Every-Day Reasoning; Or, the Science of Inductive Logic - Softcover

Reseña del editor

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1877. Excerpt: ... PART THIRD. METHODS OF INDUCTION. GENERAL STATEMENT. YARIOUS methods have been suggested as the true statement of the process of the mind in reading the laws revealed in the facts so gathered. The work that made Bacon immortal was his effort to state, in the formality of words, these mental operations by which we reach our reliable conclusions. Though highly respectable as a scholar, his attainments in that direction have been far outstripped by 'many now unknown to famet His great claim to human gratitude is in this, that he was the first to urge the supreme importance of testing theories by facts, and to insist on the abandonment of every theory, however plausible, which was contradicted by the facts. His aphorisms were designed by him as a kind of proverbial philosophy by which investigation should be directed. Many of them are of little account, but his phrase, " The proper rejections and exclusions," and his explanations and illustrations of instances and examples, were so apt a statement of the mental operations, that they at once passed into the popular thought of scientific men. Indeed, the single phrase above quoted is incontestable proof that, however indistinct some of his utterances were, he really-saw the true method of inductive reasoning. What he meant by making the proper rejections and exclusions was that, by selecting test instances and examples, the various false theories proposed for the solution of a given set of facts should be one by one rejected because the experiment or fact under consideration excluded the possibility of its being true. His "Prerogative Instances" Were cases which, between two rival theories, decisively denied the one and affirmed the other. His "Experimentum Crucis "' was a case which verified one theory and exp...