Neil, I may be wrong here, but isn't what you're mentioning fall under "Logic" rather than the scientific method?
The cornerstone of scientific proof is that the results are reproducable by anyone following the same steps. This sounds more like a discussion on reasoning, argument and observation.

Okay- I admit defeat on the duck's echo thing, but it shows how things get propagated easily through misinformation.

I would say that logic does come into it, but scientific method has aspects of observation, reasoning and argument that are integral.

This was part of my course for last year so that might explain something.

Neil you've lost me as well.

First, deductive reasoning is certainly not infallable. Perhaps more accurate but not infallable. A valid deductive argument makes assumptions of truth that may not be correct. It was once true that the world was flat. No longer.

I also disagree with your claim that the Scientific Method is largely inductive (you were saying that, right?). Nearly all of the steps that Harry outlined above are based upon mathematics. Of course it could also be applied to simple observations not requiring a quantifiable analysis but we are talking about "science", correct? Most mathematical systems are always deductive. They cannot be inductive. (I say most because I haven't explored higher math applications, otherwise I would say all. I hate math.)

I'm not sure where your book's pig argument was going either. Was it saying that was deductive or inductive? Either way I don't think that is an accurate oversimplification of the scientific method.

Warning! Fairly long post ahead.

Firstly, I still maintain that a deductive argument is infallible. The moment you make assumptions it is no longer deductive, it becomes inductive. [Where inductive means a good argument, but possible for its conclusion to be false despite being based on premises which record observations that are true].

Also it was never TRUE that the world was flat. Belief does not alter reality. I may believe that I am tall, dark and handsome, when I am none of the above; so people believing that the world was flat did not make it so.

I never said that Scientific Method is largely inductive. What I said was 'That Scientific Method is actually one of a sub-group of 3 methods that all use induction. The one you mentioned is called the 'Method of Hypotheses' and is often taken to stand as the main method.'

What I was trying to say was the method outlined by Harry was called the 'Method of induction'. And by its nature the Method of Induction uses induction.

Quote 'Nearly all of the steps that Harry outlined above are based upon mathematics'. I totally agree. It is the conclusion that you draw from it that is usually inductive.

Example: Every raven I have seen is black. Therefore every raven is black.

This is induction by enumeration, where you have many positive occurances but no negatives. You then reason that your sample is the same as the whole population. There is a mathematical significance that all ravens are black, but you can't rule out the possibility of seeing a white raven. So although maths is infallible, the human will find a way to error.

I will now try to explain the pig argument well this time.

--To produce a theory we start with a working hypothesis based on previous observations, or relevant data.
--From this we make a prediction that will occur if our working hypothesis is correct.
--In the test, our prediction is correct.
--> So our working hypothesis is probably correct.
This is a restating of the method as written above by Harry.

Example1:
1. Bode-Titus law of planetary distances gives us a prediction about asteroids / Uranus / Neptune
2. Asteroids observed / Uranus discovered
So:
3. Bode-Titus law probably correct

This is fallacious reasoning because you are affirming the consequence.

Example2:
Working hypothesis - pigs have wings
Testable consequence - some winged things are good to eat
Testable consequence true
So: working hypothesis probably true

Was that any better?
Your prediction may come true but it may be down to other factors. The pig argument highlights the problem with induction; whereas deduction can not be wrong, but as a byproduct it can not show us anything new, it restates what you already have in a different way.

Scientific Method= a way in which we can gather Scientific Knowledge.

There are many proposed methods but if they are based on induction then they will suffer the consequences of being wrong occasionally, and if they use solely deduction they will never make progress. You need to use strike a balance between the two.

Hmmmm. (This is cool!)

WARNING: I think mine is even longer.



All actors are human beings.
Ben Affleck is a human being.
Therefore, Ben Affleck is an actor (barely).

This is an example of an invalid deductive argument. The fact that the premises and conclusion are all true is not relevant. What makes this invalid is that the conclusion does not follow neccessarily from the premises.



