No, just the possibility of it being wrong is enough. On the other hand, to back up induction as valid you need induction
I assume you are meaning that likelihood is subjective, is that so? Some people try to use probability or likelihood as objective tho. Without talking about certainty, belief is being prejudiced against the contrary being true. Do you agree?
Anyway, you can dispense with belief, I think. That’s why I -partly- disagree with Bayesianism. I’d like to discuss what you mean by probability in Probability - #6 by pseudoai
Anyway, usefulness is not a measure in here, since even things that make no sense can be very useful. Say, astrology. “Effectiveness” or its prospect doesn’t justify it.
For example, given all fair coins in the world, there is at least one such that when you flip that coin and it falls heads, Los Angeles Lakers wins the next match, and when it doesn’t, the Lakers don’t win. If you bet according to it, you’ll win lots of money. Now, that makes such a coin very useful, yet it is baseless to bet according to it.
You can plan according to induction, same as betting on the coin, but it doesn’t make it logically sound.
I think you wanted to point out where you thought there were beliefs. Let’s explore the one you say is the strongest case. Is that a prejudice towards that not being the case? Could it be something else?
Did I quote anything you said that you don’t believe is true?
And then a slightly different tack? Do you ever plan based on liklihood?
Like you look out the window, see the thermometer says -3, so you decide to wear your winter coat, despite knowing that we have no information about the future and the universe could end or their could be an anomalous burst of heat and it will be 65F when you go out.
I would say I believe it will be cold when I go out. This is based on induction. I think this gives me a good sense of what will happen. I’d be thrilled if it turns out to be 65 and yes, I’d have to go back.
How do you navigate such things. Are you different? Do you choose what you wear assuming you cannot know anything about the future?
Do you take your passport to the airport, so far, they always want to check this on international flights and at destinations? or do you go random, take it some times, sometimes not?
Do you never use induction?
Or you use induction but you avoid the word believe? You never say I believe I will need my passport. I believe it is very likely I will need it.
In philosophy the word belief does not mean 100%. And in every day parlance it doesn’t either.
I find the word useful and people know what I mean, for the most part. And I find the past to give me a decent sense of what is coming in many situations. It seems to produce some nice technology also, like what we are using. Tech built based on tech.
Sure, perhaps I have been running on a long lucky streak or my memory is utterly fallible and induction will be meaningless and planning will always be hubris, even if I am thinking in terms of liklihood. I’ll do my best to adapt then.
If you doubt something then you hold a belief as to its not being the case. You may not be 100% convinced but as I said above we are rarely if ever at a level of 100% certainty. That kind of certainty is not the point.
“I doubt you will understand the point of what I just wrote here.” ← this means I hold in my mind a belief (with a corresponding assessment of its likelihood of being the case) that you will not understand what I wrote. The ‘doubt’ is still a belief about something and all beliefs possess content as being ABOUT something. That last part is what I mean about beliefs being affirmative statements: each belief has a content X and is AFFIRMING SOMETHING ABOUT that X. The thing it is affirming about X may be a “negative” quality such as “is not the case”, but the X is still there as the subject.
I think this is part of the root of the problem. Some people think ‘belief’ and ‘I believe’ indicate certainty. In philosophy this is just not how the word is used. In everyday speech ‘belief’ can mean something like this and it can mean something with degrees of certainty.
Yes, unless doubt is merely an emotional experience, it has reasons for doubting and those are believed in. X might happen. There is a chance that. You cannot be certain. Here is a weakness in your justification for the belief. Once skepticism justifies the doubt, it has made assertions, at the very least of possibility and/or what we can know. That can be fine if you are occasionally skeptical. But radical skepticism means that all of those assertions, implicit or open, cannot be trusted either.
No. If I doubt the sun will rise tomorrow, I don’t believe the sun will not rise tomorrow. Plus, you don’t even need to doubt to be skeptical, just not assume more than what you can humble assert with logically sound reason.
For example, if you say the coin may land heads, and the coin may land tails… do you hold any belief there? Would that be contradictory, in your view?
Imagine being this stupid. This is why I limit my interactions with people like you, who cannot even fathom basic logic and understanding. But hey, no hard feelings and it’s not personal. I’ve just wasted enough time on this planet already.
Knowledge seems to be a subset of belief. As you said, something like a “justified, true belief”. I don’t believe certainty is attainable. Certainty is an ideal, like exactness, or proof. We can approximate closer to it, but certainty is not a practical goal in any area of inquiry. I don’t even like using the word, to be honest. People abuse and conflate words like “belief”, “faith”, “proof”, and “certainty” because charlatans have blurred the lines in common parlance.
