display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 9661 | Induction is just reasonable methods of inferring the unobserved from the observed [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I use the word 'induction' broadly, to cover all the methods we deem reasonable for forming beliefs about the unobserved parts of our world on the basis of experience with the observed parts. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: Good. Attempts to be precise about it seem to be hopeless and invite paradoxes. Personally I just define it as 'learning from experience', because that makes what we do continuous with the behaviour of other sensible animals. |
| 9652 | To just expect unexamined emeralds to be grue would be totally unreasonable [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Some beliefs are just unreasonable in a strong sense. Think of the man who, for no special reason, expects unexamined emeralds to be grue. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice converse way of seeing the point that 'grue' is such an totally artificial predicate. I still say that the most illuminating point is that grue is not a colour, so seeing a grue thing is no confirmation at all. |
| 9658 | An explanation tells us how an event was caused [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: An explanation, I think, is an account of etiology: it tells us something about how an event was caused. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: Will this cover mathematical explanations? Numbers would have to have causal powers. |
| 16280 | Often explanaton seeks fundamental laws, rather than causal histories [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Sometimes the pursuit of explanation is more the pursuit of unified and general fundamental laws than of information about the causal histories of events. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to disagree, given the 'sometimes'. I don't think that Newton's Law of Gravity (say), with its lovely equation, actually explained anything at all about gravity. Finding the law closes the quest for an accurate description of what happens. |
| 16274 | If the well-ordering of a pack of cards was by shuffling, the explanation would make it more surprising [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Suppose you find in a hotel room a pack of cards in exactly standard order. Not surprising - maybe it's a new deck, or someone arranged them. Not so. They got that way by being fairly shuffled. The explanation would make the explanandum more surprising. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] A lovely Lewisian example, that instantly makes big trouble for the (implausible) view that a cause is something which increases the likelihood of a thing. |