It sounds like you are trying to rescue induction from Hume’s argument that it has no basis in logic. “The future will be like the past because in the past the future was like the past” is a circular argument. He was the first to really make that point. Immanuel Kant spent years spinning elaborate philosophy to try to defeat that argument. Immanuel Kant, like lots of people, had a deep need for universal closure.
An easier way to go is to overcome your need for universal closure.
Induction is not logically justified, but you can make a different argument. You could point out that creatures who ignore the apparent patterns in nature tend to die pretty quick. Induction is a behavior that seems to help us stay alive. That’s pretty good. That’s why people can’t just wave their hands and claim reality is whatever anyone believes—if they do that, they will discover that acting on that belief won’t necessarily, say, win them the New York lottery.
My concern with your argument is, again, structural. You are talking about “gray”, and then you link that to probability. Wait a minute, that oversimplifies the metaphor. You present the idea of gray as a one-dimensional quantity, similar to probability. But when people invoke “gray” in rhetoric they are simply trying to say that there are potentially many ways to see something, many ways to understand and analyze it. It’s not a one-dimensional gray, it’s a many dimensional gray. You can’t reduce that to probability, in any actionable way, without specifying your model.
Here’s the tactic I use when I’m trying to stand up for a distinction that I want other people to accept (notice that I don’t need to invoke “reality” when I say that, since only theories of reality are available to me). I ask them to specify in what way the issue is gray. Let’s distinguish between “my spider senses are telling me to be cautious” and “I can think of five specific factors that must be included in a competent analysis. Here they are...”
In other words, don’t deny the gray, explore it.
A second tactic I use is to talk about the practical implications of acting-as-if a fact is certain: “I know that nothing can be known for sure, but if we can agree, for the moment, that X, Y, and Z are ‘true’ then look what we can do… Doesn’t that seem nice?”
I think you can get what you want without ridiculing people who don’t share your precise worldview, if that sort of thing matters to you.
But let’s really look at the statement “The future will be like the past because in the past the future was like the past.”
If by “like the past,” do we mean obey the same physical laws?
If we do, then I think what we’re trying to estimate is the chance, over a specified time frame, that the physical laws will change.
The problem then reduces to the problem of drawing red and blue marbles out of a hat. We can look at all the available time frames that we have “drawn” up to this point and get a confidence estimate on how likely it is that the physical laws will change over the next “draw” of the time frame
It sounds like you are trying to rescue induction from Hume’s argument that it has no basis in logic. “The future will be like the past because in the past the future was like the past” is a circular argument. He was the first to really make that point. Immanuel Kant spent years spinning elaborate philosophy to try to defeat that argument. Immanuel Kant, like lots of people, had a deep need for universal closure.
An easier way to go is to overcome your need for universal closure.
Induction is not logically justified, but you can make a different argument. You could point out that creatures who ignore the apparent patterns in nature tend to die pretty quick. Induction is a behavior that seems to help us stay alive. That’s pretty good. That’s why people can’t just wave their hands and claim reality is whatever anyone believes—if they do that, they will discover that acting on that belief won’t necessarily, say, win them the New York lottery.
My concern with your argument is, again, structural. You are talking about “gray”, and then you link that to probability. Wait a minute, that oversimplifies the metaphor. You present the idea of gray as a one-dimensional quantity, similar to probability. But when people invoke “gray” in rhetoric they are simply trying to say that there are potentially many ways to see something, many ways to understand and analyze it. It’s not a one-dimensional gray, it’s a many dimensional gray. You can’t reduce that to probability, in any actionable way, without specifying your model.
Here’s the tactic I use when I’m trying to stand up for a distinction that I want other people to accept (notice that I don’t need to invoke “reality” when I say that, since only theories of reality are available to me). I ask them to specify in what way the issue is gray. Let’s distinguish between “my spider senses are telling me to be cautious” and “I can think of five specific factors that must be included in a competent analysis. Here they are...”
In other words, don’t deny the gray, explore it.
A second tactic I use is to talk about the practical implications of acting-as-if a fact is certain: “I know that nothing can be known for sure, but if we can agree, for the moment, that X, Y, and Z are ‘true’ then look what we can do… Doesn’t that seem nice?”
I think you can get what you want without ridiculing people who don’t share your precise worldview, if that sort of thing matters to you.
Well, it has helped us to stay alive in the past, though there’s no reason to expect that to continue...
But let’s really look at the statement “The future will be like the past because in the past the future was like the past.”
If by “like the past,” do we mean obey the same physical laws?
If we do, then I think what we’re trying to estimate is the chance, over a specified time frame, that the physical laws will change.
The problem then reduces to the problem of drawing red and blue marbles out of a hat. We can look at all the available time frames that we have “drawn” up to this point and get a confidence estimate on how likely it is that the physical laws will change over the next “draw” of the time frame