Posted: Jul 29, 2011 4:54 am
jamest wrote:andrewk wrote:The OP is a version of the "problem of induction", most famously presented by David Hume in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in 1748. Various responses to the problem are described in the Wikipedia article linked there.
Nonsense. At what point in your post did you prove that inductive reasoning is the only kind of reasoning?
1. "Nonsense" is a surprisingly aggressive way to respond to a non-aggressive argument. Perhaps next time try something like "I disagree with that because of ....".
2. The Doctor's key statement is "No-one can prove reason is useful". All arguments I have come across for the utility of reason are inductive ones along the lines of "reason has been shown to work in the past, so we believe it will continue to work". This has nothing to do with whether the reason whose utility we are discussing is inductive, deductive or both (I assumed he meant both). The question would be exactly the same if you replaced "reason" with "spanners".