In model theory, a model is a structure that makes a formal system’s sentences true.

I think we are at cross purposes.

The grand edifice.

But there's a difference in our methodological dispositions that may be irreconcilable. I have an allergy to explanations of everything. I think complete explanations are completely wrong. So I'll leave you to your mythologising, and muddle along. — Banno

I’ll stick with the patch I can walk on, the language I can play with, the practices I can follow. That’s enough to get things done, and more than enough to keep me honest. Your cathedrals are impressive, but I’m happier muddling in the workshop.

If conforming to a model solves the problem, then simply infer a model on the basis of the constant conjunction of the empirical evidence. — Relativist

So you would use model theory to explain induction? An interesting idea. What do you have in mind? There'd need to be a move from the preservation of truth to a preference between model, I presume?

That’s a lot to unpack, Apo. You’ve got Bayes, neural nets, and pragmatism all packed into one explanatory hierarchy. Impressive, but maybe overengineered? Bayesianism gives us a model for updating beliefs, that can be implemented in brains, machines, or whatever. But it's not a replacement for abduction but an elaboration. Bayes doesn’t eliminate the guesswork, it formalises it. We still need to choose priors, and those priors depend on the very same customs, habits, and shared practices that Hume, Wittgenstein, and Davidson were talking about.

So yes, it closes the loop, because we’re already inside it. The Bayesian calculus doesn’t tell us why we ought to weight one hypothesis over another; it just tells us how to do so consistently, given a prior. The “hierarchy of priors” you describe isn’t an algorithmic miracle — it’s the social, linguistic, and biological history of our talk about causes.

Rationality isn’t something we add on top of experience, but what emerges from doing what we do - talking, testing, correcting, and learning together. In that sense, Bayesianism is one more way of describing Hume’s “custom and habit,” not a transcendence of it.

All-round military hero, climate change denying anti-immigration anti-gay who wants us to prepare for war with China.

So yes, let's hope the Libs choose him and push themselves even further from the middle ground they need in order to get elected.

Perhaps we all can reach some agreement that Bayesian calculus of one sort or another is a rational response to Hume's problem?

We cannot justify it by deductive reasoning, but we can by inductive reasoning — Janus

I still do not understand this. "We can by inductive reasoning" just is "the future will resemble the past". It's re-stating, not explaining.


Added:

To put it another way, it is rational in a practical sense to assume that the future will resemble the past, because to our knowledge it always has. — Janus

That says that the future resembles the past, because the future resembles the past...?

Valid, I suppose, but I find it unsatisfactory.

Cheers, Apo. Tell me more about me. Yes, the representative vocab can be understood enactively.

Bayes formalises Peirce’s approach if you like. We can move on from the nineteenth century.

This doesn't imply we should all adopt extreme skepticism. — Relativist

I don't see anyone here suggesting extreme scepticism - including Hume. His point seems to be pretty much the one you are now making.

There is a normative element to deduction, of course, but it is well-bedded, model- theoretical. All that need be accepted is that a predicate is satisfied by the objects of its extension, and that truth is preserved under valid inference. The “normative” aspect here does not consist in a choice among alternatives, but in adherence to what follows from the model itself.

And this is to agree with Hume.

Here's the OP:

In Hume, legitimate beliefs exist. They occur in a process of recurrent association. A belief is legitimate when it is associated with a vivid impression. For example, the belief that one object will move after another is based on past experience of their constant conjunction. Hume concluded that fundamental beliefs, such as the existence of an external world or the existence of the self, are not rationally justifiable but are legitimate because they are the result of experience and custom. — JuanZu

Seems to me that JuanZu is pointing to the prima facie discrepancy between our being confident in a belief based on being "associated with a vivid impression" and a generalisation that is inferred therefrom. I'd understood that as much the same as Popper's basic statements. Hume didn't have a conception of the Duhem-Quine thesis, of course, so took "vivid impressions" as incontrovertible. I don;t see that we could maintain such a thing nowadays.