Not true. In my example it is not possible to arrive at the conclusion unless one makes rather broad assumptions. The argument remains deductive. But I think we're splitting hairs here dude .



Belief certainly does alter our relity in as much as our reality is created by the scope of our undertanding and perception. General Relativity proves this.



You obviously know your logic. Very nice. However we are talking about science here. Are you implying that in applying the Scientific Method that we usually apply these kind of broad generalizations? I don't think so. A mathematical conclusion is always deductive.

I didn't address your pig argument as I think your premise that the Scientific Method is based on induction is flawed (and I didn't understand all that Bode-Titus stuff ). The use of a conditonal statement in the standard formulation of a hypothesis would best be compared to a hypothetical syllogism in logic, which is nearly always catagorized as deductive.



I believe these methods are based largely on deduction. When we discover new truths that prove these premises and/or conclusions to be incorrect it is then we will make progress.

I can't help feeling like Mikael's questions were somewhat loaded. Are we talking about something specific here or did you have something specific in mind?

Please PLease Please, don't anyone start with

1. God is Love
2. Love is blind.

I was waiting for this "deductive" argument to appear:

Quote: All actors are human beings.
Ben Affleck is a human being.
Therefore, Ben Affleck is an actor

If you had said:
All actors are human beings.
Ben Affleck is an actor.
Therefore, Ben Affleck is human.

That would be a perfectly reasonable deductive argument.

But what you said was inductive by the very fact that you had to make rather broad assumptions.

What would happen to your argument if I add this?
-All fireman are humans.
-All magicians are humans.
-All actors are humans.
Ben Affleck is human.
So what conclusion can I make?
Ben Affleck is a fireman, magician and an actor? Or is he just one of them?
Be careful not to reason from a sample (actors) to the population (all humans).

Your example fits in with the pig example, except in your example we get a conclusion that is accurate (barely), whereas in the pig argument we end up with a conclusion that is not true, despite using the same reasoning.

A purely deductive argument/hypothesis has no predictive power; it can not tell us what to expect in the future. To make a prediction about the future using past examples uses induction. Why is there such a problem with that? It is not derogatory about Scientific Method.

A largely deductive version of the Scientific Method is Popper's Falsififcation. This says that if a hypothesis passes a test then it is not correct, it is merely not falsified. It can be said to be corroborated. The theory that passes the strictest test is the most corroborated.

Can we justify using the most corroborated theory? NO! To use it on the basis that it has worked the best in the past is to indulge in induction.

So when I say that the Method of Hypotheses is a method that relies on induction (it is also called the Hypothetico-Inductivo method!) it is not a major problem. If we only use deduction then we will not make any new ground, we only restate what we know (Go back to my revised Ben Affleck=actor example).

The Method of Hypotheses is not all of the Scientific Method, there are others as I keep saying.

Logic does have a place in science. Acids turn litmus red. Sulpuric acid turns litmus red. Therefore sulphuric acid is a cabbage. (If we remove logic then I can say stupid things like that).
In the acid example can I say that Sulphuric acid is definitely an acid? In your Ben Affleck example you did exactly this, but you take a leap in logic to do so. Could other things turn litmus red? Could sulphuric acid be one of those other things? Here we have a legitimate doubt, and only an inductive leap will carry us across the gap logic creates.


Also on the belief=reality part, I can see what you are saying but you need refine what you are saying. What would happen if two people believe two totally incompatible things, eg the world is flat, the world is spherical. Do both exist at the same time? If so how? Does only one truely exist? If so which? That is why I believe theories only try to model reality and they are not actually that reality [But this is another mammoth sidetrack that we should avoid!]

Well seeing as we haven't heard back from Mikael I'll assume we are still on the right path, albeit up to our eyeballs.



