Perhaps I should consider myself lucky I have a sketchy grounding in formal logic. — Janus

Correct. I had a shudder at the mention of Tooley and Sosa’s Causation. Made me think how lucky I was to have an instinctive aversion to reductionism from as early as I remember. :grin:

:up:

But are laws of nature not codifications of observed invariances? — Janus

No. The hypothesis I discussed is that laws of nature are ontological.

I distinguish laws of nature from so-called "laws of physics". These are, at worst, codifications of these invariances. But they are more than that. when they make predictions that are later confirmed, predictions about things not previously observed. These give us good reasons to think the law of physics may be a true law of nature.

But it still may be they later become falsified by new evidence. This only means the law of physics isn't an accurate description of the ontological law of nature. .

Am I to understand that you are saying the laws of nature are not merely codifications of natural invariances and their attributes, but are the invariances themselves?

For example, would you say the law of gravity is not merely a codification of the apparent spatiotemporal universality of gravitational effects, but the gravitational effects themselves, along with their mathematically quantifiable attributes?

That's pretty much correct.

we have no well-documented occurrences of exceptions to nature's "laws" (invariance) — Janus

Isn't that simply because when we find such exceptions, we change the laws?

Second, we should take a good hard look at any philosophy that demands an appearances versus reality distinction but then denies access to reality. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Kant's problem as well.

Isn't that simply because when we find such exceptions, we change the laws? — Banno

Perhaps that happens sometimes. If there were no regularities, there would be no laws. It doesn't follow from the fact that there are laws that our understanding of them is perfect. Anyway, what I have in mind are the most general regularities such as that fire burns, water flows down hill absent intervention, the Sun rises, organisms grow old and die, wind and water cause erosion, animals need oxygen and water and food to survive, the air is thinner at high altitudes, most objects cannot float in the air and the reason that those which can float is easily understandable, and so on. There are countless examples.

He is attacking dogmatism.

Which is ironic, because we are expected to dogmatically accept Hume's judgement on how the mind works, the exact contours and limits of introspection, and the nature of reflexive knowledge, as well as the causes of the act of understanding/ideas, while those self-same premises preclude Hume's knowing that his theorizing is true. It's very curious.

Consider:

(1) We cannot know causes, only constant conjunction.

(2) We cannot know necessary connections.

(3) All ideas are copies of impressions (essentially, caused by impressions).

(4) Reason is entirely discursive ratio; there is no faculty of intellectus. Reason is not ecstatic, erotic, or unitive. It is wholly instrumental and calculative and also behaviorally inert.

Note that none of these are knowable through constant conjunction and impressions. Hume might appeal to introspection, but why is that reliable given what he's said? More to the point, he is here disagreeing with the vast bulk of prior Western thought, which has a role for contemplative, unitive knowledge (and this role is even larger in Eastern thought). What makes Hume's introspection a source of truth and the sages of past eras' a sort of vapid delusion?

As Étienne Gilson put it: "Hume could only prove that nothing can be known by knowing something he could not prove.”

Perhaps that happens sometimes. — Janus

But hang on. Isn't it a methodological presumption in science that when we come across something that doesn't fit our expectations - an exception - that we change our expectations? That is, we modify the theory so as to explain the evidence...

So of corse there are no 'well-documented occurrences of exceptions to nature's "laws"", as you say... because when they happen, it's good scientific practice to change the laws so as to make the exception disappear.

So are we to say that "the laws of nature are not merely codifications of natural invariances and their attributes, but are the invariances themselves", while also saying that we can change them to fit the evidence? Hows' that going to work? We change the very invariances of the universe to match the evidence?

Or is it just that what we say about stuff that happens is different to the stuff that happens, and it's better if we try to match what we say to what happens?

If there were no regularities, there would be no laws. — Janus

Indeed. And if laws are constraints, then the regularities can be statistical. Exceptions get to prove the general rule.

You arrive at the Peircean view where laws need a natural explanation. We want to avoid arriving at some transcendent power that lays down arbitrary rules. Instead we want laws to emerge in terms of being the constraints that cannot help but become the case even when facing the most lawless situations. The cosmic habits which maximise the symmetry of the world to the degree that it pragmatically matters.

So exceptions can exist to the degree they are differences not in fact making a difference. A law or constraint only has to achieve that. And indeed has no need to go any further. Statistical regularity is quite enough for Nature.

