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Hume's problems with induction

redacted

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Here's a short essay I wrote in the last 20 minutes for my philosophy class.

When Hume claims that we have no reason to believe an inference from the observed to the unobserved, he is correct, as long as we’re talking about a certain definition of the word reason. The way he uses the word reason is analogous to whether an inference logically follows from observed data (as in, is deductively valid based on observed data). If we see that A->B has been true any number of times in the past, we cannot logically conclude that A will imply B the next time. For example, if we see the sun rise one time per 24 hour period for our entire lives, we don’t technically have enough data to conclude that it will rise in the next 24 hour period, unless we assume that patterns that have held in the past will continue to hold in the future. Unfortunately, there is no way to prove that past patterns will continue into the future without assuming exactly that. The question “Why will past patterns continue into the future?” can only be answered by claiming something like “well, all past futures have resembled past pasts”, which doesn’t really get us anywhere, or leads to infinite regress, whichever way you want to look at it.

So does this conflict with my ordinary beliefs about the world? Not at all. In fact, I wonder why Hume’s argument was not stronger. The basic conclusion to be drawn from his argument is that inductive reasoning (reasoning with logical leaps) cannot be logically (deductively) defended. Well, of course that’s true! Otherwise, we wouldn’t have any kind of reasoning other than deduction (why would we make logical leaps if we didn’t have to?). His second claim, that the only way to defend inductive reasoning is to assume the future resembles the past, and that assumption can only be defended by again assuming the future will resemble the past, to infinity, actually seems much weaker than it could be. Any deductive argument is subject to the same kind of reasoning as well. For example, take the argument, “Bachelors are unmarried, Evan is a bachelor, therefore Evan is unmarried”. How do you defend that bachelors are unmarried? How do you defend that Evan is a bachelor? Well, all you can do is say “um, you just have to assume that’s the truth”. Or you can use inductive reasoning, but Hume has already provided good reason for why that would lead to the same problem.

The truth is that all reasoning has to be based on something. There’s always something you assume to be true in any argument. In deduction, you assume the premises are true, and in induction, you assume that the data you have is valid and the future resembles the past. To use a computer science analogy, if you write a function that adds two numbers together and outputs the answer, the function doesn’t do anything unless it gets two numbers to work with. Before data is passed to it, it is useless. Does the function itself know or care whether the numbers passed into it are somehow “true”? It’s a meaningless question. Just like when you think of the argument: “A->B, A, therefore B”. Does it matter to the actual process of deduction whether A->B is true or whether A is true? No. The process itself just takes what it’s given and gives the answer. The same can be said for induction (reasoning from the observed to the unobserved). If you were to write a computer function that used induction, the first line of it would be something to the effect of “the future resembles the past”. That’s just what induction does. The question of whether or not the future actually resembles the past is irrelevant to the process itself. So Hume is basically saying “Hey, look at that function! It says the future resembles the past! Why?”. Well, the answer is, “uh…that’s just what the function does.”
 

SolitaryWalker

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Here's a short essay I wrote in the last 20 minutes for my philosophy class.

When Hume claims that we have no reason to believe an inference from the observed to the unobserved, he is correct, as long as we’re talking about a certain definition of the word reason. The way he uses the word reason is analogous to whether an inference logically follows from observed data (as in, is deductively valid based on observed data). If we see that A->B has been true any number of times in the past, we cannot logically conclude that A will imply B the next time. For example, if we see the sun rise one time per 24 hour period for our entire lives, we don’t technically have enough data to conclude that it will rise in the next 24 hour period, unless we assume that patterns that have held in the past will continue to hold in the future. Unfortunately, there is no way to prove that past patterns will continue into the future without assuming exactly that. The question “Why will past patterns continue into the future?” can only be answered by claiming something like “well, all past futures have resembled past pasts”, which doesn’t really get us anywhere, or leads to infinite regress, whichever way you want to look at it.

