The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics


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Below is a reprint of my review of David Harriman's book on induction, originally posted here at Amazon. If you appreciate the review I suggest you go to Amazon and vote that you found it helpful in order to keep it listed above other (for the most part flawed and arbitrary) hostile reviews.

stars-5-0._V192240867_.gif A clearly written and fascinating tribute to reason, July 18, 2010 This review is from: The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics (Paperback)

In The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics, David Harriman has two target audiences, scientists interested in the philosophy of induction, and students of Objectivism interested in science. This book has much to say that will be of interest to both. I recommend it most highly.

David Harriman is a professional physicist and philosopher with a wide grasp of his subject. Interested in putting forth a theory of induction based upon Ayn Rand's theory of concept formation, he briefly introduces his thesis, and then examines two classical histories of induction. First he makes a detailed analysis of the history of thought about motion from the Greeks through Galileo and Kepler, to Newton, Then he examines atomic theory from the Greeks through Lavoisier and Kelvin to Mendeleev.

His basic theses are that induction is based on a hierarchy of generalization, parallel in form to Rand's hierarchical theory of concept formation ( a subject too complex to address here, but which is covered in her monograph, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology); that progress in science relies on not only on the experimental method, which he credits Galileo for first practicing, but on developing an increasingly sophisticated language of concepts, which must be induced in a hierarchical order; and that skepticism results from a flawed, context-dropping view of the history of science.

This last thesis is most informative. He speaks of the flawed Platonic and Cartesian idea of deriving and validating knowledge top-downward from first principles. Having arrived at some level of knowledge through a developmental process of building upon prior knowledge, whether in the history of science or in the individuals' development from childhood, the rationalist drops the more fundamental foundations from focus and treats higher abstractions, such as that force equals the acceleration of a mass, as if they were self-evident primaries from which more concrete ideas can be deduced. If valid, one's abstract ideas will have been reached by an arduous process of building upon ideas step-by-step. This upward process of induction is parallel in the history of science and in the education of an individual from infant to adult. Students who are introduced to scientific ideas in the proper order will see the elegant necessity and certainty of their concepts. Students who start halfway through the process by learning Newton's laws without having fully grasped Galileo's experiments on the acceleration of falling objects and pendulums will have to accept such formulations as F=ma on faith. Plato and Descartes had taught that one should begin with first principles and from them derive the facts in a top-downward fashion. Skepticism is the result when one attempts to take abstract concepts as givens. Unless they are constructed upon firm and more fundamental bases, "first principles" become arbitrary assertions. If one begins with an arbitrary hypothesis, such as that the planets must move in "perfect" circles, one becomes mired in trying to explain, with more and more arbitrary assumptions, why the seem to move in ellipses. Harriman describes arbitrary preconceptions as "red lights" to induction, and explains how such ideas as the perfection of spherical motion, since they were arbitrary, lead only to endless rationalization and stagnation so long as they were accepted.

While Harriman examines only chemistry and physics in detail, the pernicious nature of arbitrary preconceptions is found in all fields today. In 1786, Sir William Jones, an early British observer in India, noted the detailed correspondences between the grammar and vocabulary of Sanskrit, an ancient Indian literary language, and those of Latin and Greek, and reasoned that they could only result if the three languages (later including the Germanic, Slavic, and other tongues) had descended from some common ancestor which was no longer spoken. This was almost a century before Darwin. Over the next decades, scholars did detailed comparisons of dozens of languages and induced what exact form the mother language (called proto-Indo-European) must have had to produce such offspring. Their method could be tested, for instance, by comparing how Latin's romance daughters such as Spanish, French and Romanian evolved. And the triumph of this Comparative Method was reached when, given the evidence of sounds in the proto-language which became silent and lost, but not before leaving traces (like the vowel lengthening silent 'e' of English) in the daughter languages, Ferdinand Saussure guessed that the 6,000 year-old extinct proto-language, which left no written records, must have originally had an initial H-like sound. Soon after his death, ancient Hittite texts were found and deciphered, Hittite was found to be the oldest recovered Indo-European language, and it was found to have had H sounds just where Saussure predicted! Saussure's induction was strong enough to predict the form of a lost language that no one had heard for millennia. To see the marvelous result of the Neo-Grammarians, see Calvert Watkins Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