That was my point Neil. A deductive argument need not be reasonable. It doesn't even need to be true. Truth and reason have nothing to do with whether something is deductive or inductive. Using substitution in your form:

All magicians are astronauts.
O.J. Simpson is a magician.
Therefore, O.J. Simpson is an astronaut.

This ia a perfectly valid deductive argument. Unsound, yes, but still valid. So deductive arguments can be both invalid and valid but unsound. In either case they are not infallible.



We could debate this one all day. However the matter at hand is science. Science, by its very nature, is largely deductive.



Dude I'm old. I'm not supposed to be thinking this hard. Not sure I agree there either.

I am a human being.
All human beings have died in the past.
I, therefore, will die.

That argument is predicting a future event based on past occurances. And it is deductive as the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.



YES! Because we have no further knowledge, what is most correct today is what forms our reality. The world was flat, now it's round. It was the center of the universe, now it's not. The universe was static, now it's expanding. We use "most correct" theories in everything we do. Social structure, medicine, architecture, politics, religion...everything. We went from 8-Tracks to MP3. Will there be something more better in the future? Probably.



Granted our argument has been largely semantic. Agreed then!!



Well you and I seem to have pretty differing opinions. I haven't spontaneously combusted yet have you?

I do have a headache though.

I think we have finally got somewhere between us!
Agreed that this is mainly semantic, but I still think you use deductive and inductive interchangeably.

How something is reasoned has everything to do with whether something is inductive or deductive. Deductive reasoning is infallible, it is always sound, but the conclusion you draw from that may not be so.

The reasoning in the OJ example is exactly what I used in my Ben Affleck example (that was the idea, right?), and so the logic follows through and reaches the end. No assumptions were made in the reasoning, and the argument is solid. It was deductive. I am only concerned with the path taken, not the end result. The deductive path can always be followed by logic. The same can not be said for induction.

Your initial Ben Affleck argument had a break in the logic. It assumed that he had to be an actor just because he was a human being, even though there was no direct path for an argument based on logic to arrive at that conclusion. Somewhere an assumption was made, therefore it was inductive.

Quote:
I am a human being.
All human beings have died in the past.
I, therefore, will die. End Quote

You have made a huge assumption so this argument is not deductive. I will work it through with logic.

This would be deductive:
I was a human being
All humans die.
Therefore I died.

But you said 'all humans have died in the past' and then used information about the past to predict the future. That is inductive! That is the very essence of induction! Please go read Popper. Popper sought to avoid 'the problem of induction' by using purely deduction and this lead to his theory of falsification. Popper did not actually solve the problem because induction was still needed to determine which corroborated theory to use.

But back to your example:
The problem is that you will die in the future(probably in about 10 mins after you try to read the whole thread in one go... from brain overload!).
This is not accounted for in your argument.
You are saying that all people have died in the past, therefore I will die in the future.
What happens if the secret of eternal life is found and you do not die?
It does not follow that you HAVE to die, it is probable, if something is probable then you have used INDUCTION! Please go and read my first post again about the sun rising. I was on about this.

The sun has always risen in the morning.
It will rise tomorrow.

The problem of induction and the inability of deduction to predict the future are very common themes in the philosophy of science, it is all there if you want to check it.

Going back to the belief=reality argument, do you truely believe this? Do you actually believe that 'The world was flat, now it's round. It was the center of the universe, now it's not'?

I would say that in accordance with Occam's Razor 'the simplest solution is probably correct', and that to me would be that the Earth was always round, but we made a mistake before.

Otherwise, at one time there were only four elements and then when others were discovered they miraculously came in to being. I would suggest that they were always there but were not found.

One last example: Did the sun really orbit the earth and then suddenly changed and the Earth orbitted the Sun? I really can't see anybody supporting this argument but would genuinely like to see someone try. I can understand people undergoing a paradigm shift when something new is discovered but not that the actual environment keeps altering in line with our new theories.

An essay title from last year was 'Did Tycho and Kepler see the same thing when they saw a sunrise?'