So of corse there are no 'well-documented occurrences of exceptions to nature's "laws"", as you say... because when they happen, it's good scientific practice to change the laws so as to make the exception disappear. — Banno

Completely arse backwards once more.

Talk of laws is closet theism. How can laws exist without their law-enforcer? Constraints on the other hand can’t help but emerge out of the free play of interactions. Exceptions at the local scale become the regularities at the global scale,

When individual difference is collectively averaged, it has to fall into some natural pattern. A dynamical equilibrium.

Even chaos is such a pattern. A powerlaw ensemble of fluctuations. The universalised growth of randomness.

Science only needs to change its framing of some law if the exceptions are deemed significant for some reason. But the null hypothesis exists because regularity must always come with its grain of irregularity.

The perfect circle could conceivably exist, but could it ever be in practice drawn? What inscribing process could be so perfectly constrained that it had literally zero fluctuations?

A circle drawn to be good enough for all practical purposes will do perfectly well.

Completely arse backwards once more. — apokrisis

Perhaps.

In any case, you don't say why my "it's good scientific practice to change the laws so as to make the exception disappear" is arse backwards. Change "law" to "theory" if that suits your need to be rid of god, I won't object. So your claim is what - that we ought change the evidence to match the theory? Surely not.

Mumbling about patterns doesn't much cut it. The trouble perhaps is, like Dogberry, you are to clever to be understood. So we'll never know.

So we'll never know. — Banno

By “we”, you mean you. You can’t admit in public to your errors of thought. And so you must thus construct a world in which I am in the wrong for most likely being right.

If you could poke a hole in my reasoning, you would leap at it. Instead you must feign a moral victory in the pose: “Well who could ever understand this guy anyway. Am I right guys? Hey, am I right!”.

Impression management. Something else I find perpetually amusing even though I should be getting on with more useful things. :wink:

By “we”, you mean you. You can’t admit in public to your errors of thought. And so you must thus construct a world in which I am in the wrong for most likely being right.

If you could poke a hole in my reasoning, you would leap at it. Instead you must feign a moral victory in the pose: “Well who could ever understand this guy anyway. Am I right guys? Hey, am I right!”. — apokrisis

More about me. What fun!

In order to address your argument, it would have to be clearly expressed. You have done so in other threads, and I've addressed it. But here - it's a mess. The bits that make sense I pretty much agree with. The rest, when you try to set it out, collapses under it's own weight. That's the problem with tinsel as a construction medium.


But now we have even more certainty, from Tim. In his reply to @unenlightened, that Hume claimed we cannot know anything...

those self-same premises preclude Hume's knowing that his theorizing is true. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course Hume would agree, if not in those terms - he understands that his own philosophy is based in the same empirical and psychological habits it describes. He's not offering a proof of scepticism, he's mapping out, with humility, what can be deduced and what cannot.

In order to address your argument, it would have to be clearly expressed. — Banno

Whatever happened to the principle of charity I wonder?

So just the usual game of duck and dodge. :up:

So just the usual game of duck and dodge. :up: — apokrisis

I'm here. Offer a clear critique, and I will reply.

Just to be clear, here's my opine on the abductive response to the OP, as stated:

What is abduction, and how does it help? And the answer is quite vague. Abduction is little more than an attempt to formalise confirmation bias. It's presented as "given some evidence, infer the hypothesis that would best explain it" where "best" is left ill-defined. This leaves it entirely open to arbitrarily inferring any explanation to be the best. — Banno

I stand by it. And I don't think anyone here has presented a clear enough account of abduction to give me pause.

And I don't think anyone here has presented a clear enough account of abduction to give me pause. — Banno

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

You got nuthin'. Fine.

Peirce developed on Hume's scepticism, as did Popper, Feyerabend, and any one else with an empirical leaning. They didn't reject Hume, so much as have a go at explaining how we do make scientific progress despite the difficulties Hume noted. Peirce's contribution is noteworthy, but far from central, and certainly not the Grand Cathedral you pretend to.

Your approach is preaching rather than thinking, a gran lie with a few bits of truth thrown in to keep the masses confused.

Abduction doesn’t define a relation of consequence between premises and conclusions; logic requires a structured notation, absent from abduction. Abduction might be a good name for a psychological process, but it ain't a logic.

Abduction doesn’t define a relation of consequence between premises and conclusions; logic requires a structured notation, absent from abduction. Abduction might be a good name for a psychological process, but it ain't a logic. — Banno

Strawman. It is a necessary part of a logic of science. The bit that gets the game of deduction and inductive confirmation started.