But the painstaking course of induction by the 19th century Neo-Grammarians has been forgotten. Modern students learn proto-Indo-European from textbooks, as if it were an almost miraculous given. They are taught pre-conceived ideas, such as the notion that one can't push back linguistic reconstruction beyond 6,000 years, regardless of what evidence shows up, as an axiomatic first principle. They learn that the reconstruction of a proto-language, in truth the end product of the science, is preliminary to classification, as if saying we couldn't classify humans as mammals until we had dug up every missing fossil link. They forget that Sir William Jones began with grouping Greek, Latin and Sanskrit (as opposed to, say, Hebrew, Hungarian and Chinese) on the basis of perceived similarity in basic vocabulary. They forget that, had classifying languages based on perceived similarities not been the starting point, there would never have been a reconstructed 6,000 year old proto-language. Nowadays "mainstream" linguists deny that, for instance, detailed and unique correspondences of pronouns and vocabulary across North and South America indicate the validity of a vast Amerind language phylum covering all native Americans except for the Eskimo and Athabaskan languages and their relatives. Faced with perceptual evidence obvious at the level of comparing word lists, they present ad hoc arguments to explain the similiarities, such as "vague psychological processes" and the possibility of borrowing basic vocabulary - over thousands of miles between cultures with no evidence of historical contact. Such skepticism is seen as sophisticated. Refusing to integrate the evidence over the widest possible scope, they pretending that fully 50-100 separate language families exist on the American continents, with each, presumably, having arrived here separately, when there are only four native language families in all of Africa. (The late Joseph Greenberg, with his contextual method of 'mass comparison,' is a rare Newton-like exception.) The axiomatically skeptical Americanist linguists are a perfect example, with their repudiation of induction, and their Ptolemaic ad hoc attack on the evidence, and their allegiance to arbitrary first principles, of the "red lights" to induction which Harriman describes. The unreason of their conclusions for exactly the same causes which Harriman puts forth demonstrates the validity of his arguments in regard to a science with which he may not even be familiar.

Harriman's book is divided into three sections. In the introductory section he sets out the problem, explains Rand's theory of concepts upon which he bases his thesis, and presents his theory of hierarchical generalization. This section is introductory, not a full treatise, and it does beg further scholarly exposition. In the main portion of the book he gives detailed analyses of the bases on Newtonian physics and modern chemistry using the ideas he has introduced. This section is delightful, and, as with the entire book, it is clearly written and well illustrated with examples. Those familiar with Carl Sagan's Cosmos will be reminded of his wonderful series. No math will be needed, and only a few simple diagrams suffice to clarify some of the ideas about planetary orbits. In the final section Harriman examines classical philosophical errors and their modern results and ends with a section on the proper role of mathematics and a rational philosophy in science.

Given that a preview of the book is currently unavailable, here is a listing of the Chapter and section heads:

I The Foundation: The Nature of Concepts * Generalizations as Hierarchical * Perceiving First-Level Causal Connections * Conceptualizing First-Level Causal Connections * The Structure of Inductive Reasoning

II Experimental Method: Galileo's Kinematics * Newton's Optics * The Methods of Difference and Agreement * Induction as Inherent in Conceptualization

III The Mathematical Universe: The Birth of Celestial Physics * Mathematics and Causality * The Power of Mathematics * Proof of Kepler's Theory

IV Newton's Integration: The Development of Dynamics * The Discovery of Universal Gravitation * Discovery is Proof

V The Atomic Theory: Chemical Elements and Atoms * The Kinetic Theory of Gasses * The Unification of Chemistry * The Method of Proof

VI Causes of Error: Misapplying the Inductive Method * Abandoning the Inductive Method

VII The Role of Mathematics and Philosophy: Physics as Inherently Mathematical * The Science of Philosophy * An End - And a New Beginning

(References)

(Index)

This is not a perfect book, just a great one. I should point out that while I do consider myself an Objectivist, I do not consider myself an orthodox one. (This book has nothing to do with politics or ethics in any case.) Having listened to Dr. Harriman's lectures (some are available free on line) I find fault with his criticism of the Big Bang theory, which he bases on a mistaken idea that the Big Bang necessarily means a creation of the universe, in time, from nothing. (That is not, for example, the finite-yet-unbounded view of Stephen Hawking.) Harriman criticizes Einsteinian relativity for describing space as curved., saying that space is a relationship, and that relationships cannot be curved. I find that to be a gross and misleading oversimplification of a theory which in no way deviates from explaining observational phenomena. Harriman has criticized Quantum Theory, but his criticisms apply more to a popular if specious interpretation of the theory, rather than to the evidence upon which the theory is based itself. Harriman leaves all this out of the book, however, and I bring it up only to explain my differences with him and my independence as a reviewer. In fact, there were only two objections I had in the whole book. First was his repetition of an idea from Ayn Rand that animals cannot plan and conceptualize, which is based more on a priori assumptions than on induction from the evidence. The second was Harriman's unfortunate failure to tie his theory to prior work by David Kelley on what Kelley, in his Evidence of the Senses, calls the "perceptual judgment." That can be remedied by a full treatment by future scholars.

Reason is self-correcting, and Harriman's book is a tribute to reason. At every point Harriman returns to his main theses, which give the book an integrated structure. Students of Rand's philosophy will be fascinated to see how her philosophy relates to science. Scientists who find philosophy at best irrelevant and at worst hostile to their work will find this book enjoyable and eye-opening.

