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INDUCTION AND INDUCTIVISM

BOOK REFERENCE

 Book : Understanding Philosophy of Science

 Author : James Ladyman

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PART 1 : SCIENTIFIC METHOD

CHAPTER 1 : INDUCTION AND INDUCTIVISM

 1. The sceptic’s challenge

 2. The scientific revolution

 3. The ‘new tool’ of induction

 4. (Naïve) inductivism

PART 1 : SCIENTIFIC METHOD

 Chapter 1 : Induction and inductivism

 1. The sceptic’s challenge
 Starts with a dispute that arises when Alice, who has been reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. She has a
conversation with Thomas.
 After the Big Bang the temperature of the universe was about ten thousand million degrees.

 You are just gullible for believing it.

 ‘Science’ doesn’t tell us anything; scientists, people like you or me, tell us things and like all people they tell us what is in
their interest to tell us.

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CHAPTER 1 : INDUCTION AND INDUCTIVISM

 A used-car dealer will tell you that a car is a lovely little runner with one previous owner because they want you to buy the
car,
 priests tell you that you must come to church so you can go to heaven, because otherwise they would be out of a job,
 and scientists tell us all that nonsense so we will be amazed at how clever they are and keep spending taxpayers’ money
on their research grants.
 Science is just the modern religion.

 if you were living five hundred years ago you would believe in angels and saints and the Garden of Eden; science has just
replaced religion as the dominant belief system of the West. If you were living in a tribe in the jungle somewhere you
would believe in whatever creation myths the elders of the tribe passed down to you, but you happen to be living here and
now, so you believe what the experts in our tribe, who happen to be the scientists, tell us.
 You are right that they claim to have a method that ensures their theories are accurate but I don’t believe it myself,
otherwise they would all come to the same conclusion and we know that scientists are always arguing with each other,
like about whether salt or sugar is really bad for you.

CONVERSATION GOES ON…

 The scientific method is a myth put about by scientists who want us to believe their claims.

 I can’t believe that; scientific theories, like the Big Bang theory, are proved by experiments and observations, that is
why we ought to believe them and that is what makes them different from creation myths and religious beliefs.
 Thomas: So you say but how can experiments and observations prove a theory to be true?

 Alice: I suppose I don’t really know.

 Thomas: Well let me know when you’ve found out.

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 I believe that large doses of arsenic are toxic to humans, but I have never even seen any arsenic as far as I am
aware, and I have certainly never tested its effects.
 We all believe all kinds of things to be the case because we rely upon what others tell us directly or indirectly;

 Water is made of twice as much hydrogen as oxygen,

 that diseases are often caused by viruses and other tiny organisms, and so on.
 If we believe these things it is because the experts in our tribe (the scientists) tell us them; in that way, the causes
of our beliefs are of much the same kind as those of someone who believes what the local witch-doctor tells them
about, say, the cause of disease being the witchcraft of another person.

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

 The crucial developments in the emergence of modern science in the western world took place during the late
sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.
 The study of the motion of matter in collisions and under the influence of gravity (which is known as mechanics) was
completely revolutionized and, beginning with the work of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in the early sixteen hundreds
and culminating in the publication of Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) mathematical physics in 1687,
 telescope and microscope

 This period in intellectual history is often called the Scientific revolution and embraces the Copernican revolution,
which is the name given to the period during which the theory of the solar system and the wider cosmos, which had
the Earth at the centre of everything (geocentrism), was replaced by the theory that the Earth revolved around the
Sun (heliocentrism).

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 theories of Aristotle (384– 322 BC). As new ideas were proposed, some thinkers began to search for a new method
that could be guaranteed to bring knowledge. for a belief to count as knowledge it must be justified, so if we want to
have knowledge, we might aim to follow a procedure when forming our beliefs that simultaneously provides us with
a justification for them;
 One thing to note about the Copernican system is that it may seem to be counter to our experience in the sense that
we do not feel the Earth to be moving when we stand still upon it, and moreover we observe the Sun to move over
our heads during the day. This is an important example of how scientific theories seem to describe a reality distinct
from the appearance of things. This distinction between appearance and reality is central to metaphysics because
the latter seeks to describe things ‘as they really are’ rather than how they merely appear to be.
 Copernican system as opposite of Catholic doctrine.

THE ‘NEW TOOL’ OF INDUCTION

 The emergence of modern science required not just the contribution of those like Copernicus and Galileo who proposed
new theories, but also the contribution of people who could describe and then advocate and propagate the new ways of
thinking.
 Greatest among the propagandists of the emerging sciences was Francis Bacon (1561–
1626), who explicitly proposed a method for the sciences to replace that of Aristotle.
 In his book Novum Organum (1620)
 Bacon was profoundly ambitious about what new things could be known and how such knowledge could be employed
practically (he is often credited with originating the phrase ‘knowledge is power’).

