After I run, I am reading the book Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar…Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. It reads like the Marx brothers teaching a class on Philosophy - really quite good if you like that sort of thing.
From the book:
“Inductive logic reasons from particular instances to general theories and is the method to confirm scientific theories.”
What follows is a great joke about Sherlock Holmes and Watson - it is on page 30. In the end it breaks inductive logic into the following steps:
- Observe some event.
- Using your intuition, create a hypothesis to explain the observation.
- Test the hypothesis by ruling out alternative hypotheses.
- If your original hypothesis holds up, then you might be right.
Plato and the Platypus is much more accessible than this Stanford article, but there is a great inductive reasoning article at Wikipedia that includes this sentence:
“Induction is sometimes framed as reasoning about the future from the past, but in its broadest sense it involves reaching conclusions about unobserved things on the basis of what has been observed.”
As analysts, we observe the data that is collected by our tools, make hypotheses about what happened, eliminate alternative hypotheses, and provide recommendations that will result in “optimal” website performance in the future.
I thought we were Web Analysts when it turns out we are Practicing Philosophers.
On my to read list is The Black Swan which is based on the idea that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat, and that really important events are rare and unpredictable.
What are you reading?