Hume: Inductive vs. Deductive Reasoning

In An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume distinguishes between demonstrative , or a priori reasoning, and experience, or inductive reasoning, a distinction that I find fascinating. He argues that once you have figured out the math of the circumference of a circle, you know everything you need to know about every circle that ever existed or will exist. "Circle" is a universal, discoverable through reasoning.
 
He then writes about one billiard ball striking another. Hume argues that one such event cannot tell you anything without multiple repetitions of the same event: inductive reasoning. Of course, math and science (physics) have advanced to the point that we can now make the same kinds of predictions about a billiard ball as we can about a circle. However, we gain  that understanding through induction rather than deduction, experience (augmented by scientific instrumentation) rather than reason.

Here's the passage:

"The conclusions which it draws from considering one circle are the same which it would form upon surveying all the circles in the universe. But no man, having seen only one body move after being impelled by another, could infer that every other body will move after a like impulse. All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning⁷." (V.1.36)

There's are some interesting word choices in this passage. Notice that "conclusions" about a circle are drawn by "it." The "it" in this passage is reason, knowledge that precedes human understanding, that simply is.On the other hand, "men" infer. We might quibble about distinctions between found and constructed knowledge, particularly since the physics of the billiard ball can eventually be discovered by science.

 The last line, though, that "inferences from experience," that is inductive reasoning, is a function of custom rather than reasoning, limits "reasoning" to a very narrow band of knowledge, that which can be known inside the head of the reasoning animal, that needs no outside confirmation. Not sure what to make of this yet, though I keep thinking about Spinoza's Ethics, which is based entirely on reasoning about God. 

A run in Bastrop State Park

Two fires hit this area, the Bastrop County Complex fire in 2011, and the Lone Pines fire in 2015. Most of the trails I ran on covered land devastated by the Bastrop County Complex Fire.






A placard at one trail head said that the loblolly pines had been growing in the area for 18K years.

You can already see new growth. Some of these young trees are already ten feet tall.  

Isolated stands of pines stand tall. In a few years they will be surrounded by younger growth.

 About a mile and a half in on the purple trail you reach a thick line of deciduous trees that survived the fire.

What Runners Are Thinking

According to this article in The Atlantic, runners are thinking trivial thoughts, about their pace, their pain, traffic. The conclusion the article comes to is that onlookers shouldn't assume runners have entered some zen state of mind in which time and space become one, or disappear. They're just thinking about how hungry they are.

The problem in this conclusion can be found in juxtaposition of the phrases "zen state of mind" and "What they're thinking." A zen state of mind is a state of "not thinking." So, okay, they asked runners to record what was going through their brains while running; on the surface, they got trivialities. What I question is the assumption that those surface thoughts are the whole of the running experience.

It is the experience, not the thoughts, that bring me back to the trail every day. There is something internal, something well below the level of conscious thought that is happening while I'm running. And, whether I'm thinking about moon pies or not doesn't touch that experience.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/what-runners-think-about/400883/

The 18th Century Meets the 21st Century

This e-mail exchange between Dr. Randall Monty and myself:

Me: “Can you add Graduate Recruiting to the schedule?”
Monty: “Absolutely.”
Me: “Been listening to Hume lately. He's got me convinced that nothing is absolute.”
Monty: “One of these days, we'll get you into the twentieth century!”
Me: “Bud, I'm living in the future. The Twenty-First Century.”

Monty was kidding me about my habit of listening to what has been derisively referred to as “dead, white males.” And I often think he has a point. There’s so much interesting stuff out there. But, of course, 21st Century writing isn’t in the public domain, so isn’t available on librivox, the website I download audio books from, and Amazon doesn’t record audio for the books I’m interested in, because they don’t sell enough to justify the expense.

The exchange between Monty and myself made me think about the intersection of the 18th Century, when Hume wrote, and 21st Century technology that makes it possible for me to listen to his words. What I do wouldn’t be possible in the 20th Century. Librivox just celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. They didn’t exist in the 20th Century. Neither did the smart phone that allows me to access their site while running. True, I remember listening to cassette recording on the thirty-minute drive to school every day back in the 20th Century. But I wasn’t a runner then.

So, the technology of the 21st Century makes it possible for me to connect with a mind from the 18th Century in a way I would not be able to in written form. I’m not simply talking here about the convenience of being able to get some good reading in while I’m running. If all I was looking for was more reading time, I would listen to these writers on long drives as well. But I don’t, though I’m not sure why there is a difference. Ah, but there does seem to be a difference.