So does this conflict with my ordinary beliefs about the world? Not at all. In fact, I wonder why Hume’s argument was not stronger. The basic conclusion to be drawn from his argument is that inductive reasoning (reasoning with logical leaps) cannot be logically (deductively) defended. Well, of course that’s true! Otherwise, we wouldn’t have any kind of reasoning other than deduction (why would we make logical leaps if we didn’t have to?). His second claim, that the only way to defend inductive reasoning is to assume the future resembles the past, and that assumption can only be defended by again assuming the future will resemble the past, to infinity, actually seems much weaker than it could be. Any deductive argument is subject to the same kind of reasoning as well. For example, take the argument, “Bachelors are unmarried, Evan is a bachelor, therefore Evan is unmarried”. How do you defend that bachelors are unmarried? How do you defend that Evan is a bachelor? Well, all you can do is say “um, you just have to assume that’s the truth”. Or you can use inductive reasoning, but Hume has already provided good reason for why that would lead to the same problem.

The truth is that all reasoning has to be based on something. There’s always something you assume to be true in any argument. In deduction, you assume the premises are true, and in induction, you assume that the data you have is valid and the future resembles the past. To use a computer science analogy, if you write a function that adds two numbers together and outputs the answer, the function doesn’t do anything unless it gets two numbers to work with. Before data is passed to it, it is useless. Does the function itself know or care whether the numbers passed into it are somehow “true”? It’s a meaningless question. Just like when you think of the argument: “A->B, A, therefore B”. Does it matter to the actual process of deduction whether A->B is true or whether A is true? No. The process itself just takes what it’s given and gives the answer. The same can be said for induction (reasoning from the observed to the unobserved). If you were to write a computer function that used induction, the first line of it would be something to the effect of “the future resembles the past”. That’s just what induction does. The question of whether or not the future actually resembles the past is irrelevant to the process itself. So Hume is basically saying “Hey, look at that function! It says the future resembles the past! Why?”. Well, the answer is, “uh…that’s just what the function does.”

This is an accurate rendition of Hume's views. However, there is a small, but important part that is missing. Hume argues that we do not have certainty with respect to the knowledge induction yields, yet this does not mean that we should distrust induction.

In the Treatise on Human nature, Hume mentions that he has many beliefs about the external world and has no regrets about having them. Although he may not have made this claim, the implication of his view is that induction does not create rigorous arguments, but because frequently this is all that we have, we should accept it. After all, he even claimed that deductive reasoning (or fully justified logical reasoning) can be found only in mathematics. That subject he regarded as interesting but secondary in importance. On that note, most of the problems in life and those of greatest importance can be solved only inductively. This is not to say that deductive reasoning will be completely absent in such problem solving endeavors, however, they all will have an inductive component at the very least.
 

redacted

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This is an accurate rendition of Hume's views. However, there is a small, but important part that is missing. Hume argues that we do not have certainty with respect to the knowledge induction yields, yet this does not mean that we should distrust induction.

In the Treatise on Human nature, Hume mentions that he has many beliefs about the external world and has no regrets about having them. Although he may not have made this claim, the implication of his view is that induction does not create rigorous arguments, but because frequently this is all that we have, we should accept it. After all, he even claimed that deductive reasoning (or fully justified logical reasoning) can be found only in mathematics. That subject he regarded as interesting but secondary in importance. On that note, most of the problems in life and those of greatest importance can be solved only inductively.

Right. I mean, you can't really not use induction.

Here was the prompt I was responding to:

What does Hume mean in saying that an inference from the observed to the unobserved does not proceed by "reasoning or any process of the understanding?" Does what he shows conflict with anything you ordinarily believe?

So yeah I was taking a bit more narrow of a view.
 

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Revised essay:

Prompt: Does the conclusion that no one ever has reason to believe any unobserved matter of fact conflict with common sense or what we all ordinarily believe? If not, why not? If it does conflict, what should be done? What is the proper response?

There are a few different ways I can think of to respond to the assertion that “no one ever has reason to believe any unobserved matter of fact”. The first would be to dismiss the statement as altogether too obvious. A second response would mimic Edwards – that we don’t commonly use the term reason to mean the same thing as it does in the assertion. The last way I can think of would combine aspects of the first two responses into an evolutionary argument that negates the problem in the first place. I’ll first outline the problem itself, then respond to it in three different ways.

