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I consider the sentence:
The most famous formulation of the problem was proposed by David Hume in the mid-18th century, although versions of the problem date back to the Pyrrhonist school of Hellenistic philosophy and the Cārvāka school of ancient Indian philosophy.
There might be an anachronism here when we refer to Indian philosophy and perhaps also the Hellenistic philosophy as presenting the problem of induction. No evidence is given that it was seen as a problem at the time. Especially in the case of the ancient Indian philosophy, it is very likely that they simply knew that inductive justifications were not valid and that is it, no problem. Unless sources are provided that show that these ancient philosophies supported the inductive view, at the least during a period of time, I propose that we simply mention that they rejected inductive justifications without suggesting that it was seen as a problem. This means that to our knowledge the most ancient formulation of the problem was given by Hume. This is, for example, the position taken in SEP. I suggest the following
The original source of what is known as the problem today was proposed by David Hume in the mid-18th century, although inductive justifications were already argued against by the Pyrrhonist school of Hellenistic philosophy and the Cārvāka school of ancient Indian philosophy in a way that shed light on the problem of induction.
Dominic Mayers ( talk) 18:01, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Teishin ( talk) 21:14, 9 December 2020 (UTC)I want to isolate and explore what is puzzling about induction. Only with a clear sense of the problem can we begin to understand what a satisfactory solution would be. The normal way into the puzzle is through Hume’s justly famous argument against induction. In section 2, I argue that, interesting as Hume’s argument is, it fails to isolate what is puzzling about induction and, in fact, crucially presupposes that induction is puzzling. In section 3, I analyze an argument in Sextus Empiricus against induction—as far as I know, the very first in the history of philosophy. This argument does, I claim, get at what is interesting and puzzling about induction. Sextus’ argument has received far less attention than Hume’s.
— Justin Vlasits, chap. 11: The First Riddle of Induction
Continuing to try to correct present article is recognition that something must change. Can we agree on what needs change? Is anyone making classification errors? Dom seems to want to ignore the whole social science effort to deal with the "problem of induction." I find that rank philosophical bias in favour of traditional classifications. If many social scientists say they are dealing with the problem, how can WP editors judge them wrong?
Allow me to explain how I came to describe and judge the present article biased and obsolete.
I read S&L “Problem of induction” after reading WP “Problem of induction.” I quickly recognized the bias of the WP article because it ignored the range of information in S&L. I classified it as violating WP NPOV rule. This classification is at once a descriptive fact and a valuation. See columns 1&2 of coverage table.
I thought the bias could not be eliminated by adding S&L info to present article--WP standard operating procedure--because S&L content and definitions framed problem differently. I was delighted to learn that SANDBOX provided means for me to attempt revision. See column 3 of coverage table. Editors Dominic Meyers & Biogeographist, unaware of my evidence of bias, logically classified my sandbox revision as violating NPOV & NOR rules and reading like an essay—unencyclopedic. SK2242, equally unaware of the evidence in my table, accepts these classifications.
My proposed revision does not violate NPOV because it describes modern alternatives to present WP article. It partially corrects existing bias.
