263
See also: Socrates 46–49 ■ Aristotle 56–63 ■ Francis Bacon 110–11 ■ David Hume 148–53 ■ Rudolf Carnap 257 ■
Thomas Kuhn 293 ■ Paul Feyerabend 297
the “regularities” of nature—the fact
that events unfold in the world in
particular patterns and sequences
that can be systematically explored.
Science, in other words, is empirical,
or based on experience, and to
understand how it works we need
to understand how experience in
general leads to knowledge.
Consider the following statement:
“If you drop a tennis ball from a
second-floor window, it will fall to
the ground.” Leaving aside any
chance events (such as the ball
being snatched away by a passing
eagle), we can be fairly sure that
this claim is a reasonable one. It
would be a strange person who
said, “Hold on, are you sure it will
THE MODERN WORLD
In so far as
a scientific statement
speaks about reality, it
must be falsifiable.ScSSientific understanding
works by induction.This means working from
particular observations
(such as “every swan
I see is white”)...... and moving to general
principles (such as “all
swans are white”).But these principles
can’t be proved, only
disproved (such as by the
sighting of a black swan).fall to the ground?” But how do we
know that this is what will happen
when we drop the tennis ball?
What kind of knowledge is this?
The short answer is that we
know it will fall because that is
what it always does. Leaving aside
chance events, no-one has ever
found that a tennis ball hovers or
rises upward when it is released.
We know it falls to the ground
because experience has shown us
that this will happen. And not only
can we be sure that the ball will fall
to the ground, we can also be sure
about how it will fall to the ground.
For example, if we know the force of
gravity, and how high the window
is above the ground, we canBlack swans were first encountered
by Europeans in the 17th century.
This falsified the idea that all swans
are white, which at the time was held
to be universally true.calculate the speed at which the
ball will fall. Nothing about the
event is even remotely mysterious.
Nevertheless, the question
remains: can we be certain that the
next time we drop the ball it will
fall to the ground? No matter how
often we conduct the experiment,
and no matter how confident we
become about its outcome, we can
never prove that the result will be
the same in the future.Inductive reasoning
This inability to speak with any
certainty about the future is called
the problem of induction, and it
was first recognized by Hume
in the 18th century. So what is
inductive reasoning?
Induction is the process of
moving from a set of observed facts
about the world to more general
conclusions about the world. We
expect that if we drop the ball it
will fall to the ground because, at
least according to Hume, we are
generalizing from innumerable ❯❯