> The inductivists will therefore outcompete the anti-inductivists.
You have no deductive or a priori reason to know this, rhetoric about "epistemically traps" aside.
You have no deductive or a priori reason to know this, rhetoric about "epistemically traps" aside.
Now, if one were to try to construct a theoretical argument, I suspect it would go as follows: "If we assume the world could change in every aspect from moment to moment (e.g. pieces of matter could teleport anywhere in the universe, physical constants might change by the second, laws of physics might change over time or space, the very concepts of space and time might become invalid, ...), then the space of possible worlds is enormous and incomprehensible. If we don't have any rational way of assigning probabilities to any of the possible worlds, then this method of thinking doesn't have any implications for correct actions, because every action could be the best in some possible world; in that case, as long as you assign nonzero probability to the "laws of physics remain constant" universe most of us believe in, you may as well act as though it's the truth." If someone does claim to have a rational way of assigning probabilities to the possible worlds, then that would have to be addressed on its own terms, and any conclusion may be possible; but most such ways that people have proposed will tend to imply that "simple" possibilities are most likely, and "the laws of physics remain constant" will tend to rank highly among them.
I like the tenor of your second argument, it reminds me of Pascal's wager. That said, you're not really addressing the problem of induction. We have no reason why you'd assign a higher probability to the "law of physics remain constant" to the "laws of physics are flipped in the next second", outside of gut reasoning.
If we can use gut reasoning about induction, no reason we can when we assume that quarks are a real thing, or think about this solution to the BHIP.
For those people, it is important to realize that anti-inductivism can't be defeated on its own terms. By usual standards (for some definition of "usual"), the space of possible observations one could make is enormous, and the fact that they keep very, very consistently being in accord with the laws of physics as we've discovered them—often to many decimal places—is immense evidence in favor of "physics as we've discovered it" as compared to "anything might happen". Any viable competing theory would have to be reasonably simple (i.e. not include "billions of specific items that explain all prior observations" as axioms) and would have to make almost exactly the same predictions.
("Newtonian mechanics" is reasonably simple and makes similar predictions at the level most people can see, but with specialized equipment and experiments it has been disproven. "God did it" sounds simple, but either the word "God" smuggles in the extremely non-simple "God is a being whose psychological makeup led him to make the following billions of specific decisions that explain all prior observations", or it amounts to "God is a being who chooses to run the universe according to something approximating Einsteinian mechanics"; in that case, it is possible that God might decide to intervene and do something physics would say is impossible, but if you want to say that God will do any specific intervention, you would have to make a less-simple theory that explains why God would do that particular thing and not anything else, and the longer time passes without any verified physically-impossible miracles, the more unlikely most such theories get. "Intelligent beings vaguely like us arose, and decided to simulate our universe, following rules that approximate Einsteinian mechanics" is also possible—not much different from the God-based class of theories.)
All of our data about gravity is equally consistent with the theory “If I drop an apple it will fall only if it is before December 2020” as it is with our theory that the law of gravity will continue to exist in the future as it does today.