I’m not arguing something as strong as the “oral” theory of Havelock or Ong. Nevertheless, there are some writers, and some writing, that opens up when heard. Plato is one such writer, Aristotle only sometimes so. The Nichomehean Ethics listens well, The Topics less well, Prior Analytics, not at all. William James’s Pragmatism is a delight to listen to; Essays on Radical Empiricism is almost incomprehensible, even though I read it long before I tried to listen to it. Kant? Impossible.


Why those differences, both between listening and reading, and between various authors and works? I’m not entirely sure. When I first started listening to Plato, I thought his writing was accessible because the dialogues were written to be heard; the dialogue format encourages us to be listeners rather than readers. After listening to other writers who are firmly entrenched in textuality, I’m not so sure. Perhaps I’ll eventually come up with a theory. Perhaps not. I will keep running and listening though.  

Oh, Love, Where Art Thou?

Listened to The Symposium last. Each of the three sections is just long enough for a six mile run, with five minutes or so left over to listen to Pandora. Given the topic of The Symposium, love, I thought something schmaltzy, like the Moody Blues channel, was appropriate.

I lost count of how many spoke, each in turn, in this account of a speaking contest that Plato apparently did not attend. Of course, it's all a set-up. Socrates speaks last, and outdoes everyone. Each participant gives a speech on love. (This is one of the few dialogues in which Socrates doesn't complain about speech-making, and doesn't interrupt other speakers to ask them unanswerable questions. For some reason, he's on his best behavior. The gadfly is silent until his turn to speak comes around.)

What I find interesting is how much time in this and other dialogues, most notably, Phaedrus, is devoted to the topic of love, and how little time modern philosophy seems to spend on the topic. We seem to have rewritten The Symposium so it isn't actually about love, but about "love of philosophy." And, of course, Weaver's well-known analysis of Phaedrus would have us believe that it's really about rhetoric. Thus, love is never a philosophical topic in the dialogues; it's merely a stepping stone to other, more important topics.

So, do we leave "love" to Nicholas Sparks and the Hallmark Channel? Is love so outside the realm of reason that it's not worth talking about?

I know, I'm overstating my complaint. If we are to trust the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is a philosophy of love. (However, look at the citations; almost all are from the Greeks. Not much in the Twentieth Century, and none in the Twenty-first, even though an internet encyclopedia is very Twenty-first Century.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/love/

More thorough citations in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/

And let's not forget Wikipedia. Lot's of links to online texts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_love

Interesting that they all refer to love as a noun. I've always thought of it as a verb.  

Hume’s “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.”

Listening to Hume’s “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.” Perhaps Hume’s most famous soundbite: “That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood” (IIII.1.21).

To put his more eloquent syntax in modern parlance: logic (demonstrative, a priori, deductive reasoning) cannot prove that the sun will come up tomorrow. Only inductive reasoning, or experience, leads us to “believe” it will come up.  Certainly, the probability is high. But it is still only probable, not necessary, to use the language of analytical philosophy. Science often uses the word “theory” in this way. In science, a theory is a proposition that has been tested sufficiently that its probability is so high that we can start to refer to it as a scientific fact. This difference is often why Creationists can’t understand why scientists continue to refer to the Theory of Evolution as a fact, and not “just a theory.” With every discovery, the statistical likelihood becomes more and more probable. But it will never be certain, just as the sun rising tomorrow will ever be certain.

  

This is the sort of game runners are playing when they train for a race. Training is a way of building up experience, of terrain, of the body, or what works (critical, since what works one day doesn’t seem to work the next, confounding us as we try to figure out our best form or strategy) in order to increase the probability that we will perform the way we wish for the next race. Hume sometimes uses the word habit, though it doesn’t seem to be as critical a word for him as it is for Charles Sanders Peirce, who goes as far as to argue that everything happens from habit, even nuclear fusion.  All I want to do is finish another 50 miler. Every runner knows that it’s habit, the training you do before a race rather than the race itself, that helps you finish that race.

Prior Analytics: Rhetoric, Dialectic, Logic

I've been trying to listen to Prior Analytics while running this week. (Octavius Owen translation.) Overall I find the book almost impossible to follow in audio format. Aristotle focuses so much on the structure of syllogisms that I can't follow his outline without the text in front of me. It's algebra class all over again. I did find the introduction, where Aristotle distinguishes between dialectic and syllogism, particularly this brief statement: "the dialectic proposition is to him who inquires an interrogation of contradiction, but to him who syllogizes, an assumption of what is seen and probable."

There are several interesting distinctions in this statement:

First, dialectic is a different genre of discourse from syllogism; in other words, dialectic and logic were not not synonymous for Aristotle, as they are often seen today.

