore "truth-telling" needs some way of introducing the underlying semantics in a sensible fashion. The inductive side of the equation needs to be formalised as possible - even if in the end it is going to be still irreducibly an art.

And that is Peirce's innovation - later sort of recapitulated by Popper. He didn't bother trying to make induction work as inverse deduction (even if it sort of does work that way). He broke induction into the complementary steps of hypothesis formation and hypothesis confirmation. And deduction stood inbetween as a fully formal connection. Deduction turns general concepts into particular predictions.

So as much as possible, human thinking was cast as a formal and grammatical habit.

I realise you understand this. I just wanted to sum up the critical gist of the thread again. :)

Does anyone else find it odd that Apo can't actually say that his metaphysics is true? He acts as if it is true, and speaks as if it is true; but it binds him never to utter that truth. Indeed, he can't make any truth claims. — Banno

So you have changed your position on hinge propositions all of a sudden. Curious.

The second premise is not just dubious, but wrong, as is the conclusion. And indeed, at least in my case, so is the first premise. — Banno

And yet the argument is valid. Curious.

Perhaps semantics is the basis of truth-telling more than syntax?

OK, bottom line is I could not put my faith in any of the grand philosophical schemes of the nineteenth century. — Banno

You mean like ... scientific inquiry. :D

The analytic turn - which is now ubiquitous - offers instead a set of rational tools with which to take philosophical issues apart... — Banno

You mean like whatever came after logical atomism sunk without trace as AP's grand philosophical scheme? >:O

Speaking things that cannot be spoken, such as "it is true that there are black swans"! He says that some statements can be true! — Banno

But your spoken truths always rely on unspoken ambiguities.

Are we talking about adult black swans or their fluffy white goslings? Are we talking about "swans" as being generically Cygnus atratus, or Cygnus olor and Cygnus cygnus? Are we talking about black swans that include albino Cygnus atratus?

So we can resolve some of these ambiguities with more careful speech. We can say that is a member of the genus Cygnus. It is black.

Yet ambiguity is in principle irreducible in speech acts. We can only hope to constrain it. Which is where pragmatism comes in as it then only make sense to put so much effort into constraining the semantics of our utterances. The truths we tell turn out to have as least as much to do with our intentions as they do with "the facts of the world".

As a biologist, you could have a hearty debate about the genus Cygnus. Are geese really so different? Are they not just chubbier members of the tribe, Cygnini? Or perhaps we need to be more restrictive about the true swans. There are grounds to rule out the coscoroba swan as a proper member of the subfamily, Cygninae.

So as usual, you make your simplistic statements about objective truths and pretend to be amazed when sensible folk roll their eyes. Of course we can say that's just Banno, taking his furtive pleasure in waggling his naive realism in public again, hoping to scandalise.

Pragmatism is for serious grown-ups. But you play in the corner with your little thing if you want to.

It was your focus on the "rate" which was the confusing issue.

If you had made a contextual claim - talked about the apparatus having some particular "interference pattern causing" arrangement - then it would have been clear that you weren't thinking the fact that individual events reflected the holistic constraints of their world was a puzzle. The issue of the "rate" making a difference couldn't even have arisen. It would be an obvious non sequitur - to you as well.

So I am taking a constraints-based view that endorses a spooky non-locality ... as it must. The path determines the nature of the event. If you have two slits open and unobserved, then the "particle" must take both of them to find its way to the detector screen. In just that single event, already the outcome speaks to the downward causal impact of the apparatus having a particular set-up in terms of its act of measurement.

And likewise, if there is just a single slit, or one of the two slits is being observed, then we get the statistics that that kind of path set-up would predict.

We can even choose to observe the slits after the particle is meant to have already passed and still change its statistics - the quantum eraser effect. So the spooky non-local holism transcends our ordinary notion of a smoothly unwinding passage of time. It seems causation can act backwards, with our choices as observers making changes that happened in the collective past of the Universe.

So yes, in some sense the full metaphysical picture of what is going on must transcend our usual Newtonian notions of space and time. It's non-local for Pete's sake!

