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. — SophistiCat

Firstly that is exactly what I was proposing to do "make a case for the viability of inductive inference in general". Determinism can be framed deductively as:

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

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. It doesn't matter how ad hoc these extra premises might be, you can still produce a deductively valid argument. The argument may be wildly wrong, completely unsound; but from the point of view of validity that doesn't matter. All you need is a little imagination; and this is supplied by abductive reasoning.

Science happily proceeds with local laws and "special" theories. — SophistiCat

Science could do that but it would not be the comprehensive science we have today; which does base itself on the foundation of the four forces and the three laws of thermodynamics. The mistake in your interpretation of what I have been arguing seems to be that you think I am claiming that science must presume these forces and laws to be absolute; I don't say it has to do that; but I do say it needs to take them provisionally; and that is just what the inductive method today consists in. These forces and laws were not the premises in the past, to be sure, but other things were premised in the past that have come to be thought as dis-confirmed, and to have been superceded by current premises. Very few people would argue that no progress has been made in science, surely? And it is all based on inductive and abductive reasoning.

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.

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.

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?

"Free Will"??? There is nothing to give up here.
When I make a decision, or act in any way it is determined by who and what I am; and through my needs, motivation and volition.
I would rather I determined my own fate than be free of myself, as that makes no sense whatever.

Not true.

Here's an inductive argument:

1. Some Ps are Qs
2. Therefore, all Ps are Qs — Magnus Anderson

Rubbish.
This is just poor logic. A broken deduction, pretending to be something. Nothing to do with induction at all.


An inductive argument is more like X happens after Y all the time. So maybe X is caused by Y.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is only fallacious if it is wrong.

SO are we talking conjectures and refutations - falsification?

That is, we see f(a), f(b), f(c)..., propose the conjecture that (x)f(x), and actively seek to find an example of E(x)~f(x)? — Banno

That could be a way; but I was thinking of conjecture just as the 'creative imagination' part of science which then gets worked into hypotheses that make predictions as to what we would be likely to observe if our conjectures were correct; predictions which can then be tested by further experiment and observation to see whether they actually obtain. I think Pooper was right that no amount of such verification ever absolutely proves a theory. On the other hand could we say that any number of counter examples could ever absolutely refute a theory? This doesn't seem to make sense, because surely to falsify one judgement is to verify another; that the first judgement is wrong, no?

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. — apokrisis

That's an intriguing, yet puzzling, statement: could you flesh it out a bit?

No one "expects."
We get born and learn.
And shit, if that rock was just like the last one. I drop it and it falls!!!
I hit the cat and it runs away! I fall over and it hurts.
The sun keeps on appearing every morning.
That's what a deterministic universe looks like.
Maybe tomorrow the sun will be shaped like a turnip?

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

This is a very good point. Deduction being a derivative puristic formalization of inductive reasoning can hardly arrogate to itself such a priority. Without its ancestor it would never have existed in the first place. And without its living relatives, it could tell us nothing whatsoever about the world.

LOL, I'm not really sure what you're wanting to say here. That's twice in a row now, so maybe the problem lies with me. Here's an abductive/ inductive inference: not enough sleep maybe? :-O

yes; good, so we can move past naive falsification to holistic refutations of theories- groups of observations?

At the risk of not causing more confusion....

By "expect" I was responding to the statement "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.", which you asked apokrisis about.

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.

[Delete] @Baden

[Delete] @Baden

↪Janus
yes; good, so we can move past naive falsification to holistic refutations of theories- groups of observations? — Banno

I'm not sure where you are going with this Banno; could you elaborate?

All good points!

Rubbish.
This is just poor logic. A broken deduction, pretending to be something. Nothing to do with induction at all.


An inductive argument is more like X happens after Y all the time. So maybe X is caused by Y.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is only fallacious if it is wrong. — charleton

You're being pedantic. It's what people to do in order to feel superior (when they are actually not.) See Banno for example.

Here's an amendment to my argument:

1. Some Ps are Qs (e.g. all of the observed ones)
2. Therefore, all Ps are Qs (in my opinion, so yeah, maybe I'm wrong, it's not certain)

Basically, what we have here is people who do not think ob their own but parrot. So when someone comes along and does not repeat the popular narrative word-by-word he's subjected to pathetic pedantry.

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.

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

No it would be the same inference with the premises made explicit. And the point is simply that inductive arguments can be rendered in deductive form in order to be presented as valid arguments.

If you don't see the significance of that to refute the claim that inductive arguments are not valid then I guess that would be to your detriment, not mine.

You're being pedantic. It's what people to do in order to feel superior (when they are actually not.) See Banno for example. — Magnus Anderson

You problem is that you just don't know what you are talking about.
If you don't find out, people are just going to laugh at you.

I hit the cat and it runs away!
— charleton

GTFO — SophistiCat

lol

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

This is more of a tautology.

You problem is that you just don't know what you are talking about.
If you don't find out, people are just going to laugh at you. — charleton

Tsk. You're being a fool.

Deduction is about definitions. About figuring out a fact from a generalised law.
Induction is empirical. It seeks to offer provisional laws FROM observations.
All Ps are Qs, and such arguments have no bearing on induction.
If you can't work that our you need to run along.

You are not saying anything relevant.

I was responding to Banno.

Here's the first paragraph form the Shorter Rutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, inductive inference.

According to a long tradition, an inductive inference is an inference from a premise of the form "all observed A are B" to a conclusion of the form "All A are B". Such inferences are not deductively valid, that is, even if the premise is true it is possible that the conclusion is false, since unobserved A's may differ from observed ones.

Now, does anyone here think that this is wrong? Surely at least we have agreement on this. — Banno

Basically, the encyclopedia is saying that inductive arguments have the following form:

1. All observed As are Bs
2. Therefore, all As are Bs

You must be smarter than this encyclopedia because it says nothing about the conclusion being "merely" probable. Right?

I generalized this to:

1. Some As are Bs
2. Therefore, all As are Bs

The premise is no longer restricted to observations.

Now I have to ask: what exactly is your point?

There is no compromise. Just one choice, one probabilistic (or random choice), no matter how small, destroys determinism. — Rich

If a probabilistic determinism allows space for free will then that enough of a compromise for me.

probabilistic determinism — Perplexed

That's OK, but it is no longer determinism. The only aspect of determinism that is being maintained is the word. Why the infatuation with the word? I think it lies in a religious-like faith in the Laws of Nature. But then we need to discuss the overall human condition and the desire for outside forces to rule one's life.