No, you are saying that some of yours do and others don't. You have said before that deductive logic forms a basis for rational beliefs.

You can't form beliefs instinctively. I think what you are trying to say is that instinct-level processes underlie all reason and thought. This goes without saying, and I agree. In fact, thought is reducible even farther to very simple electrochemical interactions. You are making the mistake of saying that because we can reduce reason to something else, reason is not reason. That's like saying a car is not a car because ultimately, it's all just nuts and bolts. 

I totally disagree. I do not need to refer to instinct (ie my feelings) to determine that 2+2=4. 

If all our reasonable conclusions must agree with instinct, then why are we able to arrive a counter-intuitive conclusions using reason? The earth looks flat...according to you, shouldn't our reason be constructed so as to support this feeling? 

 You need to think more about what it means to be a civilized society before you say that instinct is a better basis for it than reason. Our instincts tell us to band together in inter-related tribal groups of about 100 people, establish a territory several miles across and fight to defend it against all rival groups. Based on instinct alone, there would be no cities and nothing to which one could attach the word "civilized."

This conversation is causing me to think we've spoken before. Are you an anarchist? 

Babies (and adults) do not differentiate between theories using instinct. Instinct can't do that. I think what you are trying to say is that a baby's reason develops naturally to be able to choose between theories, and I'll agree to that. But because it develops naturally doesn't make reason the same as instinct.

Occam's Razor is a formal description of something our common sense has told us for millions of years. This doesn't mean it isn't based on reason. Our distant ancestors had a very good reason for developing brains that could naturally use a crude version of the Razor - survival. 

Then that isn't reason and it isn't something that you could defend in discourse. If you come to me and say "I think you should accept that theory because I feel better about it" I'm going to disregard you entirely because your whole argument is based on a subjective impression that has nothing to do with me.

But there's no reason why anyone else would trust your instincts. So either agree that we need to use reason to have a discourse about this or go away. 

And I've shown (repeatedly) that reason itself is impossible without use of the Razor. So what you are really asking for is a rational defence of reason. To which I respond that reason is necessary for life, and without life, all theories fail. Therefore any theory which tends to end the existence of the theorizer is ultimately self-refuting and incorrect. Not to mention a silly wank that no one should spend any time discussing or refuting. 

Then can I suggest that you tighten up your use of terms so that we all might understand what you are saying. I'm getting tired of having to read between the lines and interpret what you mean.

Capital-T Truth is the mythological absolute Truth that is accurate in every respect and ultimately indisinguishable from the object it describes. It is perfect description, free of any error. It has never been observed and may very well be fictitious. it is unclear even how we would know should we come into possession of Truth.

Small-t truth is that which we can understand to be true. It is that set of axioms and knowledge which we find to deliver useful results and which resists refutation by rational means. It is those facts which are sufficiently probable to be correct that we would base any action upon them.  

Capital-T Truth is the one we shouldn't care about, because it is with God, ie it doesn't exist so far as we know. It is the abominable snowman of philosophy. We can imagine it and make guesses about it, but no one, anywhere, has been able to show that we can or do possess it. 

But you have no basis for saying that without using the Razor. 

Nope. I never tried to show that Occam's Razor is untrue. And the absurd things I present are known to be absurd in a number of ways, not just with use of the Razor. Are you really going to waste our time arguing that discarding the Razor doesn't lead to absurd results?

I'll repeat it to you again. The Razor is more than usually useful, it's necessary in order to draw any conclusion at all. If you want to argue that it's only our petulant desire for conclusions that drives our use of the Razor, fine, but as I said without conclusions we die and a theory that kills the theorizer is rather useless. 

It seems that since LJoll claims he basis everything on his instincts it look like his only criteria for whether we are wrong is whether what we say and argue conforms to his feeling. If not, then I guess we're 'wrong'. Unfortunately for him almost all of his criticism rely on the concepts he is trying to disregard: Occam's razor, induction, etc. And furthermore, without reason we cannot even engage in discourse because without it all we get is individuals throwing out their feeling hoping someone else's feelings agrees with them.

I just gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you weren't making a circular argument.Stop trying to use induction to prove the value of occam's razor and then use occam's razor to solve the problem of occam's razor, because that is what you're essentially doing.

All I am saying is occam's razor is not something that is either true or false. Saying occam's razor is true/false makes no sense. The question is whether it is useful.

 

 

I think you have an extremely narrow defintion of rational. Can you clarify how you are defining the term and give an example of how we can rationally know something.

