Episode 294: The Scandal of Philosophy (Hume's Problem of Induction)

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] Reason ain't his long suit.

[00:01:10] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, political junkie that you are, I'm sure you watched the Walls-Vance debate last night in its entirety. Now, I didn't get the chance to see it because we're watching The Shield right now. Are the reports true? Did J.D. Vance, your boy, win the debate?

[00:01:32] First of all, obviously, yes, I watched it. There is one thing about J.D. Vance that I love. I'm just gonna say it.

[00:01:40] Wow.

[00:01:41] His makeup game is on point. Like, I'm a fan of Guy Liner, and I feel like I've got a lot to learn from that guy. I didn't watch the debate, but I did see that he was complaining about the rules that were that there wasn't gonna be any fact checking.

[00:01:57] The rules were that there wasn't gonna be any fact checking, which is what I feel about this show.

[00:02:04] Yeah, that's our rule, yeah. Listeners. Just so you know.

[00:02:07] Like, when people write to us and they're like, you got this wrong, I was like, hey, hey.

[00:02:10] This isn't something that you retract. Like, we don't really... There have been a lot of retractions lately, but podcasts aren't something. They are fleeting. They arise and they pass away, you know?

[00:02:23] Okay, the arc of very bad wizards bends toward truth.

[00:02:26] I mean, that's definitely the case. All right, we have a lot today to cover. Like, this is a big show that we might not be either one of us in a state to actually cover them in their entirety. But first we have, as promised last episode, we're gonna talk about kids who seem to, at least as reported, remember their past lives. They have descriptions of past life memories.

[00:02:54] I have a question about why they call it past lives instead of just straightforward, like, possession. Like, but we'll get to that when we get to it. And then in the second segment, we're gonna talk about the problem of induction.

[00:03:09] This is part of our series where we go back to the basics a little bit in philosophy and coming up soon, psychology. Just some kind of things that we may have mentioned, referred to at certain points, but haven't fleshed out.

[00:03:24] Do we have a name for our series? Is it the foundational, like something or other?

[00:03:29] Yeah, or the... No, we should come up with a name for it. Back to Basics?

[00:03:36] Back to Basics. With a two, with a number two?

[00:03:38] Yes, back to Basics. I like it. That's the series. Look at that. We just came up with it. It's like the ambulators. We just came up with it on the fly.

[00:03:50] And both times, actually, it was you, I have to admit.

[00:03:52] So this is part of our Back to Basics series.

[00:03:57] And yeah, we'll talk about the problem of induction as formulated by Hume, although he didn't call it that, and as responded to by Pizarro.

[00:04:06] So, but first, well, actually, like what approach do you think I'm going to have to today's episode?

[00:04:13] I was thinking quite a bit today about your approach to the problem of induction.

[00:04:20] I didn't give this one so much thought. I feel like you're going to be reasonable in a way that will surprise me.

[00:04:27] Wow.

[00:04:30] Well, this will have less effect then, but like, I feel like both of these, you know, the first, which involves potential supernatural phenomena, and the second, that involves being skeptical about some, you know, bedrock principle of science.

[00:04:46] Like, you might think that I'm going to be combative.

[00:04:50] Yeah.

[00:04:50] But I'm just going to be chill.

[00:04:53] Yeah.

[00:04:53] You know, I came into this with this attitude, too.

[00:04:56] I was like, this is not going to be, this is going to be a consensus building.

[00:05:00] Listeners are just pressing stop, like next podcast.

[00:05:04] Well, don't count anything out yet.

[00:05:06] Yeah, that's true.

[00:05:07] This first opening segment article that you suggested, the children who remember their past lives, it's in the Washington Post from, I think, a few months ago.

[00:05:14] Yeah.

[00:05:14] It more filled me with sadness than anything else.

[00:05:18] Like, I wasn't like feeling like, oh, these charlatans or anything like that.

[00:05:23] I mean, I obviously have an opinion about, you know, what might be going on or not, but it struck me as like just families who are dealing with some sad shit.

[00:05:33] So, like, yeah, there are a couple of things I want to talk about, and one of them is just like what you believe about what's happening.

[00:05:39] Yeah.

[00:05:39] The explanandum here is you have very young children, like as young as two years old, who seem to talk about things and know things that there's no way they would be exposed to.

[00:05:57] Right.

[00:05:57] And also that don't seem like part of their actual lives.

[00:06:01] So here is the description.

[00:06:03] Two-year-old Aija had invented plenty of fictional characters before, but her parents noticed right away Nina was different.

[00:06:13] Now, she's two years old, right?

[00:06:15] Like, kids don't talk about that much at length then.

[00:06:20] She would talk about Nina, and the descriptions were consistent.

[00:06:24] Right.

[00:06:25] She told her parents that Nina played piano, that she loved dancing and favored the color pink, which Aija didn't favor.

[00:06:32] And she, her voice changed.

[00:06:35] And so, like, all of this is like, okay, wait, this could be her imaginary friend, which is what they thought of first.

[00:06:40] But then when, like, Marie used a food processor in the kitchen, Aija reacts, like terrified, and she says, get that tank out of here.

[00:06:51] And, like, how does she know the word tank?

[00:06:54] And then at one point, now imagine your little, imagine Lola saying this.

[00:07:01] Nina has numbers on her arm and they make her sad.

[00:07:05] All of a sudden, Aija just says, Nina has numbers.

[00:07:08] She's two years old.

[00:07:09] Nina has numbers on her arm and they make her sad.

[00:07:13] And then says, Nina misses her family.

[00:07:15] Nina was taken from her family.

[00:07:17] And so, so what you get is that this is a child who was killed in the Holocaust or was in a concentration camp.

[00:07:26] There's a lot of stuff that little Aija couldn't have known.

[00:07:32] And also just her expressions, how she looked was, as her mom says, there was so much pain in the face, like she looked too old.

[00:07:42] Yeah.

[00:07:43] Okay.

[00:07:43] So that's one of the cases.

[00:07:44] Then we find out that there is, this is like happens all the time that you get these people.

[00:07:51] And that, in fact, at the University of Virginia, there is a division of perceptual studies that someone named Tucker.

[00:08:03] I don't have his first name in my notes here.

[00:08:05] Jim Tucker.

[00:08:07] Jim Tucker.

[00:08:07] It was originally started by a guy named Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker took over that.

[00:08:12] Maybe, did Stevenson die and now is working through Tucker?

[00:08:17] Probably.

[00:08:18] I assume.

[00:08:19] Yeah.

[00:08:20] There's no, the article leaves that up to us.

[00:08:23] So anyway, he's been making these like records of children's memories.

[00:08:29] So here's some of the patterns that you see in it.

[00:08:32] And I think they're just studying it as phenomena.

[00:08:34] Like this stuff does happen.

[00:08:36] Like these people exist and they say what they say.

[00:08:39] Right.

[00:08:39] So he's studying it as phenomena, maybe with a little more of an open mind than dogmatists and

[00:08:45] scientism enthusiasts like yourself would like.

[00:08:50] I don't think he thinks like obviously this is all real.

[00:08:54] They say that the most convincing cases occurs in children between the ages of two and six.

[00:09:00] They'll suddenly describe places they've never been, people they've never met, phrases that aren't in their vocabulary or it seems like couldn't be.

[00:09:09] And they start to speak earlier than their peers.

[00:09:13] Like I don't know what the actual empirical evidence for that is.

[00:09:17] And that he is convinced that the vast majority of families, you might agree with this given your opening introduction about this, like that they're not lying.

[00:09:27] Right.

[00:09:27] They're not trying to draw attention.

[00:09:29] In fact, many of them don't want to publicly share this.

[00:09:33] They're deeply unsettled by it as what one might be and are like more looking for help than trying to turn their this into some sort of cash cow or they can be a reality show or something like that.

[00:09:48] OK.

[00:09:48] Opening sound though.

[00:09:49] What do you think about all this?

[00:09:51] Like what's your explanation for all this?

[00:09:53] So, all right, like cards on the table, like I don't believe that this is actual past lives, but I don't want to be a dick about it here because I also want to maintain an open mind about these what these people are saying.

[00:10:06] I did a little reading up.