If I might indulge myself, let me tell you to take the logical leap and buy this book.

(See and vote on the review here at Amazon)

Edited by Ted Keer
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Ted,

Here are the posts from the other thread, which I closed. I was going to delete it and remove the new account, like I mentioned offline. But since so many people responded, it will get complicated. So keep the other account as a backup.

I have recently submitted the first non-hostile review of David Harriman's The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics to Amazon

Here is the opening of the review which includes a content summary in its complete text. You can read the contents in full at amazon (here) or at the same link below. If you appreciate the review I request you vote that you found it helpful in order to keep it above the hostile reviews on the page at Amazon. Thanks.

"A clearly written and fascinating tribute to reason," July 18, 2010 Five Stars out of Five

By Theodore Keer

In The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics, David Harriman has two target audiences, scientists interested in the philosophy of induction, and students of Objectivism interested in science. This book has much to say that will be of interest to both. I recommend it most highly.

David Harriman is a professional physicist and philosopher with a wide grasp of his subject. Interested in putting forth a theory of induction based upon Ayn Rand's theory of concept formation, he briefly introduces his thesis, and then examines two classical histories of induction. First he makes a detailed analysis of the history of thought about motion from the Greeks through Galileo and Kepler, to Newton, Then he examines atomic theory from the Greeks through Lavoisier and Kelvin to Mendeleev.

His basic theses are that induction is based on a hierarchy of generalization, parallel in form to Rand's hierarchical theory of concept formation ( a subject too complex to address here, but which is covered in her monograph, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology); that progress in science relies on not only on the experimental method, which he credits Galileo for first practicing, but on developing an increasingly sophisticated language of concepts, which must be induced in a hierarchical order; and that skepticism results from a flawed, context-dropping view of the history of science.

This last thesis is most informative. (read the full review)

Ted,

Terrific review. I will list a few of my preliminary concerns below:

Harriman seems to be talking about how science is verified and defended against skepticism rather than how science is done. I can already come up with counterexamples like Feynman's conceptualization of Feynman diagrams for electron-electron interactions which illustrates the importance of the individual's creative insight and that scientific discovery often involves an intuitive rather than logical leap. Feynman's diagrams had to be digested through a painstaking 4-year process of mathematical verification by Freeman Dyson before they were widely accepted.

Other example abound: Schrodinger intuiting the Schrodinger wave equation, Kekule positing the benzene ring after dreaming about a snake eating its tail, etc. etc. etc. If I wanted to educate a productive scientist, I would not shackle the student to historical precedent, but try to put them in an environment where they developed a full repertoire of creative mental imagery, combined with a rigorous grounding in both mathematics and experimental science. What about Rand's celebration of men of unborrowed vision?

I think the best books to shine light on the scientific process are written by scientists. I particularly recommend Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory, which is part autobiography, part dissection of the process of scientific discovery in his field of neuroscience.

Jim

In fact, Harriman mentions August Kekulé in his book. Finding the correct molecular structure for benzene was an important step, from his point of view.

But the dream (or daydream) of a snake swallowing its own tail does not make an appearance.

Robert Campbell

Just so people know, I removed Ted's moderated status.

I believe, underneath, he is a person of good will. And he certainly is intelligent.

Let's see what happens.

Michael

I'm not clear there was ever any reason to moderate or ban him in the first place...and I hadn't even realized that had occurred - I thought he had voluntarily absented himself.

Ted has always been one of the most intelligent, erudite, well-educated posters on a list that sorely needs them. While he can be insulting or abrasive or guilty of personal attacks sometimes, he's certainly no worse than George or Jeff or any number of others.

Phil,

You always like to mouth off where you don't know the facts, don't you?

You remind me at times of those people who automatically think the USA is wrong, regardless of what the issue is, as their default position.

I suggest learning about something before putting foot in mouth.

EDIT: Actually, because of this crap you are now trying to start, I regret taking him off moderation. (He didn't even request it.) Now I think this thing has the potential to blow up again...

Michael

Michael, I said "I'm not clear". Not that I clearly knew there was no justification. And I compared him to GHS and JR.

Why are you so agitated at a simple question? Using phrases like 'mouth off' and 'this crap'.

Are you unwilling to be asked for reasons?

You are taking something as an attack which was more of a question.

Phil,

Let's do it this way. If you want to learn about this, go offline and write Ted or whoever and ask.

Otherwise, stop stirring up crap in public. It's not productive and it reflects poorly on you.

Michae

Thanks for the review and the notice, Ted.

I will be looking forward to comparing the proposals of Harriman in philosophy and history of science to those of Meyerson and Whewell (and to my own work on induction: 1, 2).

How ironic.

