Owen,
As I understand it:
Doug announced his ordination. After a bit
of banter, Doug made some generalizations about religious and non-religious
people based on his past experience.... but... the ability to draw conclusions
from past experience is a bit philosophically mysterious. The seeming
contradiction between Doug's disavowal of faith and his drawing of conclusion
based on induction set off Nick. Nick attempted to draw Doug into an open
admittance that he accepted the truth of induction as an act of faith. But Nick
never quite got what he was looking for, and this lead to several somewhat
confused sub-threads. Eventually Nick just laid the problem out himself.
However, this also confused people because, 1) the term 'induction' is used in
many different contexts (e.g., to induce an electric current through a wire),
and 2) there is lots of past evidence supporting the effectiveness of
induction.
The big, big, big problem of induction, however, is that
point 2 has no clear role in the discussion: If the problem of induction is
accepted, then no amount of past success provides any evidence that induction
will continue to work into the future. That is, just as the fact that I have
opened my eyes every day for the past many years is no guarantee that I will
open my eyes tomorrow, the fact that scientists have used induction
successfully the past many centuries is no guarantee that induction will
continue to work in the next century.
These threads have now devolved
into a few discussions centered around accidentally or intentionally clever
statements made in the course conversation, as well as a discussion in which
people can't understand why we wouldn't simply accept induction based on its
past success. The latter are of the form "Doesn't the fact that induction is a
common method in such-and-such field of inquiry prove its worth?"
Hope
that helps,
Eric
On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 10:05 PM,
Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
Could anyone summarize the recent several thread
that originated with this one?
I'm sorry to have to ask, but we seem to
have exploded upon an interesting stunt, but with the multiple threads (I Am
The Thread Fascist) and the various twists and turns, I'd sorta like to know
what's up!
--
Owen
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Eric Charles
Professional Student and
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Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
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16601