[00:10:08] Like one of the things that bothered me about this post article is that it didn't really offer any of the like potential problems with the way that people have collected this data.

[00:10:19] Like what's they talk a little bit about, oh, sometimes parents can be a little too into it and they influence it.

[00:10:24] They ask leading questions or they, you know, start giving the kids information.

[00:10:29] And we know that that can happen super easily.

[00:10:32] It reminded me of, you know, Clever Hans, the trained horse that was supposedly capable of doing mathematics.

[00:10:38] Yeah.

[00:10:39] But he was actually getting subtle cues that the trainer didn't even himself know he was giving.

[00:10:43] Right.

[00:10:43] And just sort of repeating those.

[00:10:46] Yeah.

[00:10:46] So like that can really happen.

[00:10:48] So I looked up Ian Stevenson, the guy who started this, who is described in this article as widely respected by even critics as super scrupulous, you know, super like.

[00:11:00] Oh, God.

[00:11:01] Are you about to engage in some character assassination?

[00:11:04] No.

[00:11:05] In method criticism, which you're all for.

[00:11:08] Oh, yeah.

[00:11:08] Right.

[00:11:09] Yeah.

[00:11:10] I'm so conflicted right now.

[00:11:12] Yeah.

[00:11:14] Right.

[00:11:14] And so there were a lot of people that had a lot of problems with the methods that he used.

[00:11:19] So this is a quote.

[00:11:22] Major problem with Stevenson's work is that the methods he used to investigate alleged cases of reincarnation are inadequate to rule out simple imaginative storytelling on the part of the children claiming to be reincarnations of dead individuals.

[00:11:32] In the seemingly most impressive cases, Stevenson has reported the children claiming to be reincarnated new friends and relatives of the dead individual.

[00:11:38] The children's knowledge of facts about these individuals is then somewhat less than conclusive evidence for reincarnation.

[00:11:43] And it just seems like there were a lot of criticisms about how he was going about collecting the data on these kids.

[00:11:51] And I believe that he even though he didn't say that he was like a believer in reincarnation, it's clear that his inclination was that something supernatural is happening.

[00:11:59] Right.

[00:11:59] And so given what we know about how leading questions work, how malleable, like and how easy it is, there's a lot of work on children's eyewitness testimony showing how easy it is to get kids to say things.

[00:12:11] I wish that this article had done a little more than just present this as like, isn't it crazy that these kids have these uncanny recollections without more criticism?

[00:12:18] Well, at least Ija, like this was happening during COVID.

[00:12:23] They haven't had this intervention with and been studied by Stevenson, right?

[00:12:30] There's no way that at the very least Stevenson could have.

[00:12:34] I mean, he could have interviewed them, right?

[00:12:36] Like online.

[00:12:37] But he was already done.

[00:12:39] Like he was.

[00:12:40] Oh, no, no, no.

[00:12:41] This is Tucker.

[00:12:42] No, this is Tucker.

[00:12:43] Yeah, yeah.

[00:12:43] I was just bringing up Stevenson because that's who started this foundation and who started this database of like all of these reports.

[00:12:50] Right.

[00:12:50] And so this division of perceptual studies has like this database of like hundreds of reports.

[00:12:56] Sure.

[00:12:57] That if they're tainted, you know.

[00:12:59] So I guess my question is, even if you think that these are tainted, you know, in terms of the database with Stevenson, like, you know, there's still the question of what this reporter just personally witnessed.

[00:13:13] And I agree with you.

[00:13:14] They, uh, the reporter does not, is it a guy who wrote it?

[00:13:17] No.

[00:13:18] No.

[00:13:18] Caitlin Gibson.

[00:13:20] She does not really give the, the critical skeptical view any space in this.

[00:13:27] I do think there's a lot of hand waving with, oh, we know how leading questions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:13:33] Wait, why are you saying it's hand waving?

[00:13:34] Well, I think it is hand waving because you're not actually talking about any specific research that would explain this specific phenomena.

[00:13:42] You're, that you're hand waving.

[00:13:44] You say there's a lot of research that probably explains this or that does explain something like this without actually giving any specific examples.

[00:13:51] Right. No.

[00:13:52] What I'm saying is that we know that children can be led to believe things through the way that the questions are asked.

[00:13:57] Like there's evidence for that.

[00:13:59] Right.

[00:13:59] But that doesn't, but that doesn't explain like just all of a sudden yelling out like, oh, there's a tank.

[00:14:05] The kid's not been, no, I've been asked a question.

[00:14:08] Right.

[00:14:09] If you're under the impression that what I was doing is giving a clear refutation of every single example with my saying that we know that sometimes children can be asked leading questions and like then obviously no.

[00:14:18] But I think that's a very uncharitable reading of what I was trying to say.

[00:14:21] Like I'm not hand waving away the whole thing by saying that there's research on leading questions.

[00:14:25] All I'm saying is that we know that there is like a clear mechanism by which you can get kids to believe and say things that they wouldn't have otherwise said, even when you don't realize that you're doing it.

[00:14:35] But there's another thing about this that is like many of the things that are claimed that these kids are saying are vague enough that you could like the parent could interpret them in a certain way.

[00:14:44] Right.

[00:14:45] So like, can't you see how like if a kid said, oh, I like I have an imaginary friend.

[00:14:49] There's numbers on her like that.

[00:14:51] They would be like, are there numbers on her arm?

[00:14:53] And like we have no way of knowing whether any of that happened.

[00:14:56] Like there's just no good way of knowing that the parents weren't like, holy shit.

[00:14:59] She said there were numbers on her arm, you know?

[00:15:01] Sure.

[00:15:02] Right.

[00:15:02] Like that's not what they say, but we have no way of knowing for sure that it wasn't like that.

[00:15:07] But what about the one where this kid wakes up sobbing in the middle of the night and then remembered living in Hollywood in a big white house with a swimming pool and that he had three sons and a younger sister, that he drove a green car and his wife drove a black one.

[00:15:24] Like, what about that?

[00:15:26] And the fact that they actually figured out who he was.

[00:15:31] Well, okay.

[00:15:32] Well, they did buy it.

[00:15:33] Yeah.

[00:15:33] They figured out at least what was being referred to by this kid who was, I forget how old this kid was.

[00:15:41] Here's what I want to know.

[00:15:43] So I don't even want to talk about this as like, is this real or not?

[00:15:47] Or is there a perfectly natural?

[00:15:48] I do think people are a little overconfident that they can provide purely naturalistic explanations for what's happening.

[00:15:54] But set that aside.

[00:15:55] The thing that really puzzled me is why they think this is reincarnation.

[00:16:03] Because in every example, the kids don't act like, oh, I remember this when I used to be this person.

[00:16:11] They always just talk about them as actual other people.

[00:16:16] Well, except for Ryan said, that's me.

[00:16:18] Yes, that's true.

[00:16:20] But even that could be just straightforward possession, right?

[00:16:23] Like, you know, like, oh, and because that's what Aja or whatever was like, all of a sudden would start talking like this.

[00:16:30] You know, it's like Danny in The Shining.

[00:16:32] So like.

[00:16:33] And we know why he talked like that.

[00:16:34] Stop.

[00:16:38] So I have found no like explanation for that.

[00:16:42] Like if they didn't keep saying reincarnated and you seem to have bought that too.

[00:16:47] It's like, oh, if you tell the kid they've been reincarnated.

[00:16:50] But but nothing except what like people like the way people are describing about this sounds like a past live rather than just either a ghost is like with you or the ghost is possessing you.

[00:17:03] You're 100 percent right.

[00:17:04] I hadn't thought about it.

[00:17:06] And it's just true.

[00:17:07] Like the way that I was raised, this would just be like explicitly cases of possession.

[00:17:13] But they would just say this is just obviously possession.

[00:17:17] So then, yeah.

[00:17:18] Yeah, because then what like all of a sudden it leaves them when they're six years old.

[00:17:22] Exactly.

[00:17:23] It's like they can't possess them anymore because they've become mature.

[00:17:27] Like I feel like even the parsimonious like supernatural explanation is not that they've been reincarnated.

[00:17:36] It's that it's that it's just a demon.

[00:17:38] Actually, a fallen angel.

[00:17:40] Maybe.

[00:17:40] Like I don't know the underlying metaphysics besides that.