Phil, I had criticized Michael for commenting here on goings on at other fora rather than making his criticisms in those fora themselves. He then moderated me because he didn't appreciate some of the terms I used. I neither contested his moderation nor requested that it be lifted. I have been busy anonymously creating new articles at wikipedia, several of which have been featured on the front page.

I find it hilarious to note that the last thing I saw, you are over at RoR - where I am now banned by Joe Rowlands for being a "Christian" (!) - doing the same exact thing, criticizing the principles of this forum, in effect, behind their backs: Here's Another Reason I'm Getting More and More Disgusted with OL. If you want to challenge why I should be moderated, I suggest you ask that question at RoR.

Michael had the decency to say that he was moderating me based on his personal opinion of words I actually used. I was banned over at RoR due to Joe Rowland's feelings that I secretly support Christianity. (See this thread.) When challenged to provide a quote of where I had ever done so I was told the suspicion was based on a general feeling. This from an "Objectivist"!

I have no more to say on this. I will repost my review in full under my original sign-on in a new thread. (This thread was created with a different sign on because I mistakenly used the wrong user ID, and when I attempted to use the recovery tool it recognized my email but did not send me a reset link.)

Thanks, Stephen, James and Robert for your comments. I will reply in the new thread.

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Ted,

Terrific review. I will list a few of my preliminary concerns below:

Harriman seems to be talking about how science is verified and defended against skepticism rather than how science is done. I can already come up with counterexamples like Feynman's conceptualization of Feynman diagrams for electron-electron interactions which illustrates the importance of the individual's creative insight and that scientific discovery often involves an intuitive rather than logical leap. Feynman's diagrams had to be digested through a painstaking 4-year process of mathematical verification by Freeman Dyson before they were widely accepted.

Other example abound: Schrodinger intuiting the Schrodinger wave equation, Kekule positing the benzene ring after dreaming about a snake eating its tail, etc. etc. etc. If I wanted to educate a productive scientist, I would not shackle the student to historical precedent, but try to put them in an environment where they developed a full repertoire of creative mental imagery, combined with a rigorous grounding in both mathematics and experimental science. What about Rand's celebration of men of unborrowed vision?

I think the best books to shine light on the scientific process are written by scientists. I particularly recommend Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory, which is part autobiography, part dissection of the process of scientific discovery in his field of neuroscience.

Jim

Thanks, James. Yes, this book should most certainly have been entitled An Introduction. The presentation of the main thesis, that generalizations are hierarchical, is treated matter-of-factly and basically piggybacks on Rand's theory of concepts. Harriman doesn't present or criticize any academic work on the subject. The book is written in a popular, not an academic style. And no, it does not put forth a complete program of how to go about induction, formally or intuitively. It really amounts to a defense of induction, based on the fact that any attack on induction is based upon the stolen concept. Nevertheless, I think this book will be enjoyed immensely by Objectivists interested in science and by actual research scientists who'd like to see a little respect from philosophers for the scientific method.

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Ted,

Thank you for the long and thoughtful review.

I find it interesting that you present an example from historical linguistics, because for the past century or so linguistics has had a grossly ambivalent relationship with data.

Harriman's exposition of developments from Kepler through Newton is pretty solid, and his account of developments from Lavoisier through Mendeleev is also helpful (though he has more trouble with such a mass of detail to manage).

However, the book is also as pure an exposition of Peikovian epistemology as we will probably ever get from an author not named Leonard Peikoff (it even alludes to the DIM hypothesis), and it inherits all of the difficulties attendant thereon.

Harriman relies heavily on the doctrine of the arbitrary assertion, but never spells all of it out in one place (presumably because if he did, its internal inconsistencies would jump out at the reader). Nor is he ever clear about the boundary between arbitrariness and falsehood.

It is invalid concepts that Harriman calls "red lights" to induction, not arbitrary assertions—and invalid concepts are said to presuppose errors, not to spring from bouts of arbitrariness.

He also applies the doctrine of contextual certainty, without ever clearly indicating what is the context of application for an inductive generalization. His defense of this doctrine contradicts one of the key points in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

He breaks his own announced rules when making generalizations about human developmental psychology and (as you noted) about animal psychology. Apparently on both subjects the authority of Leonard Peikoff is meant to suffice.

He also does the worst job I've ever seen of interpreting Karl Popper. But more about that in due time.

Robert Campbell

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Ted,

Terrific review. I will list a few of my preliminary concerns below:

Harriman seems to be talking about how science is verified and defended against skepticism rather than how science is done. I can already come up with counterexamples like Feynman's conceptualization of Feynman diagrams for electron-electron interactions which illustrates the importance of the individual's creative insight and that scientific discovery often involves an intuitive rather than logical leap. Feynman's diagrams had to be digested through a painstaking 4-year process of mathematical verification by Freeman Dyson before they were widely accepted.