Any old guess could be a starting point. — apokrisis

We could apply a Bayesian calculus to any old guess, and move towards a better guess, sure. That's one possible solution to Hume's scepticism.

Very much along the lines of Davidson.

At issue is finding a solution to Hume's scepticism. That is, how we can move from a finite set of observations to the "objectively best" general conclusion. We know that this is not something that can be done by a valid deduction.

In order to answer Hume's scepticism, abduction would have to show us how to infer the objectively best general conclusion.

We agree that abduction does not do this, but provides only the subjectively best general conclusion.

Hence abduction does not provide and answer to Hume's scepticism, but rather agrees with it.

Here's your error. The "best" in an IBE is not necesarily warranted (rationally justified). It just means it was chosen as "best" because it was subjectively judged to be better than alternatives that were considered. — Relativist

So an inference to the best explanation is actually an inference to any explanation?

So what would Wittgenstein's response to Hume's scepticism be? — JuanZu

For Wittgenstein, the demand for justification presupposes a language game, a shared background of practices that already give meaning to “evidence,” “reason,” and “doubt.” To ask, “but how do we really know that causes exist?” is to try to stand outside all language games — to doubt from nowhere. And that, he’d say, is nonsensical. “If you tried to doubt everything, you would not get as far as doubting anything.” So instead of answering Hume’s scepticism, Wittgenstein dissolves it: the idea that we might need a justification for induction or causation presupposes a context of justification that itself depends on certain unquestioned practices.

In a sense it's the same answer as Hume - it's just what we do.

For Davidson, we make sense of the talk of others by presuming that they are rational and are participating in much the same word as we are. We then have the shared basis of the world in order to make sense of the talk of others. Again, we talk in terns of causes in order to make sense to each other.

That's much the same as the basic semiotic answer, that causation and belief are not primarily “out there” in the world; they are enacted and intelligible only within structured systems of interaction, whether psychological, linguistic, or semiotic. Apo and I do not differ as much as might be supposed. What Davidson, Wittgenstein, and semiotics all emphasise is that causation and belief are embedded in structured practices — psychological habits, language games, or broader semiotic systems. They are not features of the world independently of these practices. In that sense, the difference between Apo’s semiotic framing and the Wittgensteinian–Davidsonian account is largely one of emphasis: one highlights codes, the other interpretive and linguistic practices. But both converge on the insight that causal talk is intelligible only within a shared, structured system of interaction.

We could move on to the neuroscience, and talk about how neural nets recognise patterns - a sort of physiological background against which this stuff plays out.

That's very interesting. But you've forgotten to relate it to Hume's scepticism. — JuanZu

Each of those - Kant, Wittgenstein, Feyerabend and Davidson - can be understood as a reply to Hume.

No. Being warranted means to be rationally justified. — Relativist

We seem to be circling. Being warranted means to be rationally justified, and something is rationally justified if it is warranted. The best explanations are the ones which are rationally justified, and those are the ones that are warranted, and they are the ones we accept. A subjective best inference may not be warranted, but then it would not be the best inference, and so not justified, and not the best.


Help me out of the loop.

That's a very compacted account, yet pretty much spot on. Yep, for us to experience objects and events as structured and intelligible, the transcendental subject applies categories like causality, using the schematism as a bridge, and unifying perceptions under the “I think.”

Is your aim here to understand Hume, and then to move on to Kant's response? that is, are you after an exegesis, or are you looking for broad answers? It seems to me that you have a pretty good grasp of both Hume and Kant.

What I've been doing is more about relating these ideas to more recent work. So we have Hume showing that what "I" have access to is just impressions. He points out that it seems illegitimate to infer the patterns of causation and so on that make up our world. His answer is somewhat unconvincing - habit and custom. This all woke Kant, who used a transcendental argument to claim that minds are predisposed to join these impressions into those patterns.

In Wittgenstein, those “necessary conditions” become grammatical rules rather than transcendental structures: not timeless features of mind, but conventions of our shared linguistic practice. In Davidson, the unity of apperception becomes the principle of interpretive coherence: understanding others and the world depends on fitting utterances and actions into a rational, causal, and linguistic web. And in Feyerabend, even that web becomes plural — our patterns of causation and justification are practices that can vary across scientific paradigms.