[00:17:43] Right.

[00:17:44] You're referring to circular ones.

[00:17:46] But then here's something a little more controversial that I want to propose to you.

[00:17:51] OK.

[00:17:52] Is that a distinction without a difference?

[00:17:54] Is there a coherent like distinction or difference between like, oh, I'm reincarnated or I'm possessed by the person that I'm supposedly reincarnated as?

[00:18:11] Like what's the difference?

[00:18:13] I think you're on to the difference.

[00:18:14] Like it's the question of identity.

[00:18:16] Right.

[00:18:16] Like now, like I guess that people who were hardcore believers in reincarnation would think that we're all reincarnated.

[00:18:22] So we all like lived a previous life.

[00:18:25] I don't know what they think about whether or not that previous life could interact with you.

[00:18:30] Like I've never heard people say that like if you were Joe, a farmer from 1920, like that you could talk to Joe.

[00:18:36] Like that just seems like not like you're talking to yourself.

[00:18:39] Well, so my point is more conceptual.

[00:18:42] Like what is the difference between, oh, I am possessed by the spirit of Joe the farmer and that's why I'm talking about like bales of hay and the cattle and the.

[00:18:56] Marry the cow.

[00:18:57] Yeah.

[00:18:58] And oh, I'm remembering that that's who I was and I'm talking like that right now.

[00:19:05] Like what's the difference between those two things?

[00:19:07] Because you have no normal memory of that.

[00:19:10] Yeah, maybe.

[00:19:12] Yeah.

[00:19:12] I thought my answer was conceptual, but maybe it's not.

[00:19:15] But what I was trying to say is that like in one case, it's supposed to be literally you.

[00:19:20] And in another case, it's supposed to be not you.

[00:19:22] So the difference might not in practice, though, mean anything.

[00:19:26] But it would matter to me if I was remembering things that had happened to me versus experiencing the shit from somebody else's life.

[00:19:35] But but I get what you're saying.

[00:19:36] Like, I don't know that it would in both cases is pretty invasive memory that you're someone else.

[00:19:42] So like like take Aisha.

[00:19:44] Right.

[00:19:45] So she all of a sudden will start talking, play the piano and start talking in that high pitch voice.

[00:19:50] By the way, Aisha all of a sudden knew how to play piano.

[00:19:53] But that's probably because she was asked a leading question.

[00:19:56] According to Dave.

[00:19:58] Right.

[00:19:58] Or, you know, you can't you can't rule out fraud in some of these cases.

[00:20:02] Just saying.

[00:20:03] Just saying.

[00:20:03] Right.

[00:20:04] That has the advantage of theft over honest toil.

[00:20:06] But OK.

[00:20:07] No, but my point is like what's so OK.

[00:20:10] She's remembering that she used to play the piano and now being that person who used to play the piano versus she's being possessed by that spirit, which allows her to play the piano.

[00:20:22] Like this is like maybe a skepticism about personal identity.

[00:20:25] But like given that Aisha then just goes back to normal and just acts like normal Aisha, not like Nina.

[00:20:32] Right.

[00:20:33] Like what's the difference?

[00:20:35] Like either I'm possessed by them or I'm like all of a sudden remembering that I was Nina in the past life.

[00:20:41] Like I'm wondering if there's like if you asked a person who believes this, is there in principle a way to distinguish those two things?

[00:20:49] I'm not sure what their answer would be.

[00:20:51] Right.

[00:20:51] Maybe.

[00:20:52] Yeah.

[00:20:53] So maybe there's not in principle.

[00:20:54] The way that like given the way that people talk about memory and the difference between memory and belief is like one of them is you have a trace that you experienced something and it feels like it was you.

[00:21:06] Yeah.

[00:21:06] And I would think that in possession it wouldn't feel like it was you.

[00:21:09] Right.

[00:21:09] It would feel like an external force.

[00:21:11] So like it's different to say I remember something than I know something it is to say I know that something happened.

[00:21:16] Like to say that you remembered it means that you have like some sort of phenomenology about what it went, what you went through.

[00:21:21] Right.

[00:21:22] Yeah.

[00:21:23] OK.

[00:21:23] Well, we should do it, you know, possession, metaphysics of possession.

[00:21:28] Listeners, if any of you have been possessed or remember a past life, how do you know the difference between which of those two things happened to you?

[00:21:36] Is it a conceptual difference or an empirical one?

[00:21:39] A priori, a posteriori.

[00:21:43] This actually, yes, that distinction will come up in the next segment.

[00:21:48] Do you have anything else to say about this?

[00:21:49] I thought it was super interesting.

[00:21:51] Obviously, you can't you don't know in these particular cases, but it's just another thing to add to the pile of the world is weird and mysterious and maybe don't think that you fully understand it.

[00:22:02] Or be very skeptical about Washington Post reporters.

[00:22:07] I, for the record, Caitlin Gibson, I thought this was an excellently reported piece.

[00:22:14] Can you imagine if your kid did this?

[00:22:17] I like I and I think you too wouldn't so blithely dismiss it.

[00:22:22] Um, I, I would spank her until she stopped saying that.

[00:22:27] You would make her read.

[00:22:28] You know it's a lie.

[00:22:30] Blind watchmaker and the end of fate.

[00:22:35] I would make her read Hume so she could become a proper skeptic.

[00:22:39] All right.

[00:22:39] We'll be right back to talk about the problem of induction.

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[00:26:30] Now let's get to the problem of induction.

[00:26:33] All right, let's get to our main segment, part of our Back to Basics series, this time on the problem of induction.

[00:26:45] By the way, what's the next one of these?

[00:26:48] I think you have something in mind.

[00:26:50] Yeah.

[00:26:50] So I want to talk about this core debate in cognitive science about whether perception can be influenced by our beliefs and desires and motivations.

[00:26:59] So this traditionally is called the question of whether there are top-down influences on perception.

[00:27:03] But it really is a debate about like modularity and like how is the mind actually organized?

[00:27:08] Like how does it work?

[00:27:09] And I have some readings.

[00:27:10] Kind of excited.

[00:27:12] I can't wait.

[00:27:13] All right.

[00:27:14] Well, today though is the problem of induction.

[00:27:18] Hume is the most famous person to kind of flesh out this problem, which is still believed today by many, including myself, to be a live problem.

[00:27:29] Like what kind of problem it is is open to question, but definitely not something that has been definitively responded to.

[00:27:37] What was your like experience with the problem of induction?

[00:27:41] I'm sure you've heard about it.

[00:27:43] I'm sure you knew the basics.

[00:27:44] But like, you know, what did – like how did you think about it before doing this deep dive?

[00:27:49] Yeah.

[00:27:51] Yeah.

[00:27:51] So for me, of course, like I knew Hume and I knew this problem existed.

[00:27:57] And, you know, Hume is one of those guys that scientists like to quote when it's convenient for them.

[00:28:02] And so I had even read a little bit of his talking about this.

[00:28:06] It just hadn't been something that was like taught to me as a problem.

[00:28:13] It was this sort of curiosity.

[00:28:15] Like, oh, isn't it interesting that we can't – like there's no good way to justify induction.

[00:28:21] And then you move on.

[00:28:22] Stick and move.

[00:28:23] You're doing science.

[00:28:24] Right.

[00:28:25] And honestly, like as we prepared for this and I was doing the readings in particular, this one good paper that you put in, I was like, oh, man, I'm in over my head.

[00:28:35] This has been talked about by so many people and anything that I thought of has been thought of by like so many people.

[00:28:42] So I feel a little bit like I'm in over my head.

[00:28:44] And this is obviously something that you're taking the lead on.

[00:28:47] But it's central.

[00:28:48] Like whether or not the problem has been solved, it is a central issue.

[00:28:52] Certainly in philosophy, you know, like there's a real question about to what extent scientists take it seriously and to what extent they should take it seriously.

[00:29:01] But yeah, so the paper you're referring to and one that I recommend to all of our listeners because you really don't need to know that much about philosophy.

[00:29:11] You don't need to know that much background to at least understand the way he lays out the problem.

[00:29:17] So it's by Wesley Salmon, really good kind of mid-century philosopher of science.

[00:29:23] It's called Unfinished Business, the Problem of Induction.

