Talk:Circular reasoning

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This article was selected as the article for improvement on 30 September 2013 for a period of one week.

The problem of induction is unrelated to the topic of the article

See heading. The paragraph on 'The problem of induction' - quite apart from taking Feinberg and Scahfer-landau's assertion as fact - is unrelated to the topic of this article. Induction (outside mathematical proof by induction) is not an example of circular reasoning. The paragraph should be removed from this article.

Nor, by the way, is it actually circular to apply the scientific method to evaluation of the scientific method; it is merely recursive and that is not the same thing. One needs only to come up with a valid means to refute a general hypothesis of success of the scientific method to break the recursion. Refuting the general hypothesis would be a successful (if disappointing) evaluation result. The issue there would be the same as for any inductive assumption; one would have to demonstrate that _success_ in the particular test case necessarily implies the general hypothesis on _all_ cases, and in general that is not true. SLR Ellison (talk) 23:53, 31 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. If you delete that paragraph it would be fine. Dezaxa (talk) 14:58, 4 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]