And QM wavefunction formalism models this by talking about the evolution of the probabilities taking place in infinite dimensional Hilbert space. This is an abstract calculational space - although some interpretations would like to treat it as itself now the "true reality". Another can of worms along the lines of block universes, multiverses and modal realism.

But rather than treating a calculus of probabilities as a direct representation of an underlying metaphysical reality - that is, maxing out on fecundity of any numerical technique - I take the view that it is better to actually believe in a constraints-based ontology where classical regularity is what emerges from a generalised quantum potential. To the degree that you place macroscopic thermal constraints on existence, you will tend to restrict the kind of microscopic thermal fluctuations that then occur.

Any act of measure is a physical interference in that it creates an irreversible energy transfer and so forces that part of reality to become woven into the general emergent story which is the Cosmic clock of time winding down from the extreme energy density of the Big Bang to the least possible energy density of the Heat Death.

That is why the spread out wave-like potential of "an event" contracts, or decoheres, to become some highly located particle-like occurrence when there is any kind of thermal interaction. Time itself is emergent. Its "rate" is the cosmic-level rate at which the Universe is cooling or entropifying. And that flow of time is created out of a myriad of these little quantum events which fix the history of the Universe as some set of actual happenings - actual energy transfers.

So a post-QM theory - like a quantum gravity theory - is likely to explain time itself in this emergent fashion. And folk like Kauffman are talking about that.

Then whether you see reality behaving in a particle fashion, or a wave fashion, is really about the degree to which the inherent quantum uncertainty of any event has been constrained. If it is only weakly constrained - as in the very special thermal circumstances of a twin-slit apparatus - then you get "weird" single particle interference patterns. If it is more strongly constrained - as in that there is an act of observation effectively closing down one slit with its thermal interaction - then you instead get the kind of probability wave you would predict for the scattering of individual particles by a single narrow slit.

So this is a thoroughly contextual or holistic view - one where the organisation of the whole shapes up the identity of the parts. Particles are emergent features that reflect the constraints of their world.

And the wrinkle is that this emergent story applies even to space and time now as feature of that "world". Well, at least that is the story that quantum gravity would have to tell.

The problem is that physicists in general never study Bohmian Mechanics a little, much less thoroughly, thus they never passed through these phases and therefore they don't understand anything that Bohm's physics and metaphysics is offering. — Rich

Physicists don't think like crackpots. They've got better things to do than obsess over an interpretation with no observable consequences - and one not even able to make proper predictions in a relativistic setting.

So if BM had some metaphysical advantage in theory building - as in paving a way to a testable theory of quantum gravity - then the theoreticians would be all over it. No ambitious post-grad is going to overlook something that offers even an outside chance of stealing that ultimate glory. Your reading of the situation is comical just based on ordinary competitive human behaviour.

You will note that by contrast, holography is really hot. Every ambitious post-grad is all over that. They can see that bandwagon having an excellent chance of getting somewhere.

Sadly, your understanding of holography is as far off the mark as it is with anything else to do with physics. You've got stuck at the point where they mention a hologram as a helpful beginning analogy.

But if it's a wave, how can the rate NOT matter? — Wayfarer

Again, the wave refers to the probability of observing a particle at some location. It applies to the individual event and does not describe some collective weight of particles as you seem to imagine.

So the wave is happening, or evolving, while the emission/absorption event is happening. Its "rate" is one such probability wave per event. Or if you instead want to focus on the collective view that is the experimental apparatus expressing its statistics over time, then the rate is continuous over all the identically prepared events. The same probability wave is in play while trials are indistinguishable in terms of their spacetime reference frame.

So again, your issue seems to be to wanting to think of it as an actual wave - some kind of substantial force - rather than as a description of observables.

Of course you can go Bohmian despite all its well know issues - like no sensible way to give a relativistic version of BM, no good answer on the question of contextuality, etc.

And frankly - for me at least - there is just a basic metaphysical inelegance with a deterministic/substantialist ontology. QM really ought to be much more of a challenge to materialism and locality. So why try to make a Bohmian uber-materialism be the one that comes out right?

I mean I find it weird that the folk like Rich who seem happy with the whackiest kinds of idealism are also the first to commit to the most materialist versions of QM they can find. Well I guess maybe that if you treat the divine, or mind, as some kind of pseudo-substance, then perhaps there is some kind of consistency there.

