Tom Griffiths

Yeah.

And that was the second half of Boole's book.

I was talking about uncertain inference.

So Boole was very much interested in induction as much as deduction.

So deduction is reasoning from certain things to uncertain things.

Sorry, deduction is reasoning from certain things to other certain things.

And induction is reasoning from the things we know, which might not be enough to determine

what the conclusions are, but still nonetheless making some reasonable inference on that basis.

He was interested in induction from the perspective of how it is that scientists

figure out the principles of the world around them.

Where it's clear that they're not doing something like deduction.

They're not being able to identify a bunch of things that are true and driving the consequences.

Maybe they do a little bit of that when they're theorizing, but coming up with the theories themselves and coming up with the generalizations about the world and even coming up with the laws of nature is something that's an inductive enterprise and he really wanted to understand that.

And again, people in the 19th century were trying to draw those lines and figure that out.

So you had people like Charles Sanders Pierce, who is trying to work out, here's the way that deduction seems to work.

Let's see if we can write similar kinds of schemas for different kinds of inductive arguments.

He distinguished between induction, which is kind of

seeing instances of things and then going to the general law, and abduction, which is seeing something happen and then coming up with an explanation for it.

I would call both of those inductive inferences, but they both have this fundamental, there's something uncertain about the conclusion that you're reaching.

And then I think it took a little longer to really start to be able to use the solutions to that that are offered by probability theory as a tool for understanding how it is that people make inductive inferences.