Other example abound: Schrodinger intuiting the Schrodinger wave equation, Kekule positing the benzene ring after dreaming about a snake eating its tail, etc. etc. etc. If I wanted to educate a productive scientist, I would not shackle the student to historical precedent, but try to put them in an environment where they developed a full repertoire of creative mental imagery, combined with a rigorous grounding in both mathematics and experimental science. What about Rand's celebration of men of unborrowed vision?

I think the best books to shine light on the scientific process are written by scientists. I particularly recommend Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory, which is part autobiography, part dissection of the process of scientific discovery in his field of neuroscience.

Jim

Thanks, James. Yes, this book should most certainly have been entitled An Introduction. The presentation of the main thesis, that generalizations are hierarchical, is treated matter-of-factly and basically piggybacks on Rand's theory of concepts. Harriman doesn't present or criticize any academic work on the subject. The book is written in a popular, not an academic style. And no, it does not put forth a complete program of how to go about induction, formally or intuitively. It really amounts to a defense of induction, based on the fact that any attack on induction is based upon the stolen concept. Nevertheless, I think this book will be enjoyed immensely by Objectivists interested in science and by actual research scientists who'd like to see a little respect from philosophers for the scientific method.

Interesting. So it presents a theory of knowledge in philosophy of science based on Rand's theory of concepts. One of the difficulties I've had with this approach is that it is incomplete. Gerald Edelman, in his terrific book, Second Nature, talks about a traditional epistemology and a brain-based epistemology. A traditional epistemology deals with logic and propositional truth, a brain-based epistemology deals with pattern recogition and making decisions under constraints or with incomplete information. Our brains can do both. A defense of induction as it pertains to science would be almost totally weighted toward traditional epistemology. However, that treatment is backward looking. In hindsight, causal connections seem obvious and settled, but they aren't always.

In Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swan, an approach to uncertainty and the unknown is presented. The difficulty with these subjects is that there are two dominant approaches, both partly wrong in important ways. One is the Randian approach which is to say that we are certain about what we know until we have new information and that in principle everything is discernable if we know enough. The other says that we are uncertain, but that we can depend on statistics to handle that uncertainty. There are realms where the Randian approach is true and mainline statistics can handle uncertainy in information that is normally distributed. With Bayesian corrections it can handle other situations that are not normally distributed. However, there are regimes where extreme events are more common and kurtosis (peakedness) of the statistical distribution is so pronounced that we cannot model the outcome. The best we can do in such situations is to try to handle them with conditional probability and iterative data gathering in real time.

Certain kinds of uncertainty like quantum mechanics are manageable, because the uncertainty follow a normal (Gaussian) distribution.

Economic systems and some events involving chaotic dynamics are not like this (earthquakes, financial panics, Newtonian orbital systems where an object passes through an L1 Lagrange point, EEG patterns, certain chemical and biological systems, the weather). The good news is that we can know what we know, know what we don't know and identify regions where we don't know what we don't know and then beyond that expect to be surprised sometimes.

Jim

-Edited the first paragraph to say induction as it pertains to science.

Edited by James Heaps-Nelson
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Gerald Edelman, in his terrific book, Second Nature, talks about a traditional epistemology and a brain-based epistemology. A traditional epistemology deals with logic and propositional truth, a brain-based epistemology deals with pattern recognition and making decisions under constraints or with incomplete information. Our brains can do both. A defense of induction as it pertains to induction would be almost totally weighted toward traditional epistemology. However, that treatment is backward looking. In hindsight, causal connections seem obvious and settled, but they aren't always.

Jim,

Excellent points.

I'd go a little further, though. Harriman is obviously interested in propositional truth—but remarkably uninterested in what propositions are.

Robert Campbell

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I don't think you can go so far as to call this book as actually presenting a theory of anything. Rather, it proposes the idea of a hierarchy of generalizations, and ties that to Rand without too much exposition, and then presents a prima facie case for the usefulness of Harriman's ideas in its analysis of the history of induction behind Newtonian physics and atomic theory using his concepts. The idea that sciences cannot progress without the induction of new concepts, and that more abstract concepts cannot be achieved until their prerequisite antecedents are achieved is quite true but hardly original. For me, the best articulated and most interesting point was that all too many epistemological dead ends occur when scientists adopt arbitrary first principles from which they attempt to deduce more basic notions top-down rather than building bottom up from the evidence regardless of preconceptions.