This is what I meant when I spoke about degrees of confidence - gradations of belief along a spectrum according to how confident, or convinced, one is in a given proposition. We do the same thing when referring to degrees of uncertainty or indifference. How often have you heard this qualifying question after learning bad news:
“How bad is it?”
Belief is not boolean, regardless of how much we want it to be. Belief is subject to gradation all the time, for very practical purposes.
I’d be interested to see you propose a better schema. As I mentioned, those states lie on a spectrum. Your change in motivation & attitude in the analogy you provided speaks to the degree of confidence you have in your belief that the students will show up. I think induction is a very practical and powerful tool. We know that it can be wrong, and therefore exploited, but we go on doing it because that is how we make predictions or plan for the future. Bayesianism assigns value to quality of evidence, which is an attempt to standardize degrees of confidence.
Frankly, I don’t know if/how a person could function without induction. I’m willing to bet none of the detractors in this thread can actually tell you how it can be done.
The people in the discussion make no difference. Now, do you think doubting something is assuming the contrary?
@statiktech If you have gradations of belief, and knowledge is justified true belief, you then have gradations of knowledge.
The problem of practicality is that wrong things are practical too. A stopped clock is very precise twice a day. I don’t agree about the bayesian view or probability, and I suppose you agree that people are not needed to do so. Would you say your probability of a scenario is trust or something like that?
It’s not that you don’t bet based on induction, but rather that induction doesn’t entail that something other than induction is impossible.
Probability literally represents a degree of confidence in the likelihood of an event. Baysean analysis assigns probabalistic values to the evidence, which is intended to provide a framework by which we can justify a particular degree of confidence, rather than reducing it to a boolean yes or no. Your statement about needing people for this doesn’t makes sense to me. Who is doing the analysis and assigning the probabilistic values? We are talking about human constructs here, so they do require people, to be sure.
There are absolutely graduations of knowledge. A person can be more or less correct or accurate about something he knows. Do you know your friends the same way you know yourself? Of course not. They are different degrees of knowledge.
When you say “wrong”, do you mean morally or functionally? If the former, then sure, but this is not a discussion about the ethics of induction. If the latter - yes, people make mistakes. However, removing the functionality removes the practicality, so maybe you mean something more akin to “less than optimal”. An act need not be optimal to be practical. That’s what pragmatism is. And guess what? Practicality is subject to gradation as well because, like belief and so much else, it lies on a spectrum. Some things will be more or less practical than others, and we can acknowledge that fact while doing impractical things. We know something is practical when it works.
Also, I don’t think induction can be used to demonstrate impossibility. Ar best, we can develop accurate expectations.
Is someone here saying that something other than induction is impossible? Could you quote them? And unless they said more or less exactly that could you explain your interpretation of what they said after the quote? Maybe you mean that something other than what induction predicts might happen, but pretty much everyone who knows what the word induction means know that. I find it hard to believe you think any thinks only induction exists. They probably think they exist and at least some of their furniture.
That’s why I disagree with bayesianism. Bayesianism and attaching confidence to probability is just one view of it. Could you talk about probability without the need to attach it to confidence?
I got myself confused about the ‘needing people’ too, don’t worry, it indeed doesn’t make sense.
The ‘knowing’ you put forward seems to be rather a mix of knowledge and confidence. Could it be so?
Morality was not at stake here. “Functionally” seems to be another way to say “practical” (and the quotes are there for a reason), which is nothing more than weighing out if something is correct just out of the outcomes (like with a stopped clock). Say you want to get to how much is 1+2, then you go check the first leaf you see and count the corners of it. It has 3, so is it ‘functionally right’, to you?.
Practicality makes no difference here since it’s the same problem - weighing it by results alone (and prior results, which make then no difference to induction).
@greenfuse sorry for being unclear, that was about all those ‘how would you live without induction?’ questions and so.
I’m not sure what ‘that’ refers to in the sentence above. Let me ask another question related to those questions. How come you go to the computer to send messages here (or phone, some digital device)? Why don’t you try typing on the wall? For example. When you feel the desire to engage in the activity, something draws you to go somewhere and use something. As you say: you have no information about the future. So, what leads you to use these digital devices. And hey, I will be very happy if you can type on the wall. I would love it if induction meant nothing, in a certain sense, since the current habits of the universe (and society) include some really, really destructive habits. To put it a bit in the Rupert Sheldrake model.
