Eating Dirt etc

[Brant Gaede]

If a man has two legs, one inductive and the other deductive, and we cut off one won't the poor bastard fall down?

The problem is that one leg kicks the other out from under him.

To continue with this metaphorical reasoning: then man's on the ground! How do we lift him up and get him walking?

--Brant

I know this is silly but I've got that last-word itis

[Selene]

Levitation...

Encouragement....

Prayer....

[Brant Gaede]

In addition, should a given hypothesis be falsified by an experiment or prediction on one occasion, we would have no good reason to assume that the same hypothesis would be falsified by the same experiment or prediction in the future.

Scientists rely a good deal on the repetition of experiments. And these repetitions would have no cognitive value without presupposing the "uniformity of nature." To repeat experiments, claiming that results are more reliable when the findings of one scientist are confirmed by other scientists, is to engage in inductive reasoning -- the very thing that Hume and Popper repudiate. If inductive generalizations can never be justified, we would have no rational warrant to assume that future experiments will yield the same results as past experiments.

Well, no matter how many repetitions of experiments it only takes one experiment that is repeatable and repeated that contradicts a theory to invalidate it, so you cannot escape the tentativeness of this type of knowledge. Induction cannot give you absolute knowledge, nothing can, and absolutism is core Objectivism, culturally if not intellectually. There is nothing a standard Objectivist likes to do more than go around saying "Absolutely!"--end of discussion. This relief from thinking must be a profound default to over-taxed neurons needing rest. To me it's a declaration that "I'm saved! Praise the Lord [Ayn Rand]!"

--Brant

Things are not this simple. Even Popper recognized that a single experiment -- a so-called "crucial experiment" -- that contradicts a theory does not necessarily disprove that theory. This is so because ad hoc explanations can always be given that explain away the contradiction as an apparent contradiction only.

Moreover, as many philosophers of science have pointed out, a well-established theory will not usually be rejected on the basis of one experiment until and unless there exists a better theory to replace it. The anomaly may raise doubts and thereby motivate scientists to develop a better theory, but until that is done the established theory will tend to prevail. Some changes might involve the "paradigm shifts" that Thomas Kuhn regarded as emblematic of scientific revolutions.

George keeps putting me in my place without any regard for my tender sensibilities. Why can't I know as much as George? It's not fair that he's read 23,000 books while I was out having a good time! Just yesterday he forgot more than I learned in the last year. It's a fact that he knows so much that every new fact requires getting rid of an old fact. That's how bad his brain has become. Listen everybody, George needs intervention; he's a hoarder! (Maybe we can get him on that tv show.)

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

George keeps putting me in my place without any regard for my tender sensibilities. Why can't I know as much as George? It's not fair that he's read 23,000 books while I was out having a good time! Just yesterday he forgot more than I learned in the last year. It's a fact that he knows so much that every new fact requires getting rid of an old fact. That's how bad his brain has become. Listen everybody, George needs intervention; he's a hoarder! (Maybe we can get him on that tv show.)

--Brant

Although I have read a lot, I know many people who know more than I do, in the sense of numbers of facts.

I have never had a great memory, so I can easily forget things when I cram my head full of information. One way that reading Rand helped me in my early years was her stress on essentials. I realized that when reading books, I needed to do several things.

First, I needed to accumulate a core library in those fields that truly interest me. Ownership of books was important because I needed to mark them up extensively, using a notation system -- one that indicates various degrees of importance for paragraphs -- that I have not changed since around 1972.

Second, I learned the value of using the blank flyleaves of books to create my own informal indices. I just picked a book ((Bentham on Liberty) at random from the nearest bookshelf. Here are the first few entries from the first blank page: "Fictions, 38, 61 (liberty qua fiction), 68. Contra liberty: 38, 65 ff, 74 (absence of coercion). Coercion: 59. Constraint/restraint 79. Equal liberty: 75 (nb). Neg. liberty: Q-p. 76. Etc., Etc. ("NB" -- nota bene, or "note well" -- indicates an especially significant passage. "Q" indicates a representative passage that would be suitable for quoting.)

These indices have proved invaluable over the years when I needed to jog my memory. The trick is not to overdue the number of entries. An overload will make the indices too cumbersome and can render them virtually useless. I reserve the extensive notes for the margins of the texts, or for large post-it note sheets that I insert between pages when not enough space is available in margins.

Many people are reluctant to mark in their books, but for me a book with no notations can prove almost useless as the years go by. It's as if I am later looking at a book that I have never read before.

Third, I needed to shed the superstition, which afflicts many people, that I should read a book page by page, cover to cover. I usually skim a book to find the sections that interest me, and I read those. I may go back later and read other sections, but I never force myself to read parts that strike me as personally worthless, simply because I want to be able to say that I have "read" a particular book. (It has surprised me to learn how many people have this latter attitude.)

Fourth, whenever I engage in a technical discussion on an elist, I typically return to the relevant books and reread them selectively, using my notations as guides. After I do this a few times, the information tends to sink in more and more. And the more I can express an argument clearly and succinctly, the more the essentials become fixed in my mind.

There's a lot more to this -- I used to give talks on how to use books -- but these are some of the basics. The methods mentioned above can greatly enhance one's feel for essentials, and once you get the essentials down, the details can always be filled in later.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

That was an offhand polemical tag, not an argument. So did I miss something? Did I mention another infinite regress argument? I can't recall any.

Try the very first post on this thread.

Here is part of my discussion.

In other words, if inductive reasoning is never valid, there would be no way to falsify a hypothesis or even render it improbable. For just because x was incompatible with our hypothesis in the past would be no reason to assume that instances similar to x would be incompatible with our hypothesis in the future. We would be required to "test" our hypothesis over and over again, indefinitely, with additional instances of x, and then we could only say that this particular x is compatible or incompatible with a hypothesis. We could never (legitimately) generalize about all x's. We could only say that the dirt we have eaten so far is not food. We could never justifiably say that dirt we haven't tried yet is not food. We could never learn from experience. We would need to keep eating dirt over and over again in an effort to falsify our hypothesis that dirt is not food, and, logically speaking, this process would never end.

Now, this is an infinite regress.

As I said, this was a polemical tag. Whether my argument would strictly entail an infinite regress is something I haven't given much thought to.

I am more inclined to say that the falsification of a hypothesis is simply impossible in any significant sense without inductive reasoning, because we would otherwise have no reason to assume that a hypothesis that has been falsified in the past would also be falsified under the same conditions in the future. We could never make a rational generalization to the effect that a given hypothesis has been falsified, period. All we could say is that a hypothesis was falsified at some specific time in the past, while adding that that falsification has absolutely no implications for the present or the future. For all we know, the falsification test, if repeated now, would yield entirely different results. This is the consistent Humean position.

Ghs