Am 14.03.2012 04:15, schrieb Kevin Wampler:

>> David Hume's point was: laws are general, and therefore apply to an
>> infinity of cases, so no finite number of observations increase their
>> likelihood by any amount.
>
>
> I don't follow this line of reasoning, so if it's important could you
> elaborate?

With pleasure. I already knew that condensing Hume into one sentence 
would fail but as I do definitely include him in my personal list of the 
10 most influential philosophers of all time I thought it would be a 
good idea to start with him.

Often Hume is mentioned as an empiricist (I just skimmed through the 
wikipedia article to look up his year of birth - 1711) while I would see 
his important characterization as the first *modern* skeptic and also 
one of the most radical skeptics ever. In his work "A Treatise of Human 
Nature" (quite easy to read BTW, especially given the time it was 
written, but maybe I should mention one should be in a good mood, I know 
people who do find Hume's view of the world extremely depressing) he 
demolishes all believe-systems, i.e. everything from fairy-tales to 
religion, and as he had a good run, he did not stop there and did 
deconstruct deductive and empirical methods in natural sciences as well.

The only things that do remain for Hume are algebra, geometry and a 
distant echo of humanism.

As an (absolutely incomplete) introduction what a friend of mine did 
call "Hume versus Holmes" (Doyle's Sherlock he did mean ;)):
Given a series of observations that a lady walks her dog by the market 
at 8am on Monday, it seems valid to infer that next Monday she will do 
the same, or that, in general, the lady walks her dog by the market 
every Monday.
That next Monday the lady walks by the market merely adds to the series 
of observations, it does not prove she will walk by the market every Monday.
First it is not certain, regardless of the number of observations, that 
the lady always walks by the market at 8am on Monday.
Second Hume argued that we cannot claim it is "more probable", since 
this still requires the assumption that the past predicts the future. 
Third, the observations themselves do not establish the validity of 
inductive reasoning, except inductively.

Hume was a strong influence to Kant who said something along the line: 
it was Hume who did awake me from my dogmatic slumber. Kant always did 
see it as a problem that he was not able to formulate his theories about 
science without clashing with Hume. While Kant thinks that e.g. the 
concept of space and time is given to us "a priori" for Hume space and 
time are just the *result* of two successive observations.
So Albert Einstein himself did mention David Hume as a source of 
inspiration when formulating the "Special Theory of Relativity".



>> But Emanuel Kant: In science, only observation and experiment may decide
>> upon the acceptance or rejection of scientific statements, including
>> laws and theories.
>
> Hmmmm, not entirely sure I agree with this as stated,

And you are completely right, my fault, I did forget to write down what 
I was thinking and the result is actually the opposite of what it should 
be: the logical problem of induction that did lead to Poppers 
"solution". It goes like this:
a) Hume's statement from above: laws are general, ... or better Hume's 
reasoning about induction in general.
b) Sometimes science proposes general laws at the drop of a hat, after 
even single observations.
c) Empiricism: In science, only observation and experiment may decide 
upon the acceptance or rejection of scientific statements, including
laws and theories.

But Emanuel Kant did *reject* point c in favor of a and b.
And for good reason especially from todays view: After all, astrology 
(or Adler's psychology) can produce tons of confirmation - as long as we 
limit the view to pure empiricism without Popper's "call for predictions".

Note that both Hume and Kant are always talking about natural sciences 
but not mathematics.


> Also, you put quite a bit of weight on the phrase "risky", but I'm not
> entirely sure how you precisely define the risk of a theory. I assume
> you mean that a theory is risky if it's (potentially) easy to prove
> wrong? If so this pretty well fits within the statistical view. In the
> statistical view a good theory should be "as specific as possible
> without becoming unlikely based on the evidence". Does this match what
> you're saying?

Exactly. I like the phrase "risky" for that in the same way as I 
actually do like and accept your phrase "aesthetic criteria".


-Ive

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