Though isn't it clear that we need some first-principles, which cannot be derived via argumentation, but must be derived rather from experience? — Agustino

Fuck, do you want to go another round or two[? That the future will be like or unlike the past, that it will be something or nothing, cannot be derived from experience.

Do you think that this is what Kant says or is this unrelated? — Agustino

No, I'm being totally unfair to Kant here, because this is a thread about Hume.

Fuck, do you want to go another round or two[? That the future will be like or unlike the past, that it will be something or nothing, cannot be derived from experience. — unenlightened

Ok, let me switch gears then. What the future will be cannot be derived from experience - but can a rational way to behave (and we're always behaving for the future) be derived from experience?

Something has to give when faced with the evidence of quantum contextuality as a causal thing. — apokrisis

We simply cannot expect our models of the universe to be immune from inadequacy and eventual revision. Do we live in a universe of waves or particles? Is the universe digital or analogue? It seems to be neither and both.
We've been here before. Model revision is what makes science what it is. But at every stage of the development of science we have relied on an assumption that we can work out what is going on based on observations of what went before. Uniformitarianism and determinism has continued to sustain investigations, and results.
I do not see anything in QM to change that situation.
After all we cannot exactly predict the fall of a simple dice, yet we can define the parameters with determinism. Were we to have complete knowledge of the dice's rotation, speed, the wind resistance, the reflective properties of the table onto which it falls and so on, we'd be able to tell what the result is, and know the result could never be 7.
It is simply the case that measuring these things tend to change their values. Observations have always played their part in skewing results - ask any anthropologist.
Double slit, double nonsense. Stick to determinism and we'll understand it.

200 years??? LOL

200 years??? LOL — charleton

Yeah, because, you know, we haven't been measuring the acceleration of gravity in any thorough manner before that (for example). Maybe I should've said 300-400 years though, I suppose we have enough measurements from around Newton's time.

When Einstein said "God does not play dice" he was affirming the utter deterministic nature of the universe, and denying any miraculous or antirecessionary god.

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was written in 1686
Check your basic arithmetic!

Maybe I should've said 300-400 years though, I suppose we have enough measurements from around Newton's time. — Agustino

That's why I said the above. But whether it's 200, 300 or 400 - same thing really, I mean Trump used to say that people were doing business with sticks and stones hundreds of millions of years ago - so why you gettin' on my case for just 100-200 years?! >:O

1) Newton codified gravity 332 years ago
2) He asserted that the "law" was universal and maintained by the action of God
3) He was wrong on many issues as we now know due to Einstein.
4) Whatever Newton OR Einstein say nature remains unchanged, but the LAWS which are human constructs DO in fact change.
So to get back to the thread point, you were wrong.

1) Newton codified gravity 332 years ago
2) He asserted that the "law" was universal and maintained by the action of God
3) He was wrong on many issues as we now know due to Einstein.
4) Whatever Newton OR Einstein say nature remains unchanged, but the LAWS which are human constructs DO in fact change.
So to get back to the thread point, you were wrong. — charleton

No, I wasn't wrong. We still use Newton's equations, and not Einstein's when we build homes. It works.

As for saying that nature remains unchanged - how do you know that? :s I don't address metaphysics here, as I made it clear to Rich, but a priori it is equally possible (if not more possible) that nature changes.

You have to rely on the assumption that the future will be like the past in order for past evidence to be relevant to the future. Which is assuming the conclusion. I don't object to you doing it, I just object to your claim that is is reasoned. — unenlightened

The reasoning might not be purely deductive, but it is scientific reasoning that thus includes a deductive element.

So a full account of the reasoning would go that we start with an abductive step - a guess at a causal mechanism. Then we deduce the observable consequences. Then we tally the inductive confirmation.

As I argued earlier, a belief in induction is justified by a guess at a mechanism - history builds constraints on free possibility. Then from that, we can deduce the observable consequence - the past can be used to predict the future in this fashion. We will see this causal mechanism at work. And then observation - of the success of this inductive approach - will be inductively confirmed (or not).