How's that?

But if the ensuing belief is warranted, that's all that matters. — Relativist

Isn't "warranted" just another way of saying "best"? If it's best, then it's warranted, and if it is the one warranted move, then it's the best?

Further, both involve an evaluation that is not a deduction.

Ok, thanks - that's clearer. So values always supervene on properties, and hence intrinsic values are those that supervene on intrinsic properties. Seems I misunderstood your "it is morally valuable because of the kind of thing it is" to be saying that values are properties, and not something that supervenes on a property.

I gather that your argument now depends on physical properties not being the sort of thins that supervenes on an item, and since values do supervene, then values are not physical. Hence,

...if we are physical things then our intrinsic moral value would have to supervene on some of our essential features.....but it doesn't. — Clarendon

So your argument runs somethign like :

• All moral value supervenes on properties — that is, nothing is morally valuable “for no reason.”
• Intrinsic moral value supervenes specifically on essential properties of a thing.
• For physical things, essential properties are things like shape, size, location.
• Our intrinsic moral value does not supervene on those physical properties.
• Therefore, we are not purely physical things — our intrinsic value must supervene on something non-physical (e.g., consciousness).

But a person, or a balloon, remains what it is despite change in shape, size or location. So these do not seem to be good candidates for essential properties. It seems to me that, for example, personality might be a good candidate for an essential property of a person, and that's not physical anyway. Seems your conclusion is already present in values not being physical. You've given a different articulation of Hume's fork.

But I might leave you to it. The notion of essential properties is far more problematic than just this.

Do you agree that inference to the best explanation can warrant a belief? This of course is only if it was done rationally. — Relativist

Well, I won't disagree, but point out that "the best" remains ill-defined. If we are in agreement as to which explanation is the best, then we should accept it; but here, "the best" might just be "the one we accept"...

Which is to say that we accept the answer based on experience and custom.

So it's not so much answering Hume as agreeing with him.

Are there NO easy cases, in your opinion? — Relativist

:blush: Pretty much. Welcome to philosophical analysis.

I hope we are in a position to see the problem with the argument as it stands.

Some item X has properties a,b,c... Moral values supervene on these properties, and so on X - value(a), value(b), value (c) and so on. The value of X is some summation of the value of its properties.

But an intrinsic value, instead of taking another property as its object, is understood as instead one of the items a,b,c...

Is that close to what you have in mind? If so, there are two approaches to value at work here.

Also, and parallel to this, there seems to be a presumption that a,b,c... are physical, while valuations are not. I agree, roughly, with this, and with the intuition that sits behind it, that moral values are not physical things. But I think here, it is presumed, rather than demonstrated.

Thoughts?

I have said an IBE is not necessarily rational. But it can be. — Relativist

Good. Then we are agreed that abduction, considered as inference to the "best" explanation, does not determine one explanation, and is not itself a rational process. Do we also agree that as a result it doesn't serve to answer Humes Scepticism?

And yes, I am discussing the use of the term, and so its meaning. What I would bring out is that it is not so easy as some might suppose to set out what is a conspiracy theory and what isn't. That the detail is important.

Or one might accept some doctrine as the ultimate truth, and then save oneself the trouble of thinking by simply lambasting any objections. That works, too.

Perhaps it is necessary to bear in mind that it is possible for two incompatible interpretations of data to be right, or at least not wrong. — Ludwig V

Just so.

But we could define a "conspiracy theory" using epistemology. — Relativist

What I've read, including the paper I've already cited, leads me to think that the term functions in the way offten described by Bernard Wooley in Yes, Minister

It’s one of those irregular verbs, Minister:
I have an independent mind,
you are eccentric,
he is round the twist.

Or in our case,

I question the official story,
you believe in conspiracies,
he’s a paranoid lunatic.

The epistemic issue here is that it's again not just the evidence that is being used, but the background against which that evidence is being evaluated. Things are not so clear cut as they might seem.

Most of our beliefs are established as subjective inferences to best explanation. Consider the alternatives: few beliefs are established by deduction, and few are basic. What else is there? — Relativist

This is a good approximation, perhaps.

We do make inferences, sure. The question I would bring back to you is that of what makes one inference "the best" among those available. It need not be the case that one inference is the best explanation we have - indeed, it is more common that there are multiple inferences that satisfy the evidence at hand.

And yet we are often obliged to choose. The evidence is insufficient for the choice to be determined, so there are other things at play, including our other beliefs, and the practices we share with those around us. Our epistemic choices are guided by more than evidence; they include the whole form of the life in which we are engaged.

And here Feyerabend's thoughts come in to play. What he shows is that sometimes we infer, not to the best explanation, but to some other explanation - and that this can be a very good thing. You will come across many examples in his book, so I will not list them here.

Now the problem with calling inference to the best explanation, abduction, and listing it alongside deduction and induction, is the air of logical determinism that is given to what is in reality a practice fraught with ambiguity and guesswork. There's a lot going on here that is plainly irrational.

And this brings us back to Hume. His talk of “custom and habit” reminds us that much of our reasoning isn’t strictly rational at all — it’s rooted in the patterns we’ve come to expect, both individually and collectively. What Hume saw as psychological, Wittgenstein turned into grammar, and Feyerabend showed as scientific practice: we act, speak, and infer within a shared way of life. Causation, explanation, belief — all of these belong as much to what we do as to what we think.

No, I wouldn't say that the attitude is intrinsic to the thing. Rather, something essential to the thing is what is responsible for my valuing attitude. — Clarendon

Yes, I see that. So you are right here:

Were I to say that I find something intrinsically valuable, then, I would be saying that I value it due to some of its essential properties, rather than saying that my valuing of it is an essential property of that thing. — Clarendon

Here you show again that the value supervenes on the property. It appears to me that what you have shown is that the idea of something's having an intrinsic value doesn't work in this scheme.

To be forthright, if the value is a property of the thing, then it can be intrinsic to the thing. But if instead it is a seperate property that does not belong to the thing but supervenes on the properties of that thing, then it is not a property of the thing.

In your argument I think you move from one to the other. So rather than showing that we are not physical things, perhaps you've shown that values are not intrinsic properties of things.

To my eye, what all this shows is the poverty of the notion of a property. Better by far to talk of predicates.

Everything truly has to be about him in egocentric fashion. — apokrisis

And will continue to be so, as long as you two talk about me rather then the topic at hand.

You don't have to make this a conversation about me. But you choose to. You can stop any time you like.

I didn't start the conversation about me. But I am happy to encourage it.

An example, maybe: suppose, for the sake of the discussion, that moral value is an attitude adopted towards some thing. Then we might say that having a moral value supervenes on a given act, and on the attributes of that act.

The moral value of a thing is, for the purpose of the argument, an attitude towards that thing that supervenes on it.

Can we say that the attitude is intrinsic to the thing in question? That seems to be what would be implied by "it is morally valuable because of the kind of thing it is"...

You've been failing to answer arguments and even posts for months now. — Leontiskos

From you, yes.

Your engaging in yet an another conversation about me instead of about my arguments is gratifying. It implies you have no were left to go.

A dignified exit from a poor thread. You did some nice work here.

Excellent first post, by the way. Welcome.

Nice.

Can you clarify what it is to be morally valuable? Does having a moral value "supervene on some of our essential properties", or is it itself a property? IF "it is morally valuable because of the kind of thing it is" then isn't moral value a property of the thing - the kind of thing that it is - rather than something that supervenes on a property?

On the one hand, a thing has some set of properties and the moral value of that thing supervenes on at least some of those properties, while on the other, the moral value just is a property of the thing.

So isn't supposing that a thing can have an intrinsic moral value denying that values supervene on properties?

Hastie has resigned from the front bench - he can do more damage to Ley, the leader of the opposition, - if he is not bound by the conventions of being a shadow minister.