My proposed revision does not violate NOR because it reports existing scholarship in S&L. Reporting existing scholarship requires comparing modern classifications with traditional, regardless of whether or not it appears “encyclopedic.” TBR-qed ( talk) 15:42, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
we need the sources. TBR-qed's arguments have been repetitive so far because he is just comparing three sources: the present article, Sloman & Lagnado, and his draft. There needs to be comparison among a larger body of secondary and tertiary sources, not just Sloman & Lagnado. Biogeographist ( talk) 16:04, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
I know that no original research is allowed in the article, but sharing our understanding in the talk page can help the discussion. Besides, what I am going to say is not really original research in the following sense that many others have noticed the same thing. I see that before Popper, induction was strongly associated with justification, especially in the Vienna Circle. It was important at the time to separate science from non science and the hoped difference was that science is justified knowledge and that every thing else was not even meaningful. I think that after Popper it has becomes generally accepted that justified knowledge was the wrong objective, though there is still a remain of justificationism for knowledge that is uncertain. But, even among those that stopped to fight for justificationism in any of its forms, induction was not abandoned. This new trend is that induction does not have to be justified, because it is an observed fact. This is a complete shift in comparison with the pre-Popper notion of induction. This notion of induction is not at all opposed to Popper's philosophy. In fact, it perfectly goes along with it, because it starts with the premise that justification is not needed. They would even say that, for that reason, the problem of induction does not really exist, which is exactly Popper's point. I find it weird that those who support this notion of induction pooh-pooh Popper's philosophy. The explanation, I believe, is that the true meaning of justificationism is lost. In artificial intelligence, they create machines that can infer laws from observations. The principles used by these machines are considered as some kind of justifications for the laws and they are called inductive principles. Similar notions have spread in social science. However, these inductive principles are not universal. They have nothing to do with the kind of justifications that were hoped for in pre-Popper time. There was a very good reason for the pre-Popper time justificationism. It was puzzling in ancient Greece, for Hume and in Popper's time that no true justifications can be found and it is still puzzling today. It's not obsolete at all. Dominic Mayers ( talk) 18:58, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
TBR-qed reports that the table below was not properly formatted and will be replaced.-- Quisqualis ( talk) 20:15, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
I mistakenly thought my coverage table was posted here. Here it is. TBR-qed ( talk) 17:45, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
TABLE OF SCHOLARS IN 3 VERSIONS OF “Problem of induction.”
|- column 1 = EWP; column 2 = S&L; column 3 = SBox
Philosophers | Hume | Hume | Hume |
Popper | Popper | ||
Goodman | Goodman | Goodman | |
Pyrrhonists | Logical empiric | Pyrrhonists | |
Carvaka | Hempel | Carvaka | |
Quine | Quine | Dewey | |
Stove & Williams | Miller & Lipton | ||
Campbell & Costa | Carnap | ||
al-Ghazali & Ockham | Hacking | ||
Scotus | Nagel | ||
Salmon | Kuhn | ||
Hard scientists | 0 | 0 | Duhem |
Social scientists | 0 | Rosch | Rosch |
Tversky | |||
Kahneman | Kahneman | ||
Shepard | |||
Rips | |||
Carey | |||
Sloman | |||
Osherson | |||
Lopez | |||
Hampton | |||
Gelman & Coley | |||
Mandler & McDonough | |||
Nisbett | |||
Gopnik & Meltzoff | |||
and more. |
Draft:Problem of induction is a proposed rewrite of Problem of induction. It was declined by User:Theroadislong for two reasons, both because it reads like an essay, and because it is a rewrite of an article, which is not how Articles for Creation works.
There has been extended discussion of the content of this article. Three years ago, this might have been a good case for formal mediation by a member of the Mediation Committee, or even longer ago for informal mediation by the Mediation Cabal. Two years ago, in a remarkably stupid action, the community disbanded the Mediation Committee. This content dispute is too large to be handled by the dispute resolution noticeboard. Without studying the details of the content dispute, it appears to me that a mediator is needed, and that the mediator should largely assist in the formulation of multiple Requests for Comments.
This draft was resubmitted, and I removed the resubmission tag while moving the commentary to the talk page. I restored the resubmission in order to decline it again with comments. I recommend a combination of mediation and Requests for Comments. Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:59, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
The leading sentence is too complicated, and without reason, because the "knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense" is the same thing as "justified knowledge". Therefore it does not need to mention both the justification and the "classic philosophical sense". My suggestion was "The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense...", but there are other possibilities, how to solve it. In any case, the current lead should be changed because it lacks the required conciseness. Ioannes Pragensis ( talk) 07:31, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
@ Ioannes Pragensis, Biogeographist, and Teishin: what is your opinion on the following proposal, an attempt to make the first sentence in the lead simpler. The current sentence is:
The problem of induction is the philosophical question of what are the justifications, if any, for any growth of knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense—knowledge that goes beyond a mere collection of observations [1]—highlighting the apparent lack of justification in particular for:
- Generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (e.g., the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and, therefore, all swans are white", before the discovery of black swans) or
- Presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (e.g., that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold). Hume called this the principle of uniformity of nature. [2]
I don't think it is so bad, but I propose to change it to
In philosophy, the problem of induction is the apparent or true absence of justifications for a growth of knowledge that goes beyond a mere collection of observations as understood in inductive reasoning, [1] in particular for:
- Generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (e.g., the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and, therefore, all swans are white", before the discovery of black swans) or
- Presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (e.g., that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold). Hume called this the principle of uniformity of nature. [2]
I removed the reference to "knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense", which is linked to justified true belief, a concept that gained approval during the Enlightenment, "justified" standing in contrast to "revealed". The concept of justified true belief in relation with the Gettier problem, etc. is still discussed in epistemology in general, but not in the article. For our purpose, the concept of inductive reasoning does a better job in distinguishing revealed knowledge from scientific knowledge. So I replaced it with "as understood in inductive reasoning". To simplify further, I also used "apparent lack of justification" from the start instead of highlighting it later. Also, I made the sentence more neutral by adding that the lack of justifications might not be apparent only, but be actually a real absence of justifications.
