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Yeah. Sadly, the standard undarstanding what "Bayesian" means among philosophers is very different from its meaning among statisticians. I've written on the s

Yeah. Sadly, the standard undarstanding what "Bayesian" means among philosophers is very different from its meaning among statisticians. I've written on the subject for both audiences and it's been a real pain. And it's not just disagreement about what probabilities are (although I suspect that was the root cause historically). It's each discipline ignoring all sorts of aspects of the literature of the other discipline. Oh well. Life is suffering.

robocat 4y ago
And I have just learnt yet another overloaded meaning for induction. Induction has a meaning specific to philosophy, although to be fair, philosophy has used Latin “inductio” for a bit over 2000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning
- goatlover 4y ago
  Yeah, and Hume's problem of induction is that we don't have solid reasons for expecting the future to be like the past, because causality is not observed, but rather is a habit of thought. We think the sun will shine tomorrow because laws of physics regarding nuclear fusion, but we can't prove they will be the same tomorrow morning. We just assume it. That goes for all science. Which is why Kant was motivated to try and save science from Hume. This isn't even a case where we can assign some probability. If the laws of physics just changed on us, we have no priors to calculate that. We can argue that they won't, but we have no proof of that. The laws may might just be contingent (A always follows B for no reason until it no longer does for no reason, because nothing causes it to follow or not follow, because there is no causality and laws are nothing but constant conjunction up to this point in time).
  - spindle 4y ago
    IMO, that's a more accurate summary of Hume's problem of induction than what I've read in textbooks! Props!

robocat 4y ago

And I have just learnt yet another overloaded meaning for induction. Induction has a meaning specific to philosophy, although to be fair, philosophy has used Latin “inductio” for a bit over 2000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning

goatlover 4y ago
Yeah, and Hume's problem of induction is that we don't have solid reasons for expecting the future to be like the past, because causality is not observed, but rather is a habit of thought. We think the sun will shine tomorrow because laws of physics regarding nuclear fusion, but we can't prove they will be the same tomorrow morning. We just assume it. That goes for all science. Which is why Kant was motivated to try and save science from Hume. This isn't even a case where we can assign some probability. If the laws of physics just changed on us, we have no priors to calculate that. We can argue that they won't, but we have no proof of that. The laws may might just be contingent (A always follows B for no reason until it no longer does for no reason, because nothing causes it to follow or not follow, because there is no causality and laws are nothing but constant conjunction up to this point in time).
- spindle 4y ago
  IMO, that's a more accurate summary of Hume's problem of induction than what I've read in textbooks! Props!