We know two ways of coming to conclusions: deduction, which makes conclusions that follow from premises, and induction, which makes conclusions that don’t follow from the premises alone. Hume specifically goes after induction – since the conclusions made from induction do not follow from the premises, they are by definition not logically justified. So in order to justify those conclusions, Hume thinks we make an implicit assumption, that past patterns will continue into the future, or put another way, observed patterns will continue whether or not they are observed. For example, if we see a light turn on every time we flip a light switch, and that’s all the information we have, it’s not justified to conclude that the light will turn on the next time we flip the light switch (because that would be an unobserved matter of fact). But if we assume that observed patterns continue even if they’re not observed, and combine it with the information we have about the light turning on every time we flipped the switch in the past, our conclusion that it will turn on the next time is logically justified.

The problem with making the assumption about continuing patterns is that it’s impossible to justify. The only way to support the assumption is by pointing to patterns that have continued in the past, which is akin to saying “the observed pattern of [observed patterns continuing] will continue whether or not those patterns continue to be observed”. To make this more clear, we’ll assign the name S to the statement “observed patterns continue when they’re not observed”. In order to justify S, we point to observed evidence. But observed evidence alone is not reason to believe unobserved matters of fact unless we assume S. So in justifying S, we need S itself and some extra evidence. In order to justify the S that justifies the first S, we need another S, and so on to infinity. So we’re now at a point where we can’t justify induction (which is analogous to making conclusions about unobserved matters of fact based on observed matters of fact) whatsoever – the observed is by definition not enough to make conclusions about the unobserved (since induction is by definition not logically justified), and the only way to justify the conclusions is S, which is unjustifiable.

So, does this conflict with what people ordinarily believe? I think not. In fact, I think the conclusion is actually weaker than what humans actually believe. When Hume attacks induction and not deduction, it might be assumed that he thinks we have no reason to believe in induction but we do have a reason to believe in deduction. That seems to be the counterintuitive part. So I want to extend the argument to deduction as well, showing that it’s impossible to fully justify any conclusion.

What is deduction? It’s an argument where the premises (or assumptions) entail the conclusion. To put this another way, there is some set of logical statements (we’ll call the set X) that the combination of the premises entails. The conclusion of a deductive argument is limited to X – it can be a subset of X or it can be X itself. (If the conclusion isn’t contained within X, it’s not logically valid.) So how do we justify the assumptions that entail X? All we can do is point to other assumptions that entail X as well – but if two sets of assumptions entail X, those sets of assumptions are logically equivalent. So to justify X, we must assume a set of logical statements that include X. In order to justify the X that justifies the first X, we must assume X again. This problem is equivalent to the problem mentioned before regarding induction: in order to justify S, we must assume S. So both induction and deduction fall prey to the same problem; they are impossible to justify except by assuming they are justified.

In this sense, we can see that no conclusions are justifiable. To justify a conclusion, we must assume things that entail the conclusion itself: in induction, we must assume our observations are true and that observed patterns continue whether or not they are observed. In deduction, we must assume our assumptions are true. Once you go into justifying those assumptions, you run into problems. But this dilemma of justification seems trivial in the context of common sense. It seems like everyone knows that different assumptions lead to different conclusions. People understand that those with different assumption sets cannot find common ground unless they change their assumptions. People very rarely get into arguments where they question the conclusions someone is making based on their assumptions, they go straight into questioning the assumptions themselves. Because they implicitly understand that no assumptions are logically justifiable, except with other assumptions (which are also not logically justifiable). Mostly, in order to find common ground, people look for assumptions that they have in common, as those assumptions lead to the same set of logical conclusions.

Here’s a different way of approaching the prompt – “reason” is being used in a way that conflicts with everyday usage of the word. We’ve just seen that no conclusions are justifiable, in other words, we have no “reason” (in the same sense as in the prompt) to believe any conclusion that anyone makes. But usually, when people use the word “reason”, they don’t mean “perfect justification”; if they did, we’d never use the word “reason” in the first place! If someone has “reason” to believe something, it usually means that out of all possible beliefs they could have, some of them are more useful than the rest – so they have reason to believe some of them. The beliefs that are “reasonable” are the same as the beliefs that are useful. We could ask to justify why they are useful, but then we run into the same problem mentioned above. Most people go through the world defining goals, coming up with strategies, dealing with problems, and implementing goals with no second thought as to whether their actions are logically justified. And in going about life that way, a “reason” for doing or believing something just depends on the subjective experience of an individual.