Second, dialectic is a negative discourse, whereas syllogism is positive. One "interrogates contradiction." The other makes a statement that might then be interrogated. (Note that this is a different concept from Peirce's, who argues that logic cannot create new knowledge but only test knowledge.)

Third, syllogisms deal with the "probable," something that is seen in On Rhetoric as the province of rhetoric, not logic.

Overall, the introduction to Prior Analytics provides interesting insight into what Aristotle might have meant when he wrote that rhetoric was the "antistrophos" of dialectic. In much of the writing concerning the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, this passage is seen as a defense of rhetoric as the counterpart of logic, that the two are intertwined. If that is the case, however, how do we account for this passage, where dialectic is seen as distinct from logic, or indeed, the title of this work, where logic is discussed as though syllogisms are the building blocks for effective rhetoric?

Laguna Atascosa NWR

This sign was at the trailhead at Laguna Atascosa this morning. As per the fine print, I picked up a mesquite branch, but it felt awkward while running. 

 

The grass along most of the trail was knee and even thigh high. I wondered how close a cougar could get before I saw him in that grass.

Democracy and Oligarchy

The "warrant," to use Toulmin's terminology, that underpins democracy and oligarchy, and places them at odds with one another.

"Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal."

"Oligarchy is based on the notion that those who are unequal in one respect are in all respects unequal; being unequal, that is, in property, they suppose themselves to be unequal absolutely."

Aristotle. Politics. Book 9, Part 1

Aristotle on the Gun Debate

The Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."


Aristotle: "Without discipline, infantry are useless" (Politics 4.VIII)

Question: Will we be safer if we have more guns or more discipline?

Aristotle's Politics on a Hot Day

Listening to Aristotle's Politics while running the canal roads I'm struck, not for the first time, with how often his ideas are condensed, simplified, turned into sound bites that make him sound naive, if not simplistic. I've been guilty of doing the same myself. In the past I have been known to say that Aristotle divided political systems into two types,* oligarchy and democracy, and that, like Plato, he was critical of democracy. By the time I got to Fourth Book of Politics (only halfway through) I discovered that I was the one being simplistic.

What he actually writes is that most people think there are only two forms of government because these are the two forms they see the most often. He insists that "There are so many different kinds of democracies and of oligarchies" (VI). He then subdivides each into so many categories that I couldn't follow him while running. (It was 92 degrees; felt like 96 with the humidity figured in; I have an excuse.)

After mentioning that "an ideal state which is an aspiration only," he writes that governments must adjust to the situation, (a subtle dig at Plato?). Then he writes about  a "polity or constitutional government" (IV) which he sees as the most effective government. This is a government that combines elements of an oligarchy and a democracy, trying, if incompletely so, to get the best of both. I won't go into details.  This chapter is worth reading by anyone interested in politics. And, if Aristotle is right, we are political animals.

Just one factoid to illustrate how different our ideas of democracy are from those in 4th Century BC: According to Aristotle, oligarchies elect officials by vote; democracies elect officials by lot. (Why? Election by lots keeps the rich from being able to buy elections. Are you listening Koch brothers?)



*He also dealt with dictatorship and monarchy, but felt those required less attention. An assessment I agree with.

Payback for all those words Plato put in Socrates's Mouth?

Dawn over the canal road at Santa Ana NWR

Hume's "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion"

I'm going to have to go back and listen to this again in six months or so. The arguments are quite complex, too complex to follow while running. Hume thoroughly explores all arguments that might be made about the existence or nature of God. Though Philo takes on the role of Devil's Advocate, which provides a nice twist in Part 12, overall, the dialogue lacks the  humor of Plato's dialogues.

At question in Hume’s treatise is whether we can come to a knowledge of God, or even the belief there is a God, by systematically observing nature. This method leads to a problem that tends to obfuscate the argument even today. Of course, Hume is writing at the cusp of the scientific revolution. So it makes sense that he should explore whether experience or reason, science or a prior arguments, are the best method for coming to a conclusion about God. The problem, as Hume recognized, is that any empirical discovery can be interpreted to prove either side of the argument. In the dialogues, Philo remarks that,    

“The discoveries by microscopes, as they open a new

universe in miniature, are arguments ·for theism· according

to me, whereas to you they are objections to it. The further

we push our researches of this kind, the more we are led to

infer that the universal cause of it all is vastly different from

mankind, and from anything of which we have empirical

knowledge” (Part 5)

The conclusion we have to come to, and that Pamphelus was so uncomfortable with, is that we believe what we believe, or often what we must believe, and filter the evidence through our belief. In this sense, all knowledge is a priori, though not necessarily rationally so. In fact, one could draw the inference that the more strongly we believe on either side of the hypothesis, the less rational we have become.