The Problem of Induction: Scientists Woes - Article Example

 The Problem of Induction: Scientists’ Woes Abstract The Problem of Induction strikes at the very heart of scientific research and advancement by negating the validity or justification of inferences by induction. Inductive inferences form the basis of scientific universal generalizations and matters of fact. Taken as it is, the problem of induction could lead to a state of pyrrhonism that could bring even day-to-day scientific applications to a stop. This paper examines the Problem of Induction from all aspects, and moots an approach whereby the problem of induction can be fruitfully utilized for the betterment of science and technology. Introduction The Problem of Induction is a philosophical poser which threatens the very foundation of what we know as Universal Generalizations (UGs) (Bebee, 2002) or as what David Hume refers to as ‘matters of fact’ (Johns, 2009). These UGs or matters of fact are the empirical claims that are made in every day life or through scientific methods. Examples can range from something as mundane as the sun rising in the east to more scientific claims such as all free-falling bodies falling with the constant acceleration due to gravitation. All such matters of fact are held to be true mainly by inference or induction. Because we have seen the sun rise in the east every morning, we assume or infer that it had done so even in the past which is beyond the physical experience of human kind as also in the future of which we cannot have any conceivable experience whatsoever. In other words we are extrapolating or interpolating experience to the realms of the unknown. The problem of induction questions whether we can actually arrive at the truth by such inductive reasoning. It identifies a reason void or gap between the cause-and-effect relationship that is at the heart of inductive reasoning. In other words what is inferred from practical observations is not based on reasoning, it is simply a way of saying that since a particular cause is found to produce the same effect from a number of observations, the same cause must have produced the same effect even in a time period when we are unable to observe the cause practically produce the same effect. Although David Hume first presented the problem in the middle of the Eighteenth Century (Hume, 1978), its roots go back to the Pyrrhonism or Pyrrhonian skepticism of ancient philosophy founded by Aenesidemus in the First century BC and recorded by Sextus Empiricus in the in the late Second Century or early Third Century AD Wikipedia (2009). Defining the Problem To define the Problem of Induction, Hume presented two propositions (Johns, 2009) which he remarked were far from being the same: “• I have found that such and such an object has always had such and such an effect. • I foresee that other objects which appear similar will have similar effects.” Hume stated that “the second proposition is always inferred form the first,” and also conceded that he would even grant that the second proposition was rightly inferred, but would never accept that the inference was made by a chain of reasoning: “But if you insist that the inference is made by a chain of reasoning, I challenge you to produce the reasoning. The connection between these propositions is not intuitive [i.e. the second doesn’t self-evidently and immediately follow from the first]. If the inference is to be conducted through reason alone, it must be with help from some intermediate step. But when I try to think what that intermediate step might be, I am defeated. Those who assert that it really exists and is the origin of all our conclusions about matters of fact owe us an account of what it is.” Hume knew fully well that there was no ‘intermediate step’, so do we. The inference is based solely on the knowledge that similar causes have similar effects. Without this knowledge, the inference becomes invalid! Now the point is that the knowledge we are speaking of comes from custom or habit, it is not based on intellectual reasoning, or any reasoning for the matter of fact, nor on any process of understanding as it is. “It is (purely) a matter of association of ideas, or behavioral conditioning.” (Johns, 2009) Hume is of the view that unless inferences are deductive i.e. they are logically acceptable, they are not valid. Hume’s Problem of Induction therefore threatens to sweep aside the base repertoire of human knowledge on the following logic: i. Universal generalizations or matters of fact are based on inductive inference ii. It is not possible to logically justify inductive inference iii. Since the universal generalization is based on unjustified inference, it itself is unjustified and cannot be counted as knowledge. It therefore implies that universal generalizations or matters of fact can be classified or categorized as knowledge. The Dilemma of Scientists The problem of induction is unacceptable to scientists simple because of the fact that if they accept it, they will also have to accept that the very basis of all scientific research and studies is false. If scientists are not able to infer conclusions from observable causes and effects, they would have no premises to base their science on. And this would apply not only to scientific research and studies, but to many fields of scientific applications in our day-to-day life. Take medical science for example. Diagnosis of diseases is primarily based on the premise of inductive inference. A disease is inferred inductively from a certain range of symptoms. Clinical observations and tests which are akin to experiments are at the heart of almost all medical diagnosis. This becomes all the more glaring when we go on to specialized branches of medical science such as radiology. Radiology is a diagnostic science that relies heavily on inductive