There is nothing like political ideology to create difficulties with thinking, and the situation worsens when it is channeled through institutions. Among the most pronounced sources of such difficulties, ironically, is the university. I would like to suggest that the logical problem of induction is the single biggest problem in higher education. A few words about induction. It is a topic with a long history in philosophy. It largely concerns how we make generalizations and predictions from specific examples. But it contains a significant “judgment trap” because we may take liberties with limited, incomplete, or corrupted facts, applying them to whatever preoccupies our personal or group mental frameworks, and we give little consideration to probability. Our chances of getting it right in such circumstances are limited. This is also at the heart of the controversy over artificial intelligence (AI).
While our higher education tradition in America has brought us many successes, it is also creating problems, notably in how we think.
That may be counterintuitive: On our college campuses, we tend to address what we think are serious problems seriously. In reality, they often become points of disagreement, stemming from differences in perception.
These differences in perception, however, usually rest on basic flaws in logical thinking, which create a constant tension in our social discourse. As psychiatrist Carl Jung noted, illogical thinking is our greatest source of danger.
The disagreements that really matter, like those in physics and engineering, for example, usually get little attention. Instead, our college campuses are preoccupied with disagreements over perceptions of ideological categories such as climate change, race, or wealth distribution. Nobel author Saul Bellow, in the foreword to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, called these issues among the “backflow” of society that should be kept off our university campuses as much as possible, so that students can concentrate on acquiring authentic knowledge, tangible skills, and their own powers of judgment.
[T]he university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. Liberal democracy in its generosity made this possible, but by consenting to play an active or ‘positive,’ a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society’s ‘problems.’ Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes and the university has become society’s conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences.
These disagreements, however, stem not from differences in perception but from difficulties with thinking that lead to misperception. Such misperception flows directly into AI routines. When students and ideologue faculty otherwise assume that a local storm represents climate change, that single claims of discrimination create a protected class, or that individual abortions promote women’s liberties, they are demonstrating the logical problem of induction.
But who is actually doing the thinking? Is it the students, or the university, effectively speaking through them? Do we, as philosopher Frederick Will claimed, start our thinking process “inter-institutionally” by centering our thought activity within a set of institutional references? Is the university itself merely a “cognitive institution?” Even within a single university, thinking conforms to sub-institutions, such as “departments” or professional schools, each with its own culture and modes of thought.
One of the most reliable places in the university system to locate the logical problem of induction is in our law schools. Law, as practiced in academia, is especially vulnerable to such error because, among other problems, it systematically mixes law and politics as teaching content, thereby portraying law as an instrument of politics—and, by extension, of ideology—and ideology as an instrument of justice.
Because law schools and law operate in a closed system of self-reference, these errors become self-reinforcing and self-escalating. The end result is that our legal and political systems rest on a constantly growing base of technically corrupt thinking. Professors are unaware of the problem or will accept it if it serves their ideology.
Let’s look at three examples of what I am referring to.
In the first example, two tenured law professors—one from Yale University and the other from the University of Chicago—collaborated on a guest essay. In it, they argued that they are entitled to taxpayer funds without any conditions, asserting that universities have a “constitutional right” to such funds. Their appeal to imaginary constitutional rights is made by the same ideologically aligned professors who think that the Constitution should be discarded and replaced. They are joined by faculty colleagues, one of whom invents a theory that the Constitution provides a “federalism” doctrine that blocks the president’s duty to suppress insurrection. They then indict the Supreme Court as a conspirator. Law faculty almost uniformly reject the current Court’s ability to assert conservative or textual jurisprudence. These examples demonstrate a systematic lack of insight into personal bias, while presenting beliefs as if they were rational thinking. Such confusion then becomes the basis of teaching.
Another essay from the dean of Berkeley Law, including one from a former Senator, lawyer, and university president, argues that universities risk being “extorted” because the federal government dares to suggest that some accountability be attached to taxpayer finance. If universities like Berkeley were extorted, it would involve the use of force or coercion to extract money. The White House is not extorting universities or “overreaching;” it is merely imposing conditions on the use of taxpayer funds. Those conditions include fair and balanced treatment of all political points of view and interests, and they reflect a constitutional interpretation of citizen representation and the fiduciary responsibilities owed to them. Universities have had a hard time upholding this standard. If the Berkeley Law dean feels this is extortion, it may stem from his reluctance to accommodate ideological diversity at his university, including his apparent sense of entitlement to taxpayer funding. He carefully twists the meaning of language to make an argument that is an inductive error.