That is the question you would need to answer to support your assertion. One thought the sun went round the Earth and the other vice versa. Could they really see the same thing? I would say yes, but that they interpreted it in different ways. What do you say?

You hold that science is deductive that 'A valid deductive argument makes assumptions of truth that may not be correct.' So to you that is what science does, makes predictions using past events.

I hold that science is inductive BECAUSE of it making assumptions. So to me science is inductive because it makes predictions using past examples.

I wonder if we were to use a standard language if we would be arguing the same thing?

Frantic Semantics anyone?

I have actually stopped following this thread actively since it is, as you say, up to our eyeballs, at least mine. I thought I was going to get short replies that were easily understandable

But don't let me stop anyone. I just wish I had got more opinions that I understood what they were.

Mikael

Sorry Mikeal, I didn't mean to divert the thread.

In my posts you should be able to piece together what I was trying to say.

1. Do not worry that something isn't proved. It might not ever be proved(if it is possible). If something is working consistantly, then use it, but take it with a pinch of salt.

2. It does matter why it works. If it didn't then drug companies would only produce vitamin C pills, and get doctors to give them to cure any illness with the message that it has cured 100% of people. The psychosomatic effect would be enough to cure lots of people. But after the psychosomatic effect wears off when 'Watchdog' reveal the scam, it would be nice if the drug worked anyway whether or not I believed it would.

That's what I was saying too.


Nice discussion Neil. I'll concede and reserve my rebuttal for a later time and place that involves beer.

:cheers:

I really enjoyed that too.

I'll drink to that!

"Sorry Mikeal, I didn't mean to divert the thread."

Don't worry! You were not the only one

Mikael

Mikael,

What someone experiences in a predictable way MAY matter only to them. If it works for them, that is really all that matters to them.

When their finding is communicated to someone else, and they get a similar result then the nature of the effect is irrelevant. It is when the other person does NOT get the effect that further investigation begins. This investigation is where science comes in. Scientifice method is there to find what is critical to the effect.

Science is a method of discourse and investigation that has as its goal the simplest yet most complete theory of HOW. There is no 'why' in science. 'Why' is left to personal and subjective perspective and the study of philosophy.

May I ask two new questions? Since it seems many here know how science works.

1.What happens if science can't explain a certain phenomenon? The effects can be observed, but there is really no explanation.

2. How big can the placebo effect be? It's often talked about effects like "20% better", or "increased by 35%". If the increase is 1000% better, would that be explained by placebo?

Mikael

Hi Mikael,

Phenomena that are reproducable can be studied, hypotheses formed (as to what is in action) and these hypotheses tested most stringently. Hypotheses that survive stringent testing by the proponant and a generation of others become theories. We sometimes say that a theory is the same as an explanation. Some experiences don't seem to make it into the laboratory for observation much less testing. Psychic experiences seem to be like this. The feelings are accepted as real, it's just the phenomena don't seem to be 'on demand'. No sane scientist is going to deny someone their feelings or experience. By the same token no sane scientist is going to offer a hypothesis or theory about something they have no way to measure. Good news about the subjective stuff. PET scans can now 'watch' brain activity. Not as glamorous as thinking about psychic stuff but at least there is now something to watch and compare the measurements to the subjective experiences.

2) Two issues there. First, how does one measure the 'big/size' of an effect and then ... statistics.

a) Let's say there are 200 people with colds divided into two groups. One gets a remedy and the other gets a placebo. Double blind study. Two days later all are tested and ten times as many members of what turns out to be the 'remedy' group report feeling better and less symtoms than the people who turn out to be in the 'placebo' group.
We can then say the 'remedy' was 1000% better than the placebo. Now let's add that only ONE member of the 'placebo' group felt better and only TEN from the 'remedy' group felt better. In this case one could then report the 'remedy' as 10% effective.

b) The proper design of treatment experiments really has to incorporate the 'no treatment', 'remedy' and placebo data to be meaningful. People have a response to treatment / doctor contact all by itself. Likewise there seems to be about a 30% chance that a person will experience subjective effects of a placebo. This seems to work for 'placebo' pain killers, headache remedies and it seems anti-depressants as well. The studies are in the journals. There were courses in college on experiment design and statistics to determine the likelyhood that an outcome was due to chance alone. The placebo effect is real and needs to be taken into account when determining efficacy of treatments.

