| | Popper came up with many refutations of induction. That made it hard to come up with a new one. But I managed it:
Deutsch, Popper, and Feynman aren't inductivists. I could add more people to this list, like me. So here we see a clear pattern of people not being inductivists. There's a bunch of data points with a certain thing in common (a person not being inductivist). Let's apply induction to this pattern. So we extrapolate the general trend: induction leads us to conclude against induction. Oh no, a contradiction! I guess we'll have to throw out induction.
Q&A:
Q: Your data set is incomplete. A: All data sets are incomplete.
Q: Your data set isn't random. A: No data sets are entirely random.
Q: I have an explanation of why your method of selecting data points leads to a misleading result. A: That's nice. I like explanations.
Q: Don't you care that I have a criticism of your argument? A: I said we should throw out induction. As you may know, I think we should use an explanation-focussed approach. I took your claim to have an explanation, and lack of claim to have induced anything, as agreement.
Q: But how am I supposed to object to your argument using only induction? Induction isn't a tool for criticizing invalid uses of induction. A: So you're saying induction cannot tell us which inductions are true or false. We need explanation to do that. So induction is useless without explanation, but explanation is not useless without induction.
Q: That doesn't prove induction is useless. A: Have you ever thought about how much of the work, in a supposed induction, is done by induction, and how much by explanation?
Q: No. A: Try it sometime.
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