honorentheos wrote:I was wondering if you could clarify something further for me. I didn't really see MFB respond directly to your question about induction, instead appealing to the Duhem-Quine Thesis.
To be honest, I have no idea where mfbukowski was going with that, since I’m curious how one would reason from recalcitrant experiences.
honorentheos wrote:M1: A person who applies Moroni’s promise will know that the Book of Mormon is true scripture from God.
A natural, a priori hypothesis that follows from the above could be-
M2: All people who do not know that the Book of Mormon is true scripture from God have not applied Moroni’s promise.
M1 is not logically equivalent to M2, it should be this:
M2: A person who doesn’t apply Moroni’s promise will not know that the Book of Mormon is true from God.
In any case, your examples show that anything can be added to M1 to save it from a counter-instance like Runtu, to the point that it becomes a self fulfilling. Text book Ad Hoc.
honorentheos wrote:I was wondering how does the above get around the issue of falsifiability? If a person can simply continue to modify their hypothesizes to continually account for conflicting data, what does this say about the value of this philosophical worldview? If no individual hypothesis can be falsified, can the underlying experientially gained "truth" be said to be falsifiable even if early versions of the M1/M2 are contradicted by experience?
Or does falsifiability matters?
Falsification matters, but not as much as most people think.
As I pointed out in another post, induction has it’s problems, it’s not rendered useless, but it can’t be used alone. All the various problems get put under an umbrella term called “under-determination” which speaks to no matter how many observations we make, the evidence will never be good enough to justify a belief.
I think mfbukowski has created a system of thought that relies only on experience, in which the only way he can reason from said experiences is with induction, and that under-determination forces him to reject just about everything, because there is simply no criteria to honestly say, “ This works.” I’m sure he’ll disagree with that, but he’s affirmed it over and over, and until I can read a more in-depth explanation from him, it’s all I have to go off of. I don’t see how an appeal to Quine does anything in this case, because we are right back to reasoning from recalcitrant experiences.
Popper decided that induction could do nothing for us, so the best criteria was falsification. He’d spent some time in Vienna listening to Freudians and Marxists creating ‘just so’ stories (Ad Hoc) to always make the world fit their grand theories, so he came up with falsification in response. Good idea, but it suffers from two errors.
First, is that if you take under-determination as seriously as Popper did, you can’t actually do much with probability, meaning that if a theory survives, that’s just it, it survives and it doesn’t tell us if a theory is more probable or not. It tells us what’s wrong, but not what is right.
Second, the more complex a proposition becomes, the harder it is to show false. If we wanted to say that 98% of all Ravens are black, we’d have to account for every raven alive, which is just not possible.