I feel like there’s something slippery happening when you claim
Deutsch dissolved the Problem of Induction by pointing out that induction doesn’t actually play a role in science. Science is a reverse-engineering exercise that doesn’t rely on the assumption that “the future will be similar to the past”.
When we understand the business of science as reverse-engineering a compressed model of the universe, I don’t think its justification relies on a “loop through the meta level”. Although, admittedly, it does rely on Occam’s Razor.
I think at best you can say Deutsch dissolves the problem for the project of science, but this is not the same thing as dissolving the problem of induction, which is generally considered impossible because it exists because of the problem of the criterion, i.e. how can you know the criterion by which you know something is true if you don’t first know some true thing. And although reducing the problem of induction to the problem of justifying Occam’s razor is helpful, it just pushes the problem around, because at some point you still have issues where you’ve reduced things as far as you can and you still have some question of the form “but how do I really know this?”. After all, I might ask about the proposed justification of Occam’s razor something like “why probabilities?”, and you better hope the answer is not some version of “because they are a simpler than alternatives”.
This is not to say we can’t get on with projects like science, only that there’s a epistemological gap we have to cover over, as you note. The general solution to this is called “pragmatism” and the specific solution in epistemology to this particular problem of justifying anything is called “particularism” because you pick some particular statement(s) to claim as true and go forth on their unjustified assumption.
If that’s not satisfying, epistemological nihilism is also an option if you don’t want to have to take a leap of faith to make some unjustified assumptions (i.e. propose some axioms), but it’s not a very useful position if you want to make distinctions about the world because it collapses them.
I feel like there’s something slippery happening when you claim
I think at best you can say Deutsch dissolves the problem for the project of science, but this is not the same thing as dissolving the problem of induction, which is generally considered impossible because it exists because of the problem of the criterion, i.e. how can you know the criterion by which you know something is true if you don’t first know some true thing. And although reducing the problem of induction to the problem of justifying Occam’s razor is helpful, it just pushes the problem around, because at some point you still have issues where you’ve reduced things as far as you can and you still have some question of the form “but how do I really know this?”. After all, I might ask about the proposed justification of Occam’s razor something like “why probabilities?”, and you better hope the answer is not some version of “because they are a simpler than alternatives”.
This is not to say we can’t get on with projects like science, only that there’s a epistemological gap we have to cover over, as you note. The general solution to this is called “pragmatism” and the specific solution in epistemology to this particular problem of justifying anything is called “particularism” because you pick some particular statement(s) to claim as true and go forth on their unjustified assumption.
If that’s not satisfying, epistemological nihilism is also an option if you don’t want to have to take a leap of faith to make some unjustified assumptions (i.e. propose some axioms), but it’s not a very useful position if you want to make distinctions about the world because it collapses them.
Ok I think I’ll accept that, since “science” is broad enough to be the main thing we or a superintelligent AI cares about.