Not Everything

Not Everything

We are not naïve enough to believe that someone will be immortal because we have never seen him die, or that someone is innocent of murder because we have never seen him kill. The problem of naïve generalization does not plague us everywhere. But such smart pockets of inductive skepticism tend to involve events that we have encountered in our natural environment, matters from which we have learned to avoid foolish generalization.

For instance, when children are presented with the picture of a single member of a group and are asked to guess the properties of other unseen members, they are capable of selecting which attributes to generalize. Show a child a photograph of someone overweight, tell her that he is a member of a tribe, and ask her to describe the rest of the population: she will (most likely) not jump to the conclusion that all the members of the tribe are weight-challenged. But she would respond differently to generalizations involving skin color. If you show her people of dark complexion and ask her to describe their co-tribesmen, she will assume that they too have dark skin.

So it seems that we are endowed with specific and elaborate inductive instincts showing us the way. Contrary to the opinion held by the great David Hume, and that of the British empiricist tradition, that belief arises from custom, as they assumed that we learn generalizations solely from experience and empirical observations, it was shown from studies of infant behavior that we come equipped with mental machinery that causes us to selectively generalize from experiences (i.e., to selectively acquire inductive learning in some domains but remain skeptical in others). By doing so, we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors—which found its way into our biology.