Problem of Induction

Pardon me for this Philosophical post. Those who are not fond of headaches can be excused for wanting to give this a pass =p

There are ways of constructing Knowledge, and one of them is Induction. This is basically the idea that goes "the sun had risen in the morning yesterday, today, so it will probably rise again tomorrow". It is what happens when we do experiments - we expect repeatability. When we do not get the results we expect, we ask, "why does this happen? It worked before!" This working before thing comes about because we expect it to work again, because it had before.

Over the centuries, there had been various arguments about the validity of Induction. First, there were those who says that, why should it be so? Need the sun rise again tomorrow? Even if there had been an unbroken positive record in the past, need it necessarily imply that it will happen again in the future? Those who had been let down by a person deemed to be very trustworthy will be well acquainted with this feeling. I expected him to do this, he always had, but... Next, there were those who counter argued that well, we can expect this to be true, because it had always worked. As of today, induction had always succeeded in predicting the rise of the sun correctly. So there is no reason to doubt induction. And eventually, it came into the hands of (I think) David Humes or one of the others who have too much time on their hands, and he said that well, this counter argument is not valid because you are using induction to support induction, which is naturally a circular argument (Ie: Induction should work because it had always worked, which is an induction argument).

But seriously, the argument about the problem of induction is not a problem of induction at all. Induction can only predict things on the basis of "all things being equal". Right? You won't expect the sun to rise if an alien spaceship had stopped the earth rotation. No one in the right sense of mind would say that induction had failed in that instance. Results will only be repeatable if the situation is the same.

Let me clarify a little more. When I mention identical situations, I would mean situations that affect the results, in ways known or unknown to us. A person switching on the light bulb will probably not affect the sun rising tomorrow, as far as I know.

In that case, why do people still say that induction is flawed? Seriously, in identical conditions (safe in the case of people), is the expectation of identical results flawed? For those who throw Heisenburg's uncertainty principle, may I remind you that because you cannot know both the momentum and position is at the same time, you can only know a probability of it, but the probability of the position and momentum being some value will be the same. But this is my basic assumption in using induction - I believe that the universe runs in an orderly manner. Given identical situations, I believe that I get identical results. That is why I can use induction. Without any external interference, I believe that I can predict things with a degree of certainty, proportionate to the availability of knowledge that I have.

For those who criticize Induction, there can be only 2 reasons why induction failed to predict correctly. The first is in the event of non-identical conditions - in which case induction fails because induction was never meant to play that role. This is common sense (honestly, sometimes I think the philosophers think so much they throw common sense out of the window. And some of them will probably criticize me for believing in common sense because it had been known to be flawed -_-"). But could it be that in identical conditions, the results are different? This is the crux of the issue. For those who believe in the orderliness of the universe, it is not difficult to give an unqualified response of "Yes". Those who wish to throw induction out of the window must give a response of "No". But if now, where does the reasoning to say that come from? Or are you the only order, the only voice of reason in the universe? If not, why should I listen to you? Believe you?

It is true that there is no particular reason (if you do not believe in God) that the universe should be reasonable or orderly. Yet, even those who proclaim themselves to be atheists usually do believe that the universe is orderly, and live as though it is.

Perhaps faith in God is not so unreasonable afterall ;)

I think some of my not so theist friends and some of my philosophical friends may have some things to say about this =p