No it doesn't. If both explanations made the same predictions, it would be true that choosing the simpler theory would prove to be more useful on a practical level. Yet there are an infinite number of theories that are underdetermined by our observations, which make an infinite number of different prediction. It does not follow that the theory that is simplest to use will prove to be the most useful. 

If it makes exactly the same predictions, then it it will have exactly the same outcomes, and if it is simpler to use, then it IS more useful.

Now if something changes, we will then re-examine our options, and test the alternatives again.

Until that happens, what do you propose we do? Since by definition you are referring to some totally unpredictable change, both in when it might occur and in the nature of the changes, we have no basis for deciding in advance how we should make allowance for it.

So 'business as usual', in the absence of any possible alternative plan, or even evidence of such thing has ever happened, or is likely to happen, is a totally rational strategy.

And I massively agree with the point that the practical truth is the one which, virtually by definition, is the one we should, and normally do, care about.

Sounds like you have been reading way too much philosophy. 

Which most emphatically a rational conclusion, based on available evidence, or lack thereof. Logic only has value to check for logical inconsistencies, it can only show that some conclusion must be false, it cannot show what is true. There is no logic showing that the decision 'business as usual' is wrong, therefore logic DOES NOT AND CANNOT show that such a judgement is 'bad', or even ill-advised, therefore it is not irrational. 'Logic' cannot show any more than this.

You would only be justified in saying this decision was irrational if it was explicitly more likely to lead to situations that we would find unpleasant than some other strategy. Reason tells us that we have no material evidence for our reason to act on, with regard to the speculation that something totally unprecedented and unpredictable may happen tomorrow, therefore it is reasonable not to take such speculation into account in reasoning about what to do next. Labelling such reasoning as irrational is a very peculiar use of the term, IMHO.

You continue to bang on with the same tired set of assertions without seeming to address our detailed counter arguments, it seems to me.

You say you accept induction, etc in practice, so all that we have established so far is that you are obsessed over the problem of our decisions being not based on ultimate Truth, or perfect knowledge, or so0me such philosophical concern. OK, your instinct is to agonise over this, ours are that we don't care.

At the same time you do seem to be using some important words in highly idiosyncratic ways, so apart from questions of individual differences of outlook and 'instinct', I think we have a consensus that your reasoning is flawed, or at least only meaningful within the context of your own particular set of instincts.

You're right.  Here is how he is using the term:

So, according to Hume, induction cannot produce absolute certainty.  I would add that there is no mode of thought that can do that, as demonstrated by the brain-in-a-vat problem.

However, also according to Hume, using induction to draw conclusions and guide behaviour is not only valid and rational, but necessary.

Therefore, atheists are not irrational in their induction-based beliefs, and can safely accuse theists of irrationality when they refuse to acknowledge conclusions that are based on correct use of induction. Certainly theists have no superior mode of reasoning to back up their claims.

So can we put this put to bed this claim that atheists are somehow acting irrationally when they use induction to support their claims? 

 

P1 If you don't observe Occam's Razor and induction you die.

P2 It is reasonable to attempt to stay alive.

P3 It is reasonable to observe Occam's Razor and induction. (P1, P2)

  Or

P1 The proper use of reason is to arrive at correct conclusions.

P2 We cannot avoid error without the use of Occam's Razor and induction. 

P3 We must use Occam's Razor and induction to make proper use of reason. (P1, P2) 

 

There's another thing that bothers me about this so-called problem of induction: it assumes that we occupy a special place in time. We know, because we can observe, that every time someone in the past used induction correctly, it worked. What has changed between then and now? Why was it correct for them to make that assumption, but not us?

For those who might be tempted to point to our position in the present, rather than the past, and say that the present is somehow different, I would reply that we are not conscious of the present and never work within it. Our entire outlook, even when we are thinking as fast as we can, is situated moments behind our local "present," which is a one-dimensional point in time anyway and can't really be said to exist except in the most technical sense anyway. So we are here at our point in the past saying that we should make different assumptions than other people in the past.

So when the induction skeptic says "Yes, it worked before, but how do you know it's going to work next time?" I think the burden rests on the skeptic to show how "next time" is different from "last time." Obviously we are talking about two different points in time as measured from some relative point in the past, but there needs to be some explantion put forth for why the skeptic thinks that that difference alone (which is only an artifact of our perceptions of position and velocity relative to other things, not an absolute value) should act as a force on the workings of the universe.    

And of course LJoll went way off the deep end if claiming that there is 'no empirical evidence supporting the value of induction'.

How about Exhibit 1: the current state of Science and Technology.... 

Gonna have to call pot and kettle here too, Bob.

