Science and the Problem with Induction

Presentation: 10:20-10:40, Kennedy Union 222

Description

Science is founded on inductive reasoning. That is, a theory's "goodness" depends on how often it accurately predicts the measurements we make in experiments. However, imagine one could list out every possible experiment we could ever conduct - there'd be infinitely many. But, we can only ever conduct finitely many of them, so there's always infinitely many experiments that we haven't conducted, and our effective certainty in any theory is always essentially zero. If a theory accurately predicts the outcomes of essentially 0% of all possible experiments, is it still a good theory? How could we ever know if it's even close to accurately modeling reality? In this talk, I speak on the logical issues underpinning science, and how we can never know if the "axioms" of science are actually true. From this, I talk about the philosophy of science and the different ways that this problem can be dealt with.