This is fun. I'll be brief.

I once had a great time with a guy who tried to convince me that only statements that could be proven were true.

I asked him to prove that statement. Eventually he conceded that some statements must be true which cannot be proven.

He also later conceded that the craters on the moon existed before the first human being ever thought of such a geological formation, and long before the first telescope was ever trained upon the moon... before a "proof" for such a thing could ever have even been conceived! The truth of their existence was independent of our ability to prove their existence.

Aristotle was right. We all start with assumptions or first principles. Even the most empirical scientist starts with some unprovable assumptions about reality. We all hold some truths to be self-evident.

Most of us can eventually be convinced that statements are true or false INDEPENDENTLY of our ability to prove them logically or defend them empirically. We discover truth in our proofs; we do not create it with our proofs.

I don't want to turn this into a religious thread, so I want to limit the book recommendation I'm about to make to Christians only... check out "Unshakable Foundations" by Norman Geisler & Peter Bocchino. If you're a Christian and you like this thread, then you're going to love this book. (And if you haven't read all of C.S. Lewis' works yet, then get busy.)

JMT
...student of apologetics...

Joe (et al)

Likewise epistomology is cool and requires no apologies

Part of the 'human condition' is that what we know is dependant upon what we believe.

Mikael,
First for your question, and then more fun (I just can't stay out of this one).

The problem you're talking about is a very valid one. Must something be proven, to be real?

Well, science isn't really as rigid as many of us like to think, but to some extent what you're saying is true. Science works from a certain perspective; one which does demand what my might call "reasonable proof" or perhaps better stated, "reasonable disproof" (although true disproof in no more provable than proof is). They can only make statements about what can be studied under certain conditions, with repeated experiments, or worked out mathematically (and yes, math is just as fallible as anything else, since it depends on some sort of evidence, which we all know doesn't exist ). More on that later.

Does this mean that science is limited? Of course. It is entirely possible that not a single thing they've ever said is true. But the problem is really not with Science (as Science is merely the "seeking" of truth, not the truth itself), but with our perception of it. If anyone decides that "reality" is limited to what Scientists have been able to "reasonably prove", then even the Scientists couldn't get anywhere. If we believe something that Science states is untrue, or rather is in contradiction with some scientific law, then there isn't a problem until someone tells you that you can't be right, simply because Science disagrees with you. Now, what they are really saying is that they have more "faith" in the findings of scientists, than in your belief. But try jumping into a scientists shoes sometime, and watch how they duke it out over what was thought to be true, and what could really be true, and you'll see that it's quite a bit more unstable than our perception of it is. Of course, as Neil said, if it wasn't unstable, it wouldn't get anywhere.

Now, an argument could be made that because science must base itself on some type of "proof", or reasonable proof, or unproof, whatever; while pure belief bases itself only on faith-then because science is basing itself on something that doesn't really exist (real proof), while pure belief is based only on faith, then at least pure belief is not based on a fallacy, and must therefore be more valid.

That is only a comical perspective, but an interesting thing to think about.

Forget that something you do happens all the time, but can't be studied for a moment. Let's say that one day I float up in the air for about five seconds, with no means of support, and come back down. It happens only once, and therefore it cannot be repeated or studied. Does that mean it didn't happen? Of course not. But it does mean that the only one who knows for certain that it happened is you (assume that you can even depend on your own experience), and anyone else would have to take it on faith (they'd have to believe you for some reason).

Now-Neil and Burt. Man we could have fun on a three-way conference call!

