wedrifid comments on What I've learned from Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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Yes there is although one must of course already have some kind of vocabulary within which to represent hypotheses. It is finding a hypothesis out of an infinite number of hypothesis that such a method is useful for.
No there isn't, because as I have illustrated above, an 'inductive inference' pointing to a hypothesis presupposes a set of data selectively chosen and written down in such a way that the hypothesis is already present.
I think you probably have something else in mind, perhaps "abductive inference" (i.e. "inference to the best explanation").
Yes, abductive inference or some form of analogical thinking are how powerful hypotheses are really generated. Neither of the posts linked to in number 4 above even mention induction, so I'm not sure why the author thought they were evidence for the thesis.
That's the kind of science aliens use.