What problem is the theory of induction intended to solve? What’s it for? What’s the goal or purpose?
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://criticalfallibilism.com/induction-and-critical-rationalism/
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://criticalfallibilism.com/induction-and-critical-rationalism/
People often make mistakes about introspection even when they’re trying to be honest; understanding everything that goes on in your mind, in detail, is extremely hard.
If it wasn’t hard large parts of epistemology wouldn’t be so hard.
Overall I think the article wasn’t that useful for me. I don’t think it was bad, I just think that I’m not the target audience, I was already familiar with the content. I think it would be good for people who know very little about CR.
Based on the title I thought it would be more about logic and arguments of induction and CR, so I was a bit disappointed when it was more about the history and meta of the ideas. I’m not at all entitled to a different article, I had just built up some different expectations.
@Elliot, was that feedback useful?
There were still interesting parts that told me new things:
However, for many centuries, most people saw induction as the only way to avoid skepticism and rationalism, so they came to equate defending induction with avoiding skepticism or rationalism.
I don’t think I had thought of it in those terms. I knew that inductivists have opposed skepticism and that belief in induction has lead to/been accompanied by a pro-reason attitude. I think this is some useful historical context to know.
I haven’t read much Popper so I think this one is also useful:
Not all of this is super clear in Popper’s writing and he wrote a lot of other stuff too.
1 Like
Yeah the title isn’t great; it’s pretty vague. Titles can be hard. I don’t know what would have been better.
Yes the article is at a pretty introductory or overview level. I also thought a short, organized, clean overview could be useful to people who already know a lot. I also think it’s useful to have this article exist so I can link it to people like @actually_thinking; I don’t think it’s a duplicate of a previous article.
I don’t think it’s a duplicate either. I guess it’s just the story I’ve picked up on reading a bunch of your stuff.
The part about Popper critics would also have been new and very useful if I hadn’t read your recent blog posts on that topic.
I think the overview was short, organized and clean, and that seems useful for knowledgeable people too. Maybe I’m underestimating the value it had specifically to me because I had different initial expectations.