Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The chief characteristic of inference in the exact sciences, the characteristic of which Greek logicians tried to give a theoretical account when they formulated the rules of the syllogism, is a kind of logical compulsion whereby a person who makes certain assumptions is forced, simply by so doing, to make others. He has freedom of choice in two ways: he is not compelled to make the initial assumption (a fact technically expressed by saying that 'the starting-points of demonstrative reasoning are not themselves demonstrable'), and when once he has done so he is still at liberty, whenever he likes, to stop thinking. What he cannot do is to make the initial assumption, to go on thinking, and to arrive at a conclusion different from that which is scientifically correct. In what is called 'inductive' thinking there is no such compulsion. The essence of the process, here, is that having put certain observations together, and having found that they make a pattern, we extr...

In this post . In fact, we have an equivalence: "The principle of conservative induction is true" and "the laws of nature are eternal" are simply two ways of saying the same thing.

without realizing it. I recall a humorous instance when one of my Popperian friends in London chastised me for moving to Hackney. "Don't you realize how high the crime rate is there?" "[INSERT NAME HERE]," I replied, "you're not suggesting that, because the crime rate was high there until today, it will continue to be high there tomorrow, are you? Because that sounds a lot like an inductive inference." Of course, no one could make it through the day without making continual inductive inferences, so of course Popperians make them all of the time... even when trying to refute the idea that inductive inference is necessary. Take Lee Kelly, responding to my previous post on Popper : (1) A theory which is falsified by some observation-statement today is still falsified by it tomorrow, next week, a month later, and forever after. This is not induction. The falsifying relation is deductive and timeless–to say that it will continue to hold in the ...

The statement in the title is true in a number of ways, but here is a very simple argument. Let us say we have decisively "falsified" a theory: rocks float on water, perhaps. So, per Popper, we now abandon that theory, and come up with a new bold conjecture. Well, this abandonment depends entirely on an inductive inference! In fact, it depends on the principle of "conservative induction" being true: more of the same . Unless that is the case, why should the theory having been falsified today having anything whatsoever to do with whether we should employ it tomorrow ? Imagine that, instead, the principle of revolutionary induction is true: time for a change . In that case, the fact that our theory was falsified today should give us great hope for the theory tomorrow. And if that principle is true, then we should abandon all of our theories that have not been falsified right away! So, falsification, far from solving the "problem" of induction by el...