“Grass is grue”
From Philosophers’ Playground, something relevant to Intelligent Design:
The” grue” of which he speaks comes from Nelson Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction” in which he argues that the central logical tool in scientific reasoning, induction, is not the language independent thing we think it is. The idea is that if the word “grue” means “green before 1/1/07 and blue thereafter” then all of the evidence we currently have that the grass is green is also evidence that the grass is grue since all observations have come before the year 2007. By using induction from this evidence, speakers of our color language would predict that on New Years’ Day, the grass will still be green, but using the very same logical inference, grue-speakers will be lead by their language to argue that all scientific evidence points to it being what we would call blue. So we have different claims about how the world will be based on the same evidence and the same scientific inference, with the only difference being the language we choose to speak — something that should be innocuous.
Is the statement “Grass is grue” only falsifiable after 1/1/07. In the naive sense, yes, because that is the first point at which there theories make different predictions. But as Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, and Lakatos (amongst many others) point out. No matter what we observe, we haven’t necessarily falsified anything in particular. We can hold onto the grue language and grue-based inductions if we are willing to make adjustments elsewhere in our web of belief.
February 7th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Actually, Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction” would have no relevance whatsoever to questions about evolution and intelligent design because both are attempting to give explanations of natural phenomena. The Disovery Institute’s arguments based on complexity theory would suffer the same exact issues as any other explanation that refers to general propositions based on induction.
If you want a conversation about ID, here is another post.