The Hume/Newton thing arises out of a particular metaphysics - a belief that the world might be deterministic, atomistic and mechanical. But rather paradoxically, that nominalism created some serious realist type problems. It couldn't account for the existence of backdrop dimensions, such as space and time. It couldn't account for how physical events were ruled over by natural laws. It couldn't account for gravity's action at a distance.

The background metaphysics that Hume relied on to motivate an argument was so patently full of nominalist holes that it never was a complete story. Yes, it did speak to a deductive consequence of its axiomatic hypotheses - all the guesses about determinism, atomism, etc. And that part of the belief system could be inductively confirmed in its own terms. But then it also relied deductively on a set of unobservables - like the laws, and space-time, and action at a distance. These "must" exist according to the metaphysical set-up, but they could never be directly measured or shown. So they could not be inductively reasonable as such.

So Hume was making points that seemed appropriate in a particular metaphysical context. They were "reasonable" in his day. But if we are talking about a modern scientific view of reasoning, then introducing the third thing of abduction, or an axiomatic leap of the imagination, makes a big difference. It says knowledge works quite differently from how the traditional conflation of deductive logic and rationality might want to represent it.

The sharp line folk tried to draw between the rational and the empirical was too strong. All reasoning relies on a mix of both. And indeed, the mixture is triadic.

You have forms of induction book-ending the process. Abduction is the generalisation step, the inference to the best explanation. It begins as vague or hazy intuition and snaps into crisply expressed hypothesis.

After that, deduction can kick in. It has something to work on and can do its syntactic, rule-bound, thing. But while the consequences of deductive argument carry the stamp of certitude (valid is valid), it is still a case of garbage in/garbage out. The hypothesis might be wrong, or more likely just part of the story. So nothing is reasonable until it is measured against the world it pretends to model. Induction from the empirically particular back to the abductively general has to close the loop, confirming the initial guess is right (or right enough for all practical purposes).

So "reasonable" should mean reasonable in that full scientific method sense. And induction itself seems reasonable in that light. We can guess at a mechanism - the accumulation of constraints. We can deduce the observable consequences. We can measure the degree to which nature conforms to our model.

And as I say, we then encounter the ways that nature doesn't in fact conform - as in the frequency with which abrupt or catastrophic changes do occur in the world. So at that point, we need to go around the loop again. We realise that we were presuming a linear world. We need to develop a larger model that relaxes that constraint. That leads us towards non-linear models - non-linear models being more generic than linear ones.

No, I wasn't wrong. We still use Newton's equations, and not Einstein's when we build homes. It works — Agustino

When we build homes????

How does nature change?

But if we are talking about a modern scientific view of reasoning, then introducing the third thing of abduction, or an axiomatic leap of the imagination, makes a big difference. It says knowledge works quite differently from how the traditional conflation of deductive logic and rationality might want to represent it. — apokrisis

I have yet to see the relevance of introducing the third type of reasoning that is abductive (or retroductive) reasoning. It does more to obscure than to clarify the manner in which reasoning functions. Personally, I think you're paying way too much of your attention to a single philosopher that is Charles Sanders Peirce.

There is very little difference between induction, deduction and abduction.

My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future is like the past.
— Agustino

You're muddling the tenses. "My past experience has proven, that in certain circumstances (ex. the laws of nature) the future has been like the past." And this says exactly nothing about what will be.