Andrew Hastie’s resignation over immigration couldn’t be worse timing for Sussan Ley

The Liberal Party has to sort out whether it is conservative or liberal. This is the process in play here at present.

Just noticed an article in the recent Philosophy Now that is germane: Popper, Science & Democracy.

Things are stirring...

Georgian Dream claims victory in all municipal elections in first round

Georgia’s police use water cannons on protesters trying to storm presidential palace

What's your point? Are you just acknowledging what I said about background beliefs being involved in our epistemic judgements? — Relativist

The point is clear, I hope - evidence is always equivocal. There is always a point about which folk may disagree.

I contend that more credence should be given to claims that are supported by evidence, than those that are purely speculation. — Relativist

No one would disagree ( :wink: ). At issue is how "supported by evidence" is payed out. From Quine-Duhem, we see that there are always ways to question the evidence. So the issue becomes when questioning the evidence is reasonable, and when it isn't. And it seems there is often no clear clean place at which to draw the line.

Hence,

Plausibility is a factor in epistemic judgement. — Relativist

And not the result of the application of an algorithmic method. I think you see this, but perhaps what's been said here will better articulate it.

Feyerabend's conclusion is that "Anything Goes" in choosing between hypotheses. That's too far. The trouble with "anything goes" is that we are obliged to choose, and so if anything goes, we may as well choose the easiest path, which will be what we already hold true - again, a recipe for confirmation bias. The trouble with "anything goes" is that it will amount to "everything stays the same".

But instead we can admit that the process is fraught with difficulty, and not so clean and clear as some theorists would suppose. Scientific method is not algorithmic, but communal. It is human, involving the interaction of many, many people in an organised and cooperative fashion. I'd argue that this process involves not interfering with the work of others, responding to their claims in a way that is relevant, and doing so publicly; basic liberal virtues. Values not on show in places in this very thread.

Part of that is the issue of demarcation, the separation between science and non-science, which relates to your discussion of conspiracy theories. The idea is that conspiracy theories are not scientific; they do not conform to scientific methods. Now this is I think pretty much toe right sentiment, but given that we are unable to set out what that scientific method is quite as clearly as some suppose, and hence that the difficulty in setting out what counts as a conspiracy theory and what doesn't, a bit of humility might be needed. It won't help to just tell a conspiracy believer that their theory does not match the evidence, because for them it does.

Take a look at this.

First issue is whether abduction is just brainstorming, or if it includes some selection amongst the hypotheses generated. To you, it seems it does. To others, it seems it doesn't.

The problems I want to point out apply to abduction considered as being normative - as involving choosing between hypotheses. So, to your account.

How is it that "abduction would tend to rule out theories that are commonly called conspiracy theories"? What's the basis for the selection?

The criticism I began with is that if you set out those criteria, if you set out your expectations for a good hypothesis, then what you are in effect doing is choosing only the hypotheses that meet those expectations; I somewhat hyperbolically called that "confirmation bias" - you get what you want, an so perhaps not what you need.

On this approach, is any theory that does not meet one's expectations a conspiracy theory? Seems to be so, unless there is some additional criteria.

Next step was introducing Feyerabend, who shows historical cases in which going against expectations and logical conclusions leads to progress in science - were irrationality leads to choosing the better theory. His argument gets a bit deeper than that, but there's a start, since this is counter to the naive view of abductuion as choosing the best theory.

Now some care is needed here. We agree that we do "make judgements based on data too sparse to draw a deductive conclusion". what I am baulking at is calling these judgements "abduction", if what is meant is that they are correct, or true, or worse, necessary.

All up, it seems to me that there remains a hole in your account, that explains the why of how we must choose this hypothesis over that one.

I have a problem with this part: — javra

Me, too. It's intended to show how the "why" doesn't end satisfactorily in at least some cases.

There's a whole side road concerning intentionality here, that is well worth considering. At issue is the difference, if any, between these and other causal explanations. All good stuff.

Do we go there, in this thread?