Dominic Mayers ( talk) 19:40, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
Right now the lead, as Harry Belafonte sang, is clear as mud, but it covers the ground. It confuses and discourage anyone who doesn't already know what it is talking about. It's important to think of the principle of least astonishment WP:ASTONISH, as well as the MOS:LEAD. I will be building it around this formulation of the problem: "Therefore, for Hume, the problem remains of how to explain why we form any conclusions that go beyond the past instances of which we have had experience" from the Stanford Encyclopedia, as well as "On what grounds we can expect the future to resemble the past". I know there are a million reasons why this doesn't cover the ground, What about thinkers before Hume? What about.... The answer is, we can't cover everything in the lead. We owe the average reader a comprehensible, not a comprehensive, explanation. The rest of the article can cover all the rest of the ground. DolyaIskrina ( talk) 22:41, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
DolyaIskrina ( talk) 23:24, 27 July 2022 (UTC)First formulated in Western analytic philosophy by David Hume, the problem of induction questions our reasons for believing that the future will resemble the past, or more broadly it questions predictions about unobserved things based on previous observations. This inference from the observed to the unobserved is known as “inductive inferences”, and Hume, while acknowledging that everyone does and must make such inferences, argued that there is no non-circular way to justify them, thereby undermining one of the Enlightenment pillars of rationality.
{{
cite book}}
: |work=
ignored (
help)#9662: Most recently updated in 16 October 2007
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 |
I consider the sentence:
The most famous formulation of the problem was proposed by David Hume in the mid-18th century, although versions of the problem date back to the Pyrrhonist school of Hellenistic philosophy and the Cārvāka school of ancient Indian philosophy.
There might be an anachronism here when we refer to Indian philosophy and perhaps also the Hellenistic philosophy as presenting the problem of induction. No evidence is given that it was seen as a problem at the time. Especially in the case of the ancient Indian philosophy, it is very likely that they simply knew that inductive justifications were not valid and that is it, no problem. Unless sources are provided that show that these ancient philosophies supported the inductive view, at the least during a period of time, I propose that we simply mention that they rejected inductive justifications without suggesting that it was seen as a problem. This means that to our knowledge the most ancient formulation of the problem was given by Hume. This is, for example, the position taken in SEP. I suggest the following
The original source of what is known as the problem today was proposed by David Hume in the mid-18th century, although inductive justifications were already argued against by the Pyrrhonist school of Hellenistic philosophy and the Cārvāka school of ancient Indian philosophy in a way that shed light on the problem of induction.
Dominic Mayers ( talk) 18:01, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Teishin ( talk) 21:14, 9 December 2020 (UTC)I want to isolate and explore what is puzzling about induction. Only with a clear sense of the problem can we begin to understand what a satisfactory solution would be. The normal way into the puzzle is through Hume’s justly famous argument against induction. In section 2, I argue that, interesting as Hume’s argument is, it fails to isolate what is puzzling about induction and, in fact, crucially presupposes that induction is puzzling. In section 3, I analyze an argument in Sextus Empiricus against induction—as far as I know, the very first in the history of philosophy. This argument does, I claim, get at what is interesting and puzzling about induction. Sextus’ argument has received far less attention than Hume’s.
— Justin Vlasits, chap. 11: The First Riddle of Induction
Continuing to try to correct present article is recognition that something must change. Can we agree on what needs change? Is anyone making classification errors? Dom seems to want to ignore the whole social science effort to deal with the "problem of induction." I find that rank philosophical bias in favour of traditional classifications. If many social scientists say they are dealing with the problem, how can WP editors judge them wrong?