inferences: “Radiology reports exist in order to convey new knowledge about a patient’s condition based on empiric observations from anatomic or functional images of the body. The route to explanation and prediction from empiric evidence is mostly through inference based on inductive (and sometimes abductive) arguments. The conclusions of inductive arguments are, by definition, contingent and provisional.” (Sistrom, 2008) Radiology would therefore lose its utility as a medical tool if we were to go by the problem of induction. So would a wide range of other basic scientific fields such as physics and chemistry which chiefly rely on empirical beliefs based on inductive inferences. The Newton’s Laws of Motion, which forms the very foundation of the study of all kinds of motion and movement, would fall flat on their faces if the problem of induction is to be accepted as it is. Many empirical laws of chemistry are also based on cause-and-effect inferences without any deductive logic in between. Something as simple as identifying a salt by the color produced when a reagent is added would not hold good as per the problem of induction. To sum it up, the problem of induction as propounded by David Hume would wreck havoc in the field of science. But this would be also true even in the case of other fields of studies in social sciences such as economics and civics as these areas of knowledge also depend on empirical formulations which are based on inductive inferences. The problem of induction therefore threatens to annihilate knowledge and turn the world upside down. Workings of the Problem of Induction It is however not that we can discard Hume’s problem of induction out of hand. History bears proof to the temporal nature of what can be termed as inductive inferences. Towards the fag end of the 17th century, scientists buoyed by what they thought to be extraordinary successes, led in a large measure by the theories of Newton, were inclined to believe that they had finally unraveled most if not all the mysteries of life. It was a time when convincing explanations had been forwarded on many intriguing phenomena such as tides, the paths of planets and the behavior of light and sound. Just four centuries later, scientists of the 21st Century tend to think otherwise. They now believe that all those 17th Century theories were false. None of those theories survive today. “Take as an example classical Newtonian mechanics. There never was a more successful theory. If repeated observational success could establish a theory, it would have established Newton's theory. Yet Newton's theory was superseded in the field of astronomy by Einstein's theory and in the atomic field by quantum theory. And almost all physicists think now that Newtonian classical mechanics is no more than a marvellous conjecture, a strangely successful hypothesis, and a staggeringly good approximation to the truth. (Popper, 1974)” This leads us to contemplate on what happens to the empirical laws and theories that we hold to be true today after a couple of centuries. Would there be new findings that would lead to new inductively incurred new empirical laws that could turn the present set of empirical laws on their heads? Is this why induction is a problem? Inferring by induction could have led humankind unwittingly into a vicious cycle of conjectures and approximations in science; approximations and conjectures that are replaced by newer approximation and conjectures arrived at by the same process of inference by induction. Are all the laws and universal generalizations that we hold so sacred not actually matters of fact but rather matters of conjecture? Or for the matter of fact, could the sun not rise in the east tomorrow? One way of trying to tamper down the scepticism in the problem of induction is by introducing want can be termed as conditional inferences from causal observation. A very common example in this case is that of the white swans. When we state that all swans are white by observing a number of swans, we may actually not be aware of a black swan tucked away somewhere in the remote wilderness of the continent of Australia. But if we condition the statement by saying that all swans out of such and such a number of swans observed are white, we are within safe territory. Such an approach would however severely limit the application range of matters of fact and universal generalizations can no more be termed as generalizations as such. Looking at it the other way round, trying to condition inductive inferences would only male them more prone to pyrrhonism. No joking matter There are many who are of the opinion that Hume himself regarded philosophical scepticism as a matter of academic joke. In A Letter from a Gentleman to his friend in Edinburgh, Hume uses the expression jeux d’esprit, and states that, “When he (a person afflicted by Pyrrhonism) wakes from his dreams, he will be the first to join in the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections were mere amusement.