Post that on Physics Forum I dare you. :)

So my question to you is: do you think my inference that 'what is causing the interference pattern is outside, or not a function of, space-time' is indeed 'gobbledygook'? Or do you think it's a valid inference? — Wayfarer

Your approach is confusing as you start off suggesting that rate ought to matter. So your mental picture seems to be that each event has to be "close enough" in spacetime for interference to occur ... between individual events. Distant events - distant in space or time would not "feel the force". But events happening close together, would.

But that is not what it is about. It is about the interaction between the measuring apparatus and the individual event. Every particle is travelling in an identical fashion down the same apparatus. So - if the slits are not being observed - every particle will show the same probabilistic result. It is the two slits which are constantly in interaction if you like. If both slits are always "open" and free from measurement, then every particle running the gauntlet will behave in wave-like fashion.

So the statistics reflect the shape of the path. The same path is always going to give the same result for every identically prepared particle, regardless of the rate of their release (so long as they don't come so thick and fast they do physically interfere with each other!).

Totally 100% wrong again. — Rich

The expert speaks.

Well that's your metaphysics and can be rejected for being too "nothing". — Rich

Coming from you, that's rich.

Bohmian Mechanics is real. — Rich

So reality is both fully deterministic and fundamentally tychic in your book? An interesting twist on quantum crackpottery.

The do nothing no-goodnik or the do-everything-over-achiever. It's all the same.. what is it all about. — schopenhauer1

Does it actually feel the same? And is there a balance of the two that feels even better?

You seem to be presuming your conclusions again. What you say does not tally with either psychological science or my own experience.

But perhaps you have proved the case for you?

...what matters is that we survive/maintain our comfort levels/get bored and need entertainment. — schopenhauer1

Sounds a pretty minimal idea of a life to me.

You reduce living to some kind of consumptive activity. You seem to see no role for creation, challenge and variety.

So again you assume your conclusions by speaking of life in as meaningless a way as you can imagine. Rhetoric 101.

I've asked people in other threads to explain Platonic perfection, what a utopia looks like, what does completeness look like, etc. No one usually has a good answer. — schopenhauer1

Utopia is already the wrong answer. Perhaps the dichotomies of heaven and hell, good and evil, just don't apply to nature. Your frame of reference is already wrong.

...what I am interested in is the nature of the so-called 'probability wave'. — Wayfarer

It is not some actual material wave hitting the screen. It is a description of predictable observables with a "wave-like" evolution in time.

In the same way, a quantum field is not a material field. It is a field-like description of observables.

Of course we then want to impute some kind of underlying reality that generates these observables. That is where all the interpretive machinery comes in, like physical pilot waves or spooky non-local connections.

So we can interpret the formalism in all sorts of metaphysical ways, the majority of which are then "bad" metaphysics. We would criticise them on grounds like that they are too profligate (many worlds), or too concrete (Bohmian mechanics).

It is fair enough to seek some kind of mental picture of what is "really going" on underneath the covers. However calling the evolution of a set of observables a "probability wave" is misleading as there is no actual wave in a material sense. It is just the pattern we see in our abstract model of how the probabilities of the situation will unfold.

I don't even know what that means "anti-evolutionary ethics". We can choose not to procreate. That in itself is obvious. — schopenhauer1

Is it that difficult? If evolutionary logic defines what is natural, then doing something contrary to that logic lacks a natural justification. You would have to explain why the choice - as a general one you advocate for a whole species - is not merely possible but somehow ethically cogent.

Do you mean to ask whether we as humans can reflect on our own existence, find it wanting, and decide not to continue procreating? In that case, indeed we can do that on an individual level. — schopenhauer1

Yeah sure. If that is your choice, then who cares. The breeders win in the end.

And that choice may be pretty rational if you put economic self-interest at the top of your list these days. Or if you feel that life is complicated enough already.

But it is where you elevate anti-natalism to a general good that your argument is in want of ... an actual argument.

I just like to keep the various different position clear and distinct, not mash them together as you are now doing in your recent anti-natal threads.