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 Bacon’s method is thoroughly egalitarian and collectivist in spirit: he believed that if it was followed by many ordinary
people working together, rather than a few great minds, then as a social process it would lead to the production of useful and
sure beliefs about the functioning of nature.

 The translation of Novum Organum is New Tool, and Bacon proposed his method as a replacement for the Organum of
Aristotle, this being the contemporary name for the textbook that contained Aristotelian logic.

 The good thing about deductive logic is that it is truth-preserving, which is to say that if you have a valid argument with true
premises, then the conclusion will be true as well.
 The problem with deductive logic is that the conclusion of a deductively valid argument cannot say more than is implicit in
the premises.

 In a sense, such arguments do not expand our knowledge because their conclusions merely reveal what their premises
already state, although where the argument is complex we may find the conclusion surprising just because we hadn’t
noticed that it was already implicit in the premises.
 If I already know that all humans are mortal, and that I am a human, I don’t really learn anything from the
conclusion that I am mortal, although I may find it strikes me with more force when it is made explicit.
 The Aristotelian conception of knowledge (or scientia) restricts the domain of what is knowable to what is necessary and
cannot be otherwise.

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 The obvious objection to all this from the modern point of view is that there is little about the role of actual sensory
experience in the acquisition of knowledge of how things work
 If we want to know whether metals expand when heated we expect to go out and look at how metal actually behaves in
various circumstances, rather than to try and deduce a conclusion from first principles.
 To the modern mind, science is immediately associated with experiments and the gathering of data about what actually
happens in various circumstances .

 In science today when people insist that to be a scientist one must be sceptical and prepared to break with receive wisdom,
and also not leap to conclusions early in the process of investigation of some phenomenon.
 Bacon called the things that could get in the way of right inductive reasoning the Idols of the Mind.
 1. Idols of the Tribe, which refers to the tendency of all human beings to perceive more order and regularity in
nature than there is in reality.
 2. Idols of the Cave are individual weaknesses in reasoning due to particular personalities and likes and dislikes; someone
may, for example, be either conservative or radical in temperament and this may prejudice them in their view of some
subject matter.

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 3. Idols of the Marketplace are the confusions engendered by our received language and terminology, which may be
inappropriate, yet which condition our thinking;
 4. Idols of theTheatre are the philosophical systems that incorporate mistaken methods, such as Aristotle’s, for acquiring
knowledge.
 Experiments allow us to ask ‘what would happen if . . .?’

 Bacon says that by carrying out experiments we are able to ‘torture nature for her secrets’.

 Experiments are supposed to be repeatable if at all possible, so that others can check the results obtained if they wish.
Similarly, scientists prefer the results of experiments to be recorded by instruments that measure quantities according to
standard definitions and scales so that the perception of the individual performing the experiment does
not affect the way the outcome is reported to others.

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(NAÏVE) INDUCTIVISM

 The method of Bacon rested on two pillars, observation and induction.

 Observation is supposed to be undertaken without prejudice or preconception

 The results of observation are expressed in what are called observation statements.

 Then we get scientific laws and theories.

 Universal Generalizations

 ‘all metals conduct electricity’ is a universal generalization about metals,

 ‘all birds lay eggs’ is a universal generalization about birds

 The simplest form of induction is enumerative induction, which is where we simply observe that some large
number of instances of some phenomenon has some characteristic.
 Some salt being put in a pot of water dissolves,

 Many of the drug and other medical treatments that are used today are based on trial and error.

 Aspirin was used to relieve headaches a long time before there were any detailed explanations available of how it
worked, simply because it had been observed on many occasions that headaches ceased following the taking of
the drug.

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 ‘When is it legitimate to infer a universal generalization from a collection of observation statements?’

 The answer according to naïve inductivism is

 when a large number of observations of Xs under a wide variety of conditions have been made, and when all Xs
have been found to possess property Y, and when no instance has been found to contradict the universal
generalization ‘all Xs possess property Y’.
 If we carry out a lot of observations and all support the law while none refute it, then we are entitled to infer the
generalization.

 All philosophers are neurotic, having observed only a handful of philosophers in Bristol to be neurotic.

 one perfectly stable and balanced philosopher

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 What we have just been discussing is known as a Principle of Induction

 We must take care to observe the world carefully and without preconception

 then it assumes the status of a law or theory and we can use deduction to deduce consequences of the law that
will be predictions or explanations.

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