If a Christian stepped up here in this forum and said, "we know the Bible is true because the Bible says so," we'd all be waiting in line to point out the circular argument.

But here you have seemingly claimed "Science is true because the scientific evidence says so" without apparently recognizing that it's precisely the same kind of reasoning.

I personally wouldn't agree with the statement 'there is no empirical evidence to support the value of induction,' because it's too imprecise ('value' by what standard?). But I would support the statement 'there is no definitive evidence to support the correctness of induction.' 

That's right, this whole debate only broke out because LJoll made some rather inflammatory remarks back at the start of the thread to the effect that atheists should stop trying to claim the rational high ground on theists when we use induction to back our claims. The upshot of what he's saying appears to be that the basis for inductive claims is just as arbitrary as the basis for faith-based claims...which is pure TAG.

I've been a little sidetracked in the discussion, though, because I really think that any logical proposition that leads us into the kind of egregious empirical error that the problem of induction does, points to a problem with the proposition and not the empirical evidence of our senses. I think the fact that induction has never failed, ever, totally trumps whatever game with language and math we are able to play that shows that it might fail, or that we should not have confidence that it won't fail. Making arguments from these kinds of games is a waste of everyone's time. I think a logician's energy would be better spent developing a new logic that eliminates the problem of induction.

I really fight the tendency of hairsplitting philosophers to define what we can say we know only in terms of what we can prove with a math formula. We know that which informs our behaviour. If we can bet our life on the truth of a proposition, over and over, and still keep on living, day after day, then in my books we are logically justified in holding to that proposition. Word games that say we aren't are just proof, IMO, of the flexibility of the human imagination and it's apparently infinite capacity for generating bullshit. 

Again, your missing the point here. No one is denying the tentative nature of induction, in fact we are highlighting it. The question we are discussing (which seems lost to you) is whether we are justified in holding to induction... is it rational to do so? We are saying it is. LJoll is saying it isn't. You seems to agree with us when you say that: "A system of thinking that doesn't allow for the problem of induction isn't rational anymore". So you agree that induction is rational, because to not use it would be irrational.

I'm gonna call strawman here. No one states this, and even is peope have said things similar to this, they do so tentativly. They are not asserting a dogmatic, closed conclusion, but rather a rational position that will change according to the evidence.

We tend to say things like:

- There is no evidence that god exists, therefore [it is justified/rational to hold that] he does not.

- The only possible rational conclusion, given the lack of evidence, is that god does not exist.

- The supernatural cannot be defined or describe (by defintion), therefore god claims relying on supernaturalism are incoherent

None of these statements are dogmatic/closed assertion. They are tentative conclusions based on the avaliable information.

I see this problem as being separate from the problem of induction we have been discussing. LJoll, as I understand it, has been arguing that we can't be certain that anything, even the most basic forces of nature, will work the same from one moment to the next, even given identical circumstances. He isn't saying that they will change because x,y and z will happen to change them. He's going farther and saying that our assumption of uniformity is baseless. To me, this means that the laws of nature could change spontaneously and without the presence of some added element or force that we've overlooked. The argument is that chaos may persist, we just haven't observed it so far.

What you are describing is a circumstance in which a conclusion is drawn based on incomplete data, then more data comes along to overturn it. Nothing in this suggests that the universe is anything other than orderly nor that anything works in any way other than the way we expect it to work. You are pointing to uncertainty, not a problem with induction.

I don't pretend to be a philosopher so maybe I'm wrong about which of these represents induction as it is commonly understood, but I'm just saying that these two things seem to me to very different. 

The reasoning didn't produce the error — bad data did. There was nothing wrong with using the inductive processes that were used. The problem occured because the full degree of uncertainty was not understood and accounted for in the process of assigning a margin of error to the inductive conclusion. 

I think uncertainty and the problem of induction are two different things.

Agree with this.  

This frustrates me, and it's arguments along this line that have kept atheists dancing to the theist tune for a long time. Whenever we water down our rhetoric and kowtow to these niggling philosophical word games we accomplish nothing politically except to give theists hope that they have some loophole and to confuse fence-sitters into thinking we're losing the argument.

I think there is a difference between philosophical speech and political speech and this, being an activist website, tends to have a lot of political speech. Philosophical speech may be about what is strictly true, and therefore needs to be very precise and careful and technical  — similar to scientific speech. But political speech is supposed to address that which motivates us to action. And the fact of the matter, from the perspective of behaviour and real, living beliefs, is that all of those statements are true. No one can deny the truth of those statements by advocating their opposite and claim intellectual honesty.