The final way I want to approach this problem is to give a hypothetical evolutionary account of why people have the beliefs that they do. We’ll think of living beings as belief-holding mechanisms that navigate their environment with limited processing ability. Because of the limited processing, these mechanisms can only have a finite amount of beliefs. The more efficient a belief holding mechanism is (with respect to the environment), the more likely it is that the mechanism will out-compete the rest and eventually replace the less efficient mechanisms through natural selection. There are two ways in which these mechanisms can be efficient – to hold beliefs that accurately predict environmental factors, and to hold simple beliefs that take as little processing as possible, leaving room for more of them. It follows, then, that if two beliefs predict changes in the environment equally, the mechanism with the more simple of those two beliefs is more efficient. Additionally, if two beliefs are equally simple, the mechanism that has the belief that better predicts changes in the environment is more efficient. As time continues, the mechanisms that are left have simple and predictively powerful beliefs about navigating the world.

We run into a slight problem with this view – what if one extremely simple belief is correct most of the time and an extremely complex alternative belief is correct even more of the time. Which takes precedence? The simple belief or the more predictively powerful belief? There is no easy answer to this question. We can only pit these two mechanisms against each other and see which one outcompetes the other. My guess is that they each win in different situations. This could explain why humans sometimes have very complex representations of objects in the world and sometimes have very simple ones. It also explains why we don’t predict environmental events with 100% accuracy. Sometimes simplicity is favored, as our processing power is limited.

The powerful conclusion we can draw from viewing beliefs with this framework is that it doesn’t actually make humans more fit to logically justify their beliefs or conclusions. No belief is actually logically better than any other; evolutionary fitness is the only deciding factor in which belief tends to be held. And a mechanism that needs to justify every conclusion wastes belief space on processing information that doesn’t actually help navigate the environment at all.

In all three of these responses, we see that Hume’s problem of induction isn’t actually much of a problem at all. If induction is not justifiable, then deduction isn’t either, and it’s a waste of time to care about justification at all. If Hume’s use of the word “reason” is different from our everyday use, his conclusion is just a trick with words. And if we view human beliefs as only chosen by natural selection, we’ve already answered the question of why they have the beliefs that they do.
 

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Post your revised essay in appreciation of contemplation. I should get around to it in a week.
 

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Hi Evan,

I largely agree, though I ask: if neither deductive nor inductive inference justifies its conclusion, then what is the use of inductive inference?

I can see some use in deduction, because we can explore logical consequences, identify testable predictions, and check for consistency.

But what good is inductive inference? It seems to me that the whole point of induction was precisely to justify universal statements with existential statements. It was felt necessary because sense experience (assumed to correspond to sets of existential statements) was taken to be the only legitimate source of knowledge.

For the longest time people tried to show that induction (a specific kind of invalid inference) was actually valid afterall. When that goal was given up, attempts were made to make inductive inference partial or probable -- in other words, induction may not be deductively valid, but it can be inductively valid (to which we have discussed objections elsewhere).

But in the end, this whole chain of problems and attempted solutions arose out of old empiricist philosophy and its desire to justify beliefs with sense experience. If that goal is truly dropped then induction can be dispensed along with it, in my opinion.
 

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Oh I see what you're saying. If the conclusions of induction aren't justified, why do we even pretend to have some reasoning process behind it; why not just assert the conclusions directly?

While we could do that, it may not be equivalently useful in all cases. If someone asks why you believe something will happen, they're essentially asking you for a premise of inductive reasoning that could lead to the conclusion they're questioning. Not that the conclusion will ever be fully justified, but sometimes people feel more comfort in approaching guessing in that way.

OR, you could always use the premise "the unobserved resembles the observed", and then you don't need induction anyway, as you can make a deductive argument for most guesses (of the kind that are usually talked about). That's probably the way I'd go.
 

ygolo

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This has turned into a really interesting discussion.

A few points...

