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rojo8

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How can you prove that if some object of some concept acts in a certain way, then every object of that concept acts that way? So, a generalization. For exemple, a first level generalization like: you predict that if you touched some water and it was wet, then the next time you will touch some water it will be wet too.

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First off, your wording implies something that nobody believes: generalizing from seeing one instance of a black crow to the rule that all crows are black. More generally, the truth of a proposition is validated from establishing that all evidence points to the truth of the proposition, and no evidence, not even conceptual evidence, points away from it.

Conceptual evidence is not the same as “imaginary evidence”, where one states “I can imagine that X is false” or “I can imagine that X happened”. There is an informal rule that all bricks will fall to the ground if they are dropped. Initially, this was simply an observational-correlation rule: it always happens. Later on it was replaced with better rules addressing causal principles which apply to vast numbers of things.

Focus on causal principles is important, otherwise you might get stuck in the crow-trap. Maybe you live in a location where all crows are black, and they haven’t invented the internet or printing presses so that you cannot easily gather knowledge from afar. But you will surely know that animal color is variable (not all cows are brown, not all dogs are brown), which provides a conceptually valid basis for retaining “some crows are not black” as an alternative – that alternative defeats the black-crow proposition’s claim to certainty. You are, at this point, entitled to say that the proposition is probable, but you haven’t established a causal rule explaining the observed correlation. Your experiences may expand by taking a trip to Europe and then you reject the specific proposition, though not the knowledge. You learn that the generalization is true of specific species. Later on, on your deathbed, you learn about albinism, and you desperately try to understand the import of “broken units”, but too late for you.

A third and much easier (indeed, facile) possibility is to question the concept and propositions themselves, retorting “It depends on what you mean by ‘crow’”, “It depends on what you mean by ‘black’”. We can precisely define “water”, but “wet” is a sensory evaluation, shorthand for “feels wet”, but actually “the feeling that you get when you touch water” is the ostensive basis for the judgment “feels wet”, so of course whenever you touch water, you have the feeling that arises from touching water, unless you add in some neural blocking agent (lidocaine!!). We resolve that by saying that the proposition which you are trying to validate excludes the presence of neural blocking agent, or neoprene gloves. Those sorts of evasions only arise in philosophy fora, and aren’t really necessary guard conditions that have to be added to every valid proposition.

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Let me elaborate on the reason why silly guard conditions do not have to be added to every valid proposition. Briefly, all knowledge is contextual. Less briefly, that means that knowledge is an integrated system, not a collection of unrelated propositions. Propositions need not, should not, and cannot be wholly self-contained statements of truths, for example we do not have to include a definition of “and” in every proposition that contains “and”, nor do we build in all of the laws of nature into every proposition (noting btw that “the laws of nature” are themselves propositions). Every proposition is expressed in some language, we need not build in the rules of grammar and the lexicon of a language when we set forth a proposition.

“Context” is where you import knowledge from outside the particular statement or circumstances. It can be a bit of a wild card in that it means “knowledge that should be available to others and therefore need not be specifically introduced into the conversation”. Sometime a person is mistaken about what others know. As I have confessed elsewhere, there was a point in life where I believed that all crows are black, since in my experience it was absolutely true. I think it is true of all American crows, however elsewhere you find white, grey and brown in crows. I simply was unaware of the breadth of the concept “crow” – so this is not a case of “how you define crow” (which is the genus corvus), it is just about my knowledge. Sometimes, people speak of “the crow family” which includes crows, magpies and jays – corvidae. Now that is a case of redefining “crow”. In ordinary English, jays are not crows. Science sort of solves this problem by agreeing to standard definitions (alas, no standard is immutable, so you have to know the standard). Philosophy seems socially opposed to fixed definitions, instead you always have to add on some rider about whose theory of “truth” you are talking about.

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