Ok, let's suppose Hume is wrong. Then try to solve the following problem: A billiard ball rolls toward a second billiard ball. Try to figure out (before they meet) what will happen when the two balls meet and state what method you used to do it.
By what reasoning do you find out whether the balls will attract each other, whether they will bounce off each other and in what direction, whether they will penetrate each other, or disintegrate, or explode, or ... or ...? — Jacques
Before the next collision, we can now calculate, based on our experience, what will happen, but only based on the assumption that the balls will behave as they did in the previous collisions. The assumption that the future will be similar to the past, however, cannot be justified by any calculation but only by experience. — Jacques
We just naturally assume that things will be the same, rather than having derived this idea from experience and inductive reasoning. — Metaphysician Undercover
So Hume really ought to be classified with G.E. Moore and Wittgenstein in as an opponent of sceptical conclusions. — Ludwig V
Hume's statement that "uniform experience" provides a proof which leads no room for doubt is very unsound. — Metaphysician Undercover
But, it is through the use of memory, comparison, and inductive reasoning that we identify consistency through distinct events, to conclude uniformity. — Metaphysician Undercover
You outline a standard account. But I don't accept that it is Hume's. But he is very clear a) that he accepts the sceptical argument (on the grounds that our experience provides no basis for rejecting it) and b) that we make our predictions because of association of ideas and custom or habit. He is careful to say that our understanding plays no part in this, which I think means that no process of reasoning is involved. I think his account is best classified as a causal one. — Ludwig V
He needs to explain what other types of mental customs we have, which are other than reasoning, and how those other customs might result in successful predictions. — Metaphysician Undercover
I'm not trying to defend Hume, just to understand him. All we've got is what he wrote and I don't think those texts have the answers to your challenges, except that I don't think he ever claims that there is any guarantee that our predictions are always successful. That would be inconsistent. — Ludwig V
Look at it this way. He argues 1) that all our ideas are drawn from experience 2) that experience provides no justification for making predictions based on past experience and 3) that we are going to go on doing just that. He also says that we have found this practice useful. Whether this counts as a justification or merely a cause is debateable. — Ludwig V
The point is not whether our predictions are guaranteed, or one hundred percent certain, but that we can have success in a consistent way. — Metaphysician Undercover
Now, we can see that Hume tends to conflate these two types of successful prediction, the one based in statistical analysis, requiring no concept of causation, and the one based in causation. — Metaphysician Undercover
We might inquire whether this type of prediction based in simple memory, and developed into an application of mathematics in statistical analysis, is a form of reasoning, or another type of habit or custom. — Metaphysician Undercover
And I really don't think we can relate two types of events as cause and effect, in the true and necessary way required to produce consistently successful predictions, without some form of reasoning. And this is why it is necessary to understand "the reason" why they are related as cause and effect, in order that the relationship proposed be the true and necessary relation required for consistently successful predictions. — Metaphysician Undercover
I have to say that I don't understand what necessity means here. I assume you don't mean the "true in all possible worlds" kind of necessity. That would be ambitious for an explanation of empirical phenomena. — Ludwig V
It is this understanding of "the reason why" the two events are related, which validates the necessity of causation. — Metaphysician Undercover
we can say that when the cause occurs, the effect must occur. — Metaphysician Undercover
So, for example, if a temperature of lower than zero Celsius is said to cause water to freeze, then we can say that whenever this temperature occurs, water will freeze necessarily. — Metaphysician Undercover
I'm afraid I do have a problem here. I don't disagree with this, but I don't understand what "validates the necessity" means. — Ludwig V
That's fine, except that I want to ask why "must". What if it doesn't? — Ludwig V
If you say "Oxygen is necessary for life (except for anaerobic bacteria)", I understand that if there is no oxygen, most living things die. So I understand that most living things must live in an atmosphere that contains a certain percentage of oxygen. — Ludwig V
I'm not clear what the last word adds to the bald statement "water will freeze." — Ludwig V
The best that I can offer is that if the prediction fails, I will not abandon the generalization, but treat it as a problem that demands an explanation that will preserve as much as possible of what I thought I knew. So if a sample doesn't freeze at that expected temperature, I will research until I find an answer - such as that the water contains too much salt to freeze at the normal temperature. Again, having learnt that fire causes burns, when I find burns occurring in the absence of fire, I will research until I realize that it is heat, not fire, that causes burns and amend my causal law accordingly. Admittedly, my belief that when a causal law fails, there must be an explanation, and my treatment of such failures as not just a fact, but a problem, is a matter of faith, (this may not be the right expression, but something along those lines is needed). Strictly speaking, when what we think is a causal law fails, that disproves the law (cf. Popper). But I can postpone abandoning the law until I'm convinced that there is no explanation for the exceptional case. There is no time limit on the postponement, so I am never compelled to abandon it and if my law is useful, I will classify the falsification as an unexplained event and continue to rely on it. Necessity is a matter of the status of "water will freeze", and not a straightforward question of truth or falsity. — Ludwig V
I don't think you have this quite right. The point Hume makes is that the assumption that the future will be similar to the past cannot be justified by experience, — Metaphysician Undercover
Maybe inductive inferences do not even have a rule in common. What if every inductive inference is essentially unique? This can be seen as rejecting Hume’s premise P5.