  1. "Exhaustive" Induction is, in a way, a deductive argument. Suppose there are only 4 instances of consideration in the domain of proposition, P: a, b, c, and d. Suppose further that P(a), P(b), P(c), and P(d) are true. Then P is true on it's domain.

    Here we are reasoning from specifics to the general case. However, the specifics form independent premises which fully justify the conclusion (which is, in effect, a disjunction of all the premises).


  2. Statistical "Sampling," seems to also be a way to reason from specifics to generalities. We get a sufficient sample, and calculate the mean of a particular observable on that sample, and use that mean as an estimate for the mean of the observable for the whole population.

    But, again, we see that the power of this method actually comes from deduction--the deduction that starts from the axioms of probability theory, and a further assumption about the population distribution. Now, along with the estimate, when "done right" with deduction, we get confidence intervals for various confidence levels based on our sample size.

    Similar things are true of further tools of statistics...regression, factor analysis, cluster analysis, etc. The power of the seemingly "inductive" method is actually derived from deduction--the deduction starting from the axioms of probability and the assumptions of the probability models involved.


  3. Although the process of deduction that leads to many things that we widely accept to be true (the laws of physics, the laws of probability, the conclusions of geometry) is painstaking and an even ingenious at points, I am more impressed with the (often error-prone) process of abductive reasoning that produced the very axioms we use.

    How did Newton come to posit the basic premises of Classical Mechanics?
    How did Euclid and others create the postulates of Euclidean Geometry?
    Many of of us live in structures that rely on the amazing accuracy of these incredibly well chosen premises of deductive reasoning.

    Certainly, they were based on on experiments and observations. But I very much doubt that these experiments and observations were as slavishly scrutinized and analyzed, before their proposition of premises, as many of the observations and experiments leading to (far less accurate) theories of modern life and social sciences. They were incredibly scrutinized after they were proposed, and withstood those tests to amazing effect.

Like, reason, I challenge the value of inductive reasoning. It somehow seems to lack the intellectual courage that abductive reasoning takes.

As a further example, consider Quantum Mechanics--Among the most accurate theories we have. The abductive leaps taken (from "photons" to "matter waves") often seemed downright audacious.

I posit that what requires intellectual rigour and care is NOT what leads to the generalities we posit, but the intellectual rigor and care that follows. If the premises we create are malformed, then the wake of deductive reasoning and empirical testing should destroy the weaker theories.
 

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[*] Statistical "Sampling," seems to also be a way to reason from specifics to generalities. We get a sufficient sample, and calculate the mean of a particular observable on that sample, and use that mean as an estimate for the mean of the observable for the whole population.

But, again, we see that the power of this method actually comes from deduction--the deduction that starts from the axioms of probability theory, and a further assumption about the population distribution. Now, along with the estimate, when "done right" with deduction, we get confidence intervals for various confidence levels based on our sample size.

Similar things are true of further tools of statistics...regression, factor analysis, cluster analysis, etc. The power of the seemingly "inductive" method is actually derived from deduction--the deduction starting from the axioms of probability and the assumptions of the probability models involved.

The power of statistics isn't just about sampling size and extending it to the general population. that sampling size jump to the general population is necessary for practicality, you simply can't sample the global population for every hypothesis and test you want to conduct. practically, it is necessary to take a sample, because most people don't have a hundred years of testing time available to conduct one experiment by testing the entire population. The power of statistics for hypothesis testing lies in being able to eliminate randomness and establish a high probability of "connection", which will never be certain 100%. you would need inductive reasoning in most of the extremely valuable areas of statistics, in terms of hypothesis generation, hypothesis testing, explanatory power, autocorrelation elimination, etc... what does seem more deductive, is filling in the lego pieces between the architecture of the statistical model. but without inductive reasoning, you are left with 10^100000 possibilities to aimlessly apply deductive logic in general.
 

ygolo

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The power of statistics isn't just about sampling size and extending it to the general population. that sampling size jump to the general population is necessary for practicality, you simply can't sample the global population for every hypothesis and test you want to conduct. practically, it is necessary to take a sample, because most people don't have a hundred years of testing time available to conduct one experiment by testing the entire population. The power of statistics for hypothesis testing lies in being able to eliminate randomness and establish a high probability of "connection", which will never be certain 100%. you would need inductive reasoning in most of the extremely valuable areas of statistics, in terms of hypothesis generation, hypothesis testing, explanatory power, autocorrelation elimination, etc... what does seem more deductive, is filling in the lego pieces between the architecture of the statistical model. but without inductive reasoning, you are left with 10^100000 possibilities to aimlessly apply deductive logic in general.