[00:29:27] And you can find it online pretty easily.

[00:29:31] So it's in a, yeah, it's a Phil Studies paper.

[00:29:33] Really interesting Phil Studies now is the papers tend to be a lot more technical.

[00:29:39] This is written as like you could give a lecture with this to a non-professional audience, a non-academic audience.

[00:29:48] And then also there's the Stanford Encyclopedia article, which gets a little deeper into the weeds on this.

[00:29:55] And of course the Hume primary source material, both in the inquiry and the treatise on human nature.

[00:30:03] All just great stuff.

[00:30:04] Hume is really good.

[00:30:06] He's just mind-blowing.

[00:30:07] He really is.

[00:30:08] So let me just give a little introduction.

[00:30:11] It is considered by a lot of people, very famous people, to be this terrible problem that if we don't solve,

[00:30:20] then we just don't know the difference, according to Russell, Bertrand Russell, between sanity and insanity.

[00:30:27] There's no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity.

[00:30:31] But more specifically, I think there's no difference between pseudoscience and science, at least rationally.

[00:30:37] That would be the problem, right?

[00:30:39] That somebody who is trying to predict the future with a crystal ball is just as reasonable as someone who's trying to predict the future using scientific theories and the results of past experiments and all of that.

[00:30:52] Okay.

[00:30:52] Given that this is back to basics, let's first start just defining like certain terms, right?

[00:31:00] And the first is like deduction.

[00:31:02] What is deduction?

[00:31:03] And it's not what Sherlock Holmes does, turns out.

[00:31:05] No, it turns out that what Sherlock Holmes does is precisely not deduction.

[00:31:11] It's about logical relations.

[00:31:13] It takes what knowledge you have or what knowledge you might have.

[00:31:18] And like if it's true, then see what follows from that.

[00:31:21] At best, like in terms of giving you new information, deduction can establish what's impossible, right?

[00:31:28] Like it could say, oh, this thing that you think, you think both of these two things can be true, but they can't.

[00:31:34] But it can't tell you what's actual, right?

[00:31:37] So the famous example when people are trying to give this definition, Pizarro is a man.

[00:31:45] Usually it's Socrates, but you're the modern day Socrates.

[00:31:48] Pizarro is a man.

[00:31:50] All men are mortal.

[00:31:51] Therefore, you can infer via deduction, Pizarro is mortal.

[00:31:56] He's going to die.

[00:31:58] Sorry.

[00:31:58] Fuck you.

[00:31:59] Change it.

[00:32:00] Well, here's the thing.

[00:32:01] And you could take some solace from this actually.

[00:32:04] All we know is that it's impossible for you to be an immortal man based on how we define those terms, right?

[00:32:13] I'm getting gender assignment surgery, reassignment surgery.

[00:32:17] Yeah, I guess we should update this to include all the genders.

[00:32:22] The point here is it's just a hypothetical.

[00:32:25] Assuming those two premises are true, then you will die.

[00:32:28] Hopefully not for a very long time.

[00:32:30] Right.

[00:32:30] Okay.

[00:32:31] So that's deduction.

[00:32:32] Deduction.

[00:32:32] And, you know, like you can do a lot with deduction.

[00:32:36] You can, we always talk about with Euclid, you put these five axioms and see what you can derive from those five axioms.

[00:32:44] But you have to just assume those five axioms to be true, or you have to have some other way of knowing that they're true.

[00:32:51] The deduction can't tell you that they're true.

[00:32:55] Induction does the opposite of this.

[00:32:57] It assembles particular observations and derives from that some kind of general law or fact about the world.

[00:33:06] So you take this huge set of observations, for example, about the location of planets at various times and infer from that laws of planetary motion.

[00:33:16] Just because you have all these observations for all these years and now you can infer certain physical laws.

[00:33:24] Right.

[00:33:25] So that's induction.

[00:33:27] That's a pretty uncontroversial way of describing it.

[00:33:30] It's too simplistic and too general.

[00:33:32] But, right, you don't dispute either of those.

[00:33:35] No, no.

[00:33:35] That totally makes sense.

[00:33:37] That's exactly what happened with the laws of planetary motion.

[00:33:39] Shit ton of data collected by Tycho Brahe.

[00:33:42] Then, like, Kepler and Newton, like, figured out some generalities.

[00:33:47] Yes.

[00:33:48] Right.

[00:33:49] Some generalities that applied up until today.

[00:33:53] Yeah.

[00:33:54] Okay.

[00:33:54] So now we get to the problem.

[00:33:56] So if we're empiricists and Hume was an empiricist, right, we believe that observation and experiment, but observation more fundamentally, that's the only way we're going to get new information about the world.

[00:34:11] In spite of your Kantian proclivity, as I think you agree with this, you can't just use pure reason to understand nature and understand the world and how it operates.

[00:34:22] Right.

[00:34:23] Yes.

[00:34:23] So then, as Hume points out, right, all we have, if it comes to observations, are just the observations and the data that we have right now and memory or records of the observation and data we've collected in the past.

[00:34:41] Now, if you want to build a theory, though, or even just make predictions about what will happen in the future, well, then you need something in addition to just stockpiling observations.

[00:34:52] You need some kind of underlying principle that would justify, that would get you to, okay, how do I get from all these observations to some sort of prediction about what you're going to observe in the future, right?

[00:35:05] Yeah.

[00:35:05] Okay.

[00:35:06] Okay.

[00:35:07] So put a pin in there for a second, as we like to say.

[00:35:10] That's Hume's first point.

[00:35:12] Look, we're going to be empiricists.

[00:35:14] We're going to be really consistent empiricists.

[00:35:18] Okay.

[00:35:18] Separate, but this is going to turn out to be related in an interesting way.

[00:35:23] Hume also points out that when it comes to causation, that's something we never observe, right?

[00:35:31] What we observe is what he called constant conjunction or regularities, and we infer causation from that.

[00:35:41] At least some of the time we infer causation.

[00:35:43] The nine ball hits the eight ball on a pool table and the eight ball moves.

[00:35:48] Well, you infer that the nine ball caused the eight ball to move, but you don't see the cause.

[00:35:54] All you just saw is the nine ball moving, hitting the eight ball, and then the eight ball moving, right?

[00:36:02] And then you've probably seen that over and over again in all sorts of different contexts.

[00:36:06] So we don't observe – the point here is all we observe is as many times as we observe it and as similar as it all looks.

[00:36:18] Like we don't observe the necessary connection between one event and the other.

[00:36:22] We just observe the regularities or the constant conjunctions in the present, and we remember or talk to other people or read about all these things happening in the past, and we infer causation.

[00:36:34] So now comes the question, right?

[00:36:36] If we're going to be real empiricists, why do we think that any kind of regularity is about the past?

[00:36:43] All these observations that we have assembled, why do we think that we can use that to predict the future?

[00:36:51] Which is, again, by definition unobservable to us right now.

[00:36:55] So we need something else.

[00:36:58] And to be very clear about this, because I think this is the wrong way to try to dismiss this problem, the question isn't like how can we be certain if the eight ball hits the nine ball, the nine ball will move?

[00:37:13] How can we be certain that that will happen in the future?

[00:37:15] How can we be certain about what will happen in the future?

[00:37:18] Nobody thinks that we can be certain about the future or that we're completely right about certain causal laws, right?

[00:37:25] Even the most fanatical, unrepentant scientific realist doesn't think that.

[00:37:30] So that's not the question.

[00:37:32] The question is, why do we think that some predictions about what will happen in the future are any more reasonable than other predictions?

[00:37:41] Why is believing scientific prediction or any kind of like prediction based on causal law, why is that more rational than just a psychic seeing it in their mind?

[00:37:54] Or why is it any more rational than just me basing it on my gut or my intuition or just rolling the dice?

[00:38:02] That's the question.

[00:38:03] So it's important to emphasize that this isn't a quest for certainty.

[00:38:07] This is just a quest for why is one belief more reasonable than another?

[00:38:13] Why believe that the sun's going to rise tomorrow?

[00:38:15] Right.

[00:38:15] Like what's the rational basis for believing the sun's going to rise tomorrow?

[00:38:18] Why believe that when I take a sip of this bourbon, it's not going to taste like a Bloody Mary?