P5: Any probable argument for UP presupposes UP.
Proponents of such views have attacked Hume’s claim that there is a UP on which all inductive inferences are based. There have long been complaints about the vagueness of the Uniformity Principle (Salmon 1953). The future only resembles the past in some respects, but not others. Suppose that on all my birthdays so far, I have been under 40 years old. This does not give me a reason to expect that I will be under 40 years old on my next birthday. There seems then to be a major lacuna in Hume’s account. He might have explained or described how we draw an inductive inference, on the assumption that it is one we can draw. But he leaves untouched the question of how we distinguish between cases where we extrapolate a regularity legitimately, regarding it as a law, and cases where we do not.
One way to put this point is to say that Hume’s argument rests on a quantifier shift fallacy (Sober 1988; Okasha 2005a). Hume says that there exists a general presupposition for all inductive inferences, whereas he should have said that for each inductive inference, there is some presupposition. Different inductive inferences then rest on different empirical presuppositions, and the problem of circularity is evaded.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#NoRule
If anyone said that information about the past could not convince him that something would happen in the future, I should not understand him. One might ask him: what do you expect to be told, then? What sort of information do you call a ground for such a belief? … If these are not grounds, then what are grounds?—If you say these are not grounds, then you must surely be able to state what must be the case for us to have the right to say that there are grounds for our assumption….
-Wittgenstein
1. Techniques in statistics and probability theory do not rely on induction. — Count Timothy von Icarus
One way to put this point is to say that Hume’s argument rests on a quantifier shift fallacy (Sober 1988; Okasha 2005a). Hume says that there exists a general presupposition for all inductive inferences, whereas he should have said that for each inductive inference, there is some presupposition. Different inductive inferences then rest on different empirical presuppositions, and the problem of circularity is evaded.
This turned out to not be true under all consistent geometries, e.g., a triangle on a curved plane, as drawn on a ball. — Count Timothy von Icarus
That is, there is no way to tell between an a priori analytic truth and a firmly held dogma. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Additionally, if I buy into computationalist conceptions of physics, then what comes before dictates what comes after by the same sort of logical entailment Liebniz had in mind when he developed his conception of computation, then my expectation that the future is like the past is not grounded in Hume's UP. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If anyone said that information about the past could not convince him that something would happen in the future, I should not understand him. One might ask him: what do you expect to be told, then? What sort of information do you call a ground for such a belief? … If these are not grounds, then what are grounds?—If you say these are not grounds, then you must surely be able to state what must be the case for us to have the right to say that there are grounds for our assumption….
-Wittgenstein
Please tell me what your rationale is for believing that the future will resemble the past. — Jacques
If anyone said that information about the past could not convince him that something would happen in the future, I should not understand him. One might ask him: what do you expect to be told, then? What sort of information do you call a ground for such a belief? … If these are not grounds, then what are grounds?—If you say these are not grounds, then you must surely be able to state what must be the case for us to have the right to say that there are grounds for our assumption….-Wittgenstein
Because seeing events follow from one another is somehow not seeing how events follow from one another. But this is true only if you don't accept that events follow from one another in the first place. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Either of these routes then leaves Hume open to all the arguments against radical skepticism, my favorite being from Augustine's "Against the Academics," because they're witty. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Therefore the skeptic wins out in the end, because each such expectation is unique, and therefore must undergo examination through the skeptic's microscope, in a way unique to it. — Metaphysician Undercover
So we would need to isolate and analyze this specific UP as to its own peculiarities and uniqueness, in order to determine whether your expectations about particular aspects of the future are well grounded. — Metaphysician Undercover
but only the ones which prove themselves to be useful (and this is itself an inductive method) are accepted into convention. The usefulness is what inspires the "firmly held dogma". — Metaphysician Undercover
The difficulty is to see exactly what "how" means and to understand that asking such a question means rejecting Hume's idea of atomistic idea of experience (which analytic philosophy largely inherited from Hume). — Ludwig V
I'm afraid I disagree with both of you. You misunderstand Hume. His position is that scepticism is right if it recommends careful and judicious examination of the facts and judicious decisions based on them, wrong if it is applied excessively. I think that's about right. It's not a case of radical scepticism (Pyrrhonism according to Hume) or nothing. — Ludwig V
Hume's position is that even though our inferences are not well grounded, we will continue to make them, as a result of what he calls "custom or habit". He then makes a sequence of moves, as I outlined in an earlier post, to arrive at a non-sceptical position that "uniform experience" is proof. One may or may not think that's legitimate; it's certaintly dubious. There is also the problem that experience is not uniform, unless we select among our experiences. Which, as you are indicating, we do, and in the process notice differences as well as similarities. — Ludwig V
The theories themselves do not necessarily rely on induction to be produced, but a judgement of the reliability of them, in application, does rely on induction. So people might produce thousands or millions of such theories, in any random way, but we would only choose the ones proven by induction as reliable, to be used, and these would become the conventional.
