Gill,
Ok. Ready to take a whack at this. I am reading Peirce these days (as you all know, ad nauseam). And Peirce is widely regarded as a premier logician and one of the (if not the) greatest American philosopher. So, I will try to give Peirce’s answer.
Yes (he would say), assuming that you were chosen at random from the population of humans, it is a VALID inference from the fact that you can break concrete that humans can break concrete. It is valid because we would, if we continued to pick random individuals indefinitely come ultimately to the correct conclusion, say, that less than .01 percent of humans can break concrete. Unfortunately, though valid, this inference is extraordinarily “weak”. The adjective “weak” seems to relate to how much money you should be willing to bet on it. In this case, with the sample size at one, and the population at billions, Peirce would advise you to bet very little if anything, until you had a much larger sample.
I agree with you that there are traps for the young lurking in the enthusiasm and nostalgia with which the elderly often approach guiding the young. Even worse than “you can do anything you can put your mind to” is “all I want is for you to be happy.” Both set one up for blaming the victim when life screws one over, which it inevitably will. I do believe that “being happy” is a behavior and a skill that comes only to those who work at it, but alas, I see no evidence that it comes to everybody who works at it. And I also believe that whatever sins of guidance may have been inflicted on a child before that child is 21, all those sins are washed clean by the child being emancipated. Whatever the child is at 21, and from whatever causes, s/he is what s/he is from that point on and must make do with that. No value comes to a child from blaming his or her parents.
Does this help?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Gillian Densmore
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2013 12:56 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why I was wrong about the nuclear option
Mr. Thompson,
New-Clear options? In what context?
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Logic trap?
The logic trap that's popular in colleges goes about like: Gill is a human able obliterate concrete and kick ass in MMA, therefore all humans can kick ass in MMA and make short work of concrete.
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On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
This reminded of our discussion about a year ago concerning the so-called “fallacy of induction”. Do any of you know about grue and green. Grue is a property of grass that it is green, just until you stop looking at it, at which point it turns blue. The point is that every scrupulous observation of grass confirming that it is still green, is equally a confirmation that it is also grue. “Absurd!”, you say, but only if you take for granted that the world is not the sort of place that changes on a dime. And where else could you have learned that save by induction.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/12/04/why-i-was-wrong-about-the-nuclear-option/
Nick
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