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The problem with inductive reasoning is that it's totally illogical. This means that we do irrational things all the time, which makes it difficult to accuse anyone else, theist or atheist, of illogic.

What a crazy world.

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Them's fightin' words!

Inductive reasoning, abductive reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, and even intuitive reasoning are quite logical and completely rational. That's not to say they're truth-preserving, or always going to be right, but without them we are faced with an even more irrational and illogical result: the failure to reach more than the most trivial of conclusions, and from that the failure to make any decisions.

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Sure there is. We have plenty of experience of more often than not things behaving similarly to how they have behaved in the past. It's evidence of a somewhat ordered and predictable universe. Of course we have no guarantee that it will keep behaving that way, but that's the way to bet. It is possible that random chance led to the appearance of some sort of order which will henceforth break down, but the odds against it are astronomical.

Or are you suggesting that any proposition that is not 100% certain might as well be 50-50? Are you willing to back it up with a bet that the sun will rise in the west tomorrow? I'll be happy to give you 2-1 odds to make it worth your while.

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com

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Or are you suggesting that any proposition that is not 100% certain might as well be 50-50? Are you willing to back it up with a bet that the sun will rise in the west tomorrow? I'll be happy to give you 2-1 odds to make it worth your while.

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Would it be fair to say the main difference between deductive and inductive logic is that inductive logic rests on the assumption that an observed pattern (that we cannot absolutely quantify) is likely to persist given a continuation of certain factors? We then use that observed pattern as an accepted (?) clause in a deductive argument.

The Weather Channel says it will probably rain today.
The Weather Channel is usually correct.
It will probably rain today.

The problem with this, of course, is that what people deem acceptable as far as the patterns go. To one person, it may seem obvious that welfare causes laziness and perpetuates poverty. Others may see a completely different pattern regarding this sociological entity.

What separates the reasoning that makes us accept the Theory of Gravity (and our expectation that it is correct) from the reason used in making less obvious inductive conclusions? It mostly has to do with our collective confidence level in the inductive argument. I think this is what Andy is getting at.

Or not.

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

Yes, but why should past experience yield any kind of evidence of how the future's going to be? The argument comes down to "experience is reliable, because experience has proven it to be". That's just begging the question.

But we don't know that! If the principle of induction is faulty, we have no way of knowing what the odds of anything are. Intuitively, that looks very dodgy, but I can't see any logical way out of it.

Well, as I've said, I wouldn't take the bet, because I can't detach myself from the belief that the sun will rise in the west tomorrow because it has done every time in the past.

The position I'm taking has a way of defeating its proponent, because simply by virtue of bothering to argue my case at all, I'm inducing the future from the past. But the fact remains that there isn't any way logically to justify that kind of reasoning - at least, not that I can think of.

It's funny the conversations you find at random on here...

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

wirthling put my point a little more eloquently, I think.

It's random the things you find funny here.

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What others say about boorite!

There are two possible explanations for you and I reaching different conclusions regarding the effects of welfare. One is that we have perceived different things and our experiential evidence, incomplete in both cases, leads to different conclusion. Just like if you're presented with a bunch of hair from a dalmatian's spots and conclude it must have been a black dog, while I am shown hair from the rest of the dog and conclude it's white.

The second explanation is simply that our base assumptions differ. That is, it is a second explanation if those assumptions are created in a void, rather than experience-based; in that case, it reduces to the first case.

Unless, of course, you and Andy wish to argue that our very base assumptions are irrationally formed. There may be a fair amount of credibility to that. I'm sure, for example, many of us can credit our religious outlooks to a large extent to what our parents said when we were little (even if we subsequently rejected it) ... and we probably had a lot more confidence in their being an Oracle of Truth then than we do now.

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com

I think "irrational" is not exactly the right word to be using here. In my opinion, anyway, what we are talking about concerning inductive reasoning is its "reliability."

Inductive reasoning is fairly reliable when used to describe an albino dog, named "Gravity," to borrow your analogy. Everyone who has ever collected any hair from this dog has found it to be white hair, and this dog sheds a lot. We can be fairly sure Gravity is a white dog. Where inductive reasoning becomes more troublesome is when we have collected various hairs of different colors and we can't prove for sure which animal they came from. The inductive reasoning we use in trying to describe the animal is not irrational, but it is not necessarily reliable.

Oh, shut up. It was kaufman's analogy.

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

GO OUTSIDE!

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

GO OUTSIDE!

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

The future and the past are not true entities, andy. They are a human invention used to bring order and categorization to our lives.

Time does not move.

It is a constant. It is singular. There is no tomorrow, yesterday, or anything else other than the moment. This moment right now that we're in. And it extends forever. (Or, till the death of time.)

I don't have the crystals out, chanting this as a koan. It crops up in special relativity and quantum mechanical equations quite often. I saw one page where someone explained it something like this: "The equations say that time is stagnant and unmoving. It is one continuous body. The passage of time can be seen as a collection of parts of the whole, but that does not change the continuity of the whole."

