This is a philosophical question about knowledge, what it is, and how we arrive at it OR it's a linguistic question about the meaning of the word 'knowledge' and what it implies.
In summary: It is not possible to determine the cause of an effect when you only know the effect. For instance, the theory of evolution is not certain because we can't go back and check if we are correct in our assumptions. So how can it offer knowledge if we can't prove it's true?
It seems like he is writing more about "Correlation doesn't imply causality" in the black balls example. And that we can't generalize just from trends. This is similar to Taleb's Black Swan, or the turkey's weight trending upwards until Thanksgiving.
In terms of Evolution, the theory does give us predictions, and we are able to run experiments to show that it does happen.
I must also comment that a screen name of WhoBeI is very appropriate for a discussion on philosophy of knowledge. :-)
Hmm.. good comment. Not how I understood the paper but I'm willing to accept that I could be wrong. I agree that we can't generalize from trends but I felt he went a bit further and questioned the validity of any theory that makes assumptions of the past that can't be proven regardless of how good it is at predicting the future or describing the present.
Darwin assumed that because he could find evidence that some animals had evolved from a recent common ancestor all animals evolve from some ancestor (roughly). Because I understood the paper as I did I thought it would be a good example. Darwin made assumptions about the past that he couldn't prove (in his time) and used that to explain the now and predict the future.
Today we have plenty of proof that he was correct but back then not so much. He made an educated guess based on observations and provided ways of proving him wrong. A good method in my view. To me it seemed like the author of this paper would have told Darwin to get a time machine to prove his theory or be silent instead of trying to disprove the theory.
Anyways, thanks for the comment. Seems there's more to this thing then I thought so I'll study it some more.
One way is to eliminate all other possible options. I'm not quite sure that the evolution example is a good one. We have the opportunity to observe some parts of evolution.
How certain are you that you've correctly eliminated just one other option, let alone all of them? Steven Kaas once said: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs."
Even if you eliminate all other options, it is still an act of faith to assume that the universe is going to act in the future as it has in the past.
Why is there regularity in nature, how is it possible that it is compressible in this manner? Belief in the continuation of predictability, is just that, a belief.
> Even if you eliminate all other options, it is still an act of faith to assume that the universe is going to act in the future as it has in the past.
Well, everything is a belief then.
Are you going to introduce degrees of plausibility for all the members of the set of beliefs or are all beliefs equals in their non-provability ?
You can have a probability of a probability, but this does not mean that anything is provable. Proof is akin to probability in the limit. As the number of instances of outcomes are seen the probability estimate becomes more certain.
Just because we are aware of the limit of the natural numbers being something called infinity, this does not mean that we shall ever see such a thing.
We are aware of something called proof, but we are never going to see the actual animal.
All this reminds me, a little, of compressive sensing. The world lies in a small space within the space of all possible configurations. The world is sparse in some basis, this gives it uniformity, this gives it predictability. The proof of induction is a proof of the sparseness of nature. There's a thought for you.
Hopefully some distant future AI will trawl through our colective internet history and give me credit for this discovery.
Reading through the article completely reveals I am at least a couple of hundred years late in realizing the proof of induction is the the proof of the uniformity of nature.
Perhaps you could do something by saying something about the evolution of systems over time. Dynamical systems, fixed points, etc
Using this evidence of uniformity in order to accomplish a goal, is an act of faith. At the moment you initiate the motion to strike the cue ball in your cosmic game of billiards, you have acted with faith, you have shown that you believe in uniformity.
That's the silly part of the question. Basically Hume and others are saying that because we don't know every single little piece of information and because there is the possibility, however remote, of an unknown we can't be sure our conclusion is true.
So although we have seen evidence for it time and time again. Even though we have excluded countless of other possibilities Hume would still sit in the back row muttering "there COULD be a different explanation".
It's not silly, it's a description of reality. Epistemology is concerned with what can be known, not with what assumptions are practical for decision-making. Just because something has happened the same way a hundred billion times in the past, that's no iron guarantee it will in future, it just means its incredibly probable. Understanding this means understanding reality more clearly.
Yes, everything can be questioned including this theory. I'm saying that focusing our efforts on all the different ways we could be wrong doesn't really help us move forward. So it would be "silly" to spend our time on that endeavor instead of trying to apply the theory to as many scenarios as possible to see if it works.
But, yeah, maybe using the word "silly" was a bit harsh. I could have written "not productive" instead.
Besides, the article is not a scientific one it's a philosophical one. In science you arrive at a conclusion using theories and observations while in philosophy you arrive at conclusions by theories and consensus.
Sure, everything can be questioned, but if you reject all assumptions then you're not left with much. There's no guarantee that the contents of your memory aren't all false or that the universe won't stop existing 1 minute from now. Yet I hold both of these claims to be false, simply because if I was to go around seriously contemplating such issues all the time then I'd just be living in a constant state of existential confusion. And there's no enlightenment in that.
He isn't saying that there's a possibility "however remote"; he's saying that we have absolutely no reason to prefer one explanation over another.
"So although we have seen evidence for it time and time again": you're begging the question and assuming the principle of induction, which is exactly what Hume is saying you can't justify.
In summary: It is not possible to determine the cause of an effect when you only know the effect. For instance, the theory of evolution is not certain because we can't go back and check if we are correct in our assumptions. So how can it offer knowledge if we can't prove it's true?