 Things for which we have no evidence should not be deemed to exist. There should be no quibble about this and no need to qualify the statement. The technical point that we can't know is just that — a technical point born of endless, pointless navel-gazing. Not one single person out of the nuthouse actually lives as if there are real things around that we just can't sense, theists included. Oh, they say they do and they pretend to talk to invisible beings, but all these observances are carefully limited to areas of their lives where their "faith" can't really make any difference. They sure as hell don't rely on God when it comes time to punish sinners. They seem quite clear about the need to rely on their own, evidence-based, materialistically justified hands and eyes and tongues when it is time to do that.

The only possible rational conclusion is that God does not exist. Anyone who claims to harbour a rational belief in God is lying to themselves and others. Their belief in this regard is not held on the same rational grounds that they hold every other belief in their lives. They cannot explain why the God idea merits this special treatment, and when you really analyze their responses it always comes down to a set of irrational, wish-fulfillment motivations. I have not yet seen a rational argument for the existence of God that holds water, only appeals to faith and ignorance. Therefore, as far as I'm concerned, it is irrational to conclude that God exists.

If part of our definition of what it means to exist is that the object can be described, and if God fails this test, then God does not exist, pure and simple. If God is really an incoherent concept that can be shown to actually mean nothing, then God = nothing. Why would we back away from this stance, which is true every time we apply it to anything? Where is the value in noting that we have somehow fallen short of pure deductive truth, when we can use this truth every day and never be steered wrong? 

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great for philosophers to continue to try to wrestle with these questions, but an activist website needs to take the philosophy and turn it into language that will motivate action. You and I an everyone here knows that if you live your life as if those three points are true, you will not be in error. For political speech, that is the test and that is enough. 

A bit. The positions are not equal in any way shape or form.

If we dont trust induction and dont use it we get very bad results in our decisions and tend to end up dead.

If we do use induction nd trust we might sometimes get things wrong but on the whole it works very well indeed. 

If our goal is to make good decisions and to not end up dead very quickly then the proven rational thing to do is to trust induction. There is simply mountains of evidence that induction works. So the "assumption" that it works is really a very stringly justfied belief. Its not really much of an assumption.

 

I see the fundamental problem here that there are literally infinitely many things which may be true, so that is actually a recipe for a total intellectual log-jam.

It seems to a better use of our reasoning to assume (non-trivial) propositions to be false until some positive evidence suggests they make have something going for them - not necessarily 'true' either, that is not relevant, just not impossible, and having some minimal support.

This does not stop us speculating or hypothesising about possibilities, so it doesn't lead to ignorance. It is the mistake of the Theists to jump from a speculation that is particularly appealing to an assumption of its truth, without worrying about looking for evidence, or considering all the alternatives.

When approaching a bridge, scepticism would not point automatically to an assumption that it was not safe, only to a specific claim that it was 'perfectly safe' when there were other grounds to be suspicious, like the age and/or apparent state of disrepair. Skepticism would be just as appropriate about an assertion that a perfectly sound-looking bridge was on the brink of collapse.

 

Oh, I see what I may have said wrong here. In the quotation you've cited, I've said that "false until shown true" is a path to ignorance, and yet, at the same time, I would say to a Christian, "I don't believe in your God because there is no reason to believe in your God."

 So taking my quote as it stands, I would be calling myself ignorant. True.

 

I don't think there is disagreement, I think I've just worded my post in a troublesome way that I no longer like. I've tried to put all claims up against the same rule, but what I'm essentially saying is this: reason (induction included) is a human faculty. It exists to assist humans in making decisions. Whether or not the human using induction comes to a decision that is true or false, if he is using induction well, then he is being rational. The truth of his conclusion has little to do with it.

As you've pointed out in your response, the theist tends to cherry pick the evidence he uses to inductively skip to his desired conclusion. But if he was to use induction responsibly, testing the conclusion against all offered evidence and being honest with himself, he would probably find that he is more agnostic about the question than he realizes. 

 The bridge is a bad example, I admit, in comparison to the question of a god's existence because the bridge spiel is all about secondary qualities and can be completely arbitrary (dangerous for a 300 pound man, but safe for an 80 pound child).

Take away all my prattling and blabbing and bad analogies, and what I'm saying is simply that if a person is being rational, it doesn't matter if his accepted conclusion is actually true, it only matters how he came to that conclusion and how he persists (or not, when appropriate) in holding to that conclusion.

