Induction is Wrong. A lot

Michael Philp:Optical illusions tell us that our senses and our perceptual mechanism have a nature and identity. Apparent contradictions between percepts and what we think we are seeing.
Ed Thompson: I  agree with Michael P. that illusions actually illuminate a counter-intuitive, underlying objectivity to sense-perception.

Eliot Temple: "What most people mean by "induction" varies a great deal.  Most professional philosophers ...  Most people ...  Another option ...   I recently spoke with some Objectivists ...  One strategy is to elicit from people *their* ideas about induction, then address those. That poses several problems. For one thing, it means you have to write a personalized response to each ...  How do you argue with people who have only a vague notion of what "induction" is...  "

I believe that you’ve made an excellent point in stating that Bacon attacked the Aristotelians of his day; there might be a ‘true’ Aristotle that’s left standing after the polemic is over.

This is because even though he was a fierce polemicist, Bacon was far more concerned in going after ideas than people.

For example, there was a ‘Paduan school’ that he simply left alone, because they wrote long essays on the ‘real’ inductiveness of Aristotle’s science. Those whom he attacked were of the more orthodox sort: deduction works because things present themselves to the senses as they actually are.

Well, not, said Bacon.

Central to the issue is Bacon’s observation that things do not necessarily present themselves as true. The Aristotelian model (accepted by Rand) says, basically, that if you observe properly and think properly, you’ll derive truth.

Transcribed into a philosophy of language, this indicates that a language- based concept adheres to its object as real. This new position was taken up and re-developed by Kripke

(Now Rand discusses this position in what I’ve seen as rather indirect, yet assertive. I’m still looking for specifics…)

Bacon’s response to either Aristotle or his scholastic followers was, in a nutshell, “The New Method”, or not the Aristotelian business as usual. On a more personal note, Bacon penned the famous expression, ‘Crooked Mirror’ to contradict Aristotle’s own ‘Tabula Rasa’.

In any case, ‘method’ means to devise a way of doing something, or performing any task, that doesn’t come naturally. So herein lies the rub. Science needs a method because normative thought is inadequate.

The key word to this process, as given,  is induction. No telos or formal cause can offer us a deductive indicator.

That science isn’t like daily thinking through somewhat resembles the recent work of Kahneman and Tversky. Normally, we use heuristics, science demands more. ‘Method’, in any case, would be a way of ensuring that one doesn’t lapse back into said heuristics.

Most all of philosci discussion begins with this critique of thought that began with Bacon. Science is a rig-up, a procedure that tries to isolate us against common bias, of which Bacon said there are three.

In this light, Popper‘s just another amendment, important as he might be. Induction presupposes far too much. If everyone inducts, yet comes up with different results, then of what use is the term…etc…? Well, let’s see if the researcher offered us data that was falsifiable….

On and on…assuming interest. Cartwright, for example, is big on saying that laws of science lie because of the extraordinary nature of the rig-ups we have to perform. What we do is develop ‘simulacra’. For her, cause always relates back to use, because that’s the only realistic standard we have.

Lastly, because Rand accepted both the Aristotelian model of science and language, her notion of ‘induction’ must be somewhat different than that defined by Bacon. Again, for him, we induct because concepts don’t just naturally adhere to things. We have to find a method to make it so.

Eva