The last example comes from the current president of Barnard College at Columbia University. She claims that the Charlie Kirk tragedy gives her a mandate to officially organize student ideological training that purportedly lessens the chances of another “copycat” tragedy. She implies that political disagreement often escalates into extreme violence. How she derives such a prediction is unclear.
The Barnard president assumes that a single past event can predict future ones. She then rationalizes that her university must act as a source of preventive public policy. But it is worse than that: the single event she uses as the basis for claiming a universal need for student training and guidance is one she knows only through the media. She has no primary data. Like the George Floyd event, she has decided to bypass the standards of evidence. She appears to believe only what she passively hears and then makes both generalizations and predictions based on a single data point from third-party reporting. She goes even further, using it as a basis for university administrative action.
This is either institutional opportunism or the reflection of an ideological agenda formed prior to the tragedy—an example of a cause in search of a reason. It is striking that, as a lawyer and former law dean, the Barnard president appears to operate without an instinct to probe, cross-examine, or statistically test—particularly in how she arrives at the judgment that the Kirk tragedy can be causally explained by higher education and students. If Kirk had been killed at an airport terminal or football stadium, would this indict all travelers or sports fans? She ultimately reinforces the view that among the greatest threats to intellectual standards in higher education is university administrative institutionalism.
What I think we can say about these examples is that, if they are representative—and I think they likely are—then we can better understand how our broader public discourse on many critical issues cannot improve unless we improve how we perceive. We cannot improve how we perceive unless we can correct how we think, and we cannot correct that unless we face the logical problem of induction.
Relatedly, there is some current speculation that AI may provide universities with “thinking” routines that could run their operations. But can it solve the induction problem? Would thinking improve?
Consider an airliner being flown by an autopilot, which is a form of AI. Such tools are indeed effective in certain contexts. Pilots use an AI autopilot during high-workload periods or in stable cruise flight to free up their cognitive capacity for diagnosis and decision-making. The autopilot, including its data management and reporting functions, is not a thinking machine. If we compare aircraft to universities, then administrators, like pilots, can indeed be aided by computing tools, but thinking, perception, and especially judgment, reside in human cognitive processes and are products of human leadership. AI doesn’t “lead;” it follows. It is a task servant.
If computing machines could run an entire university, and if students and faculty relied on such systems as their primary sources of thought, the logical endpoint would be a university without people. From certain technological or ideological perspectives, such a scenario carries its own inevitable seductions. Regardless, universities may be prime candidates for various forms of “shock therapy” as they resist transitioning to a new stage of growth. Incidentally, in researching examples of “shock therapy” using AI, only one of twenty sources addressed the concept objectively; the rest were heavily biased, often reflecting leftist university perspectives hostile to markets, classical liberalism, capitalism, and related global policies. One AI-generated example even illustrated a textbook case of the logical problem of induction.
Note: Readers wishing to explore this topic further may consult The Logical Problem of Induction by G. H. von Wright (Macmillan, 1957); Law as Fact by Karl Olivecrona (Einar Munksgaard, 1939); Logic and Language, first and second series, edited by A. G. N. Flew (Basil Blackwell, 1959 and 1961); Induction and Generalization by Frederick L. Will (Cornell University Press, 1974); The Pragmatic Philosophy of C. S. Peirce by Manley Thompson (University of Chicago Press, 1953); The Continuum of Inductive Methods by Rudolf Carnap (University of Chicago Press, 1952); Logic by Stanley Jevons (Macmillan, 1878); and The Philosophy of Bacon by F. H. Anderson (University of Chicago Press, 1948). For those interested in the link between student use of AI and psychological effects, including distraction, diminished attention, and apperceptive deterioration, see The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 3, Psychogenesis (Bollingen Series Princeton). The problem of induction, of course, extends to several categories beyond the classic “problem of Hume.”
Image by photoopus on Adobe; Asset ID#: 1257499840