[00:38:24] So Hume points out that like you can't get there purely by observation.

[00:38:30] You need to believe that there is some kind of uniformity to how nature works, right?

[00:38:37] Some reason to believe that the regularities you've observed in the past are likely to operate in the future.

[00:38:43] In the Stanford article, they call this the universality principle, I believe, right?

[00:38:48] Or uniformity.

[00:38:49] Oh, sorry.

[00:38:49] Yeah, the uniformity principle.

[00:38:51] So you have to have that kind of basic assumption.

[00:38:55] Otherwise, like the whole point of coming up with laws of physics or any kind of law would be just incoherent because all you would be doing is describing what's happening in the past.

[00:39:05] You wouldn't be thinking that you have any reason to believe that they will apply in the future.

[00:39:10] I don't even think conceptually that that's a law anymore.

[00:39:14] It's just a description of what's happened.

[00:39:16] Yeah.

[00:39:16] Yeah.

[00:39:17] So, okay, you know, why shouldn't we believe that nature operates like it doesn't just jump around in terms of how it operates?

[00:39:27] That there is some kind of uniformity principle that we can rationally believe.

[00:39:31] And this is what Hume says.

[00:39:34] He says, well, still, we want to justify it, right?

[00:39:37] Like we're not just believing any principle just because it seems right to us, especially not if we're empiricists.

[00:39:45] So he poses this as a dilemma.

[00:39:47] You can't infer the truth of a uniformity principle purely through deductive or a priori reasoning because that's just not the way deductive arguments work.

[00:39:59] So he calls this demonstrative reasoning.

[00:40:02] And what he says is, look, that can rearrange the knowledge that you have and maybe establish conclusions at best.

[00:40:09] Like it can establish, oh, these two things can't be true because they contradict each other.

[00:40:16] But as Hume says, it implies no contradiction.

[00:40:20] It's totally conceivable that the course of nature may change and that an object seemingly like those which we have experienced may be attended with different or contrary effects.

[00:40:32] In other words, it's conceivable that the sun doesn't rise tomorrow.

[00:40:35] It's conceivable that all of a sudden I drink this and it's like, oh, this tastes like a Bloody Mary.

[00:40:40] There's nothing that's like logically impossible about that.

[00:40:44] And so you can't use deduction on its own to establish a uniformity principle, right?

[00:40:52] Billiard balls may fall down now, but they might fall up tomorrow.

[00:40:55] There's movies where that's what happens, right?

[00:40:58] OK, so purely deductive argument is out.

[00:41:01] But then he says, and this is what I think is very cool about this argument.

[00:41:06] And this is the one that you don't get, you don't fully get the problem of induction until you get this point.

[00:41:12] So he says, look, if you want to use probable reasoning or what we'd call now induction or inductive belief formation, right?

[00:41:22] That doesn't work either.

[00:41:24] Because what's the main argument for why we would think that this whole induction method works?

[00:41:32] Well, we would say, look how well it's worked in the past, right?

[00:41:37] We've observed all these regularities.

[00:41:39] We've made all these predictions and those predictions have come true.

[00:41:43] And so like, yeah, of course, we're going to believe that this is what's going to happen in the future.

[00:41:47] Of course, we're going to believe that there are these laws, right?

[00:41:51] But you can't use induction to justify induction, right?

[00:41:56] You can't say, well, inductive reasoning has worked in the past, so it'll work in the future because that's begging the question.

[00:42:04] You can't use induction to justify induction.

[00:42:06] I got that today.

[00:42:08] I had that moment today where I was like, oh, that's the heart of the argument.

[00:42:11] Yes, exactly.

[00:42:12] And it's really like, it's so simple, but it's not obvious in a weird way, right?

[00:42:19] Yeah, totally.

[00:42:20] So then in the treatise, so Hume in both the inquiry and the treatise has different formulations of it.

[00:42:28] But this is what he concludes in the treatise.

[00:42:31] Thus, not only our reason fails us in the discovery of the ultimate connection of causes and effects.

[00:42:39] So in other words, like some kind of necessary connection that will attach causes to their effects.

[00:42:46] He says, not only can our reason not provide that, but even after experience has informed us of their constant conjunction,

[00:42:54] tis impossible for us to satisfy by our reason why we should extend that experience beyond those particular instances which have fallen under our observation thus far.

[00:43:07] Right?

[00:43:08] Right?

[00:43:09] Technically, we're fucked.

[00:43:10] Or at least we're fucked when it comes to reason.

[00:43:12] Reason can't justify this.

[00:43:14] We can't justify this rationally.

[00:43:17] And so given this, like why do we still expect?

[00:43:22] Like why do I expect this not to taste like a Bloody Mary?

[00:43:25] Or even think it's more likely that it'll taste like bourbon and not a Bloody Mary and that the sun will rise tomorrow?

[00:43:31] Hume says, well, that's just custom and habit.

[00:43:34] That's how we're wired.

[00:43:36] That's just what we do.

[00:43:37] It's not rational.

[00:43:38] It's not irrational.

[00:43:39] It's just how it is.

[00:43:41] And he thinks like he's kind of interesting.

[00:43:45] He thinks on the one hand, that's fine.

[00:43:47] That's just how we are.

[00:43:49] On the other hand, he can get really upset by that.

[00:43:52] He can his skepticism can take him into dark places.

[00:43:56] But then he goes and plays back in.

[00:43:58] Yeah.

[00:43:59] Can I read that quote from he says, most fortunately, it happens that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose.

[00:44:08] And cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind or by some avocation and lively impression of my senses, which obliterates all these chimeras.

[00:44:17] Is that how you say that?

[00:44:18] Chimeras.

[00:44:19] Chimeras.

[00:44:20] I die and I play a game of backgammon.

[00:44:22] I converse and am merry with my friends.

[00:44:24] And when after three or four hours amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained and ridiculous that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any farther.

[00:44:33] Yeah.

[00:44:34] How do you interpret make merry with my friends?

[00:44:40] Whatever.

[00:44:42] Anyway, look, that's the kind of Hume thing.

[00:44:46] It's like, oh, I'm going to just show why all of this is irrational, but fuck it.

[00:44:51] Like, this is how we're wired.

[00:44:53] Fine.

[00:44:54] That's one answer.

[00:44:55] Sure.

[00:44:55] But it's a tough pill to swallow, I would suggest, for unrepentant scientific realists like yourself who want to believe that there's some rational reason to prefer science over astrology.

[00:45:10] You know, and also for a lot of philosophers like Kant, who was awoken from his dogmatic slumbers from this problem.

[00:45:20] And who, I don't know how much we want to get into this, but kind of came up with his synthetic a priori and the kind of transcendental method.

[00:45:29] This was the thing that spurred him.

[00:45:32] Right.

[00:45:32] I don't think we should dive deep into it, but it is interesting.

[00:45:35] Like, so what he basically said is we're brought into this world with these basic concepts that structure our experience, the concepts of space, time and causality, without which our experiences would just be like completely disordered and we wouldn't be able to exist in the world.

[00:45:53] And those themselves, space, time and causality are not, we don't get those concepts from experience.

[00:46:00] Those concepts, though, like our experience feeds in through those concepts and then gives us knowledge.

[00:46:06] So we don't have to justify causality.

[00:46:09] Like, causality just is, and it's part of our mind that we see it.

[00:46:12] Well, it's a precondition for knowledge about anything are these categories.

[00:46:18] But it just is, it's not exactly dogma.

[00:46:24] So then the justification has to be, well, we know all these other things.

[00:46:29] What would make it possible for us to know these things?

[00:46:34] Well, it's the truth of causation and space and time.

[00:46:39] And yeah.

[00:46:40] Right.

[00:46:41] Which I think I've mentioned before, but this view ended up influencing developmental psychology quite a bit.

[00:46:46] Because Piaget took those concepts, those transcendental.

[00:46:51] Now, like, let's see if we can see evidence that children have a basic concept of space, time and causality super early on in life that they couldn't have learned.

[00:46:59] Well, what's interesting about that is that doesn't say anything about the truth of any causal principle.

[00:47:06] It just, it further confirms Hume's point, which is this is a deeply ingrained custom and habit.