I don't dispute that the statistical methods save a lot of time. What I do dispute is that that the statistical methods are truly "induction."

What I am claiming here is that the seeming "induction" is actually abduction in disguise. The abductive step is in the choice of statistical methods to use (which carries with it the assumptions of the probability models involved).

Statistical reasoning is more accurate than going by "feel" based on evidence, because it is based off of the laws of probability.

The models that lead to hypothesis generation, hypothesis testing, autocorrelation elimination, etc., are all deductive processes (that's why you can program them to run on computers).
 

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The models that lead to hypothesis generation, hypothesis testing, autocorrelation elimination, etc., are all deductive processes (that's why you can program them to run on computers).

Lets say you run a simple two sample t test to see if Americans are heavier in weight than Finns.

Lets say you find with 95% confidence that this seems to be so.

Trying to determine whether this information is useful or not would require more testing. Trying to eliminate possibilities like weight per height inch, % of women vs. men, relative age, etc... and finding the right conclusion would require a lot of inductive reasoning. Is it really just that Americans are fatter? You can't just conclude that with that simple t test. If so, why are they fatter? Questions that you simply cannot solve with a high degree of confidence with deductive reasoning alone.

Trying to determine whether your sampling population is accurate and relevant would require a lot of inductive reasoning. Testing explanatory variables, and finding those explanatory variables is very inductive. How would you know which autocorrelation variable to eliminate? What falls more in line with your hypothesis and won't corrupt the results? Does that autocorrelation specific to your sample or is it not?

I think in general you can classify deductive as what the field researchers will do, and inductive as what the conclusions the professor can derive or what the professor will do in "consulting" with the field researchers if they want to have their results up to a global standard. Once you can conclude that you've reached the end of knowledge in the entire world, you can say you don't need inductive reasoning anymore. well, in that case, you wouldn't need deductive reasoning either.
 

ygolo

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Trying to determine whether this information is useful or not would require more testing. Trying to eliminate possibilities like weight per height inch, % of women vs. men, relative age, etc... and finding the right conclusion would require a lot of inductive reasoning. Is it really just that Americans are fatter? You can't just conclude that with that simple p test. If so, why are they fatter? Questions that you simply cannot solve with a high degree of confidence with deductive reasoning alone.

Trying to determine whether your sampling population is accurate and relevant would require a lot of inductive reasoning. Testing explanatory variables, and finding those explanatory variables is very inductive.

I claim what you are doing is abductive reasoning.

Note you used the word "eliminate" not "conclude," which implies deduction IS happening. You are testing out possible explanations for the disparate things you see...generating those possible explanations is abduction, testing them afterwords is deduction.

True induction would look at the evidence, then conclude something, not generate a possible explanation. That is abduction.
 

nomadic

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I claim what you are doing is abductive reasoning.

Note you used the word "eliminate" not "conclude," which implies deduction IS happening. You are testing out possible explanations for the disparate things you see...generating those possible explanations is abduction, testing them afterwords is deduction.

True induction would look at the evidence, then conclude something, not generate a possible explanation. That is abduction.

well, i think its both induction and abduction. because eliminating auto correlation, and looking at possible sample corruptions can be derived from previous similiar experiences, which would be inductive on wider scale.

but to say again, you can't conclude anything with 100% certainty from statistics. if you derive a 100% confidence interval, your intervals will be too wide to produce a useful result.
 

ygolo

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well, i think its both induction and abduction. because eliminating auto correlation, and looking at possible sample corruptions can be derived from previous similiar experiences, which would be inductive on wider scale.

but to say again, you can't conclude anything with 100% certainty from statistics. if you derive a 100% confidence interval, your intervals will be too wide to produce a useful result.


Well, I suppose I have a very rigid view of what induction is. So we'll likely have to agree to disagree here. I believe abduction works in all cases that induction does, it is simply done in a more intuitive and heuristic basis--where as induction requires the citing of "reasons" and coming to a "best" guess.