So to say that inductive reasoning is faulty because it induces the future from the past is itself faulty. Rather it would be better to ask if time (or more accurately, spacetime) has any proclivity towards changing its characteristics. Is time unchanging or is it evolving? (Which goes back to Einstein's question "Did God have a choice when creating the universe?" That is, are their many shades of time he could have chosen to create, or can time only have one form.) If the characteristics of time don't change, then dismissing patterns based solely on their occuring in the "past" is completely unfounded. But even if the characteristics of time do change, dismissing patterns based solely on their occuring in the past is probably still incorrect for two reasons. 1: If the characteristics of time do change, they almost certainly does so slowly, so slowly that it's completely negligible over such a piddly span as a person's life, and 2: If the characteristics of time do change, even quickly, it's likely that the physics of the universe still hold, and so time will still be governed by special relativity. And special relativity tells us that even as the characteristics of time change FOR US, time still appears exactly the same TO US. Like the famous example, if one astronaut's on a non-moving spaceship and another's on a spaceship going a relativistic speed (say half the speed of light), and each have a clock hanging on the wall, the non-moving astronaut will see the moving astronaut's clock turning very slowly. The secondhand of the non-moving astronaut's clock will sweep out 3 minutes for every 1 minute the secondhand of the moving astronaut's clock sweeps out. However, AS SEEN BY THE MOVING ASTRONAUT, his clock is not running slow at all, but exactly as it always has.

So even if the characteristics of time change (assuming it changes everywhere, and if it doesn't it would be easy to tell), this still adds no feature to time itself that would proclude drawing patterns from the past to predict the future. (eg, time itself does not nullify my "fire has burned me in the past, fire will burn me in the future" reasoning.)

Other factors will certainly affect the accuracy of drawing conclusions from past patterns (I'm wearing fire-retardant underoos, fire will not burn me), but none of these hinge on some inherent difference between the past and the future. There is none. Neither exist. Time does not move.

So while it's true that sometimes circumstances change and have to be reasoned in when applying past patterns to future or current events, this is not due to time. Rather it's due to the changing components of the situation. Those changing components, if not factored in, can be the pitfall of inductive reasoning. But if factored in, necessarily make inductive reasoning every bit as accurate as deductive reasoning. 'Necessarily' because both are governed by the Conservation of Probability.

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

I examined this question a couple of months ago from the pleasure-vs-pain standpoint. Imo, it's rather complicated (as you might imagine), but chiefly comes down to this: a person's situational assessments (what you call base assumptions) are either rational, or are irrational. Earth shaking, I know. But here's the thing: rational situational assessment *usually* arise from the desire to know the truth. (The Conscious's main motivation for most (if not all) of us.) However, irrational situational assessments usually arise from the desire to get pleasure, avoid pain (both strong Subconscious motivational factors - imo, the only ones), or due to a previously rational assessment which is still assumed as true though circumstances have changed. (A good example of faulty inductive reasoning.)

An example of an irrational situational assessment is a wife not wanting to admit to herself her husband's having an affair (irrational situational assessment to avoid pain), or an addict playing down the risks of heroin (irrational assessment to seek the pleasure of the high).

The third irrational assessment method though (believing in a previously rational assessment whose circumstances have changed and is now irrational) can be corrected by someone reaassessing their values. It should be more of a staple of therapy than it already is. And all the reassment requires is a reevaluation of the intensities and probabilities of the pleasure and pain of each possible choice a situation presents.

For instance, if the stuntman re-evaluated the pleasure and pain of jumping the canyon at 45, he may realize the pain of dying with a wife and three kids, is higher than it was at 25 when he was single and started out as a stuntman. Or he may find the pleasure he gets from adrenal rush has decreased since the novelty is no longer new. etc.

The point is that a lot of us get locked into a habit that no longer presents the greatest pleasure minus pain value. But because we don't re-evaluate the situation, we continue choosing the choice that no longer yields the greatest pleasure minus pain. And then we wonder why we're sad.

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

Time is a measuring device that we invented to give a construct and index to the passing of events. We die. Everything does. We, however, KNOW that we die. Therefore, we need a tape measure. Time is, indeed, money, because neither are anything more than convenient forms of measurement or exchange.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

Andy, the problem is that you are painting yourself into a corner. if you allow yourself to be bound by the basic uncertainty of our whole existence, then you can never argue anything with any confidence, using any school of logic. You say that our inability to be certain of anything invalidates inductive logic. By the same reasoning, it also invalidates deductive logic.

"I have sat on this chair fifty times," I say, "and it has never broken under my weight. Therefore I am confident that it will hold my weight now."

"But how can you be sure?" asks Andy. "Our very perception of patterns is flawed, so it is illogical for you to use your perception of the past as a basis for a logical argument in the present."

"If you say so," I reply, taking a seat, "but what about simple deductive arguments. a is equivalent to a - a chair is a chair. a is a subclass of b, and b is a subclass of c, therefore a is a subclass of c - a dalmation is a dog, and a dog is a mammal, therefore a dalmation is a mammal."