Of course, my argument all along is not everyone will stop procreating, but rather to get people to question the ends of their own existence, what they are living for in the first place, and to recognize certain aspects of existence- instrumental nature, striving-for-no-ends, etc. — schopenhauer1

OK. Then that is a change of tune. Great. You are not against procreation itself, you are against a social system with poor general outcomes.

Who could disagree there?

But how is seeing humans as acting a way that is part of this super-organism (i.e. cannot help but lead towards some telos) not simply being a self-fulfilling prophecy? — schopenhauer1

Well it probably is inevitable. But still, at least recognising the true nature of the situation gives a possibility of choosing a different path.

Or more pragmatically, if you view things as already fated by nature, you can make your own life plans accordingly.

In fact, by somehow promoting grandiose notions of participating in the super-organism, this seems more Romantic than many other philosophies you slap with that label. — schopenhauer1

How I am promoting rather than diagnosing?

:-} It's the paths that "interfere". They either add or cancel to create the interference pattern. It's a thing even in the classical wave mechanics view - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_interference

Piaget argued against claims by Chomsky and Fodor for a genetic basis of semantic language content. — Joshs

Yep. And while Piaget's structuralism is a big step in the right direction, I in fact am in the semiotic or social constructionist wing of the debate by being a Vygotskian on the issue of cognitive development.

So I am even less in the innate camp. Except I then argue that cultural evolution is just evolution continuing at a different level of semiosis - a linguistic one as well as a neural and genetic one.

That is why there can be both a sharp division and yet not really any division. All cognition is entrained to the constraint of being functional in an ecological sense in the long run.

Schop's arguments are always directed at supporting the rightness of anti-natalism. That is the real issue of the thread.

And Vygotskian psychology was a natural repost to Nihilism and Existentialism, so continues also to be one against the latest incarnation of the Romanticist's pessimistic tendency.

Well why was Newtonian determinism such a metaphysical surprise? Because it stands directly against the belief that we are creatures of capricious whims and desires.

In pre-scientific thinking, the world as a whole was understood animistically. It also operated like a mind. So the idea that physical events had no essential choice was a surprise given that context of expectations.

We can't induce generalities from particulars unless we already have some general reason to notice those particulars in the first place. Nature has to falsify some already extant mental prediction - one held implicitly at least. The facts have to be drawn to our attention by failing to fit.

That is why I keep stressing the other neglected side of the story - the principle of indifference that then becomes our tolerance for exceptions to the rule. No constraint on the accidental can ever be total (in the way that the deductionists/absolutists/mechanists dream it). So any "law of nature" has to be fundamentally a probability statement. And it becomes an informal judgement - part of the act of measurement - where to set a reasonable threshold on that.

Banno always likes to argue from a trancendental absolutist perspective - that there is a fact of the matter.

But Peirce kicked that logicist's nonsense for touch. Reality itself is probabilistic. Our modelling of that reality is self-interested. Those are the fundamental constraints in play when it comes any putative "theories of truth". We can draw lines across reality - such as where we feel that differences cease to make a real difference. But the lines are essentially informal and pragmatic. They are justified subjectively in the end.

But if we can also then define what would be maximally subjective, we do have a shot at defining what the maximally objective would be in contrast. Which is of course the stall that science sets up.

Each particle "interferes with itself" in the sense that it interacts with the apparatus in every way that it can. It takes every possible path, the combination yielding some sum of probabilities. So some paths add, some cancel. And that results in the "interference pattern" - even if one event could hardly show that by itself.

So it is the fact that the entire apparatus is kept constant over space and time that roots the interference pattern in space and time. If you fire enough identical particles at the slits, the same interaction between particle and path will be repeated. And so the interference pattern this will cumulative generate will slowly be revealed.

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. — SophistiCat

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?

my point was only that we have no alternative to the laws themselves to focus our investigations; — Janus

Agreed. We have to identify the invariances as the essential features of the landscape. They start as the surprises in need of an explanation.

Which again gets back to the fact that brain's operate inductively. For nature's regularity to be such a surprising fact - something we could even notice - we would have had to have been expecting something rather different.