That is the case in historical linguistics. Proto-Indo-European has pride of place, in part because of European chauvinism, in part because it has an ancient written tradition, in part because it has a complex morphological grammar with various persons, numbers, and cases marked on the lexicon. For the longest time linguists tried to link Indo-European to semitic because of the typological similarities in their grammars. Complex declensions were seen as a sign of advanced culture. (Presumably English, with its simple grammar is the vehicle of a degenerate culture, while the languages of the Causcasus and the Pacific North West are those of the most advanced cultures on earth.) The failure of the ability to link PIE and Semitic directly (their grammatical resemblances are more akin the the resemblance between insect and bat wings than between bats wings and human arms) lead to a serahc for why they could not be linked. The myth of the special nature of Indo-European arose. It was said that at some point, a language has changed so much that it "cannot possibly" be linked to any lost relatives. The dirty secret was that the resemblance of PIE, with its (m)e/(t)hee pronouns, and basic words such as name and water, to Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian, Samoyed, et al.) with its own mina/tina 1st and second person pronouns and its own roots "nima" (name) and "vete" (water). The Uralic speakers were uncivilized hunter gatherers with very simple declensional grammars. How could they be related? The idea that Uralic must have borrowed its basic vocabulary from PIE was put forth. It was said that pronouns look the same everywhere. (Although the m/t correspondence is unknown outside northern Eurasia.) It was said that even if there were a connection, it couldn't be proven, because evereyone knows that resemblances older than 6,000 years are indistinguishable from chance. In reality, PIE can be shown to be a member of a family which includes Uralic, Altaic (Turkis, Mongolian, Japanese, Korean), Chuckchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut. The family must be on the range of 10,000 years old, and shares obviously related roots for such notions as dog, bear, snow, feather, father, name, etc. This evidence is simply shouted down with mainstream linguists saying that you can find any evidence you like if you look hard enough.

Harriman's book does not put forth anything radically new. His strongest points are when he uses the standard argument that you cannot induce a disproof of induction without stealing the concept. But in so far as it does show how such an analysis can be applied beyond what Rand hath writ, it useful. What is needed academically is something along the line's of Kelley's defense of sense perception. We all know Harriman's reason for not referencing Kelley's "perceptual judgment." That's the tragedy here. Philosophy is still playing a back seat to politics.

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What I would like is a really first rate history of science..the equivalent of Windleband in philosophy. I was wondering if someone who has read the Harriman book would find it worthwhile from a historical point of view. I'm not interested in Peikoff epistemology or really all that thrilled of rehashing induction. Comments please?

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What I would like is a really first rate history of science..the equivalent of Windleband in philosophy. I was wondering if someone who has read the Harriman book would find it worthwhile from a historical point of view. I'm not interested in Peikoff epistemology or really all that thrilled of rehashing induction. Comments please?

No, it is a broad introduction for a lay audience. It is still worth reading on its own merits, howevere.

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Robert, by saying that linguists have shown a lack of respect for the evidence, were you referring to Chomsky, or the historical linguists? Historical linguistics itself became very unpopular in the US after WWII given the association of it with German scholarshpi and Nazi racism. What remained of the field was damaged by skeptical fashions among Americanists and Gerard Clauson's ignorant attacks on the validity of the Altaic language family. Chomsky's writing is either banal or a perfect example of Harriman's red light to induction. Starting from a materialist/behaviorist viewpoint Chomsky discounts consciousness and the ability to induce in general but is then faced with the need to explain that we do somehow manage to learn 10,000 words by puberty. So he invents an innate language organ for which there is no evidence and which no evolutionary theory could account for.

Merlin Donald presents a thorough critique of Chomsky and a rigorously worked out theory of mind in his most excellent Origins of the Modern Mind and A Mind So Rare. Donald induces several concepts such as mimetic culture and the episodic mind which greatly further cognitive science. He roundly criticizes Chomsky and such anti-concepts as memes. I have no substantial criticisms of him. If you want rigorous, rewarding, new work, read those two books.

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Stephen Boydstun wrote:"I will be looking forward to comparing the proposals of Harriman in philosophy and history of science to those of Meyerson and Whewell (and to my own work on induction: 1, 2)."

I can get Meyerson and Whewell from Rutgers. Are these the two works on induction you most recommend? I have a stack of 20 books next to my bed, so I am being selective. I can always start to download Objectivity, but it inevitably results in a crash. Any chance it will ever be converted to plain text?0

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Ted,

The interest I have in comparison with Meyerson has to do with conceptual hierarchy in science and with identity. Whewell is important for the “consilience of inductions” idea, for his use of the history of science, and for his contrast to Mill. The latter’s A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive is also a classic.

One little book I think highly of concerning scientific inference:

The Inference that Makes Science

Ernan McMullin

In writing my induction article, in addition to the two nineteenth-century classics, I found these worthwhile:

The Ground of Induction

D. C. Williams

The Logical Problem of Induction

G. H. von Wright

The Objectivity Archive cannot be downloaded, and I do not expect that to change. If you send me your surface address via the email service of this site, I will send you both hardcopy volumes of Objectivity without charge.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

David, concerning #9 these look good:

The Beginnings of Western Science

David Lindberg (Ancient and Medieval)

The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors

John Gribbin (Renaissance to Modern)

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Finished the book...

