[lit-ideas] Re: Pfaff on Fukuyama's Utopia
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2011 13:39:12 +0000 (GMT)
I had written and might have sent:
"Well, Russell got there a long time before [may even be in his The Problems of
Philosophy]. You don't mention whether Taleb credits Russell, but I hope this
isn't Taleb not giving credit where its due."
Then googled and found "when Russell's Turkey meets the Black Swan":-
http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/Russell/chicken.html
So it is in TPOP but it is a chicken. And at the url, I agree with David
Deutsch's remarks that Russell's chicken does not go far enough as an argument
against induction. Popper, in Objective Knowledge, points out that there are
even counter-examples to inductivist stalwarts like "the sun always rises" [not
in the land of the 'midnight sun'] or 'bread always nourishes' [not when
there's ergotism]. Anyone who thinks that the possible existence of a 'black
swan' only waters down induction from a certainty to a probability ["just
because something is observed to happen over and over again, only means that it
probably will happen again the next time, but this is not proof that it will
for certain"], has really not thought it through - for the existence of
so-called 'confirming' examples cannot put any probability on anything unless
we can find a way to show how they put a probability on the non-existence of
any counter-example or 'disconfirming' example, and
no one has shown how this can be done in a valid and unobjectionable way.
Donal
________________________________
From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, 20 November 2011, 12:51
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Pfaff on Fukuyama's Utopia
No, the story of the turkey is in The Black Swan. It is not the black swan.
John
On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 9:32 PM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
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>>Credit where credit is due: That turkey is from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
>
>That was a black swan (though, and especially at this time of year,
>unscrupulous types may have been passing this off as a reverse-albino
>long-necked turkey). It was Russell who used that turkey who is strangled as a
>sign of the dangers of inductivism; though he did not mention Thanksgiving in
>his analogy, it was otherwise the same.
>
>What Russell made of Popper's non-inductivist epistemology is, genuinely,
>something of a mystery and an interesting one - at least to me. He more or
>less sided with Popper against Wittgenstein in the pokers-at-dawn incident at
>the Moral Sciences Club and wrote very favourably about The Open Society. But
>I do not know what he made of Popper's non-inductivist account of science and,
>if he dissented, why. It may be he had more or less given up on the whole
>topic by the time Popper's work was there for consideration. Though they did
>meet and indeed Popper wished to dedicate his Postscript to The Logic of
>Scientific Discovery to Russell. In fact, the squabble between Popper and
>Wittgenstein can be seen as one between heirs apparent to Russell's approach
>to philosophy. Answers on a postcard to:-
>
>Donal
McEvoy
>Foggy London Town
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--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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