joe4 comments on Universal Law - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 April 2007 06:41AM

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Comment author: joe4 06 May 2007 11:52:26PM 2 points [-]

How careful do we have to be deriving laws from our empirical observations... deriving laws that we think must be true because we have observed them to always be true.

I believe this is analogous to Hempel's Paradox, otherwise known as the raven paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox .

I wonder what, out of everything we think we know, must actually be true. Is there anything we can really say with 100% confidence? What truths can be derived by examining what happens when a proposed truth is not in fact true?