"What's your point?" asks Andy.

"You assume that these are true based on what you have learned in the past," I reply. "Deductive logic is based as much in the past as inductive logic."

Why did I go to storytime mode for that? Fucked if I know...

I am curious to know why you claim that inductive generalisation and analogical inferences are based in circular logic, though. How does it beg the question to say that consistent behaviour in the past logically indicates likely behaviour in the future?

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This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

Back to the origins of this thread...

[Click to view comic: 'New Years']

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Andy, the problem is that you are painting yourself into a corner. if you allow yourself to be bound by the basic uncertainty of our whole existence, then you can never argue anything with any confidence, using any school of logic. You say that our inability to be certain of anything invalidates inductive logic. By the same reasoning, it also invalidates deductive logic.

"I have sat on this chair fifty times," I say, "and it has never broken under my weight. Therefore I am confident that it will hold my weight now."

"But how can you be sure?" asks Andy. "Our very perception of patterns is flawed, so it is illogical for you to use your perception of the past as a basis for a logical argument in the present."

"If you say so," I reply, taking a seat, "but what about simple deductive arguments. a is equivalent to a - a chair is a chair. a is a subclass of b, and b is a subclass of c, therefore a is a subclass of c - a dalmation is a dog, and a dog is a mammal, therefore a dalmation is a mammal."

"What's your point?" asks Andy.

"You assume that these are true based on what you have learned in the past," I reply. "Deductive logic is based as much in the past as inductive logic."

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How about you say "I have sat on this chair at this desk every day for the past 3 years and it has never broken under my weight, therefore, I am certain that it wont collapse when I sit on it now"

"I am willing to take you up on that bet" says a co-worker

"ok, you're on" you say, confident that the chances of the seat collapsing are tiny, since there has never been so much as a creak from it in the past.

You pull out the chair and take a seat, then BAM, a fucking jumbo jet careers through the side of the building taking out 4 floors including the one your office is on.

THAT'S never happened in the past, has it? But it sure as hell just happened now!

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Dad was flammable

A rehash, but it does serve to answer your question directly. It's completely governed by the laws of probability. Completely. What was that word? Completely.

As a quick proof, assume we as a species never evolved past the Bronze age. We have no modern science, palm pilots, or DVD porn. Well, everyday we get up, wash our sloping foreheads, and see the sun rise. The sun rises everyday we get up, so we expect the sun to rise everyday we get up. Well in 5 billion years or so, our sun will not be rising. It will burn out. If on that day our still-Bronze age descendants get up and expect to see the sun rise, they will be quite mistaken. That is, in this scenario, you are completely right to say that inductive reasoning failed them and they were wrong to predict the future from past patterns.

Now two things: [list]
[*]Probabilistically, the "sun rises" induction is nearly perfect, leading to error only 1 out of every 5 billion years * 365 days/year = 1 out of 1.825 trillion times.
[*]If the Bronze-Age people had all the facts, they would have been able to STILL use inductive reasoning to determine that the sun would NOT rise this 1 out of 1.825 trillion times, using the reasoning of science (which is both deduction and induction) and the inductive reasoning that science is usually right, so probably is right here as well.[/list]Every qualm you have with inductive reasoning can be satisfied if you simply factor in probability. Furthermore, both inductive and deductive reasoning follow the laws of probability. The main difference is that deductive reasoning usually has higher, more constant probability values.

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

Seems easier than this to me. Reasoning plus careful observation tell us that other stars fail, and our sun is a star, and so our sun might fail one day. Probably not in our lifetime, or the lifetime of our species, but one day, maybe 5 billion years from now, give or take.

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What others say about boorite!

You just described life in my house.

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What others say about boorite!

I know, I'm taping it.

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

Even leaving behind the Bronze Age thing and thinking about the facts we have - that the earth is turning once every 24 hours, and that this rotation gives the illusion of the sun rising roughly in the east, travelling roughly east to west across the sky, and the setting roughly in the west. Based on these facts, the knowledge that this has happened every day for your whole life, and for billions of years before that, without fail... To guess that the same thing will happen tomorrow is called an inductive generalisation: I have observed consistent behaviour in the past, so [u]it is likely[/u] that this behaviour will continue.

Now, if you know for a fact that a gifted but utterly mad scientist has launched a sun-snuffing rocket, that's different. Inductive reasoning is not immune to new premisses.

The fact is, to completely disallow inductive logic in your life is to be mad. You can't go near the dog - it might eat you. It has never eaten you before, but that is no indication of its likely behaviour today, is it? Better not open the fridge - it may be full of poisonous gas. It has never been full of poisonous gas before, but...

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This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

As I conceded at the beginning, I make inductive generalisations all the time. I expect the dog not to eat me and I don't anticipate a poison gas-filled fridge, just as I believe what my senses tell me, though I have no reason to suppose I'm anything other than a brain in a vat. We do illogical things all the time, simply because, well, we have to do something.

Anyway. Comic strips are funny.