It seems to have motivated Quine’s perhaps throwing up his hands on formal methods of epistemology, and suggesting we “settle for psychology” (not sure if he used that phrase—if not, it’s a commonly used characterization of his position).
At least part of the trouble seems to be that he proposes non-black non-ravens isn’t a natural kind. Non-ravens would seem to be all “things” that aren’t ravens, but consider what an incoherent concept that is. Do “things” include every atom in the universe? For quite a lot of “things” (atoms included, I think) the quality of blackness makes no sense.
So maybe there are around 100,000,000 ravens in the world, and as I examine Ravens and find N black ones and no non-black ones, I can say N down, 100,000,000-N to go, and that might seem like progress. Whereas when I pick one atom (does it have a color?), one H2O molecule, one green leaf, and one blue eye of newt, I have no meaningful concept of how many more “non-ravens” there are to sample.
Now if very hypothetically, ravens belonged to a genus with just one other species, also having 100,000,000 members, and the whole universe of ravenoids was frozen in time instead of multiplying and dying as we tried to sample them, we might say upon selecting one non-black non-raven, “That’s one bit of evidence that doesn’t contradict my hypothesis, and when I’ve sampled the whole 200,000,000 in the ravenoid universe with no contradiction of the hypothesis and a number all black ravens, I can say the hypothesis is true. A black non-raven also doesn’t contradict the hypotheses and is also “one more down” and goes towards the ultimately complete sampling of the 200,000,000 entities during which we hope that every raven we find will be black.
I.e. our intuition, if we have one, that {{the equivalent logical proposition “All non-black non-ravens” really should have an analogous method for gathering evidence}} might be less ridiculous if only “non-black non-ravens” actually meant something coherent.
For what it’s worth there is also a 48 page 2010 article “How Bayesian Confirmation Theory Handles the Paradox of the Ravens” by Branden Fitelson and James Hawthorne (fitelson.org/ravens.pdf—actually it’s only 29 pages in this PDF due to different layout I suppose.). I’ve been meaning to read it, but think I’ll have to work my way up to it.
The “Raven paradox” was used as a starting point to the famous article “Natural Kinds” by W.V.O. Quine; it is one of the two articles by Quine that set the anthology Naturalizing Epistemology in motion, as mentioned in my article immediately previous to this one at http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/kp1/from_natural_or_naturalized_to_social_epistemology/
It seems to have motivated Quine’s perhaps throwing up his hands on formal methods of epistemology, and suggesting we “settle for psychology” (not sure if he used that phrase—if not, it’s a commonly used characterization of his position).
At least part of the trouble seems to be that he proposes non-black non-ravens isn’t a natural kind. Non-ravens would seem to be all “things” that aren’t ravens, but consider what an incoherent concept that is. Do “things” include every atom in the universe? For quite a lot of “things” (atoms included, I think) the quality of blackness makes no sense.
So maybe there are around 100,000,000 ravens in the world, and as I examine Ravens and find N black ones and no non-black ones, I can say N down, 100,000,000-N to go, and that might seem like progress. Whereas when I pick one atom (does it have a color?), one H2O molecule, one green leaf, and one blue eye of newt, I have no meaningful concept of how many more “non-ravens” there are to sample.
Now if very hypothetically, ravens belonged to a genus with just one other species, also having 100,000,000 members, and the whole universe of ravenoids was frozen in time instead of multiplying and dying as we tried to sample them, we might say upon selecting one non-black non-raven, “That’s one bit of evidence that doesn’t contradict my hypothesis, and when I’ve sampled the whole 200,000,000 in the ravenoid universe with no contradiction of the hypothesis and a number all black ravens, I can say the hypothesis is true. A black non-raven also doesn’t contradict the hypotheses and is also “one more down” and goes towards the ultimately complete sampling of the 200,000,000 entities during which we hope that every raven we find will be black.
I.e. our intuition, if we have one, that {{the equivalent logical proposition “All non-black non-ravens” really should have an analogous method for gathering evidence}} might be less ridiculous if only “non-black non-ravens” actually meant something coherent.
For what it’s worth there is also a 48 page 2010 article “How Bayesian Confirmation Theory Handles the Paradox of the Ravens” by Branden Fitelson and James Hawthorne (fitelson.org/ravens.pdf—actually it’s only 29 pages in this PDF due to different layout I suppose.). I’ve been meaning to read it, but think I’ll have to work my way up to it.