Category: Epistemology and Method

THINKING (SEARCHING) VS REASON AND INDUCTION

(from elsewhere)

Matt Dioquardi is very clear here, and I wanted to save this quote for my own reference. But it’s so good it’s worth sharing.

For those who follow science more so than philosophy, you might note that David Miller’s “thinking” is equivalent to Kahneman’s “searching” with “System 1”.

While in any deduction the information must be present in the extant statements, Induction is logically nonsensical since the information cannot be present for it to function. But we do add information to any question when we perform our acts of free association. This action is not rational, as in “System 2” thinking, but we do intuitionistic searching for possible relationships with “System 1” thinking. To the computer-science savvy mind, this is an obvious process we are familiar with. But I suspect prior generations conflated the two or gave precedence to reason which is subject to reflection (we can observe) over searching (intuition) which is not subject to reflection (we can’t observe it). When the evidence is now, that we do a lot more searching (its faster) than we do reasoning (it’s slow and expensive).

QUOTE:

—“One could argue that we need a manner of going from particular data points to a general theory — and that this is the problem of induction. One could simply say, I don’t understand how we do this, even though we do this. There’s a fine line where someone could *reject* induction philosophically, but still argue for it methodologically … the problem is then perhaps formulated as trying to explain why we methodologically accept induction, but reject it philosophically … something like that …

Or one could argue that even once we have a theory, we need some type of confirmation of that theory, and so this is the problem of induction.

There’s no end to the manner in which one can argue we still have a problem here — and so we still need to find a solution. I’m not clear on this, but I think there are ways in which Bayesianism can be formulated so that it can be argued that it makes no use of induction — though I’m suspicious about this claim.

But putting all this aside, I think the methodology Popper presents, if accepted, simply does away with these problems. They cease to exist. So there is no problem of induction. There’s no inductivist problem. Induction is simply misguided from the get go. It posits a *justificationist* requirement where one is never needed.

Of course, if one wants to argue Popper is wrong, then that’s a different issue …

Even on the issue of “problem finding”, I think what David Miller states in his essay, “Do We Reason When We Think We Reason, or Do We Think?” might be relevant. He addresses the issue of schools that want to teach “critical thinking”: “— Matt Dioguardi

LINK: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/associates/miller/lfd-.pdf

As a now-committed operationalist, I have some difficulty with Miller’s approach. Formal logic is not operational. But he seems to consistently come to the correct conclusions. And this paper is evidence of that fact.