[00:47:14] Right?

[00:47:14] Do you agree with that?

[00:47:15] No, no, because he wouldn't say custom or habit, because those imply learning.

[00:47:18] Nature and habit.

[00:47:20] Yes.

[00:47:21] It's part of how we're wired.

[00:47:23] Yeah.

[00:47:24] And what I don't know what the relation is between the fact that our mind has these preconditional concepts that prepare us to, like, what the relation is between that and actual metaphysical causality.

[00:47:36] Yeah.

[00:47:36] What do you think about that question?

[00:47:38] Like, I mean, we're going to get back to the induction question.

[00:47:42] But do you have some sympathy with this transcendental method of saying, like, well, if this is the only way we could learn anything, then these things have to be true.

[00:47:54] Yeah.

[00:47:55] It strikes me as just pushing the question into something that we just can't demonstrate either way.

[00:48:00] Right.

[00:48:00] I do feel the pull of the satisfying, like, oh, look, we could just see causality.

[00:48:04] And I even think, you know, maybe we evolved to just track, you know, track whatever it is that's going on, these regular patterns in nature.

[00:48:12] Like, one, nature does seem regular in some way.

[00:48:15] And two, our minds seem to be able to, like, quickly comprehend those patterns when they emerge.

[00:48:20] So maybe there is something.

[00:48:21] I don't know about the metaphysics of this all.

[00:48:24] Like, but you're right.

[00:48:25] This just is sort of agreeing with Hume, though.

[00:48:28] It's just saying maybe this isn't a result of ontogeny, but it might be a result of, like, phylogeny.

[00:48:34] Like, you didn't learn it, but, like, maybe just it's part of our brains or whatever.

[00:48:37] Yeah.

[00:48:38] So when I kind of outlined this in our notes, one of your responses is who cares if it's justified in some deep sense?

[00:48:49] Maybe we don't have, quote, unquote, reason.

[00:48:51] Unbelievable that you're saying this.

[00:48:52] Maybe we don't have, quote, unquote, reason to believe in the prediction.

[00:48:56] But if you believe in bad predictions, you'll be worse off than if you believe in good predictions.

[00:49:02] Maybe you will be the one arguing for the power of reason for once.

[00:49:06] So I guess, like, I guess I have two questions about that.

[00:49:09] Number one, it has a slight question-begging problem because when you say you'll be worse off,

[00:49:14] no, I guess that's just if you believe in bad predictions, you'll be, you're not predicting that that will happen, I guess, in the future.

[00:49:21] But I guess the main question I have, which I also put in the notes, doesn't that just make you a pragmatist?

[00:49:27] Is that you're just the thing that you should believe is what will make you better or worse off?

[00:49:33] It's not justified in some larger sense than what works for you.

[00:49:38] Yeah. Okay. That was an early way of formulating the thought because as I was trying to read up more on this today, like I think that it's changed.

[00:49:47] My view has changed a little bit.

[00:49:49] But I want to start with, like, for me, what seems like the pull here, which I think Salmon or Salmon, however he pronounces it, sort of gets to at the end of his paper.

[00:50:00] You know, he talks, he says,

[00:50:15] In another recent instance at a commune in Arizona, a geomancer, a person who walks around with hands outstretched, sensing the vibrations from the earth, predicted that crops would grow there.

[00:50:25] And in arid soil without cultivation or irrigation, the seed was scattered. Nothing grew. In this case, the birds and small rodents benefited.

[00:50:32] And what he's trying to say is, like, it's just, it's not an acceptable conclusion that an astrologer, like, that you should go to an astrologer, I guess.

[00:50:42] Or you're just as well off as going to a psychic as you are going to a doctor about, like, dealing with your cancer.

[00:50:50] So the pull for me is that induction seems to work so well in the sense that we know, like, every time we think the sun's going to come up the next day, it does.

[00:51:00] And across so many domains, the question is, like, how do we reconcile our inability to justify it in this deep way with what we all just kind of believe is the case about the world?

[00:51:12] Whatever you want to call these beliefs about what will happen in the future, whether you want to call them reliable or true or somehow justified, I don't know what the right word is.

[00:51:21] I really was pulled by the description of what Strawson believed, which was maybe this is not a problem.

[00:51:29] Maybe this is that we're applying a standard, like the standard for the justification that deduction provides us.

[00:51:36] We're applying it to induction in a way that just can't happen.

[00:51:40] And that doesn't mean that it's not justified in some sense.

[00:51:43] It just means that it's not justified in the sense that deduction is justified.

[00:51:48] And so I forget what the name of this view is.

[00:51:51] Ordinary language.

[00:51:53] Yeah.

[00:51:53] It's like a dissolution.

[00:51:54] It's dissolution.

[00:51:55] It's exactly what he does in a way that I applaud to the problem of free will and moral responsibility.

[00:52:02] That's exactly what I was going to ask you.

[00:52:04] Like, what's the difference here for you?

[00:52:06] And I think, I don't know, you know, Salmon offers reasons that I think are compelling why this might not be a satisfactory answer.

[00:52:14] But I still am pulled to this, like maybe this is not the problem, not the deep problem that we think it is.

[00:52:21] To ask how to justify induction is unreasonable because it just is, like as they say, it's constitutive of what it means to believe in induction, that it is justified.

[00:52:31] Yeah.

[00:52:31] And one question I had is, I don't know if this question makes any sense, but what justifies deduction?

[00:52:39] And why isn't there conversation about that?

[00:52:42] Yeah.

[00:52:42] So you're engaging in whataboutism for...

[00:52:45] Exactly.

[00:52:46] Well, it's like, as you said many times, there are just things that you believe and to think that we need rationality to justify it seems sometimes a bit extra.

[00:52:58] Right?

[00:52:59] Sure.

[00:52:59] Some things just are true.

[00:53:00] Yeah.

[00:53:01] Right.

[00:53:01] So what does it mean to ask for that?

[00:53:04] So Strawson says, like you said, like, that's just what it means to characterize something as reasonable is to say that, like, you're appealing to the canons of induction.

[00:53:14] This is what he says about, like, to try to justify moral responsibility as a whole is to over-intellectualize the facts.

[00:53:22] So here's the thing about that.

[00:53:24] I obviously have pulled towards that.

[00:53:26] But I think it kind of makes you a pragmatist.

[00:53:29] I think it kind of makes you admit, as I do, certainly with something like moral responsibility, that this is just how we are.

[00:53:39] That doesn't help us, like, determine some further truth about the universe beyond just our psychology.

[00:53:47] And I think that's fine when it comes to moral responsibility.

[00:53:50] I think Strawson's right that, like, our practices and our standards and our relationships don't require some further justification.

[00:54:02] We don't need there to be some, like, deeper principle about moral responsibility.

[00:54:07] That's not required for the way we interact with people.

[00:54:12] I don't know if that's true about science.

[00:54:15] I feel like science has greater ambitions than that.

[00:54:19] Like, it has more grandiose aspirations about, like, laws of the universe.

[00:54:25] Like, Strawson's not giving you laws of the universe with moral responsibility.

[00:54:29] He's just saying, like, look.

[00:54:31] So then you're just a pragmatist and quasi-realist, I guess.

[00:54:36] Yeah.

[00:54:36] I can't.

[00:54:37] I don't know what I am.

[00:54:38] But obviously I didn't read the Strawson work on this.

[00:54:43] But I didn't get the sense that he was saying, like he does for moral responsibility, this is a psychological fact.

[00:54:50] But rather he was saying, induction, just the principles of induction are the principles of induction.

[00:54:56] And you don't need to justify them.

[00:54:58] This could be true about the world.

[00:54:59] Like, it just could be just a truth-generating feature of the regularities of nature.

[00:55:04] But why believe that induction is a truth-generating feature of nature and astrology isn't?

[00:55:13] Yeah.

[00:55:13] Presumably because you have some evidence for believing it, right?

[00:55:17] You're just asking what Strawson says you shouldn't ask.

[00:55:20] But, like, and this is Salmon's point.

[00:55:22] It just boils down to that.

[00:55:24] It's like Strawson saying, don't ask this.

[00:55:26] It's unsolvable.

[00:55:27] Therefore, we don't need to solve it.

