Error Filled Belief Systems

It is quite extraordinary to me that some people hold collections of unfounded beliefs while denying fact-based realities. I suppose that these alternative "thinkers" believe that it is better to hold as true that which they wish to believe, and as untrue any fact-distorted information that they choose, for whatever misguided reason, not to believe.

Here are some ridiculous world-views that I have encountered in some illogical and personally unpleasant (for many reasons beyond ridiculous beliefs) individuals:

B (for Bible Biased Bigot): God, also pretentiously called the "Intelligent [sick] Designer", dictated Absolute Moral Truths. All liberal and compassionate views, including tolerance of others' behaviors, and any behaviors that differ from the straight and narrow will lead to inevitable moral mayhem. B's knowledge of sociology ranks with B's level of empathy and compassion somewhere close to zero.

W: Global warming is a myth. W's "reasoning" runs that because the planet has previously had ice ages, then global warming must be attributable only to normal fluctuations. Knowledge of the existence of prior ice ages is the sum total of W's knowledge of paleoclimates and climatology. W finds scientists dull because they say the same things as one another. (I think that the planet would be a very scary place if all scientists concocted ideas based on a personal need for variety!) W knows virtually nothing about medical science, but firmly believes that most disease is a creation of the mind. The Nazi holocaust, according to W, either did not happen or is greatly exaggerated (the latter being a concession to the horrifying film footage). W believes that Jews have exaggerated the holocaust because they suffer a persecution complex. It does not seem to have occurred to W that the Jews have indeed been scapegoated and persecuted repeatedly during European history. W doesn't believe in God (so far, so good) and so does not believe that Jesus was the son of God (fine, since a man cannot be the son of something that does not exist). However, W considers that Jesus the man is a myth and that Jesus never lived (apparently, the Gospels are utter lies rather than exaggerations). Does W the-fact-buster believe in anything? Yes, W believes in the sort of mythical creatures that exist only in fantasy novels .....

There seems, as evidenced by these two, to be an association between truly silly or nasty belief systems and more generalized personality defects. This makes some sense in view of the fact that our personalities are the outward manifestation of our general belief system, and further, that what we choose to believe, when we diverge from evidence-logic-based beliefs, will be greatly influenced by our temperament and general attitudes to the world and others.

Quo Vadis?
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inductive vs deductive

Inductive reasoning moves from the specific to the general, that is, from data to a principle. Deductive reasoning moves from the general to the specific, that is, from the principle to particulars. Abductive reasoning moves from relevant evidence (specific) to the best possible explanation (principle). Abduction is inference to the best explanation – beginning from a set of accepted facts, inference proceeds to the most likely explanation for those facts. Inference is the process of deriving a conclusion that is based solely on what is already known (a posteriori).

Inductive reasoning involves coming to a conclusion that is inferred from multiple observations. Repeated testing will help to ascertain whether first inference (conclusion derived) is correct or incorrect. In contrast, valid deductive reasoning is based in formal logic and will yield a true conclusion if the premises on which it is based are themselves true. That is, the inferred conclusion of a valid deductive inference is necessarily true when the premises are true, so a formally valid deductive inference cannot be false.

The Scottish empiricist David Hume, raised the skeptical philosophical objection that inductive reasoning might fail whenever the past cannot be taken to be a reliable guide to the future. In essence, if we have just seen 43 white swans, are we justified in assuming that all swans are white or even that the next swan that we see will be white?

The philosopher of science, Karl Popper expanded Hume's ideas of the 'problem of induction' and argued that there can be no solution to the problem of induction in that empirical observations cannot provide proof for a scientific hypothesis, theory, or law. Popper argued that, since only disproof is a certainty, science should proceed by a 'deductivist' method of conjecture and refutation, employing deductively valid reasoning that does not resort to inductive confirmation.

In practice, modern scientific method employs inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning to move from empirical data to elucidation of principles. Ideally, hypotheses are couched so that they could be falsified should they fail to correctly predict experimental observations. However, since the hard sciences involve empirical observations of natural phenomena that can reasonably be expected to operate consistently, relevant positive results are taken to provide practical support for the likelihood that a theory is accurate.

Unlike the case for swans, would we not be fully justified in believing that all apples that fall from an apple tree will fall toward Earth rather than floating toward the moon? To stipulate that the apple tree is situated on Mars would appear to put a worm in this theory, but that problem can be avoided by asking instead, 'would we not be fully justified in believing that all apples will fall toward the planet?' Whether we talk of the force of gravity, or the more modern understanding of warping of space-time, natural laws dictate that objects are most 'attracted' to the largest nearby mass.

Quo Vadis?
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