It doesn't matter if the claim "the sun will rise tomorrow" is actually true. It only matters why a person would hold to that conclusion. If they came to that conclusion by making good and responsible use of evidence and if they allow for the possibility that they might someday be proven wrong, then they are rational. If they came to that conclusion irresponsibly (well, he told me that it will rise tomorrow, and he seemed like a smart guy) and don't allow for the possibility that they might be proven wrong, then they are being irrational.

If you were a doctor, it's not about whether the patient lives or dies, it's about how you conducted your practice, regardless.

If you were a judge or jury, it's (unfortunately) not about whether the accused is innocent or guilty, it's about how you go about making the decision.

Being rational is not necessarily the same thing as being right. So even though induction can be wrong, and definitely is sometimes, the conclusions made by induction can still be considered rational, even when they are wrong.

 Okay, hopefully I've got the kinks out.

Still problems? 

 

 

You're as intellectually dishonest as any Christian. You accuse Christians in believing in a "God of the gaps', but you're a rationalist of the gaps. You assume that a gap in our knowledge will lead to evidence for what you intuitively believe to be true, if it is given enough rational scrutinty (which, while in theory you praise, you seem to deem superfluous in practice).

 

You're are the only one that keeps brining up certainty. You have a sort of faith that after absolute certainty is abandoned, all your instincts and beliefs will be shown to be the most rational thing possible. How do you justify, on the basis of reason and empricism, that the world will probably stay the same? How do you show that, while it may not be certain, it's a pretty safe bet?

Well the thing is I don't derive our idea and belief from intuition (at least not all of them as you're proposing). In case you haven't realised science produces some of the most counter-productive ideas.
Secondly, it seems to be lost to you that you should proportion your belief to the available evidence, hence when when evidence is lacking the rational thing to do is to proportion the belief to the evidence.

Here's the thing.... we've no reason at all to assume induction doesn't work. So the burden of proof is on YOU to demonstrate why we should doubt induction. We know induction works, and we've no reason to hold this will change so the most parsimonious position to take it to hold that it will remain the same. We know induction is a "pretty safe bet" given the fact is has always worked combined the fact we've no reason to assume it will not work. Doubting it for the sake of doubting it is nothing more than pseudoscepticism, pseudophilosophy.

The changing nature of Science and Technology, which is both historically and currently, a continual growth in the breadth and depth of our ability to explain and predict reality, is precisely the point.

That process is founded on inductive reasoning. So unless you deny that Science has allowed us to improve our ability to cure diseases, and do more things we would like to do than before, in what sense is that not empirical evidence for the 'value of induction'?

Your failure to see 'a universal, unchanging set of physical laws that will remain the same for all time' is not relevant to above statement - it is a separate, mainly philosophical, point. There may or may not be such an ultimate set of laws. Allwe need is to establish and refine a system which reflects, or is analogous to, major aspects of that ultimate set, to allow a coherent and useful system of theories which themselves reflect the nature of reality adquately for our purposes.

You are confusing functional with eternal.

Ok, I just want to add some stuff, as I recently had a discussion on IRC that pretty closely resembles what went on in this thread. I haven't read enough philosophy, so I sort of violated the rule not to engage in subjects where one is ignorant. Turns out, it didn't go that badly. (Conversation edited for space, clarity, humor and names are changed to protect the guilty).

 

 

Yes, you know the type. The philosophically inclined christian theist. Same mistakes, but much better at verbose vomit and high levels of rationalizing ability. If he payed attention in class (and if I knew at the time), Hume himself solved this "problem". I don't claim to know the future with absolute certainty (which I pointed out repeatedly), I just recognize that induction appears to work in the real world. I can't prove a priori that the future will behave like the past. But that doesn't mean I can't say anything about the world, since I recognize the concept of probabilities.

 

 

At this point, I'm getting quite frustrated with the nonsense. I don't even know if what he appears to be assuming about empiricism is true. The "empiricism is self-refuting", I just stared at that one with a glazed look.

 

 

Besides his constant whining about absolutes, here's where I'm not so sure about my own reasoning. My ultimate motivation for holding to empiricism/rationalism is that it works and gives me actual knowledge about the real world. I call this "pragmatism". Which would make it a label, not a method for gaining knowledge. "test pragmatism" would then make no sense. I guess I'm wondering where the error lies in my or his thinking. On the surface, it can seem circular, I admit. Any ideas or comments? This one has been bothering me a little.

 

At least I got the last word

 

He didn't seem to understand that his claim that god is foundational is also circular, which is what he accuses you of betraying. "He commits the crime he imputes."

Pragmatism is antifoundationalist. The objection that your pragmatism lacks a foundation is not an objection but merely an acknowledgment of what you already know (or at least suspect, since you are a pragmatist).