You have to rely on the assumption that the future will be like the past in order for past evidence to be relevant to the future. Which is assuming the conclusion. I don't object to you doing it, I just object to your claim that is is reasoned. — unenlightened

I agree with you. I think this is the case of not understanding the question. The question is: what causes us to think in a particular manner where "particular manner" in the context of this thread refers to thinking inductively. This is an empirical question. We are asking what variable is correlated with the variable that is manner of thinking. Or if you don't want to think in terms of "manner of thinking" we can switch to thinking in terms of the belief that the future will be similar to the past. Our manner of thinking, that of induction, is based on that belief. So the question now becomes what variable is correlated with the variable that is "the future will be related to the past in manner X". There may or may not be such a variable. We're thus asking 1) is there such a variable, and 2) if there is such a variable, what is it? Then there is the infinite regress problem; of if you don't like to call it a "problem" you can call it something like the fact (or merely the possibility) that the past is infinite. If the past is infinite that means there are no "first causes". Instead, it is possible that every effect has a cause which has a cause which has a cause and so on. So explanations can only describe a fraction of a process. We go back only a number of steps back into the past. How many steps? As many as we need for our purposes.

Who wants to answer the question of the evolution of reasoning in humans? I am personally not so interested. But if you asked me to give you my best guess, this would be it: originally, organisms chose their beliefs at random. So some organisms chose to believe the future will be similar to the past and others didn't, others chose something else. Through time, those that chose to believe that the future will be similar to the past continued to exist -- for one reason or another, again, they might have survived for no reason at all but my guess would be that there were reasons for their survival and that these reasons were tied to their choice to believe that the future mimics the past -- and those that didn't, they simply disappeared. According to this story, the original choice is made at random (i.e. it's an arbitrary or an irrational choice) and the subsequent persistence to believe what they decided to believe (i.e. the unwillingness to revise the original decision) is due to the lack of survival pressure to do so. Of course, this is not necessarily true, but it's what I am inclined to think -- more or less. So basically, my explanation is an evolutionary explanation.

But the future is not like the past.

Yesterday I had a full bottle of red. Now it is only half full.

Supposing that the future is like the past requires quite a selective view.

I have yet to see the relevance of introducing the third type of reasoning that is abductive (or retroductive) reasoning. — Magnus Anderson

The relevance is that it introduces a third and missing step in reasoning as a holistic process. And it is interesting in that so far it is the least formalisable. It would be really important if we could add a formal model - a potential algorithmic approach - to our arsenal of intellectual tools.

The unarguable point is that humans are remarkably good at guessing right answers if we took a strictly random search approach to creative insight.

How do we form our intuitions in the first place? It can't just be that we try every possible key to unlock the door. Peirce made mathematical arguments about why a random search couldn't be executed in the lifetime of the cosmos. And the same arguments are made today about NP hard solutions.

Folk like Roger Penrose have really gone to town on the issue, saying it proves to them that conciousness must be a non-computational quantum process. So it wasn't just Peirce. This is an issue that is central to a lot of metaphysical positions, as well as being of great practical interest in human psychology and artificial intelligence.

Peirce actually was leaning towards a pretty mystical answer on the "how" of abduction. He talked of Galileo's il lume naturale. He wanted to use the existence of inspired guessing as a proof of the divine. And so - in that regard - I am hardly peddling the Peircean line. Although that then depends on how you interpret what Peirce actually wrote.

Anyway, my own naturalistic view is that human minds - being evolved to understand worlds - are good at unbreaking broken symmetries. We can inductively generalise and so leap to an understanding of what the unbroken generality must have looked like before it became broken in the particular way it presents itself to us.

This is a Gestalt or Holistic deal. The whole brain is set up to see figure in terms of ground. The figure breaks the symmetry of a ground. And we can then turn our attention to the nature of the ground that had that general potential to be broken.

So the search isn't a random stumble that would take forever. Awareness is already developed in a fashion that represents a symmetry-breaking. It is already broken into figure and ground. Reversing that is just a case of relaxing the mind in a certain fashion to allow the backdrop to be seen in that light. It is a short leap - like seeing the negative space in a reversible Gestalt image of vase and two faces - rather than a blind computational search through every alternative.

I guess it all depends what you think is a central question of epistemology. Is it how can we hope to have certain knowledge? Or is it how is it that we can reason in optimal fashion?