[00:55:30] But, like –

[00:55:31] Right.

[00:55:31] But I think Salmon's just, like, being a bit uncharitable here because what he's saying is that this is a word problem.

[00:55:37] It's not that, like, oh, let's just admit that as Hume and others have believed that there is no justification and that Strawson's arguments are throwing their hands up in the air and admitting to no justification.

[00:55:51] It's just saying that, like, this is just a foundational truth of the world that inductive methods yield something true in the same way that, like, you might be ultimately perplexed at why contradiction is wrong.

[00:56:04] You can keep asking.

[00:56:05] It just is true.

[00:56:06] But then, like, why can't you say, as I think Salmon points out, a counterinductive principle is true?

[00:56:15] And it's just a fundamental truth about the world.

[00:56:18] And, like, if you can ask why, it's like, well, you're just asking the wrong question.

[00:56:23] It's just fundamental truth.

[00:56:25] Yeah.

[00:56:26] Yeah, I know.

[00:56:26] You're right.

[00:56:27] I don't know.

[00:56:28] Like, it does then push me into, like, well, maybe there is something to transcendental idealism.

[00:56:34] Right.

[00:56:35] And I think there is a Kantian element to Strawson in that way.

[00:56:39] Like, but I do think it either goes that way or it goes the pragmatist way.

[00:56:43] Yeah.

[00:56:44] There's another thing when you were saying, which I'm not sure follows from this view, which is that suppose that science does have more grandiose ambitions to determine the laws of the universe.

[00:56:54] That's okay to say that you believe in induction in this and that it can't be justified through any external, like, or anything close to the deductive way.

[00:57:04] Or in any way is the question that isn't question begging.

[00:57:07] Or that is, yeah, isn't just faith stipulation that it's true.

[00:57:11] But suppose that you just do believe it and you're just like, okay, forget it.

[00:57:16] Don't ask me anymore.

[00:57:17] I'm going to do science.

[00:57:18] I'm going to collect observations and I'm going to come up with generalities.

[00:57:22] That you can then postulate laws that predict other generalities I think is a separate question.

[00:57:29] Like, I think you need to build science on some minimal induction, some basis for saying induction is right.

[00:57:35] But whether or not you can, like, tap into fundamental laws, I think an inductivist could go either way, right?

[00:57:42] Sure.

[00:57:43] I think that's another question.

[00:57:44] But, right.

[00:57:45] So then just reformulate the problem then as whether you call them laws or whether you call them whatever.

[00:57:51] Just what reason do you have to think that whatever you've collected in the past will have any bearing on what happens in the future?

[00:57:58] Right.

[00:57:58] So there if you say I'm an inductivist, don't ask me how I can justify induction.

[00:58:03] It just is justified.

[00:58:05] Now I can just say let's talk about the methods for good induction.

[00:58:09] And I think there you're fine.

[00:58:11] Once you pass that hurdle, then you can say I have evidence for universal law.

[00:58:16] And here's what it means to have evidence for universal law.

[00:58:19] It means being able to predict things in the right way and, like, match my observations with these general principles.

[00:58:25] I think you can build your way up to that.

[00:58:27] But you don't need to.

[00:58:28] You could just be like I'm a scientist who doesn't care about laws.

[00:58:30] I'm just interested in regularities without any metaphysical claim about the underlying laws or whatever.

[00:58:36] Sure.

[00:58:36] But, like, so then what's the difference between that and, like, my relatives who take as just canon that certain facts that are laid out in the Bible are true and they can't be questioned.

[00:58:53] And so what we're trying to determine, and there's a ton of, like, legitimate, reasonable controversy.

[00:59:03] This is what the Talmud is.

[00:59:04] It's like trying to figure out what follows from all of that.

[00:59:08] But, like, if you ask them to justify the thing that this is all based on, then, like, what's the difference between those two things?

[00:59:20] If I am a neutral observer, why should I believe the science one and not the Orthodox Jewish one?

[00:59:27] Well, I think the answer is that once you accept that inductivist methods are justified, then you would simply say—

[00:59:34] That's the question.

[00:59:35] Well, that's what I'm saying is on the Strassen view, if you just say inductivism is—induction is justified, then you can determine which of the views is more true.

[00:59:48] Sure.

[00:59:48] Because if the religious view predicts future events in a reliable way, then you would say that's evidence for believing those things.

[00:59:55] It's not claiming to do that.

[00:59:56] But the point is, it's like, you can't just say if you accept the inductive principle, because that's the very thing at issue, right?

[01:00:03] Like, and you could accept the counter-inductive principle.

[01:00:07] Or, like, you can't just say if you accept it, look at all you get.

[01:00:11] Yeah.

[01:00:11] I obviously can't solve the problem of induction.

[01:00:14] But what I would say is, like, maybe it is a pragmatist view, but I would say you can't rationally justify that given that every day that the sun has gone up, that it's going to go up tomorrow, the sun will rise tomorrow.

[01:00:25] Sure, you can't offer anything close to that airtight deductive reasoning for that.

[01:00:29] But what you can say is, if I say that the sun will rise tomorrow, I will either be right or wrong.

[01:00:35] And being right just seems to correlate with being right later on.

[01:00:39] So far.

[01:00:40] So far, yeah.

[01:00:41] Like, it could be one day that billiard balls fall up.

[01:00:46] And that would throw science off completely.

[01:00:49] But that hasn't happened.

[01:00:50] Like, that's, when it happens, like, then sure.

[01:00:53] I'm puzzled by this deep need for, like, this, like, foundational justification for something that just seems to be something that not only does everybody intuitively accept,

[01:01:03] but, like, it actually does seem to track the pattern of reality as we experience it.

[01:01:09] Yes.

[01:01:10] It has so far.

[01:01:11] Yeah.

[01:01:12] At least.

[01:01:13] Look, I get what you're saying.

[01:01:15] I also get the counter to that, which Salmon says, which is the whole point is, why do we think, and Hume, like, why do we think that what's been so fruitful thus far will be fruitful in the future?

[01:01:30] And then normally we do talk about begging the question.

[01:01:33] We do think circular reasoning is bad.

[01:01:35] So to just say in this case, oh, no, it's okay in this case is a little sleazy.

[01:01:43] So you like the consistency.

[01:01:46] Right.

[01:01:47] Fair enough.

[01:01:49] You ought to apply.

[01:01:50] Touche.

[01:01:51] Here's a question.

[01:01:52] And I think that people, even in the Salmon article, he points this out.

[01:01:55] But you can say that something isn't justified but still have reason to believe it.

[01:01:59] Right.

[01:02:00] And I think this comes up when he's talking about, like, validation versus vindication.

[01:02:05] Yeah.

[01:02:05] Where you could say that, like, let's just loosen up the demands for what we mean by justifying induction.

[01:02:11] And I think you could have reason to believe it.

[01:02:13] Just those reasons are, you know, of a different class.

[01:02:17] Question begging.

[01:02:18] No, well, you could just say I think that the sun, having gone up every day, gives you reason to believe that the sun will go up tomorrow.

[01:02:26] It's just not reason that it's as airtight as Pizarro is mortal.

[01:02:29] Well, I guess this is the question.

[01:02:31] Whether it gives you reason beyond just the pragmatist view, which is it's worked for me in the past.

[01:02:37] It works for me now to just believe that there are these regularities that will continue in the future.

[01:02:43] So I'm going to believe it.

[01:02:45] And maybe what you're saying is either that you're a pragmatist or that the realist view is indistinguishable from the pragmatist.

[01:02:53] So kind of a quietist view.

[01:02:55] Like, yeah, I think that might be where you are.

[01:02:58] But like, but that is different than at least the ways in which science is sometimes presented.

[01:03:06] And it also opens the door for another view that's completely incompatible with that.

[01:03:13] It also works for the person and also has worked for them in the past to be just as reasonable, vindicated, whatever the label you want to attach to it as yours.

[01:03:26] And that might be a bullet that you're willing to bite.

[01:03:29] Yeah, it might be.

[01:03:30] It gets me to the question of what is what I think I sometimes get confused about what whether we're doing epistemology or whether we're doing metaphysics.

[01:03:39] And I don't know if that's the right way to formulate this.

