Postmodernism gone mad!

[Yahzi]

I have not read the Stove link, but from the quotes provided it sounds like he mischaracterizes Hume and Popper.

I think it would be safe to assume the confusion is my fault, and not Stove's.

Hume's criticism of induction was not that it can lead to false conclusions, but that there is no logically valid basis for believing that any inductive conclusion is true.

I agree, and I don't think Stove argued otherwise. Assuming that by "logically valid" you mean "deductive." Stove agrees with Hume that induction can never be turned into deduction by any logical sleight-of-hand (indeed, he spends many turgid pages proving this).

His point, which he claimed Hume agreed with, was that accepting deduction as the only method of truth was unjustifiable. A result that I think anticipates Godel.

 

[Yahzi]

his main point (as I recall) was that even explicitly assuming that the structure of induction was logically justifiable still hinged on a deeper assumption about the constency of the universe's laws.

I think - but am not sure (Stove can be terribly technical) - that Stove actually rejects that, and argues that even assuming the consistency of the universe is inadequate to render induction logically valid (i.e. equivalent to deduction). (If that is what he says, he means to imply that Hume said it too).

I believe Stove's point is that induction, even without the logical validity of deduction, is a perfectly acceptable way to get truth, and that its failure to be as rigorously formal as deduction is not terribly significant. To me that sounds like Godel observing that all formal systems contain truths that cannot be proved within the system.