Harriman's last chapter is his worst.

His attempts to pin the blame on Immanuel Kant for the developments he professes to deplore are downright feeble.

There are other problems as well. More about all of this over the next few days.

Robert Campbell

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His attempts to pin the blame on Immanuel Kant for the developments he professes to deplore are downright feeble.

If I could just add a "T" to the end:

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Finished the book...

Harriman's last chapter is his worst.

His attempts to pin the blame on Immanuel Kant for the developments he professes to deplore are downright feeble.

There are other problems as well. More about all of this over the next few days.

Robert Campbell

Robert,

Modern physicists had all kinds of influences. If anything, the German emphasis on wave mechanics (or in Heisenberg's case matrix mechanics) and different philosophical tradition advanced the state of modern science. Quantum mechanics was initially more tractable and accessible to physicists with those orientations. Particle treatments came later under Dirac and then Feynman. So scientists as disparate as Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac and Feynman were all ineluctably influenced by Kant? Schrodinger was influenced heavily by Schopenhauer who was a critic of Kant. Schrodinger also had Hindu influences. Sounds like handwaving to me.

Jim

Edited by James Heaps-Nelson
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The mirror crack'd from side to side;

"The curse is come upon me," cried

The Lady of Shalott.

Complete Tennyson poem here.

How many people on this list believe that, if AR had had a Roger Cotes (see Wikipedia link) to advise her, she would have left in ITOE the sentence, so easily deletable, about induction/deduction?

(Cotes advised Newton to delete the famous "Hypotheses non fingo" statement -- Wikipedia link.)

I ordered the Harriman book. It's scheduled to arrive tomorrow. The discussion I've seen thus far both here and on Amazon sounds as if the book is going to be disastrous for the reputation of Objectivism in whatever is left of the scientific community. (Considering that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has come out with an "enemies list" of global-warming denialists, I'm thinking not much is left of that community.)

Ellen

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> What I would like is a really first rate history of science [DM]

Yes. I've spent years looking for the 'best book' (or books) broadly surveying an important field. I've been fortunate in finding them in world history, american history, anthropology, philosophy, writing skills, public speaking, and many other areas. But two areas where I haven't found anything really great in terms of an overview are psychology and the history of science.

I've looked at quite a few histories of science over the years, but there has always been a pretty major disappointment. The most common failure has been 'provincialism' or reductionism - the tendency to reduce a vast field to the area the author is most comfortable or most respectful toward. It's not appropriate to treat the entire history of science as if it were all or mostly about physics. Nor to only write about 'western' science of science starting with the Greeks.

A truly great history of science would be of enormous epistemological importance. Only one value is that it would show how reason and logic work and have built an enormously successful edifice over centuries. It would be very hard to write because of the breadth of knowledge it would require. It would have to include 'informal' science - the discoveries of primitive man about the order and regularity of nature, for one thing. Engineering and technology which came before formal science - understanding the nature of fire, how water flows, the habits of animals. Along these lines, some of the titles of works of Aristotle - history of animals, parts of animals, motion of animals, gait of animals - capture types of scientific knowledge about living creatures which was well-advanced millennia before he was born.

Certain sciences seem to be given short shrift in some of the histories of science I've seen. Earth science at the very dawn of man. This starts well before the modern discovery of tectonic plates and the like. It basically starts with simple observation and induction. The differing natures of things a primitive tribe would find in the ground and would find certain uses for. There is also a tendency to give disproportionate space to the most sophisticated and modern or complex theories and laws in science at the expense of the building blocks, the steady accretion and accumulation that led step by step to them.

Related to history of science, I have on my shelf right now "Asimov's Guide to Science", Burke's "Connections", and (recently very favorably reviewed in the Oist publication The Objective Standard as the best? history of science)"The Beginnings of Western Science" by Lindberg. But each one would have a problem which prevents it from being a general overview, a broad survey of the history of science: Asimov starts with modern knowledge, the most advanced and thorough knowledge we have and then systematically goes through every field. So its not a history (even though Asimov is excellent often in tracing the development of an area of knowledge or a particular topic). Burke (again, excellent) takes isolated developments in technology and traces them back to the discoveries or problems which led to them. Again, not a general survey. And more of a focus on technology not all of science. Lindberg starts too late and too narrowly to be a general history. He's only interested in Europe and he doesn't start till 600 B.C. (He's got nine pages on prehistory.)

Lindberg needs four hundred pages. And he stops in 1450. And that's the problem with writing a good to great history of science: You have to range widely across many more centuries that that and many, many sciences. Physical sciences. Life sciences. And do you include the social and human sciences? Plus you have to broaden science to include nature study on which it built over a very long time. And include engineering and simple technologies in all areas. Some of this requires a bit of technical and advanced knowledge. And then you have to integrate all of this. A normal historian wouldn't have the science exposure and a normal scientist might not be able to write or might be too specialized.

