Goodman The New Riddle of Induction Sparknotes
Goodman The New Riddle of Induction Sparknotes
Goodman The New Riddle of Induction Sparknotes
But it is also clearly temporal or positional. Fact, fiction, and forecast. Moreover, anyone who dislikes the change may be assured that the process
of replatonizing the systemunlike the converse processis obvious and automatic; and this in itself is an advantage of a nominalistic
formulation. Hilary Putnam a suggests that this idea may have some plausibility for the Big Dipper, but it does not, for instance, hold true of the
stars that constitute the Big Dipper. That is, two arguments that are formally just alike, but differ only in the words they contain, can differ as to
their inductive validity. Without such an indubitable element, Lewis fears that our epistemology would necessarily collapse into a coherence theory
of truth Lewis Assuming finitely many kinds only, the notion of similarity can be defined by that of kind: The reason that our evidence supports the
conclusion that grass is generally green rather than grue is that as a matter of fact we have used the word "green" in our past inductions. For simple
cases the quasi-analysis seems to give exactly the right results. For Goodman, the distinction between projectible and non-projectible predicates,
and hence the distinction between valid and invalid inductive arguments, is drawn by reference to accidental, contingent facts about our practice
and intellectual history. The immediate lesson is that we cannot use all kinds of weird predicates to formulate hypotheses or to classify our
evidence. Still, the non-objectivity of the notion of inductively valid inference is potentially disturbing. It is also apparent when we think about his
pluralism in logic and his insistence that there are more cognitively valuable representation systems than just the sciences, namely the languages of
art. But let us leave this problem to one side for now. In contrast, supposing that it is indeed true, L2 would not support that if an arbitrary man
were here in the room, he would be a third son. Since predictions are about what has yet to be observed and because there is no necessary
connection between what has been observed and what will be observed, what is the justification for the predictions we make? Hume's answer was
that our observations of one kind of event following another kind of event result in our minds forming habits of regularity i. Each of these statements
is analytically equivalent with the corresponding one in your notebook. They know about the texts and the so-called miracles, and they are familiar
with so-called religious experience but interpret it rather as evidence for their own non-Christian creed, or perhaps as a sign of mental illness. So
there is no room for skeptical doubt as to whether our standards are the correct ones. For them, the point of carrying out such a construction was
not to provide a foundationalist reduction to some privileged basis of experience or ontology , but rather to study the nature and logic of
constitutional systems as such. Now it would be a serious mistake to infer from this observation that for Goodman, "anything goes" in induction.
The two notions can come apart in dramatic ways. The hard work lies, for example, in creating a constructional system that overcomes the
problems of its predecessors, is simple, uses well-entrenched predicates, or successfully replaces them with new ones which is even harder ,
allows us to make useful predictions and so on. Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie und Erkenntnistheorie , Frankfurt: On the one hand, we have certain
intuitions about which deductive inferences are valid; on the other hand we have rules of inference. Richard Swinburne gets past the objection that
green be redefined in terms of grue and bleen by making a distinction based on how we test for the applicability of a predicate in a particular case.
If two hypotheses are the same with respect to their empirical track-record, then the hypothesis that uses the better entrenched predicates
overrides the alternatives. Just to take one example, it will not do to point out that the definitions of green and blue make explicit reference to a
particular time. No recourse to classes or other abstract entities e. Although green can be given a definition in terms of the locational predicates
grue and bleen , this is irrelevant to the fact that green meets the criterion for being a qualitative predicate whereas grue is merely locational. SR is
as obvious a candidate as you are likely to find for a formal rule of inductive validity. Membership is not transitive. This is as opposed to merely
considering the basis of the system in answer to this question as he does in A Study of Qualities as mentioned above. We cannot just create things;
predicates must be entrenched and thus there must be some close continuity with former versions. At least, they are not about the parts of the
world we were interested in. The first and third contain two members, but not the same members both a and b are members of the first set, but not
of the third , while the second set has only one member namely the first set. Some good, cogent, compelling arguments are not deductively valid.
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