CORCORAN ON ARISTOTELIAN INDUCTION

Springer eBooks, 2022

How induction was understood took a substantial turn during the Renaissance. At the beginning, induction was understood as it had been throughout the medieval period, as a kind of propositional inference that is stronger the more it approximates deduction. During the Renaissance, an older understanding, one prevalent in antiquity, was rediscovered and adopted. By this understanding, induction identifies defining characteristics using a process of comparing and contrasting. Important participants in the change were Jean Buridan, humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola, Paduan Aristotelians such as Agostino Nifo, Jacopo Zabarella, and members of the medical faculty, writers on philosophy of mind such as the Englishman John Case, writers of reasoning handbooks, and Francis Bacon.

Alternative Perspectives on Induction, 2014

Aristotle said that induction (epagōgē) is a proceeding from particulars to a universal, and the definition has been conventional ever since. But there is an ambiguity here. Induction in the Scholastic and the (so-called) Humean tradition has presumed that Aristotle meant going from particular statements to universal statements. But the alternate view, namely that Aristotle meant going from particular things to universal ideas, prevailed all through antiquity and then again from the time of Francis Bacon until the mid-nineteenth century. Recent scholarship is so steeped in the first-mentioned tradition that we have virtually forgotten the other. In this essay McCaskey seeks to recover that alternate tradition, a tradition whose leading theoreticians were William Whewell, Francis Bacon, Socrates, and in fact Aristotle himself. The examination is both historical and philosophical. The first part of the essay fills out the history. The latter part examines the most mature of the philosophies in the Socratic tradition, specifically Bacon’s and Whewell’s. After tracing out this tradition, McCaskey shows how this alternate view of induction is indeed employed in science, as exemplified by several instances taken from actual scientific practice. In this manner, McCaskey proposes to us that the Humean problem of induction is merely an artifact of a bad conception of induction and that a return to the Socratic conception might be warranted.

Philosophy in Review, 2010

2017

We study comprehensive analysis of the inductive arguments done by various researchers. These researchers have surveyed the basic concepts in logic such as statement, argument, premise, conclusion, deductive argument, inductive argument, primitive terms and axioms. The fundamental laws of Aristotelian logic and Hume's critique of induction are briefly discussed. We argue that all the basic rules of Aristotelian logic are inductively obtained generalized abstract statements. Existence of undefined terms is also analyzed. We conclude that every argument based on Aristotelian logic is a result of induction.

2003

BA thesis in theoretical philosophy , 2020

In this paper I argue nous should be understood as an integral part of the process of induction and not, as some scholars have argued, only as a result of it. Aristotle’s version of induction, unlike a common conception of it in our time, is not a matter of generalization over a sample of a given population, the conclusion of which is then extrapolated to all or part of the total population. It rather relies on a form of mental insight or intuition which is to be understood as an ability to grasp a certain sort of universal features of things called, 'the why' or first principles, which, as well as epistemic concepts, constitute the principles which organize the natural world. It is precisely this correspondence between the first principles of reason and those of the natural world that for Aristotle explains the type of intuitive induction herein attributed to him. I furthermore argue we should be careful of drawing conclusions about the nature of the involvement of nous in the grasping of first principles on the basis of APo alone. The main reasons I give for this are found in the connections I draw between Aristotle’s account of the grasping of the first principles from Met. I.1, the account of the intellectual grasp of the forms in DA II & III and the process of induction described in APo II.19. Although by some it is considered to be controversial to do so, I argue these texts should all be understood as parallel accounts, describing from different points of view, one and the same intuitive process of knowledge acquisition.

2011

The purpose of this note is to present a simplification of the system of arithmetical axioms given in previous work; specifically, it is shown how the induction principle can in fact be obtained from the remaining axioms, without the need of explicit postulation. The argument might be of more general interest, beyond the specifics of the proposed axiomatization, as it highlights the interaction of the notion of Dedekind-finiteness and the induction principle.

Qeios, 2024

The problem of induction, addressed in the 18th century by Hume, is at the source of the philosophy of science as it developed in the 20th century. The objective of Saint-Mont (2020) was to provide a fairly general answer to Hume's problem. To this end, induction has been treated within the framework of several connected levels of abstraction. In a recent note, he performs an archaeology that deepens this framework to its very essence-a simple fourfold table (Saint-Mont, 2023). Through this contribution, I enrich the debate by drawing inspiration from Bruno's Philosophy of Connection. The association between several levels of abstraction opens the field to bifurcation. It then appears that the inference from the particular to the general is not a simple linear extension.

Philosophies, 2018

Epistemological naturalists reject the demand for a priori justification of empirical knowledge; no such thing is possible. Observation reports, being the foundation of empirical knowledge, are neither justified by other sentences, nor certain; but they may be agreed upon as starting points for inductive reasoning and they function as implicit definitions of predicates used. Making inductive generalisations from observations is a basic habit among humans. We do that without justification, but we have strong intuitions that some inductive generalisations will fail, while for some other we have better hopes. Why? This is the induction problem according to Goodman. He suggested that some predicates are projectible when becoming entrenched in language. This is a step forward, but not entirely correct. Inductions result in universally generalised conditionals and these contain two predicates, one in the antecedent, one in the consequent. Counterexamples to preliminary inductive generalisations can be dismissed by refining the criteria of application for these predicates. This process can be repeated until the criteria for application of the predicate in the antecedent includes the criteria for the predicate in the consequent, in which case no further counterexample is possible. If that is the case we have arrived at a law. Such laws are implicit definitions of theoretical predicates. An accidental generalisation has not this feature, its predicates are unrelated. Laws are said to be necessary, which may be interpreted as ' "Laws" are necessarily true'. 'Necessarily true' is thus a semantic predicate, not a modal operator. In addition, laws, being definitions, are necessarily true in the sense of being necessary assumptions for further use of the predicates implicitly defined by such laws. Induction, when used in science, is thus our way of inventing useful scientific predicates; it is a heuristic, not an inference principle.

Logos & Episteme, 2022

The idea of the uniformity of nature, as a solution to the problem of induction, has at least two contemporary versions: natural kinds and natural necessity. Then there are at least three alternative ontological ideas addressing the problem of induction. In this paper, I articulate how these ideas are used to justify the practice of inductive inference, and compare them, in terms of their applicability, to see whether each of them is preferred in addressing the problem of induction. Given the variety of contexts in which inductive inferences are made, from natural science to social science and to everyday thinking, I suggest that no singular idea is absolutely preferred, and a proper strategy is probably to welcome the plurality of ideas helpful to induction, and to take pragmatic considerations into account, in order to judge in every single case.