I’m absolutely a layman myself too, and somewhat allergic to philosophy and its tautologies. I think it’s exactly as valuable as laypeople find it to be.

This point about induction happens to be an exceptional personal crusade I’ve been on for decades, ever since I saw someone use it in a college debate on “does god exist?”

The “no” debater laid out the usual standards we apply to scientific knowledge and showed how miserably religion satisfies them (it doesn’t even show up to try, of course).

His opponent tried to demolish those standards as a gold statue with clay feet, because really, we can’t know anything - it’s all faith.

I’ll keep standing up to say “fuck that” at every opportunity I get for the rest of my life.

If we want to define knowing things to an extreme degree of gnostic certainty then yes. I prefer though to approach that by saying that there will always be a certain level of technical uncertainty to what we can say about the universe. Because to me this is an asterisk, not a headline. I would not come at it from the opposite angle and say we cannot know anything. It is a question of where the emphasis is, and I find the OP takes the “we can’t know anything” path for literary effect, which I object to because, as I said above, this creates some real world harm.

“You can’t just wave away the entire universe”

“Hold my beer.”

Seriously, I’d work on the writing style. I was nearly asleep after the introductory paragraphs defining sub-schools of sub-schools of philosophy, and ten paragraphs in its still unclear where you are going.

I think you have a tendency to dress up your ideas as much as possible in order to legitimate them. You even did it in the above essay. You could have said that advances in medical science have moved the frontier of what we consider “dead” before and could again, therefore we should hesitate before considering death permanent. You didn’t have to invoke Hume at all. But name dropping an author and tying your idea to a previous framework makes it sound more legitimate. Unfortunately it also buries your idea and tethers it to any complications in the invoked frameworks, such as my general allergy to Hume.

“I don’t know” is quite different than “no one can ever know anything.”

It’s a problem of induction, like Hume’s sunrise problem.

Nope.

This inductive principle argument that we can’t know the sun will rise tomorrow, just that it always has before, was a cute little bit of philosophy when I was back in college.

But it has since been weaponized by religious people, arguing in bad faith, to undermine the credibility of science and legitimate their religious faith. They say we can’t know anything, therefore science is just built on faith anyway and is therefore no different than religion.

Again: nope.

The thing is, we know why the sun rises, not just that it always has. And it actually doesn’t always rise, at the poles, or during eclipses, and we can explain those too. We have a model that can predict much more minute events than the sun rising or not, in fact. We have devised experiments to strain and test our models and predictions. We throw out lots of ideas because they don’t bear out in tests.

Scientists don’t really talk about “knowing” things anyway. The bar a scientific theory must meet is being able to make testable predictions about the future. Maybe theory is always provisional and can never be proven but at some point we become fools not to accept it. Proof: prove yourself! To claim something doesn’t exist, based on the inductive principle, is to wave away the entire universe with a flick of the wrist as your opening argument.

If you still want to engage in this “we can’t really know anything” bullshit, that’s your choice. I no longer have any patience for it, having seen how it is being misused. It boils down to the “so you’re telling me there’s a chance” scene from Dumb and Dumber, where the guy chooses to focuses on the 0.0000000001% chance that something will happen, because hey it’s not zero.

We can’t know anyone is dead therefore death is social constructed? I guess life doesn’t exist either because you don’t know you are alive, you just have a lot of past anecdotal evidence that you are. Perhaps your atoms will scatter in 5 minutes from now and you will prove to have been an accidental particle fart of the universe that just happened to blow in on a breeze, and then blew out again. Who can say!!!???