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Science is a deductive method, which means that it can never "confirm" anything unless it can disprove the complement. Strictly speaking that is impossible in r

by User23 8y ago

Science is a deductive method, which means that it can never "confirm" anything unless it can disprove the complement. Strictly speaking that is impossible in real world cases. For example, quantum electrodynamics, one of the most well tested theories ever, holds up in the lab to some absurd number of decimal places (I recall the figure 9, but I read that years ago and it's got to be more now), but we can never be quite sure than the theory won't fall down with the next improvement in measurement. None of this detracts from QED being one of the great human intellectual achievements. From a programming perspective, there is an analogy to software testing. Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, it can't prove their absence, except in the case of exhaustion. Since on (most?) modern systems exhaustive testing is impossible, we're left with an imperfect solution that still works quite well when applied properly.

cbkeller 8y ago
Well, we like to say science is deductive, because induction doesn't give you perfect certainty -- but in practice induction and parsimony are and have been absolutely critical to scientific progress.. I think QED provides a nice example. I don't know if there are any formal mathematical constraints on the size of theoryspace, but for practical purposes we can probably agree that one may conceive of arbitrarily many hypotheses that fail to be falsified by a given set of observations. If deduction is all we have at our disposal, how do we choose among all these options? And should we really not have any more confidence in a theory like QED which as been tested many times and "failed to be falsified" to nine significant digits, versus one that has only "failed to be falsified" at 5% relative? In practice, I would also claim that parsimony is (and has been historically) absolutely critical in culling away the dross of theoryspace, yet this can hardly be presented as a deductive method? I think induction has been given an unnecessarily bad name lately. The falsification-centric paradigm that is popular today was proposed by Karl Popper as a solution to Hume's "problem of induction" [1] -- but Hume, and the rest of the Empiricists that laid the foundation for the scientific method, would have considered this entirely backwards. While Hume did claim that induction could not be justified by reason alone, Hume's conclusion was not to reject induction, but rather to prefer induction over deduction! > It is far better, Hume concludes, to rely on “the ordinary wisdom of nature”, which ensures that we form beliefs “by some instinct or mechanical tendency”, rather than trusting it to “the fallacious deductions of our reason” [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hume%27s_problem_of_induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hume%27s_problem_of_induction [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
- User23 8y ago
  I hope "None of this detracts from QED being one of the great human intellectual achievements" made it clear that I agree completely. Thank you for elaborating and providing a nice reference.

by User23 8y ago

cbkeller 8y ago

Well, we like to say science is deductive, because induction doesn't give you perfect certainty -- but in practice induction and parsimony are and have been absolutely critical to scientific progress.. I think QED provides a nice example. I don't know if there are any formal mathematical constraints on the size of theoryspace, but for practical purposes we can probably agree that one may conceive of arbitrarily many hypotheses that fail to be falsified by a given set of observations. If deduction is all we have at our disposal, how do we choose among all these options? And should we really not have any more confidence in a theory like QED which as been tested many times and "failed to be falsified" to nine significant digits, versus one that has only "failed to be falsified" at 5% relative? In practice, I would also claim that parsimony is (and has been historically) absolutely critical in culling away the dross of theoryspace, yet this can hardly be presented as a deductive method? I think induction has been given an unnecessarily bad name lately. The falsification-centric paradigm that is popular today was proposed by Karl Popper as a solution to Hume's "problem of induction" [1] -- but Hume, and the rest of the Empiricists that laid the foundation for the scientific method, would have considered this entirely backwards. While Hume did claim that induction could not be justified by reason alone, Hume's conclusion was not to reject induction, but rather to prefer induction over deduction! > It is far better, Hume concludes, to rely on “the ordinary wisdom of nature”, which ensures that we form beliefs “by some instinct or mechanical tendency”, rather than trusting it to “the fallacious deductions of our reason” [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hume%27s_problem_of_induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hume%27s_problem_of_induction [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/

User23 8y ago
I hope "None of this detracts from QED being one of the great human intellectual achievements" made it clear that I agree completely. Thank you for elaborating and providing a nice reference.