a way of doing induction without trying to solve the problem of induction
Well, this is the thing I have problems to understand. The problem of induction is a “problem” due to the existence of incompatible philosophical approaches; there is no “problem of deduction” to solve because everybody agrees how to do that (mostly). Doing induction without solving the problem would be possible if people agreed how to do it and the disagreement was confined to inconsequential philosophical interpretations of the process. Then it would indeed be wise to do the practical stuff and ignore the philosophy.
But this is probably not the case; people seem to disagree about how to do the induction, and there are people (well represented on this site) who have reservations against frequentist hypothesis testing. I am confused.
I think Matt’s point is that under essentially all seriously proposed versions of induction currently in existence, the technique he described constitutes a valid inductive inference, therefore, in at least the cases where hypothesis testing works, we don’t have to worry about resolving the different approaches.
You’re right—we have to have some idea of how to do induction in order to do it without fully fleshing out the details, but the unresolved issues don’t have to be confined to inconsequential philosophical interpretations. For example, we could just avoid doing induction except for when what seem like plausible approaches agree. (This is probably a better approach to “robust induction” than I proposed in my post).
Well, this is the thing I have problems to understand. The problem of induction is a “problem” due to the existence of incompatible philosophical approaches; there is no “problem of deduction” to solve because everybody agrees how to do that (mostly). Doing induction without solving the problem would be possible if people agreed how to do it and the disagreement was confined to inconsequential philosophical interpretations of the process. Then it would indeed be wise to do the practical stuff and ignore the philosophy.
But this is probably not the case; people seem to disagree about how to do the induction, and there are people (well represented on this site) who have reservations against frequentist hypothesis testing. I am confused.
I think Matt’s point is that under essentially all seriously proposed versions of induction currently in existence, the technique he described constitutes a valid inductive inference, therefore, in at least the cases where hypothesis testing works, we don’t have to worry about resolving the different approaches.
Couldn’t this be said about any inductive method, at least in cases when the method works?
You’re right—we have to have some idea of how to do induction in order to do it without fully fleshing out the details, but the unresolved issues don’t have to be confined to inconsequential philosophical interpretations. For example, we could just avoid doing induction except for when what seem like plausible approaches agree. (This is probably a better approach to “robust induction” than I proposed in my post).