(Hume, 1978)” Pyrrhonism only for the sake of amusement, can hardly be a clinching argument, and Hume’s letter can also be interpreted out of context because what Hume had to say on finding a solution to the problem of induction itself bears out that that there is much more to pyrrhonism than mere amusement. Hume had gone on to criticize dogmatic rationalism arguing that plain reasoning alone does not suffice to arrive at unique answers to scientific questions. It is at this junction that the Immanuel Kant’s famous claim of the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge comes into play. In his book Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines a priori knowledge as knowledge that is independent of experience. “Kant allows, however, that a priori knowledge (like all knowledge) can only exist after experience has triggered it – it isn’t a matter of temporal order. The idea of a priori knowledge is that the faculty of cognition supplies this knowledge from itself. A priori knowledge may also involve concepts, such as change, that have been acquired from experience (Hume, 1739).” The term ‘synthetic’ is best defined in contrast to the term ‘analytic’. All analytic propositions must be true as a matter of logic. Analytic propositions are often dubbed ‘logical truths’. A proposition is synthetic when it is not analytic i.e. when it is not true by logic alone. Kant propounded that human beings can have a priori knowledge of synthetic propositions. To cite an example, Newton’s Third Law of Motion that every action has an equal and opposite reaction is a synthetic proposition of which human beings can have a priori knowledge. Kant invented this notion of a priori synthetic truth which her defined as true knowledge that is both empirical and based on reasoning. It can neither be classified as analytic or synthetic knowledge. Hume, on the other hand, starts off by stating that “reasoning a priori, any thing might appear able to produce anything (Hume, 1739)”. Hume takes recourse to nature to save himself from the throes of Pyrrhonian or radical scepticism. He denies scepticism its undue importance by stating that it is an inherent human nature to make inferences, and the view that such inferences do not hold good unless borne out by logical deductions, has no practical implications whatsoever. Hume asserts that humankind primarily depends on their faculties, making inferences being an important one, and takes recourse to reason only because they cannot help it. Nature is too strong for philosophy to render human beings entirely Pyrrhonian (Hume, 1739). Pyrrhonism is counteracted by ‘action, and employment, and the occupations of common life.’ Human beings draw inferences not by reasoning but from customs and habits based on the experience of constant interaction with objects and phenomena. Known as Conventionalism, this approach of Hume considers custom as the great guide of human life. Without conventionalism, those who are guided only by Pyrrhonian doubt, will not be able to achieve anything and will remain tied down by their scepticism because ‘reason is the slave of our passions’. Finding a Logical Explanation There is a school of thought which holds to the view that the problem of induction is misconceived because just as deductive reasoning needs no justification, inductive interference also requires no validation or rationalization. Both have their own place and utility in the scheme of the sciences and human inventiveness. In other words inductive inference is inductively valid while deductive reasoning is deductively valid. In fact inductive inferences can be taken to be what they are – a process of getting at matters of truth by trial and error. As has already been exemplified, it has to be accepted that human knowledge is by character conjectural. Once we accept this fact, the need to validate inductive inferences does not arise at all. It is in fact impossible to validate human knowledge so. “On the other hand, we can explain all our achievements in terms of the method of trial and the elimination of error. To put it in a nutshell, our conjectures are our trial balloons, and we test them by criticizing them and by trying to replace them - by trying to show that there can be better or worse conjectures, and that they can be improved upon. The place of the problem of induction is usurped by the problem of the comparative goodness or badness of the rival conjectures or theories that have been proposed (Popper, 1974).” Under such circumstances, the problem of induction can be put to good use because it can inculcate pyrrhonism that could indicate the fallibility or susceptibility of scientists and researchers. This could in turn lead to the advancement of science and research because it becomes clear that every empirical proposition is susceptible to be improved upon, and that no knowledge in this world is static. Conclusion Popper’s Conjecturalism comprises Falsification and Verification which takes such an approach to its logical conclusion. Empirical observations refute scientific statements. The test of scientists lies in their ability to make bold conjectures and then in trying to falsify the same. “More precisely, theories are thought of as mere guesses, conjectures, which have to be falsifiable in order to earn the predicate science (Keuzenkamp, 2004).” If a theory is falsified, then the generalization from which it was deduced is also proved to be false. Just as deductive logic provides scientific rationality to overcome the problems of pyrrhonism, falsifiability can be used as demarcating criterion between science and non-science so that the sequence of conjectures and refutations lead to the growth of knowledge. Since there is always the possibility of theories being replaced by better theories, which nevertheless are themselves fallible, scientists always have to remain critical of their work and on their toes. References Beebee, H., 2002, The Problem of Induction, The Big Questions: Philosophy of Science Handout I, Chifley Library Hume, D., 1739, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 348 Hume, D., 1978, Treatise of Human Nature (B1485 1951/1978), Book I, Part III. Johns, R., 2009, The Problem of Induction. http://www.philosophy.ubc.ca/faculty/johns/induction.pdf Keuzenkamp, H., A., 2004, Probability, Econometrics and Truth: The Methodology of Econometrics, Cambridge University Press Popper, K., 1954, 1974, The Problem of Induction, http://dieoff.org/page126.htm Sistrom, C, 2008, Inference and Uncertainty in Radiology, Academic Radiology, Volume 13, Issue 5, Pages 580-588 Wikipedia, Pyrrhonism, 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhonism Read More