The two were connected for a while - particularly where Newtonian science finally cashed out the deterministic simplicities of Ancient Greek atomism. Determinism, deduction and computation all go together as neat metaphysical package that appears to promise absolute certainty - something quite miraculous to humans more accustomed to thinking of the world as an arbitrary and uncertain place.

But we are beyond that now. The other side of the story is again more interesting.

But the future is not like the past.

Yesterday I had a full bottle of red. Now it is only half full. — Banno

Erm, the story is that the future is like the past in that its total entropy has increased by much the same amount yet again.

The basic constraints in play are the physics of thermodynamics. And Hume/Newton were talking about the physics in play. It was just that that physics was the reversible story of inertial mechanics, not the irreversible story of the Cosmos as a dissipative structure.

So the surprise - the disproof of an inductive metaphysics - would be if your pissed-away bottle of red magically reconstituted again itself each night, like a Magic Pudding.

So yesterday, the slope was downhill. And tomorrow, the slope will still be downhill. That is the inductive claim here.

Everything, says Hume, falls into the category of either a priori - things that tautologically true - or experiential - things we know from experience. — Wayfarer

Quine's Two Dogmas has great relevance here. Partly in dismissing the analytic/synthetic distinction, but mostly in showing that reductionism fails. Knowing things from experience presupposes knowing a stack of other stuff. Some form of holism must apply, such that one uses the whole language, or none at all.

Or if you prefer, to use a language is to participate in a way of living.

Now deduction makes sense. It sets out the wider grammar, by telling us that when we say one thing, we are also saying other things by implication.

Induction is simply invalid. No more than wishful thinking.

Erm, the story is that the future is like the past in that its total entropy has increased by much the same amount yet again. — apokrisis

So before we invented entropy we could not plan our lunch.

Your account is just too complex.

So before we invented entropy we could not plan our lunch.

Your account is just too complex. — Banno

Well, maybe some of us have larger epistemic concerns than the world that encompasses our breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Your account is just so shallow. ;)

Avocado and poached eggs on toast, as it happens.

I put the half avocado in the fridge with the intent of keeping it until tomorrow.

I keep chickens because they provide eggs for me each day. Provided I keep them fed and happy.

The bread did not disappear from the cupboard.

Now if the avocado had not been in the fridge, or the chickens had not laid a couple of eggs or the bread had disappeared, I would have had cause to ponder. Sometimes these things do happen, and I find that wife ate the avocado, or that the crow has stolen the eggs, or that I misremembered buying the loaf of bread.

I don't lie awake at night worrying that the fridge will turn into a frog and hop away with my avocado.

So I think Hume had it pretty well right, in describing our acceptance of continuity as a habit. It's not something that requires justification. It's not as if, were we unable to find such a justification, we would cease to plan our mealtimes.

More than that, there is something quite odd in asking for a justification here. It's as if the questioner had missed something very central to how things happen. Rather the doubt here is absurd.

But the future is not like the past.

Yesterday I had a full bottle of red. Now it is only half full.

Supposing that the future is like the past requires quite a selective view. — Banno

There is repetition (habits) that are useful and there is novelty.

Humans wake up after they sleep.
Each person wakes up at approximately the same time but sometimes much different.
Most have a breakfast.

From these observations, one can begin to understand human nature.

Deduction is useless in terms of gaining further understanding, since it necessarily only restarted what is know based upon known observations. I've never witnessed any deductive argument that actually added anything to understanding since all of them rely on inductive proportions that can and will be disputed.

Deduction is useless in terms of gaining further understanding, since it necessarily only restarted what is know based upon known observations. I've never witnessed any deductive argument that actually added anything to understanding since all of them rely on inductive proportions that can and will be disputed. — Rich

It's an almost correct point. Sometimes they are helpful in working out what can and can't be said. But one only has to look at the interminable arguments for the existence of god to see their limitations.

Most tellingly, sometimes deduction shows up our inconsistencies.