I suppose you could use induction, with all the careful sighting of reasons, and coming to conclusions at various phases, but this seems like a more inefficient process actually. Because it seems like you generally would want to go through a deductive reaoning process afterwards anyway.

I still believe that you can forgo most induction for abduction followed by deduction without losing much. The extra time taken for deduction (which with the aid of computational devices is becoming smaller and smaller) is saved by the speed, flexibility, and possible recontextualization of abduction.
 

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Well, I suppose I have a very rigid view of what induction is. So we'll likely have to agree to disagree here. I believe abduction works in all cases that induction does, it is simply done in a more intuitive and heuristic basis--where as induction requires the citing of "reasons" and coming to a "best" guess.

I suppose you could use induction, with all the careful sighting of reasons, and coming to conclusions at various phases, but this seems like a more inefficient process actually. Because it seems like you generally would want to go through a deductive reaoning process afterwards anyway.

I still believe that you can forgo most induction for abduction followed by deduction without losing much. The extra time taken for deduction (which with the aid of computational devices is becoming smaller and smaller) is saved by the speed, flexibility, and possible recontextualization of abduction.

well actually before this conversation i grouped everything as either inductive or deductive. but after this convo, I guess I am more prone to think that inductive is like eating a big carl, and thinking that it is similiar to a big mac and possibly copied from it, while abductive would be like eating a big carl, and seeing fat Mr. Carl Jr., and wondering if its some cruel joke by the marketing chief.

but i do believe that induction does incorporate pattern recognition more, in either logic, math, causality, etc... and i believe pattern recognition is very important in interdisciplinary research. its where a lot of University of California style research of bringing in different experts and having them collaborate really shines. i.e. anthropologist applies verbal history insights to linguists research in linguistic language derivation and makes breakthroughs... something like that.
 

ygolo

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well actually before this conversation i grouped everything as either inductive or deductive. but after this convo, I guess I am more prone to think that inductive is like eating a big carl, and thinking that it is similiar to a big mac and possibly copied from it, while abductive would be like eating a big carl, and seeing fat Mr. Carl Jr., and wondering if its some cruel joke by the marketing chief.

To give you an idea of how rigidly I think of induction, I would say that almost all of this is abduction also. I believe the only induction is thinking that the Big Carl is similar to the Big Mac...the "and possibly copied from it" would be abduction.

but i do believe that induction does incorporate pattern recognition more, in either logic, math, causality, etc... and i believe pattern recognition is very important in interdisciplinary research. its where a lot of University of California style research of bringing in different experts and having them collaborate really shines. i.e. anthropologist applies verbal history insights to linguists research in linguistic language derivation and makes breakthroughs... something like that.

Pattern recognition can come from any of the three processes.

Also, in this case, I claim most of their research programs are more of a mix of abduction followed by deduction.

I would say that if the pattern recognition was inductively done, that is, after looking at a lot of data a a formally "justified" pattern was recognized, that this alone is not worth much for the following three reasons.

  • I believe that a pattern clear and rigorous enough to be recognized by strict induction, it could have been either intuited through abduction, far earlier, or recognized by automated statistical techniques (i.e. through deduction).
  • The pattern will generally need to be tested through deduction afterwords anyways. The predictive power of the pattern must be tested by deducing outcomes and confidence regions around those outcomes, and checking that the outcomes do actually match.
  • Without abduction giving an explanation, the purely inductively derived pattern cannot be re-contextualized or generalized to other situations. You are trapped, essentially, to the phenomenon that generated the pattern.

I'll put it in other terms... getting a pattern inductively is the worst of both worlds. It combines the clumsiness and uncertainty of a subjective process (a fault that it shares with abduction), with the rigidity and lifelessness of a formal process (a fault it shares with deduction).

Maybe I am biased, because I rarely think..."example, example, example...general case." I do however often think "...phenomenon, phenomenon, phenomenon...common explanation, ok, let's check how well theory fits."

I suppose arguing that a thinking process has little value for all people is a fool's errand. Some people may use it to good effect, I just don't see much value in it, myself.
 
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