Not all customs involve sound judgment. Many conventions of personal or social behaviour are due to mere force of habit or the desire to conform with other people. Some customs may be useless, or positively harmful. So why is it sound judgment to believe in induction? What factor makes it so? Can you elaborate, please.

Sour grapes. You're agreeing with me but then at the same time saying so what?

Agreed, so what? But that doesn't make me wrong. Does it?

What would the words, "sound judgment" refer to if not to that kind of thing?

Sour grapes. You're agreeing with me but then at the same time saying so what?

Why are you so caught up with being "wrong"?

And, if it's a "so what" question, why did you bother arguing the distinction in the first place? You seemed adamant about all of this a few pages ago...

It's easy to skeptically smash any domain of knowledge for not having access to the absolute.

But no one cares about the absolute.

So tell me why I as a real person living in the real world should care about the contention that I can't predict tomorrow based on today, when for practical purposes it gets me by just fine.

That's an argument from ignorance. You should avoid asking questions that go along the lines of "if I'm not right then why?" and expecting that your being right is taken as the default until proven otherwise. Incredulity is not a substitute for an argument.

Not at all. All I said is that what is referred to by "sound judgment" in English is exactly just that kind of thing about the brakes. If that kind of thing is not sound judgment, then nothing is sound judgment.

I value the truth.

Wait -- I thought we couldn't predict anything? Shouldn't the truth remain true tomorrow?

That doesn't explain what distinguishes it as a sound judgement. All I see are a bunch of assertions with no argumentation.

Are you interested in the current topic or are you in interested in my personal motivations... Very well, since the topic has now turned to discussing me personally, I guess I should defend myself.

Another question is, if my claim is suddenly so obvious and unimportant, why did it take dozens of pages to acknowledge that? It wasn't so unimportant when people were making post after post after post. In all, it seems kind of cheap to switch the topic from "are you right or wrong" to "who cares if you are right or wrong".

Satan; I don't know why you sent me that link, the Stanfordsite is generally MUCH better.

I think that is is necesarily true that science cannot ever be totaly complete, because it is adaptive.

I'm trying to understanding why you had to note Hume and throw wikipedia pages at me telling me I'm committing a logical fallacy if you agree that inductive reasoning is useful, and as Aedes noted, even essential to most creatures!

You're not wrong, Satan, relax. It's not always about being wrong or right. We're just having a discussion, and I'm trying to understand your reasoning.

It's not empty bickering. Just a page or two before you were assailing the rest of us with the impossibility of truth, at least as predicted by prior experience. And now you reveal that said truth is actually what you're after. Care to reconcile the two?

A very good answer, and I agree.

I'd just submit that we approach truth through experience and observation. We can never say what WILL happen, but we can say what is likely.

I'd qualify that by saying that we can predict which of two events is more likely given past observations along with certain pragmatic assumptions.

And your point initially was that, despite this, we can't say inductive reasoning is "true". Correct?

Cause and Effect

Statistics allows you to verify an implication, A implies B, and this naturally leads to the prediction that if you draw more samples from the same distribution, you will continue to observe B or not A in future data.

A statement about causation makes a much bolder prediction. The statement X causes Y suggests that even if you intervene so as to change the distribution, you will observe either Y or not X in samples drawn from the new distribution.

"Even when you change something, you cannot remove the effect without removing the cause."

Like most other scientific hypotheses, such statements about causation cannot be proved, only disproved. If we strangle the rooster and the sun comes up anyway, we have disproved the hypothesis that rooster-crowing causes the dawn.

I hope you're now aware that how you just ended this was the extent of my position earlier, in a nutshell.