You're both quite right, the argument is mostly semantical, and so I have little arguing to do, but perhaps a bit of adding.

Neil, (man we must have been separated at birth or something, because I understood everything you said, and that scares me), but you and I look at things from a certain type of extremes, while Burt comes at things from a more relative practicality.

Case in point: Deductive vs. Inductive. I'd be willing to bet that both Neil and I could make the statement that ultimately they are both the same, but that would be another subject. For now, "true" deduction relies on an omniscient point of view, therefore it isn't even a reality, but a "pie in the sky" concept. Since we can't ever really "know" anything, (for the same reason that you can't define the word "the"), then everything we know exists in varying degrees between Induction and Deduction. Because the ultimate version of “deduction” is only an ultimate concept, and doesn’t really exist, what most people are refering to as “deduction” is a reasonable form of it, not the grand ultimate we might be thinking about. Correct me if I’m wrong on that Burt.

Burt, your statement about the Earth once being flat, now being round, is quite correct as well, though of course it is a specified perspective. Perhaps it cannot be said that "the Earth is flat", but it could be said that the statement "the Earth is flat" has an equivalent validity to "the Earth is round".

We don't "know" the Earth is round after all, it is only round as far as we can presently tell. After all, several thousand years ago, the world was very obviously flat. You could tell just by looking around you, and without actually sailing around the world to find out, it was true. Aanyone saying the Earth was round, might have been making what we today would say was a "true" statement, but with the scientific understandings of the time (and yes, back then looking around you and seeing that the world was flat was science), it would have been completely illogical. Today, I could say that the world was neither flat, or round, but a straight line infinitely crisscrossing itself through an infinite number of dimentions. I might even be proven correct a few hundred years down the road, and then disproved a few hundred years after that, but according to modern understandings, I'd be out of my mind.

Another example I've enjoyed using, is the fact that the Sun was once said to circles the Earth, and now we say the Earth circles the Sun. Well, anyone with a decent knowledge of relativity, is well aware that the Earth no more circles the Sun, than the Sun circles the Earth. In fact, from a certain perspective, it is far more true to state that they circle each other. But, in order to make any statements, or make any vectors, or measurements of any kind, we must "assume" some fixed point. There are of course no "true" fixed points, but must assume them in order to study movement. It is far easier to consider the Sun as a fixed point, than to consider the Earth as a fixed point, and try to calculate the rotation of all planets and the Sun from the perspective of a fixed Earth. We say that the universe is expanding from a supposed center, but of course we could just as easily decide that the entire universe was expanding away from any given point in space. The speeds would be far less uniform, and the calculation astronomical, but we could do it. For this reason, we could also state that neither the Sun or Earth were moving, and that the universe were merely moving around them in such a way as for it to "appear" that they were revolving around each other. Mind you, these are all equally valid and “true” perpectives.

And if that doesn't give you headache, in order to make any semi-ultimate statement about the universe, you would have to assume yourself (or your head, or your center cell or molecule, or superstring) to be the actual center of the universe, and decide that EVERYTHING was revolving around you. Talk about self-centered, but it's the only way to make an actual measurement (how far is it from me, how fast is it accelerating towards, or away from me etc.).

Bottom line, because ultimately we must make vast assumptions about anything in order to study it, we must also concede that all views are equally valid. Yes, that means that if I decide "I'm a little blue bird name, Bloopy", the rest of the world can disagree, but who is right depends completely on perspective. After all, Bloopy could be right. Everyone in the world could be under hallucinogenic drugs, everyone except poor little Bloopy. The likelihood is dubious to say the least, but probability is not proof, only the likelihood of proof.

Now we can’t study the universe from a perspective that says all perspectives are equally valid, so must assume certain fallacies in order to continue. This is a necessary paradox to the evolution of thought. Paradoxes, one might say, are the legos of God.

Man, how did I get off on that tangent. I think I need to go to bed now. Burt, I'll see you Tuesday. Neil, I'll see you one day.

Sable