You seem to be very confused about this issue. But then you seem to exist in some world where logic is only a mathematical exercise rather than a pragmatic enterprise. The psychology is rather the point.

Simpler to cut, paste and trim SEP for you….

The term “abduction” was coined by Charles Sanders Peirce in his work on the logic of science. He introduced it to denote a type of non-deductive inference that was different from the already familiar inductive type.

It is clear that, as Peirce understood the term, “abduction” did not quite mean what it is currently taken to mean. One main difference between his conception and the modern one is that, whereas according to the latter, abduction belongs to what the logical empiricists called the “context of justification”—the stage of scientific inquiry in which we are concerned with the assessment of theories—for Peirce abduction had its proper place in the context of discovery, the stage of inquiry in which we try to generate theories which may then later be assessed.

As he says, “[a]bduction is the process of forming explanatory hypotheses. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea” (CP 5.172); elsewhere he says that abduction encompasses “all the operations by which theories and conceptions are engendered” (CP 5.590). Deduction and induction, then, come into play at the later stage of theory assessment: deduction helps to derive testable consequences from the explanatory hypotheses that abduction has helped us to conceive, and induction finally helps us to reach a verdict on the hypotheses, where the nature of the verdict is dependent on the number of testable consequences that have been verified.

Gerhard Schurz has recently defended a view of abduction that is again very much in the Peircean spirit. On this view, “the crucial function of a pattern of abduction … consists in its function as a search strategy which leads us, for a given kind of scenario, in a reasonable time to a most promising explanatory conjecture which is then subject to further test” (Schurz 2008, 205).

Harry Frankfurt (1958) has noted, however, that abuctiion is supposed to be part of the logic of science, but what exactly is logical about inventing explanatory hypotheses? According to Peirce (CP 5.189), abduction belongs to logic because it can be given a schematic characterization, to wit, the following:

The surprising fact, C, is observed.
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

But Frankfurt rightly remarks that this is not an inference leading to any new idea. After all, the new idea—the explanatory hypothesis A—must have occurred to one before one infers that there is reason to suspect that A is true, for A already figures in the second premise.

Frankfurt then goes on to argue that Peirce suggests an understanding of abduction not so much as a process of inventing hypotheses but rather as one of adopting hypotheses, where the adoption of the hypothesis is not as being true or verified or confirmed, but as being a worthy candidate for further investigation. On this understanding, abduction could still be thought of as being part of the context of discovery. It would work as a kind of selection function, or filter, determining which of the hypotheses that have been conceived in the stage of discovery are to pass to the next stage and be subjected to empirical testing.

The selection criterion is that there must be a reason to suspect that the hypothesis is true, and we will have such a reason if the hypothesis makes whichever observed facts we are interested in explaining a matter of course. This would indeed make better sense of Peirce’s claim that abduction is a logical operation.

Frankfurt ultimately rejects this proposal as well. Given, he says, that there may be infinitely many hypotheses that account for a given fact or set of facts, it can hardly be a sufficient condition for the adoption of a hypothesis (in the above sense) that its truth would make that fact or set of facts a matter of course. At a minimum, abduction would not seem to be of much use as a selection function.

One may doubt whether this is a valid objection, however. Echoing what was said in connection with underdetermination arguments, we note that it is by no means clear that “accounting for a given fact” is to be identified with “making that fact a matter of course.”

For all Frankfurt says, for a hypothesis to account for a fact, it is enough if it entails that fact. But virtually no philosopher of science nowadays holds that entailment is sufficient for explanation. And it would seem reasonable to read the phrase “making a given fact a matter of course” as “giving a satisfactory explanation of that fact.

Even so, it is remarkable that there is no reference in Peirce’s writings on abduction to the notion of best explanation. Some satisfactory explanations might still be better than others, and there might even be a unique best one. This idea is crucial in all recent thinking about abduction. Therein lies another main difference between Peirce’s conception of abduction and the modern one

Strawman... — apokrisis

...is what folk claim when they don't have a reply.

Odd of you to quote back to me from an article that supports the view I just set out. If there was a point, you dropped it somewhere. If there is something you think relevant in that block of text, set it out.

Here's a bit you left out:

It is a common complaint that no coherent picture emerges from Peirce’s writings on abduction.

Have a look at the article on Abduction, as well, for a slightly wider field of view - it might help you come to terms with what is going on here.

So how do you say a process of scientific inquiry normally begins?

