Actually “could he, in principle, have made place for such possibilities in advance?” is very, very excellent question.
We can allocate for such possibilities in advance. For example, we can use a simple statistical model for limitations of our own understanding of reality—I have a certain number of years experience in making judgements and assumptions about reality; I know that I don’t consider all possible explanations, and I can estimate that in x% cases the ‘true’ explanation was one that I hadn’t considered. So I can make a ‘belief budget’ for the ‘other’ category. For example, any question like ‘will the coin fall heads or tails’ has to include ‘other’ option. It may fall on it’s side.
A great example is the quotation “One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”
If you want to handle reality, you have to model the probability of ‘jack of spades jumping out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirting cider in your ear’ as non-zero. 10^-99 might be ok, but not 0.
Actually “could he, in principle, have made place for such possibilities in advance?” is very, very excellent question.
We can allocate for such possibilities in advance. For example, we can use a simple statistical model for limitations of our own understanding of reality—I have a certain number of years experience in making judgements and assumptions about reality; I know that I don’t consider all possible explanations, and I can estimate that in x% cases the ‘true’ explanation was one that I hadn’t considered. So I can make a ‘belief budget’ for the ‘other’ category. For example, any question like ‘will the coin fall heads or tails’ has to include ‘other’ option. It may fall on it’s side.
A great example is the quotation “One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”
If you want to handle reality, you have to model the probability of ‘jack of spades jumping out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirting cider in your ear’ as non-zero. 10^-99 might be ok, but not 0.