Allow me to explain how I came to describe and judge the present article biased and obsolete.
I read S&L “Problem of induction” after reading WP “Problem of induction.” I quickly recognized the bias of the WP article because it ignored the range of information in S&L. I classified it as violating WP NPOV rule. This classification is at once a descriptive fact and a valuation. See columns 1&2 of coverage table.
I thought the bias could not be eliminated by adding S&L info to present article--WP standard operating procedure--because S&L content and definitions framed problem differently. I was delighted to learn that SANDBOX provided means for me to attempt revision. See column 3 of coverage table. Editors Dominic Meyers & Biogeographist, unaware of my evidence of bias, logically classified my sandbox revision as violating NPOV & NOR rules and reading like an essay—unencyclopedic. SK2242, equally unaware of the evidence in my table, accepts these classifications.
My proposed revision does not violate NPOV because it describes modern alternatives to present WP article. It partially corrects existing bias.
My proposed revision does not violate NOR because it reports existing scholarship in S&L. Reporting existing scholarship requires comparing modern classifications with traditional, regardless of whether or not it appears “encyclopedic.” TBR-qed ( talk) 15:42, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
we need the sources. TBR-qed's arguments have been repetitive so far because he is just comparing three sources: the present article, Sloman & Lagnado, and his draft. There needs to be comparison among a larger body of secondary and tertiary sources, not just Sloman & Lagnado. Biogeographist ( talk) 16:04, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
I know that no original research is allowed in the article, but sharing our understanding in the talk page can help the discussion. Besides, what I am going to say is not really original research in the following sense that many others have noticed the same thing. I see that before Popper, induction was strongly associated with justification, especially in the Vienna Circle. It was important at the time to separate science from non science and the hoped difference was that science is justified knowledge and that every thing else was not even meaningful. I think that after Popper it has becomes generally accepted that justified knowledge was the wrong objective, though there is still a remain of justificationism for knowledge that is uncertain. But, even among those that stopped to fight for justificationism in any of its forms, induction was not abandoned. This new trend is that induction does not have to be justified, because it is an observed fact. This is a complete shift in comparison with the pre-Popper notion of induction. This notion of induction is not at all opposed to Popper's philosophy. In fact, it perfectly goes along with it, because it starts with the premise that justification is not needed. They would even say that, for that reason, the problem of induction does not really exist, which is exactly Popper's point. I find it weird that those who support this notion of induction pooh-pooh Popper's philosophy. The explanation, I believe, is that the true meaning of justificationism is lost. In artificial intelligence, they create machines that can infer laws from observations. The principles used by these machines are considered as some kind of justifications for the laws and they are called inductive principles. Similar notions have spread in social science. However, these inductive principles are not universal. They have nothing to do with the kind of justifications that were hoped for in pre-Popper time. There was a very good reason for the pre-Popper time justificationism. It was puzzling in ancient Greece, for Hume and in Popper's time that no true justifications can be found and it is still puzzling today. It's not obsolete at all. Dominic Mayers ( talk) 18:58, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
TBR-qed reports that the table below was not properly formatted and will be replaced.-- Quisqualis ( talk) 20:15, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
I mistakenly thought my coverage table was posted here. Here it is. TBR-qed ( talk) 17:45, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
TABLE OF SCHOLARS IN 3 VERSIONS OF “Problem of induction.”
|- column 1 = EWP; column 2 = S&L; column 3 = SBox
Philosophers | Hume | Hume | Hume |
Popper | Popper | ||
Goodman | Goodman | Goodman | |
Pyrrhonists | Logical empiric | Pyrrhonists | |
Carvaka | Hempel | Carvaka | |
Quine | Quine | Dewey | |
Stove & Williams | Miller & Lipton | ||
Campbell & Costa | Carnap | ||
al-Ghazali & Ockham | Hacking | ||
Scotus | Nagel | ||
Salmon | Kuhn | ||
Hard scientists | 0 | 0 | Duhem |
Social scientists | 0 | Rosch | Rosch |
Tversky | |||
Kahneman | Kahneman | ||
Shepard | |||
Rips | |||
Carey | |||
Sloman | |||
Osherson | |||
Lopez | |||
Hampton | |||
Gelman & Coley | |||
Mandler & McDonough | |||
Nisbett | |||
Gopnik & Meltzoff | |||
and more. |
Draft:Problem of induction is a proposed rewrite of Problem of induction. It was declined by User:Theroadislong for two reasons, both because it reads like an essay, and because it is a rewrite of an article, which is not how Articles for Creation works.
