Concept
Inductivism
Overview
Inductivism is the traditional and still commonplace philosophy of scientific method to develop scientific theories. Inductivism aims to neutrally observe a domain, infer laws from examined cases—hence, inductive reasoning—and thus objectively discover the sole naturally true theory of the observed.
Inductivism's basis is, in sum, "the idea that theories can be derived from, or established on the basis of, facts". Evolving in phases, inductivism's conceptual reign spanned four centuries and began with Francis Bacon's 1620 proposal in his Novum Organum, itself a reply to the pre-scientific scholastic model of inquiry which prioritized deductive reasoning from sources of belief taken to be authoritative such as religious texts.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, inductivism succumbed to hypotheticodeductivism—sometimes worded deductivism—as scientific method's realistic idealization. Yet scientific theories as such are now widely attributed to occasions of inference to the best explanation, IBE, which, like scientists' actual methods, are diverse and not formally prescribable.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The exercise of logical reason is always concerned with these absolutely general conditions. In its broadest sense, the discovery of mathematics is the discovery that the totality of these general abstract conditions, which are concurrently applicable to the relationships among the entities of any one concrete occasion, are themselves inter-connected in the manner of a pattern with a key to it. This pattern of…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Inductivism is; the author is tied to Inductivism in the knowledge graph.
This name may, however, be also given to the whole system of pure philosophy, critical philosophy included, and may designate the investigation into the sources or possibility of à priori cognition, as well as the presentation of the à priori cognitions which form a system of pure philosophy—excluding, at the same time, all empirical and mathematical elements. Metaphysic is divided into that of the speculative and…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Inductivism is; the author is tied to Inductivism in the knowledge graph.
One of the most successfully cultivated branches of philosophy in our time is what is called inductive logic, the study of the conditions under which our sciences have evolved. Writers on this subject have begun to show a singular unanimity as to what the laws of nature and elements of fact mean, when formulated by mathematicians, physicists and chemists.
William James, Pragmatism
States what Inductivism is.
Philosophers who discussed Inductivism
Related ideas
- Category (Kant)
- Empiricism
- Aristotelian physics
- Noumenon
- Formal language
- Absolute idealism
- French Revolution
- Falsifiability
- Foundationalism
- Francis Bacon
- Neo-Kantianism
- General relativity
- Auguste Comte
- Carl Gustav Hempel
- Norwood Russell Hanson
- Springer Science+Business Media
- History of science
- Isaac Newton
- Immanuel Kant
- Idealism
- Hans Reichenbach
- John Stuart Mill
- Berlin Circle
- Spiritualism (philosophy)
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.