But I take it we agree that it is habit that underpins our acceptance that some things will be the same tomorrow. It is the exceptions to this that require explanation. If I had found a full bottle of claret this morning, I would have cause for puzzlement.

But I take it we agree that it is habit that underpins our acceptance that some things will be the same tomorrow. It is the exceptions to this that require explanation. If I had found a full bottle of claret this morning, I would have cause for puzzlement. — Banno

I agree. Bohm wrote that we seek differences within similarities and similarities within differences.

It's not that we need evolution or Bayesian analysis or thermodynamics in order to plan. It's rather the other way around; if any of these disbarred tomorrow from following on from today, we would reject them.

The profound explanations put the cart before the horse.

So I think Hume had it pretty well right, in describing our acceptance of continuity as a habit. It's not something that requires justification. It's not as if, were we unable to find such a justification, we wold cease to plan our mealtimes. — Banno

Again, it is wonderful that you accept a pragmatic account of truth and rationality. But you are still confusing philosophy with your personal satisfactions.

Animals don't need to have an epistemic theory either. A reliance on an unquestioned habit of inductive generalisation is good enough for their everyday purposes as well.

But I'm not sure why you think that the everyday routine of your eating habits is all there is to say about epistemology. I guess you just enjoy taking an anti-metaphysics stance to its caricatured limit. But in the end, who cares when there is interesting metaphysics to be discussed.

Just don't distract us too much with all your noisy chomping.

I think it a good rule of thumb that profundity leads to error.

if any of these disbarred tomorrow from following on form today, we would reject them. — Banno

How exactly could you reject them without determining which of them was responsible for some failure of prediction?

You could plan your future with Tarot cards, bedtime prayer, or gut intuition. Those have been pretty everyday habits in the past. Was there some reason they might have fallen out of fashion in the planning of your own life? Or do you still put your avocadoes in a magic box to keep them fresh, or instead a thermodynamic device called a fridge?

What metaphysics does your actual daily routine depend upon? Of course, the fridge might as well be a magic box to you. But the good folk who designed and built it might have needed some more rigorous reality model, don't you think?

Thermodynamics is part of physics, not metaphysics.

I guess it all depends what you think is a central question of epistemology. Is it how can we hope to have certain knowledge? Or is it how is it that we can reason in optimal fashion? — apokrisis

I think that epistemology, or more simply logic, should be the study of thinking (which I define to be the process of forming beliefs or assumptions.) It should study different patterns of thinking, both actual and possible, and their pros and cons or what consequences they produce under different circumstances. This should answer the second question, which is "how can we reason in optimal fashion?", but the first question, which is "how can we hope to have certain knowledge?", will remain unanswered. I think the first question makes no sense at all. Either it does not or I simply don't understand what it means. Which one is it?

So abduction, if I understand you correctly, is a pattern of no-pattern of thinking. You say that it is the least formalisable pattern of thinking which suggests to me that it lacks pattern to a considerable degree. Or it could be that the pattern is complex and thus difficult to understand and formalise? Which one of the two is the case? I am inclined to think the former but I like to keep my options open.

So if abduction is a process of thinking that has very little pattern within itself, this means that abduction is mostly a random process. It's basically random guessing.

While I believe that there are decisions that are random, I think that a lot of abduction that occurs in real life, at least as I understand the concept, is quite ordered. If you see a disembodied head lying on the floor you are not going to assume "someone clapped his heads and this head popped out of nowhere" you are going to assume something like "someone's head has been cut off". That betrays order. Not necessarily in reality but in thought.

Abduction has the following form:

1. Event B occurs.
2. When event A occurs event B follows.
3. Therefore, event A occured before B.

That's the general version of abduction. It looks sort of like deduction. Its premises are either observed (e.g. there is a disembodied head on the floor), randomly assumed (e.g. when someone claps his hands a disembodied head pops out of nowhere) or inductively inferred (e.g. when you cut someone's head off you end up with a disembodied head.)

I am struggling to see something interest here.