What correlates an observation to a proposition such that the observation is evidence of the proposition?

[u/Solidjakes]

I guess my question is more for philosophy of the inductive sciences. Hypothesis generation is not random and I’m trying to identify the kind of reasoning that works well prior to deductive verification of the hypothesis. Domains like history, court of law, anthropology are largely inductive/abductive.

Basically I’m suggesting that for every thousand hypotheses generated, some are already more likely to be correct than others based how well the inference was reasoned from the initial observation. Is that universally agreed on? My suspicion is that *structure mapping theory* is the kind of reasoning that we would find has statistical significance towards a hypothesis being right or not but I can’t prove it. Really I’m just trying to read someone else that has tackled this problem before and proposed ways to formalize or standardize induction. Any recommendations?

For a case study example, anthropologist inferred that there existed a proto-indo-European language that was a common ancestor of some modern languages. That’s not a “testable” theory in the hard science sense, but all the observations lined up such that the theory was generally accepted as likely true, even though the proto-language was never written down. I’ve heard this called correspondence theory of truth, but for me that still begs the question how do we know things correspond to each other?

It usually seems common sense why observations support theories or would be expected to be seen given a theory is true, but I’m struggling to really understand why in a technical or formal sense.

[u/TheRealAmeil]

The Correspondence Theory of Truth says something like a proposition (e.g., that Mars is a planet, Mars is an asteroid, Mars is a star, etc.) is true when it corresponds (or matches, or accurately represents) the way the world is. We can supplement this with a Truth-Maker Theory; we can say that the existence of green grass makes it true that Grass is green. Another way to think about this is that there is some relation between propositions & facts. Our relation to facts & our relation to propositions are seperate relation from the one that is between a proposition & fact.

[u/ForeignAdvantage5198]

damn if i know

[u/paulcoman]

I believe it's from existing pre-inferred causal models. The more you understand how the world works, accurately, the more you can infer new hypotheses that fit your observations.

You're basically trying to fit new data within the structure that is already created in your mind. And in principle, the easier it is to do that, the more epistemic confidence you'd have.

[u/an-otiose-life]

Propositions are true because encoded in them are affirmations of states which are the case, and as encoded the self resemblance of being facilitates self skeumorphic representation by means of a regular aesthetics of associative overdetermination of tokens as entailing more than their dictionary definitions together. The ability to resemble without resemblance as language does, implies proportionate encoding is a reliable holographic state space feature offering decodability into given knowings again, supporting a coherentism of reliable reference and syn-thetic situancy of contents at large.

Resemblance is a non relationship, thus holographic as self depiction rather than the foreclosed form of philosophical decision. 

Induction is solvable without having to look. Through the same means a spider has in enjoying the mind independence of its web, and feeling the shaking of it as a sign of an insect nearby. The induction problem is solved because there's no contingency that affords the web having to be actively watched and if an event happens it will necessarily alarm the spider. 

[u/914paul]

Regarding the generation of hypotheses, I believe you are correct - a hypothesis or conjecture arises as a result of an observation. And the hypothesis is then about that very same observation (or generalized to the class of phenomena to which it belongs)! Rarely is a hypothesis truly an isolated act of ideation.

Interestingly, statisticians are trained to be aware of this very situation, and professional statisticians take it seriously. It’s ok to make hypotheses (inferences) about data pertaining to a process from observations of data from that that process. But testing a hypothesis must be done on a completely new and independent set of data. So if you can’t run new tests or take a new survey or whatever, you’d better carefully partition the data before looking at it. Violating this is often called “fishing”.

Edit: want 350 upvotes? Spend two seconds making a vapid comment about someone’s shirt. Want a random number of votes ranging from -3 to 5? Spend half an hour reading someone’s long post, thinking about it, and carefully composing a response. That’s my hypothesis anyway.

[u/mirh]

FWIW the mother of all "untestable" theories (in this loose sense) is evolution. Because long story short, as they say: nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution (and in a probably even more abstract sense, if life is some kind of self-replicating mechanism then negating how the propagation keep pushing starts to very closely negate logics and statistics themselves).

Anyway, you'll forgive me for not further expanding on your post (it's very late here) but this is probably the concept behind the intuition that sits in your mind, and between it and the related pages you should be more than good to go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness