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The problem is how do you gain these explanations in the first place without appealing to inductivism? The process of examining a thing to propose a theory abo
by yters 8y ago
The problem is how do you gain these explanations in the first place without appealing to inductivism? The process of examining a thing to propose a theory about its operation seems indistinguishable in my mind from the inductivist approach of deriving general theories from particular observations. Both approaches make the same assumption of a consistent underlying order behind the observations we make.
- lisper 8y agoThis is the unsolved problem of "hypothesis formation." It's something that brains do that we do not yet fully understand. It's an active area of research. But the process of explanatory hypothesis formation is distinct from induction. Induction says, e.g. "Every crow I have ever seen has been black, therefore I conclude that all crows are black." (They aren't, BTW. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/whitecrows.htm http://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/whitecrows.htm https://www.quora.com/Are-all-crows-black https://www.quora.com/Are-all-crows-black)
- yters 8y agoYes, so it seems like falsificationism just pushes the fundamental problem elsewhere and renames it. The basic problem of distinguishing between patterns and luck undermines both falsification and induction. As far as I know, there is no resolution to the problem. We just irrationally assume there is no problem out of habit, as Hume states in his original work. A leap of faith, if you will.
- lisper 8y agoNo. Falsification is necessary but not sufficient. The best theory is one that has two properties: 1) it is consistent with all the observed data (i.e. has not been falsified) and 2) it is a "good explanation". Explaining what is meant by "good explanation" is too long for an HN comment, but roughly speaking it means that it is concise and brittle -- any modification would cause it to become inconsistent with the data. (So for example, conspiracy theories fail as explanatory theories not because they are inconsistent with the data -- they generally aren't -- but rather because they are not concise and brittle.)
- yters 8y agoThat sounds like Solmonoff induction. But, there is still the same problem. Why are concise explanations better? Solomnoff justified this assumption by claiming we are generated by a computable prior. But, that again pushes the question back to why we can assume this. Otherwise, no observation justifies a computable prior over random luck.
- lisper 8y ago> Why are concise explanations better? Because they require less effort to work with. Note that concise is only better all else being equal. Being consistent with the observed data is necessary, but not sufficient. We can only ever have a finite amount of data, and any finite dataset is consistent with an infinite number of theories. Conciseness is just a heuristic we use to select among the infinite possibilities. It just turns out that in the universe we live in, concise theories consistent with the data have a lot of predictive power. No one know why our universe is this way. That's just how it turns out to be.
- yters 8y ago"It just turns out that in the universe we live in, concise theories consistent with the data have a lot of predictive power. No one know why our universe is this way. That's just how it turns out to be." How is this not inductivism?
- lisper 8y agoWhat do you think inductivism is?
- yters 8y agoMy understanding is inductivism is deriving general rules from specific observations. The idea that short descriptions are better because "that is how it works" seems to be this sort of thing. From our observation of specific short descriptions working we've derived the general rule that short descriptions work better.