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Einstein famously said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I believe one of the reasons this quote is so famous is because it hits upon a fundamental truth – past experience is a good predictor of future experience. Put more formally, inductive reasoning is conditionally valid. The condition being that any conclusion drawn from inductive reasoning can be thrown out if enough conclusive counter examples are found.
How does this work in everyday life? It’s fundamental to our everyday functioning. When we get hungry, we eat because past experience has shown that eating satiates hunger. We expect our future behavior of eating to have the same outcome as our previous experiences of eating. When we drive, we press the gas pedal to accelerate. Why do we not hit the brake pedal to accelerate? Because past experience has proved to us that braking decelerates the car. Inductive reasoning is so fundamental to our experience that Einstein uses the rejection of it, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” as the very definition of insanity.
What I find interesting is that this axiom of experience is rationally unfounded. The Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed this out in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Thus the fact that we all accept induction as valid makes it an article of faith (defined as belief without rational justification). I believe that induction qualifies as an axiom (often called a postulate as well) – a simple claim accepted without proof on the basis of being self-evidently true.
Axioms function as starting points upon which other statements can be logically derived. For instance, in geometry, one of Euclid’s axioms is that a straight line segment can be drawn connecting any two distinct points. This is not proved via geometry but instead used with other axioms to derive all of geometry. Similarly, induction serves as a starting point for or experience of reality. It cannot be proven by experiencing reality, but can be used to understand our experience of reality.
Thus I call inductive reasoning the fundamental axiom of experience. This has some interesting implications which I hope to explore in future posts. What do you think?
Hmmm. I think that’s valid.
I would feel like I was doing you a disservice if I didn’t find something to question. Let’s see what I can do here.
That induction is important in experiencing reality is difficult to argue with. You might be saying something else, though, when you say that it “serves as a starting point for or experience of reality.” It seems to me that this is somewhat different from the question of reality. I think there may be some muddle here between “experience” and “reality,” and I think that could have unclear consequences.
Also, I’m not sure how exactly to take the idea that induction is fundamental. Is there anything besides experience that has a hand in establishing reality, so to speak? Or does it exist as a law of sorts beforehand? If you are an empiricist (which of course Hume was, and which you definitely seem to be, and which many professional philosophers are), then you may not think so. If reality is nothing more than the structured experiences we have, then this seems right. But I’m not sure it quite gets to reality as such, or, I should say, to the whole of it.
I’m going to take a pseudo-Kantian angle here. I recall you once mentioning long ago that you had read the Critique of Pure Reason, but didn’t find it too memorable. In a sense, that book was a response to Hume. Kant had a rationalist tendency throughout his life, but was seriously perturbed by Hume’s arguments (“I openly confess, the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction.”) Kant felt that Hume raised challenging questions but failed to give sufficient explanations; induction and association may explain why we act in certain ways and experience certain things, but they don’t explain reality, existence as such, part of the problem being of course that such psychological explanations are based on the world of experience (thus an understanding of the world) already. The result is that, to put it in your terms, if induction is an axiom (I don’t recall Kant’s exact position, and I don’t want to screw it up), it’s not the primary one. What those primary axioms actually are is what Kant delves into, and the course of metaphysics afterwards has been strongly affected by him, however indirectly (and less so in English-speaking philosophy, which was probably more strongly affected by Hume).
Now, your post was titled “The Fundamental Axiom of Experience,” so if you were only referring to experience itself, then I’m not sure how much all of this helps. In ordinary experience, we do treat induction with something like the status you give it. Not just in obvious examples of cause and effect, either: a Humean could explain an object as a consistent grouping of properties that, as a collective, comes to be identified over time (and through experience) as a thing, a one with many properties. It’s an axiom we all abide by. But to call it a fundamental axiom, as though it’s prior to all others, I’m not sure of. As to the equating of reality and experience, I’m not sure from your post whether you are doing that, so feel free to clear that up. As for me, oh dear too many words should stop talking now.
“I would feel like I was doing you a disservice if I didn’t find something to question.”
Thanks Snurp! I wish I could return that favor more often but your area of philosophy is one I don’t know enough about to question with any competency.
Yes, I am playing a bit fast and loose with terminology in this post. The reason for that is because I’m trying to keep my blog posts short (for me). That means I had to sacrifice some clarity for simplicity.
My favorite philosophers have, for the most part, been empiricist so I guess it’s fair to apply the label to myself as well. Reality may well be more than our structured experiences, as you put it, but our structured experiences are all of reality that we can know with any certainty. This is why I used our ‘experience of reality’ instead of just ‘reality’.
I used that Einstein quote this afternoon.. one of my favorites. I also liked this thought and found it helpful Sid: “It cannot be proven by experiencing reality, but can be used to understand our experience of reality.”
Hello Sid Here is a spin on induction I haven’t heard before and that is it’s evolutionary basis.Induction isn’t only prevalent in human existence but it seems positively supreme in the animal kingdom!
Learning by experience without understanding the whys of a circumstance basically determines the daily lives of all animals. I doubt if there is very much in the way of deduction going on in the animal kingdom and many times it doesn’t seem like much is happening in human society either. One can probably say that for basically all animals for hundreds of millions of years and if true and it seems to me to make sense then induction must be a very economical way of allowing it’s host to survive.
From this I think we can conclude that life on other planets if it has a way of sensing their world and there is no reason they shouldn’t will also employ induction.It seems the neural net known as the brain is the most efficient method known to weigh sensory inputs and induction is built right in.
That doesn’t mean induction will always be around but it certainly points in that direction.
Of course one can exploit this powerful trait like when people chum animals or magicians do something which is beyond our normal inductive experience.
Thanks, Kansas Bob. I’m glad I offered something you found helpful.
I guess it does make sense, Sawaz, that induction is fundamental to other animals’ experience of the world as well.
The best experience IMO is that you gained from others than from yourself.. Its the quickest way..
thanks for the’s post
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