Talk:Slothful induction

Hi

Hi Rational,logic loving heathens! So I was perusing religious apologetics (particularly by a muslim theologian) when I stumbled upon this line of bullshit:

"it (science) cannot prove using directly observable data that humans evolved from apelike creatures. To make such a claim would require interpretations and inductions using limited sets of data and in some ways, leap of "faith"."

While it's true that humans evolving from chimpanzee is based on induction.And that conclusions by inductive reasoning can't produce certainty (unlike deduction),it can produce a probabilty.And for cases where the premises are heavily supported by evidence,it's unreasonable to disbelieve in it due to a stupendously high probability (hence the fallacy).

Relevant articles:

On Proof: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Proof#Scientific_proof

WikiPedia on Slothful Induction : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slothful_induction

On induction & deduction: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Induction ^{— Unsigned, by: PakiExMoose / talk / contribs 18:28, 28 March 2015‎ (UTC)}

Attribution

Some content from http://evolutionwiki.org/wiki/Slothful_Induction Mʀ. Wʜɪsᴋᴇʀs, Esϙᴜɪʀᴇ (talk/stalk) 23:00, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

The entire premise of the "why it's wrong" section was begging the question.

It doesn't really address the problem of induction in any way that isn't itself fallacious. To take the uniformity of nature as simply being true is circularly assuming the very thing that is being doubted in the argument that induction is not a justifiable type of inference. I think a more apt way of explaining this as a fallacy is in logical inconsistency whereas someone accepts induction as an acceptable method of inference but only accepts inductive reasoning for the conclusions they prefer. I.e. accepting that given all the observations made so far the majority of ravens are black, but refusing to accept say that all electrons have a negative charge by similar reasoning. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 16:17, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Looking at Wikipedia's description and example it seems this fallacy was not at all meant to address the problem of induction to begin with, but denying a conclusion in favor of a less supported one. Which seems a lot more defensible as a fallacy. The above was written before making the changes to the page.- Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 16:32, 27 May 2023 (UTC)