There is a tendency for "just so" stories. Everything becomes an instinct rather than constructed via the virtual world of concept formation. We have to be careful what to delineate as a true instinct and what is culturally-linguistically based in our behaviors and habit-formations. We are so ready to place ourselves as "just another animal" that we often overlook the complicated way that linguistic-minds shape us. Let me add, I am very much a naturalist in terms of science essentially and materialist explanations are what I see to be the best structures of explanation. However, I don't jump the gun in explanations that reduce assumed instinctual behavior into instinct when in fact, it may just be a cultural trope that is so embedded and assumed, it seems like instinct. — schopenhauer1

So the question becomes whether we are still engaged in a generally natural game? Despite developing the new "mind-expanding" thing of conceptual thought, are we still essentially thinking in ways that are being shaped by evolutionary forces?

Your goal of making a metaphysical-strength argument in favour of anti-natalism requires a particular answer on that. So where is the specific evidence?

Now it is the case that being conceptual creatures, we have progressed to the point where even our own existence - individually, or collectively - becomes something we can question the value of.

But then that in turn raises the question of how we value the alternatives that we can imagine?

Is there a way we actually do value them - ie: one that speaks to a practical evolutionary logic. Or some other metaphysics?

So the whole instinct vs cultural deal is waste of time here. We know we are an evolved blend of the two. They have both been constrained by the same general Darwinian forces. Nothing much has changed in terms of the overall game being played.

The question now is have they become unstuck in some meaningful fashion. Have we become so enlightened about certain metaphysical facts that we should volunteer to strike ourselves from the evolutionary record? If that is your case, then present the argument.

Another possibility is that modern culture has predictably reached a super-organismic status. The good old days of small hunter-gather tribes which had a happy collective balance has been surpassed first by agrarian empires, then by industrialised nations, and now by globalised social media. Individuals have been reduced in status in some - arguably - catastrophic fashion where the only logical response is to bring the whole procreating enterprise crashing down.

Again, if that is your case, then make that argument.

But trying to both draw a sharp line between instinctive and encultured behaviour in a way that denies a historic continuity of evolutionary logic is a waste of time. Bad philosophy from the get go.

If you want to argue for the legitimacy of anti-evolutionary ethics, then that is what you should stick to as the focus.

We take these premises on faith simply because there are no viable alternatives; we cannot even begin to imagine what an alternative could look like. — Janus

I would say not quite. The Newtonian breakthrough involved a metaphysical presumption about invariant laws. And now the modern presumption is that all such invariances must be emergent regularities. All the forces of nature are patterns that emerge in self-organising fashion from collective action.

So Newton talked of transcendent laws. Modern physics is aiming at a story of immanently self-organising constraints.

And the two different ontologies map fairly obviously to a generally deductive or computational and deterministic metaphysics, and generally inductive or probabilistic and developmental metaphysics.

So we do have two alternative metaphysics in play. And each would generate its own particular kinds of hypotheses when it comes down to scientific theory.

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? — SophistiCat

You are not making sense. How does inquiry even get started unless you are willing to hazard the concrete guess that you are then committed to checking via measurement against the reality you are modelling?

What is it that you are attacking here? I can hear your angry noises, but the target of your unhappiness is very unclear.

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.

In Hume's day, there wasn't a lot of science to back up that evolutionary view. But now our best models of neurocognition are explicitly Bayesian. We took the hypothesis and ran with it. The results confirmed the guess.

I interpret it to mean that you are in fact a monist. A dialectical monist. Yin-yang philosophy. You want to unite the opposites. Uncontrolled interaction is not enough. There must be a central force, some kind of God, controlling the antagonism. — Magnus Anderson

No controlling hand is needed. The dichotomy or symmetry breaking just goes freely to to its equilibrium balance. It finds its own eventual rest state where it is evenly broken across all scales of being. Hence the final state of a natural system that is just forever freely growing in evenly-paced fashion is going to be fractal. It will have the structure of a scalefree hierarchy.

Hence your focus on trichotomies, triadic conceptual structures. — Magnus Anderson

Yep. The triadic structure is the balanced hierarchical relation that emerges from the symmetry breaking.

