anti-inductive situations: forum for week of 17 October

Cases Against Intuitive Line

In section 6 Justifying Induction, of chapter 4, of Dr. Morton’s book A Guide Through the Theory of Knowledge, is a reference to philosophers on inductive inferences as follows:

Some philosophers have tried to give reasons why it is reasonable to believe the conclusions of inductive inferences, and some have argued that it is only out of confusion or misunderstanding that one could think that any such reasons were possible or necessary.

Philosopher Karl Popper and physicist Freeman Dyson are offered as example, in support of conclusions of inductive inferences as unreasonable, as philosopher, and as predictive in specific application.

One of the most influential and controversial views on the problem of induction has been that of Karl Popper, announced and argued in (Popper LSD). Popper held that induction has no place in the logic of science. Science in his view is a deductive process in which scientists formulate hypotheses and theories that they test by deriving particular observable consequences.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Induction, 4.2.

Thirty-one years ago [1949], Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't.

Freeman J. Dyson, in a statement of 1980, as quoted in Quantum Reality : Beyond the New Physics (1987) by Nick Herbert