My irrationality does, for sure. The point being that for sure induction must have either a way to put it rationally and more humble (as I’ve tried before), or just say ‘it’s irrational’… or something in the middle? I don’t have the answers (if I had, I wouldn’t try to exchange ideas). I suppose induction must have a better foundation I’m not seeing
That’s why I disagree with bayesianism. Bayesianism and attaching confidence to probability is just one view of it. Could you talk about probability without the need to attach it to confidence?
That’s an interesting question. I don’t think so, but I am open to to the possibility.
The ‘knowing’ you put forward seems to be rather a mix of knowledge and confidence. Could it be so?
I think knowledge is the set of beliefs we are most confident in, such that we behave as if they are true.
Morality was not at stake here. “Functionally” seems to be another way to say “practical” (and the quotes are there for a reason), which is nothing more than weighing out if something is correct just out of the outcomes (like with a stopped clock). Say you want to get to how much is 1+2, then you go check the first leaf you see and count the corners of it. It has 3, so is it ‘functionally right’, to you?.
Well, “functionally useful” is practical. Functionally wrong could mean inefficient, insufficient, impossible, broken, etc. That’s kind of what I was trying to get an idea of because any of those can make something more or less functionally useful. To be “functionally wrong”, I think most people would assume that means a better tool exists for the job. That doesn’t necessarily mean the tool you have won’t work or is impractical. To dig the most efficient holes, I’d probably want a shovel. But if I am pressed, and don’t need a deep hole, my hands are practical enough. “Functionally right”, in a critical sense, would seem to mean whatever works (to varying degrees). However, I think most people would assume you mean “optimal for the job”. A stopped clock would not be a practical way of telling time just because it can be said to be right twice a day. Pulling arbitrary values from the properties of arbitrary objects I find is not a practical way of doing math.
If you are weighing induction by results alone, then you’d be forced to conclude it is insufficient in itself to produce the most accurate predictions and descriptions of reality. Induction is a method of reasoning and a perfectly rational exercise, but fails where more rigor is required. That’s why we use refining tools like deduction, analogical, and abductive reasoning, among others.
For example, I see probability as a measure of the symmetry of thought scenarios. Statistics is a different thing. There is a probability thread around.
Are you saying it’s impossible not to believe?
Yes, but that entails that the ends justify the means for that to be enough, and it isn’t. I’m not weighing induction by results, since the ends don’t justify the means.
Now that I wrote it that way, this thread may be like saying: “Suppose you meet an alien that is not convinced by logically unsound arguments - how would you convince the alien on using induction?”
Well, I am sort of Sheldrakian. That we can use induction to track habits - but then this might reinforce them - and the universe is actually, at root, vastly more flexible. You can say you are being irrational, but why don’t you stop using induction? Perhaps the reasons you don’t are your answer. If one truly believes we have no information about the future and it would be correct to live without using anything based on induction, why doesn’t anyone try this?
Cards on the table I am actually trying harder than anyone I know to ignore induction, especially about bigger things.
The ends don’t justify the means? How do you mean? If the end goal is being able to function adequately as a human being in the world, then induction is quite justified.
To the alien, I would reply “it’s practical”. Attempting to deduce your way through life will prove quite tedious. Induction can be probable, but not deductively valid.
So probability, to you, measures the distribution of thought paradigms? I could see probability being used to predict such a distribution, but I don’t see why probabilities would be limited to thought.
Are you saying it’s impossible not to believe?
That knowledge is impossible not to believe? If knowledge is a subset of belief, you can’t have knowledge without belief. All thumbs are digits, but not all digits are thumbs. If set A contains set B, then set B necessitates set A. However, we can determine what set A looks like without set B. We can believe that which we don’t know. We can even believe what we can’t know.
As far as I know, don’t use it, but very well could be. Because it’s my best bet at winning? That doesn’t mean it’s valid anyway.
That you cannot justify something out of the result it gets. You have to justify both means and ends, can’t skip one of them. Suppose you say ‘it’s practical’ (it gets to some ends), but since the end don’t justify the means, you’re back at square zero.
No, I didn’t say anything about paradigms even. You have a thought scenario with two outcomes that are the same except for the labeling. Since both have to sum 100%, and are symmetrical, both have to be 50%. I don’t see why probabilities wouldn’t be limited to thought. For example, what is the probability that the outcome will be one you didn’t suppose possible?
No, I was trying to understand you. I asked if, for you, it is impossible to lack belief. Maybe we don’t know. The justified true belief standpoint has its problems, like Gettier cases