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Bad Moves: It worked for me…

By Julian Baggini

"It would be interesting to see how the world would be different if Dick Cheney really listened to Radiohead's OK Computer. I think the world would probably improve. That album is fucking brilliant. It changed my life, so why wouldn't it change his?" Chris Martin of Coldplay, Guardian Weekend 28 May 2005

Our ability to predict what will happen and detect order in the world depends upon a type of argument which is strictly speaking illogical. Induction is a form of reasoning which allows us to infer general principles from particular experiences. Sometimes we have many particulars to work on: countless observations have shown water to be H2O, so the hypothesis that all water is so composed seems pretty secure. However, we often generalise on the basis of very few observations. If you have a new gadget, you press a button and something happens, and you assume the same thing will happen if you press the button again. This is because your reasoning is informed by many other similar experiences which create a general assumption about regularity in the function of buttons.

But as philosophers have long recognised, induction is a logical embarrassment. That is because, whether we base our generalisations on many instances or just one or two, we are still concluding that something is always the case on the basis of only a limited set of observations. Most fundamentally, we are also assuming that the future will be like the past, when we have no experience at all of what the future will be like.

Given the need to reason to inductively, and the great difficulty philosophers have had justifying inductive reasoning and setting out principles for its correct use, it is perhaps unsurprising that it is very easy to do it badly. The temptation to over-generalise on the basis of a potentially misleading particular experience can be almost irresistible.

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