If anyone is well enough informed to recommend books they have actually read which they know do all this - or come very close - I'm sure both DM and myself and others would be interested. (Note: Don't recommend it second hand or on Amazon or 'expert' reviews. ) I've been looking for such a book for years.

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One of my methods in the past for studying up on the history of science (I had done it before in other fields) was to go to the major university library nearest me and look up titles, find where the call numbers cluster, pull down every volume on the shelf which related or had an appropriate title, scan the toc and index, and start to read in the most promising areas.

Learned a lot in many fields where I wanted to expand my knowledge. Was disappointed in regard to history of science.

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If anyone is well enough informed to recommend books they have actually read which they know do all this - or come very close - I'm sure both DM and myself and others would be interested. (Note: Don't recommend it second hand or on Amazon or 'expert' reviews. ) I've been looking for such a book for years.

For the origin of quantum theory have a look at:

-The Strange Story of the Quantum- by Banesh Hoffman

-Thirty Years that Shook Physics- by George Gamow

Boltzmanns Atom: The Great Debate That Launched A Revolution In Physics by David Lindley

Quantum physics was born out of a complete failure of classical electrodynamics to account for atomic light spectra and blackbody radiation. Max Planck's attempt was (by Planck's estimation) an act of despair. Fortunately, it worked. Quantum physics was born out of the failure of prior theories (total failure, by the way) and did not arise incrementally. Its creation was a revolutionary act. Boltzmann's theory of atoms was in the face of determined opposition in Europe. Boltzmann's struggle was an influence on a younger Max Planck. Planck, who was a rather conservative German gentleman was a surprise as a revolutionary in ideas in physics. He knew what he had done, by the way. He told his son that he had produced a Copernican revolution.

Some science arises incrementally. Some science arises out of hitting a dead end, as did the science of atomic spectra of light.

Many folks seem to think theories in science, particularly physical sciences, leap out of piles of fact, much like a toad leaps off a lily pad. It seldom works that way. Newton's concept of reaction force pairs had virtually no precedent. It was a revolutionary idea. Also his assumption of non-contact force (gravitation) was revolutionary. Descartes idea of an Aether was much more in the mainstream, but it was wrong. Faraday's idea of the field was also revolutionary. There was no precedent for it in prior physics.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Newton's concept of reaction force pairs had virtually no precedent. It was a revolutionary idea. Also his assumption of non-contact force (gravitation) was revolutionary. Descartes idea of an Aether was much more in the mainstream, but it was wrong. Faraday's idea of the field was also revolutionary. There was no precedent for it in prior physics.

Bob K,

Harrriman, of course, discusses reaction force pairs and how he thinks Newton arrived at the notion. He downplays its revolutionary nature, however.

Some of the revolutionariness of gravitation comes through, but Harriman doesn't remark explicitly on the non-contact aspect, even though this played a major role in Newton's decision to write "Hypotheses non fingo."

Descartes, as Neil Parille previously noted, is written off as a foolish fantasist. His conception of the aether doesn't even come up. In fact, Harriman somehow manages not to mention that anyone in the 17th century (i.e., before modern chemistry) ever made any claims about atoms or "corpuscles"—except Robert Hooke, and poor foolish Descartes.

Faraday is mentioned. His idea of the electrical or magnetic field is not.

Robert C

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The discussion I've seen thus far both here and on Amazon sounds as if the book is going to be disastrous for the reputation of Objectivism in whatever is left of the scientific community.

I can't see how it could help, in the natural-science community.

But how much respect did "closed-system," Peikovian Objectivism previously enjoy among genuine natural scientists (a category in which I would not include the likes of Michael Mann and Phil Jones)?

I expect the book will just be ignored by working physicists, chemists, and the like.

Robert Campbell

PS. I put "closed-system" in scare-quotes because Harriman draws heavily on post-1982 Peikovian ideas, such as Peikovian proof and the "gen" theory.

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Newton's concept of reaction force pairs had virtually no precedent. It was a revolutionary idea. Also his assumption of non-contact force (gravitation) was revolutionary. Descartes idea of an Aether was much more in the mainstream, but it was wrong. Faraday's idea of the field was also revolutionary. There was no precedent for it in prior physics.

I agree that Isaac Newton's assumption of non-contact force was revolutionary, but I wonder how revolutionary. See here about the impetus theory. I recently read about Jean Buridan in Aristotle's Children, some of which can be read on Google Books. Does anybody here know if Newton was aware of Buridan's theory?

Back to the main topic, what does Harriman say about abduction?

Edited by Merlin Jetton
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I expect the book will just be ignored by working physicists, chemists, and the like.

Almost for sure. No math.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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