A hierarchy represents a state of maximum local~global asymmetry. You have opposing limits of scale appearing as a system develops its own history. It becomes a world organised into the general and the particular, the global constraints or laws and the local degrees of freedom.

You have a center and two extremes. Left, middle and right. — Magnus Anderson

No. The dichotomous extremes are the local and the global. The middle is then the spectrum of scales that span the space (and time) inbetween.

So for instance, the Universe is bounded at one end by the Planck scale, at the other by the cosmic event horizon. Then we humans sit about exactly middle.

So in the case of order~chaos dichotomy, you want to subsume the two to a third category which is basically that of order (which explains why you make a distinction between constraints and patterns or regularities which you say are merely observable.) — Magnus Anderson

Well now this is talking about how the whole thing develops.

So in the beginning - as Peirce describes - it starts with the symmetry of a Firstness or Vagueness. There is just the purest kind of chaos. Unbounded fluctuation.

Then you get secondness as fluctuations start to collide or react with each other in deterministic fashion. You get local events happening.

Then, after some time, you get enough local events happening to start to sort things out and create some kind of common history. You get regular patterns or habits emerging. The system develops a memory. A bunch of random local events start to add up in ways that build a general regulating pattern.

This situation is modelled by scalefree hierarchies. Take a case like the network of world airports. An airport could be freely built anywhere. But as the network starts to grow, it becomes convenient to begin to hub them. You will get certain airports becoming very large as the critical node in larger network. The airport system will develop a clear stratification - a hierarchy of airport sizes that is optimal in terms of achieving a total flow of air-traffic through the system.

So in the beginning, there are just a random scatter of airports all around the same size. By the end, there is a stratified and organised system that emerges in a random fashion to satisfy the general constraint of needing to maximise the flow.

No controlling hand is needed. Just a general constraint of having to optimise the dynamics.

So you're acknowledging the dualism and then reducing it to monism under the guise of trialism. There is chaos but this chaos is subsumed to order. — Magnus Anderson

Nothing is being hidden. But one of the difficult mental changes in gear needed to understand Peirce is that Thirdness is the third stage that incorporates the other two stages. So Thirdness is not monistic but irreducibly triadic. As it says on the box. It is only "monistic" in the sense of being holistic - speaking about the oneness of an irreducibly complex whole.

Monism is usually a substantialist's ontology. It is all about a metaphysics of a single stuff - whether that be materialist stuff or spiritual stuff. So quite different from a Peircean metaphysics where all stuff is the emergent product of an irreducibly triadic process.

Likewise, vagueness of Firstness may sound like a monistic stuff, but it ain't. It sounds like some kind of material being, and yet it can't be that. It is just an unformed potential. Substantial being is what it starts to become - once we get to the dyadicity of Secondness, or brute reaction.

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

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

The circle is that of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. So "induction" gets split into the assuming of some hypothesis and then the assessing of the evidence in favour of that hypothesis (or the lack of good reason to doubt it).

The metaphysics is then informed by that. In Peirce's case, it led him to challenge the prevailing ontic determinism of his day. He argued that the logic of how we reason is in fact the logic of how nature itself must develop its regular habits. So that revised metaphysics - one that sees probability and chance as fundamental in nature - becomes then the new hypothesis.

And what do you know? Shortly after, quantum mechanics was born.

*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. — SophistiCat

So you are saying that the problem of induction doesn’t hinge on the metaphysical assumption that causality may not be invariant? Curious. What other motivation does it have?

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.

Yes, I think modern physics makes it seem plausible that invariance is not deterministic, but instead probabilistic; yet it seems that invariance on macro scales does look, for all intents and purposes, deterministic. — Janus

You don't need invariance. You just need a limit on variance. And probability theory models limits on variance.

So i’m Going to suggest that invariance is something of what Sam called a hinge proposition. — Banno

A better "hinge proposition" - as it is gives its own founding reasons - is the view that invariance is the emergent limit to variation.

And from that metaphysics, the reasonableness of inductive inference follows quite naturally.

Induction only needs extra metaphysical bolstering if invariance is taken as the metaphysically fundamental condition. But if your complaint against the invariance of induction is that nothing prevents nature varying, then a view of induction based on the fact that variation itself can suppress variance means induction has no case to answer on that score.