There has been extended discussion of the content of this article. Three years ago, this might have been a good case for formal mediation by a member of the Mediation Committee, or even longer ago for informal mediation by the Mediation Cabal. Two years ago, in a remarkably stupid action, the community disbanded the Mediation Committee. This content dispute is too large to be handled by the dispute resolution noticeboard. Without studying the details of the content dispute, it appears to me that a mediator is needed, and that the mediator should largely assist in the formulation of multiple Requests for Comments.
This draft was resubmitted, and I removed the resubmission tag while moving the commentary to the talk page. I restored the resubmission in order to decline it again with comments. I recommend a combination of mediation and Requests for Comments. Robert McClenon ( talk) 00:59, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
The leading sentence is too complicated, and without reason, because the "knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense" is the same thing as "justified knowledge". Therefore it does not need to mention both the justification and the "classic philosophical sense". My suggestion was "The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense...", but there are other possibilities, how to solve it. In any case, the current lead should be changed because it lacks the required conciseness. Ioannes Pragensis ( talk) 07:31, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
@ Ioannes Pragensis, Biogeographist, and Teishin: what is your opinion on the following proposal, an attempt to make the first sentence in the lead simpler. The current sentence is:
The problem of induction is the philosophical question of what are the justifications, if any, for any growth of knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense—knowledge that goes beyond a mere collection of observations [1]—highlighting the apparent lack of justification in particular for:
- Generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (e.g., the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and, therefore, all swans are white", before the discovery of black swans) or
- Presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (e.g., that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold). Hume called this the principle of uniformity of nature. [2]
I don't think it is so bad, but I propose to change it to
In philosophy, the problem of induction is the apparent or true absence of justifications for a growth of knowledge that goes beyond a mere collection of observations as understood in inductive reasoning, [1] in particular for:
- Generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (e.g., the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and, therefore, all swans are white", before the discovery of black swans) or
- Presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (e.g., that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold). Hume called this the principle of uniformity of nature. [2]
I removed the reference to "knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense", which is linked to justified true belief, a concept that gained approval during the Enlightenment, "justified" standing in contrast to "revealed". The concept of justified true belief in relation with the Gettier problem, etc. is still discussed in epistemology in general, but not in the article. For our purpose, the concept of inductive reasoning does a better job in distinguishing revealed knowledge from scientific knowledge. So I replaced it with "as understood in inductive reasoning". To simplify further, I also used "apparent lack of justification" from the start instead of highlighting it later. Also, I made the sentence more neutral by adding that the lack of justifications might not be apparent only, but be actually a real absence of justifications.
Dominic Mayers ( talk) 19:40, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
Right now the lead, as Harry Belafonte sang, is clear as mud, but it covers the ground. It confuses and discourage anyone who doesn't already know what it is talking about. It's important to think of the principle of least astonishment WP:ASTONISH, as well as the MOS:LEAD. I will be building it around this formulation of the problem: "Therefore, for Hume, the problem remains of how to explain why we form any conclusions that go beyond the past instances of which we have had experience" from the Stanford Encyclopedia, as well as "On what grounds we can expect the future to resemble the past". I know there are a million reasons why this doesn't cover the ground, What about thinkers before Hume? What about.... The answer is, we can't cover everything in the lead. We owe the average reader a comprehensible, not a comprehensive, explanation. The rest of the article can cover all the rest of the ground. DolyaIskrina ( talk) 22:41, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
DolyaIskrina ( talk) 23:24, 27 July 2022 (UTC)First formulated in Western analytic philosophy by David Hume, the problem of induction questions our reasons for believing that the future will resemble the past, or more broadly it questions predictions about unobserved things based on previous observations. This inference from the observed to the unobserved is known as “inductive inferences”, and Hume, while acknowledging that everyone does and must make such inferences, argued that there is no non-circular way to justify them, thereby undermining one of the Enlightenment pillars of rationality.
{{
cite book}}
: |work=
ignored (
help)#9662: Most recently updated in 16 October 2007