onthetruemethodofinduction.docVIP

On the True Method of Induction or Investigative Induction: Real But Invisible Jagdish Hattiangadi, York University, Toronto Abstract Scientists apply Bacon’s investigative induction by first cataloguing experimental discrepancies among apparent natures of things. Induction begins by multiplying discrepancies, thus creating a puzzle with multiple clues. Solved puzzles thus give us power to produce those unusual, discrepant effects. Bacon’s experimental method, however, is not empiricist. Grasping things empirically, like receiving impressions on a wax tablet, presupposes that our senses cannot deceive us whenever we are deceived: we err in our interpretations. Empiricism thus leaves no objective discrepancies to resolve, as deception resides in our interpretation. Scientific induction, for all its success, becomes invisible to modern empiricist methodologists. Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the men of dogmas are like the spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the business of true philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in memory whole, as it finds it. But lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never before been made), much may be hoped. Francis Bacon, Aphorism XCV, Book I, New Organon Introduction Scientists apply Bacon’s investigative induction by first cataloguing experimental discrepancies among apparent natures of things. Induction begins by