idiotropic

From logical fallacies of induction to evolutionary epistemology, Kpop’s like ‘Yo! the sun might not rise tomorrow’ and ‘Yo! Hume’s psychology is primitive’ and ‘Yo! sometimes we perish by our unconfirmed hypotheses’. Break it down Karl…

“Hume himself confused the problem of induction with the problem of the necessary connection between cause and effect; and Kant saw in the problem of the a priori validity of the causal law one of the most fundamental problems of metaphysics. But Hume must be credited with the formulation of the pure logical problem of induction and its solutions…He writes, for example, that we have no reason to believe ‘that those instances, of which we have no experience, [are likely to] resemble those, of which we have had experience’.

…All that is assumed is that we have empirical evidence of the truth of certain instances, and it is asserted that this does not entitle us to conclude to or extrapolate to analogous experiences at other instances (whether in the past or in the future).

This, then, in all its purity, is what I have christened ‘Hume’s [logical] problem of induction’.

Hume’s answer is as clear as can be: there is no argument or reason which permits an inference from one case to another, however similar the conditions may be; and I completely agree with him in this respect.

I believe, however, that Hume is wrong when he thinks that in practice we make such inferences, on the basis of repetition or habit. I assert that his psychology is primitive. What we do in practice is to jump to a conclusion; that is to say, to quite inconclusive hypotheses to which we often cling, and with which we may perish, unless we are able to correct them, which is possible especially if, on the human level, they are formulated exosomatically in written form, and submitted to criticism.

The assertion that we have an irrational inclination to be impressed by habit and repetition is something quite different from the assertion that we have a drive to try out bold hypotheses which we may have to correct if we are not to perish. The first describes a typically Lamarckian procedure of instruction; the second a Darwinian procedure of selection. The first one is, as Hume observed, irrational, while the second seems to have nothing irrational in it.”

from Objective Knowledge, Ch. 2, §30: Muddles Connected with the Problem of Induction