So Hume really just makes an inductive conclusion about inductive conclusions, that they all employ some sort of presupposition about temporal continuity.
This is not really a consistent geometry though. A "curved plane" is contradictory because the curve of a sphere requires three dimensions while the plane is two
Do you know of any law that guarantees the future will necessarily correspond to the past? I for one currently believe there is none. You named a few in your post and I will try to understand and address them soon.
Scientific identities like:
Water = H2O
Gold = the element with atomic number 79
Hesperus = Phosphorus
Are necessarily true although they are discovered a posteriori.
The terms flanking the identity sign are rigid designators.
[Def. A rigid designator is a labelling device whose function is to pick out the same object or natural kind in every possible world, that is, in every possible counterfactual situation.]
Identity statements between rigid designators are necessarily true if they are true. Each term independently picks out the same thing in every possible world.
Although these identities cannot be known a priori, they are necessary empirical truths, discovered a posteriori, like all scientific identities.
Once we know that ‘water’ and ‘H2O’ refer to the same thing, we treat both terms as rigid designators.
They have different uses or connotations – a chemist would use the former, an ordinary speaker the latter – but they denote the same natural kind.
If water is necessarily H2O, there is no possible world (i.e . situation) in which pure water at normal pressure, if it is the natural kind we designate by that term, is not H2O, does not have the molecular structure it does, does not freeze at 0 0C.
This supports the essentialist picture. If a thing’s identity depends on what it is made of, its microstructure will necessarily determine its disposition to behave in particular ways, i.e. its causal powers.
If deductively accessible logical laws do cause progression, then seeing the rock break a window IS seeing causation. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If the universe follows laws, if it is deterministic (even in a stochastic way), then it seems possible, maybe even plausible given the successes of attempts to identify such laws, to define the root rules by which the present always evolves into the future. — Count Timothy von Icarus
This supports the essentialist picture. If a thing’s identity depends on what it is made of, its microstructure will necessarily determine its disposition to behave in particular ways, i.e. its causal powers.
Identity statements between rigid designators are necessarily true if they are true. Each term independently picks out the same thing in every possible world.
Hume described the experience of sensing as a series of static states which may change as time passes. This implies a break, a divide between each state. Then he moves to address the problem of how the mind relates one state to another. The distinct states being what sensation gives us. But i think that in reality, sensation is an experience of continuous activity, which we produce breaks in through withdrawing our attention, either intentionally or unintentionally. — Metaphysician Undercover
From this perspective we can apprehend the continuity which is given by sensation as manufactured, created by the apparatus which produces the sense experience, and therefore there is the potential that this is not a true representation. Now we would have the proper platform for inquiring into the possibility of true divisions, the true separations in time, which the experience of sensation, as a continuity, hides from us in its deceptive ways. — Metaphysician Undercover
I agree with the first quotation, but not with the second and, although I accept that we often get things wrong, I'm not at all sure that it is because our sensations deceive us; it may be that they neither deceive nor reveal. The problem may like in our interpretations. — Ludwig V
There is a fundamental incompatibility between the perception of reality as a persistently changing continuity, and as a succession of separate but contiguous discrete instances. This is an incommensurability which mathematicians have not been able to resolve. Therefore, one of the ways of representing the world must be wrong, either the way of sensation, as a continuity, or the way of logic, as a succession of discrete instances. — Metaphysician Undercover
So to allow for the possibility that reality is intelligible to us, we must assume that the senses deceive us — Metaphysician Undercover
And I say "Don't we also say things like "between t1 and t2 this process was going on?"We say things like "this was the situation at time1, and this was the situation at time2. — Metaphysician Undercover
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