Probabilistically, could one not argue that it's a reasonable inductive conclusion to say that because wet ground = rain in most cases, the most probable explanation (in lieu of special circumstances) for an individual case of wet ground is rain?Kuroneko wrote:Technically, the abductive argument [(Rain->Wetness)&(Wetness) -> Rain] is a logical fallacy, but there is no denying that it is the most plausible of the alternatives.
My feelings exactly. The fact is that inductive reasoning is employed heavily, it is not entirely without merit, and Popper's answer, while potentially effective, seems to be have been formulated for the purpose of winning these arguments rather than presenting an accurate assessment of how one should realistically conduct oneself when engaged in scientific inquiry. In short, it seems like he's just playing to the rules of the philosophy debate game.Still, I have a certain amount of admiration of Bayesianism simply because it confronts the problem of induction head-on, rather than the Popperian "well, we don't really need it anyway" solution. Sir Popper's account of science is logically unassailable on this particular point (although not on others), but I wonder if cutting out induction completely is too high a cost.
Would not medical diagnoses fall into the category of probabilistic logic? Given a set of symptoms consistent with (for example) both the common cold and an extremely rare disease, it seems a reasonable inference to say that the symptoms are far more likely to be caused by the common cold than by the rare disease, which is in turn a far more likely explanation than an entirely new as-of-yet unknown disease, which is in turn far more likely than divine interference. I suppose the conclusion "it must be the cold" would be fallacious, but the conclusion "it's probably the common cold" or even "it's almost certainly the common cold" both seem to follow logically from the evidence.