Deduction, on the other hand, has a metaphysical problem once you grant that nature is fundamentally variable.

If people want to have a child, it is a desire just like any other desire. That is to say, it originates with concepts (I, raise, baby, development, nurture, care for, etc.) and concepts are purely in the realm of linguistic-cultural. — schopenhauer1

So all human desires are merely linguistic social concepts?

You seem to have a very deep seated need to argue that this is the case. ;)

Constraint is, as I understand it, simply a limit to what is possible. The opposite of it is freedom. — Magnus Anderson

Yep. Simple really.

The world we live in, in other words, is stable enough to make induction good at making predictions. This makes perfect sense. — Magnus Anderson

Yep. You got it again.

The holographic principle probably explains many things about our brains, which in some ways show signs of being holographic. — Sam26

So the holographic principle - the one that current physics is talking about - is concerned about the fundamental dynamics of spacetime. It speaks to a limit on the information content of a region that is either highly curved, like the event horizon of a black hole, or expanding at light speed, like the Hubble radius of a light cone in a flat expanse of the Universe.

Which of these stories apply to a flesh and blood organ like a brain I wonder. Is a brain more like a black hole or a Hubble region? :-}

What we need to remember about Popper's version of Peirce's triadic modelling relation is of course that Popper makes the leap from merely a psychology of reasoning to claims about a transcendental or objective truth. The signs are cut adrift from their interpretant..

Popper seems to take his three worlds more ontologically seriously than I had assumed. It is more than just a metaphor or a convenient figure of thought. He credits Plato with the discovery of the third world, but differs from him as to it divine origin and claims that it is too restrictive in its scope. The stoics, he recalls, took over the Platonic realm of forms and added to it, not only objects, such as numbers, but relations between them, such as expressed by theorems. Problems too were to be part of it as well.

https://www.researchgate.net/file.PostFileLoader.html?id=59ae71f3ed99e178ec7dd8b6&assetKey=AS%3A535179471343618%401504608137511

That's what I suggested happens in statistical inference. But even there some folk are asserting that stats is based on induction. — Banno

Hmm. You mean like ...

In rejecting Bayesianism and the method of inverse probabilities, Peirce argued that in fact no probability at all can be assigned to inductive arguments. Instead of probability, a different measure of imperfection of certitude must be assigned to inductive arguments: verisimilitude or likelihood. In explaining this notion Peirce offered an account of hypothesis-testing that is equivalent to standard statistical hypothesis-testing. In effect we get an account of confidence intervals and choices of statistical significance for rejecting null hypotheses. Such ideas became standard only in the twentieth century as a result of the work of R. A. Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, and others. But already by 1878, in his paper “The Probabilitiy of Induction,” Peirce had worked out the whole matter.

Corresponding to AAA-1 (deduction) we have the following argument: X% of Ms are Ps (Rule); all Ss are Ms (Case); therefore, X% of Ss are Ps (Result). Construing this argument, as we did before, as applying to drawing balls from urns, the argument becomes: X% of the balls in this urn are red; all the balls in this random sample are taken from this urn; therefore, X% of the balls in this random sample are red. Peirce still regards this argument as being a deduction, even though it is not—as the argument AAA-1 is—a necesary inference. He calls such an argument a “statistical deduction” or a “probabilistic deduction proper.”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#logic

As you know, though, false premises do not entail that deductive arguments are invalid, just that are unsound. — Janus

Apparently reason don’t care about semantic truth. Only syntactical correctness matters.

All you need to know is the bishop moves on the diagonal. The reason why it moved to that particular square is of no interest.

Sound move, unsound move? Banno no bothered.

Inductive logic: Every crow ever seen is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is probably black.
Deductive logic: Every crow is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is black.

It's set out now.

Statistical analysis is validated empirically and is therefore rooted in inductive logic. Primacy rests with inductive logic, not deductive. Deduction doesn't even tell us what crows are, black is, or who Joe is. — Hanover

Interesting that Banno pretended not to hear this.

I always quote Wiki. Wisdom of the crowds. Meta-induction works.