Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: induction, deduction, conduction?

Author:Nick Sweeney
Posted:9/18/2000; 9:42:00 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 9/18/2000
Msg #:21467 (In response to 21466)
Prev/Next:21466 / 21468

Completely: these people are applying deductive logic to an inductive subject. Think of it as a false syllogism.

1) I release the source to my work;
2) I spend a lot of time working for no money; therefore:
3) Open source means spending a lot of time working for no money.

That's a dangerous attitude. It reminds me of the statement "All swans are white", which was a mainstay of logic textbooks from classical times. After all, given the evidence around you, it seems as reasonable a statement as "the angles in a triangle, by definition, always add up to 180deg."

And then, in the late 1700s, sailors reached Australia and saw the black swans. Could they not be swans, simply because "all swans are white"?

Karl Popper talked about this: induction can't produce certainty. No matter how many observations confirm a theory, there's always the possibility that future observations could refute it.

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