Knowing that the sun will come up in the morning is knowledge, and a success of induction. You do not even need to know that the Earth orbits the sun to have that knowledge. There is more to know about the sun, but that is yet more success of induction, and does not erase the previous success as if it were worse than knowing nothing.
An observed pattern in reality works so long as reality is observed to obey the pattern. If the pattern breaks, the previous inductive hypothesis is adjusted. “The sun will rise in the morning” is an excellent inductive prediction that holds to this day, and allows people to live successfully.
Tomorrow the sun could simply not rise in the morning, and we’d find some new pattern about the sun. That wouldn’t mean our old pattern was a hunch or pretended knowledge.
Studying neutrinos improves predictions, as does studying the growth cycles of plants. But there is no “global framework”, only more data and the abstractions on the data. If it was hunches and pretended knowledge back then, it still is now, and if you are worried about this, I don’t know any solution. I don’t even see a problem. We will continue learning more, forever, or until we run out of new data, whichever comes first.
After some reflection of what you wrote and what I wrote before I think the problem I was trying to articulate is actually an interesting subset of a more general problem, namely the Halting problem, as it applies to humans.
That is, how does one know when to stop inducing on a chain of inductions? Because surely there has to be a threshold, as with the neutrino example, beyond which induction will most likely yield a misleading answer that if taken at face value like every previous stage of induction, will lead down a garden path. Identifying that threshold every time may indeed be impossible without knowing everything.
Any pattern identified by induction either continues to hold, in which case it is fine to believe it, or it stops holding, in which case it must be adjusted. A generalization is a form of induction, and so acts the same. Could you provide an example of induction leading down a garden path?
I can think immediately of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory following the previously accepted theory of some ’Luminiferous aether’ which was at the time believed to be what light propagated through in a vacuum. Going from Newton → to ‘Luminiferous aether’ using induction works fine, explains many observable phenomena, and is somewhat elegant too. Compare the next step to Maxwell’s equations which are horrendously baroque and reliant on much more sophisticated math with some really bizarre implications that were difficult to accept until Einstein came along. There doesn’t appear to be any way induction would have led you to the correct result had you been researching this topic in the mid 19th century. In fact many people did waste their lives on the garden path trying to induce onwards from the aether.
Knowing that the sun will come up in the morning is knowledge, and a success of induction. You do not even need to know that the Earth orbits the sun to have that knowledge. There is more to know about the sun, but that is yet more success of induction, and does not erase the previous success as if it were worse than knowing nothing.
An observed pattern in reality works so long as reality is observed to obey the pattern. If the pattern breaks, the previous inductive hypothesis is adjusted. “The sun will rise in the morning” is an excellent inductive prediction that holds to this day, and allows people to live successfully.
Tomorrow the sun could simply not rise in the morning, and we’d find some new pattern about the sun. That wouldn’t mean our old pattern was a hunch or pretended knowledge.
Studying neutrinos improves predictions, as does studying the growth cycles of plants. But there is no “global framework”, only more data and the abstractions on the data. If it was hunches and pretended knowledge back then, it still is now, and if you are worried about this, I don’t know any solution. I don’t even see a problem. We will continue learning more, forever, or until we run out of new data, whichever comes first.
After some reflection of what you wrote and what I wrote before I think the problem I was trying to articulate is actually an interesting subset of a more general problem, namely the Halting problem, as it applies to humans.
That is, how does one know when to stop inducing on a chain of inductions? Because surely there has to be a threshold, as with the neutrino example, beyond which induction will most likely yield a misleading answer that if taken at face value like every previous stage of induction, will lead down a garden path. Identifying that threshold every time may indeed be impossible without knowing everything.
Any pattern identified by induction either continues to hold, in which case it is fine to believe it, or it stops holding, in which case it must be adjusted. A generalization is a form of induction, and so acts the same. Could you provide an example of induction leading down a garden path?
I can think immediately of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory following the previously accepted theory of some ’Luminiferous aether’ which was at the time believed to be what light propagated through in a vacuum. Going from Newton → to ‘Luminiferous aether’ using induction works fine, explains many observable phenomena, and is somewhat elegant too. Compare the next step to Maxwell’s equations which are horrendously baroque and reliant on much more sophisticated math with some really bizarre implications that were difficult to accept until Einstein came along. There doesn’t appear to be any way induction would have led you to the correct result had you been researching this topic in the mid 19th century. In fact many people did waste their lives on the garden path trying to induce onwards from the aether.