[01:03:42] But I do wonder whether a belief in truth or like realism is what might be pushing my intuition in one direction or another.

[01:03:51] Because one of the reasons I tend to say I'm not a pragmatist is because the pragmatist view is that truth is merely what works.

[01:04:01] Right.

[01:04:01] But I kind of think that what regularities are tracking truth.

[01:04:04] Right.

[01:04:04] But I think there's a way to like finesse you to a more sophisticated pragmatist position, which may be more Quinean or something where it's more what not just works for you in some simplistic sense of like I feel good or this is allowing me to achieve my goals.

[01:04:24] But what kind of meshes with my all these other sets of kind of core beliefs that I have.

[01:04:31] And yes, that whole web can't be justified in some ultimate way.

[01:04:36] But, you know, like it all fits.

[01:04:39] My life can't be justified.

[01:04:40] Yeah.

[01:04:41] No.

[01:04:41] Right.

[01:04:43] Can I just as a meta point of small joy, can I just say that like one of the cool things about going through all of these readings and having this conversation is for somebody who for whom the problem is fairly novel.

[01:04:55] Like is that you start thinking and, you know, if you are as our listeners are like not a complete dimwit, you start formulating some objection in your mind and you realize somebody has.

[01:05:08] And you formulate a potential answer and you realize, oh, somebody has.

[01:05:13] And it really then just becomes a matter of mapping what you seem to believe with what somebody else has already written like deeply like about.

[01:05:20] And it's it's it's kind of cool like as a as as a process.

[01:05:26] Absolutely.

[01:05:27] It's all out there.

[01:05:29] You know, this is what Borges thought.

[01:05:30] Like we're just dipping into the same pool of ideas.

[01:05:35] Oh, God.

[01:05:35] It's cool.

[01:05:36] It's just fucking cool.

[01:05:38] Like it doesn't at all depress me that other people have thought all of these things.

[01:05:41] It makes me feel like I'm part of it.

[01:05:43] So maybe the last thing, unless you have something else, is to talk about Popper and his way of dealing with it, which is quite different, I think, than the Strawson way of dealing with it, which is just to deflate the problem.

[01:05:58] Popper's way, it's just like, oh, yeah, no, induction is wrong and we shouldn't use it and we don't use it.

[01:06:06] And in fact, what scientists do is actually deduction.

[01:06:11] You know, we use observations, but only to try to refute or falsify theories.

[01:06:18] That's how science works.

[01:06:20] This is what science does.

[01:06:21] It tries to falsify.

[01:06:23] He thought this was a solution to the problem is we're actually not trying to assemble observations into some sort of like law of planetary motion.

[01:06:36] What we actually are trying to do is like propose theories or laws and then try to falsify them.

[01:06:45] And those falsifications is like the business of science, the one that survive, move on, the ones that don't are rejected.

[01:06:54] Right.

[01:06:55] And he thought that you were doing deduction at that point, right?

[01:06:57] Yeah, exactly.

[01:06:59] It's like modus tollens or whatever.

[01:07:01] Like this theory predicts that.

[01:07:03] Oh, that didn't happen.

[01:07:05] So it's falsified.

[01:07:06] Like we could do a whole nother episode on like problems with that view.

[01:07:11] But I guess my question to you is it doesn't seem to address the problem because if the problem is like why we have any reasonable basis of predicting what will happen in the future, it doesn't seem like Popper's method.

[01:07:29] That's not going to work.

[01:07:30] It's not going to give you any information about the future.

[01:07:32] It's just going to tell you about what theories survive based on like what's gone on in the past.

[01:07:41] I had problems, I think, understanding this view because he then talks about corroboration, which just ends up being induction to me.

[01:07:49] And I honestly don't honestly don't know how you derive hypotheses also from induction and generate theories that then can be tested.

[01:07:59] And maybe they are being falsified through this whatever hypothetical deductive method.

[01:08:05] But it seems like induction.

[01:08:07] I personally can't see you doing science without accepting that induction is a valid way of doing it.

[01:08:15] And maybe I don't understand Popper right.

[01:08:17] Our very dear listener Jeffrey Watermole has written us to tell us that as a Popperian, he thinks that the problem of induction isn't a problem at all.

[01:08:26] But I think resorts to his Platonism to justify that, right?

[01:08:33] Like which isn't what I think you would want to do.

[01:08:35] No, no, I don't.

[01:08:38] And even when it like successfully predicts something in the future and you say, OK, well, that theory is it survives to live another day.

[01:08:47] It doesn't mean if you do that very same experiment the next day, it'll like also survive.

[01:08:54] Right.

[01:08:54] But not only that, even worse, there's so many other theories.

[01:08:58] The Stanford article says,

[01:09:14] You know, there's lots of...

[01:09:18] It hasn't been falsified that Nina isn't possessing Aisha or that Aisha isn't remembering when she was Nina.

[01:09:30] You know, Popper did appeal to the notion of one hypothesis being better or worse corroborated by the evidence.

[01:09:37] But arguably this took him away from a strictly deductive view of science.

[01:09:41] That's the corroboration.

[01:09:42] It's not confirmation, it's corroboration.

[01:09:45] It appears doubtful that pure deductivism can give an adequate account of the scientific method.

[01:09:51] That seems to me to be right.

[01:09:52] And it seems to me to not to at least not address the central problem about what all this tells us about, you know, what's going to happen.

[01:10:01] Yeah.

[01:10:02] There's like a web of shit going on.

[01:10:05] I think scientists should avoid philosophy of science.

[01:10:08] Yeah.

[01:10:09] Like that's the Laken's view.

[01:10:12] I really think that like I'm on a surface level a pragmatist about science in the sense that they should just keep pumping out data and doing statistical inference.

[01:10:24] And we'll kind of get to approximating something that's true with a lowercase t.

[01:10:31] Lowercase t.

[01:10:32] That's what we should call this episode.

[01:10:35] I feel like this episode has accomplished something.

[01:10:41] Maybe.

[01:10:42] For both of us.

[01:10:43] Yes.

[01:10:43] It's shown that you're a whore for reason, for one.

[01:10:50] And that clearly I'm not bothered enough.

[01:10:53] It will impede my desire to do science in a way that is consistent with my views on why scientists shouldn't be doing philosophy of science.

[01:11:02] Well, that's Samman's like critique of the Strawson view.

[01:11:04] It's just like out of sight, out of mind.

[01:11:06] I mean, that's one way of dealing with it.

[01:11:08] But you could do that with a lot of worldviews.

[01:11:12] It's funny.

[01:11:13] I had this thought that with all this talk of justification, I was like, maybe Tamler's wrong about how much he hates the conversation about knowledge.

[01:11:22] Because, you know, just add a couple more conditions to justified and you're just there.

[01:11:27] I've always been interested in justification.

[01:11:29] I've not been interested in like when you call it, like just label something knowledge.

[01:11:35] But maybe you could run that same problem that I have with that on the concept of justification.

[01:11:42] I mean, we don't have to get into this.

[01:11:44] But one of the big differences is in one case it actually might make a practical difference.

[01:11:50] But in another case it doesn't at all.

[01:11:52] It's just like what you call it.

[01:11:54] For philosophers it does.

[01:11:56] Last thing I'll say, which we've already kind of said, is that it is fun to push each other on the edges of our beliefs.

[01:12:02] To show that like our hard stances.

[01:12:05] Teetering.

[01:12:07] Or maybe, maybe a little less certain.

[01:12:11] All right.

[01:12:12] Yeah, I think we'll do more of these.

[01:12:14] This is fun.

[01:12:15] It was fun really trying to think through it.

[01:12:17] And so, yeah.

[01:12:18] Absolutely.

[01:12:19] And I'm already thinking of the logo for the Back to Basics.

[01:12:22] I want like an 80s font.

[01:12:24] You know, or maybe like a 90s.

[01:12:25] Yeah, I think more 90s.

[01:12:27] It would be like too fast, too furious.

[01:12:31] Like Saved by the Bell kind of logo.

[01:12:34] You know?

[01:12:35] That's your department usually.

[01:12:37] So I'll leave it to you.

[01:12:39] But join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:12:43] The great end.

[01:13:02] I'm a good man.

[01:13:03] Good man.

[01:13:25] Just a very bad wizard.