Your theory. You tell me. But if you are stuck, try 's "exception" - the unexpected.

Your theory — Banno

Nope. Even if you feel Peirce’s account to be inadequate, you have to offer something better or there’s nothing to discuss.

So keep on ducking and dodging. Or step up for once. How else is a hypothesis to be formed except that it seems to be a thought that strikes the mark?

Something catches the attention as it seems to suggest a causal connection. One has reason to suspect a general principle lurks. It is worth shaping up in systematic fashion through deducing the consequences of such an explanation and then seeking the evidence that would offer inductive support. Or abduction as inference to the best explanation.

If you have some sharper story of how explanations originate and come to be believed, speak up. Don't be shy. Otherwise ya got nuthin’, as you say.

Of course Hume would agree, if not in those terms - he understands that his own philosophy is based in the same empirical and psychological habits it describes. He's not offering a proof of scepticism, he's mapping out, with humility, what can be deduced and what cannot. — Banno

What can or cannot be deduced, given the opening books of the Treaties are taken as true and infallible, as Hume himself takes them. He refers to his description of how the mind works and interacts with the world as a "proofs" throughout the later parts of the book to justify his theses. Again, why is Hume's introspection here absolute, and almost all prior thinkers' introspection mere delusion, and why is it "humility" for Hume to have assumed this is so?

How is simply asserting things as true, despite the fact that these very assertions imply that you cannot possibly know the truth of what you are saying, "humility" and not the very height of dogmatism?

Abduction doesn’t define a relation of consequence between premises and conclusions; logic requires a structured notation, absent from abduction. Abduction might be a good name for a psychological process, but it ain't a logic.
— Banno

Strawman. It is a necessary part of a logic of science. The bit that gets the game of deduction and inductive confirmation started. — apokrisis

It's interesting how emotively the rationalists defend. I agree with both here. It is the necessary bit of the game that gets induction started. But it ain't logical, and it ain't evidential. It's a leap of faith. Nothing wrong with that - it serves us well so far and perhaps for the foreseeable. It's just that it is not "rational". It's necessary to the project and it seems to work so far. If it stops working we'll have to think again.

What Peirce called the growth of cosmic habit. — apokrisis

That's what Hume called it too - "habit". But he located it firmly in human memory. I would have thought that the cosmos would display something more like inertia, but regardless of what one calls it, there is no evidence of it from the future, and the move from past to future, or from explanation to prediction, remains unsupported by any logic or evidence.

You asked:

how do you say a process of scientific inquiry normally begins? — apokrisis

I replied:

the unexpected — Banno

If you wanted to use your own answer, why bother asking the question...? You are choosing to carve a very human process so that it fits your pet theory, by choosing a starting point. You are the one playing games. Consider:

Something catches the attention as it seems to suggest a causal connection. — apokrisis

Yes! Again, we are not disagreeing with what's been said; I'm just pointing out that this is not logic.

Abduction doesn’t define a relation of consequence between premises and conclusions; logic requires a structured notation, absent from abduction. Abduction might be a good name for a psychological process, but it ain't a logic. — Banno

You already have your causal relation, before you start on the logic of checking it. You bring it in to confirm your bias. That's the criticism.

I agree with both here. — unenlightened

:grin: As do I! Abduction is not a formalisable process that can provide an algorithmic answer to Hume's scepticism.

You expect a deductive logic all the way down. So when it isn't there, you invent it.

You've badly misunderstood Hume.

You expect a deductive logic all the way down. — Banno

I don't, I just think Hume's conclusions are reductio ad absurdum against empiricism, while famously, the dogma also isn't supportable by its own epistemic standards, in which case it isn't "humility" it's dogmatism. Just because an asserted dogma leads to skepticism and materialism doesn't make it "humility."

Just because an asserted dogma leads to skepticism and materialism doesn't make it "humility." — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem to miss the bit where Hume is talking about the psychology of knowing, not the logic - having shown that the logic isn't of any use in justifying an induction.

It's a leap of faith. — unenlightened

Nah. We are talking science here. You have to sound reasonable when you make your grant application. You have to offer a causal explanation that would be worth testing. Or at least you have to be owed a favour by someone dishing out the dosh.

I would have thought that the cosmos would display something more like inertia, but regardless of what one calls it, there is no evidence of it from the future, and the move from past to future, or from explanation to prediction, remains unsupported by any logic or evidence. — unenlightened

Sounds like hopeful twaddle.