International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1 / Philosophy and Metaphysics

by Unknown

Even to-day the question regarding the meaning and the validity of the causal connection stands between these contrary directions of epistemological research; and the ways leading to its answer separate more sharply than ever before. It is therefore more pressing in our day than it was in earlier times to find a basis upon which we may build further epistemologically and therefore methodologically. The purpose of the present paper is to seek such a basis for the different methods employed in the sciences of facts.

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As has already been said, the contents of our consciousness, which are given us immediately in outer and inner perception, constitute the raw material of the sciences of facts. From these various facts of perception we derive the judgments through which we predict, guide, and shape our future perception in the course of possible experience. These judgments exist in the form of reproductive ideational processes, which, if logically explicit, become inductive inferences in the broader sense. These inferences may be said to be of two sorts, though fundamentally only two sides of one and the same process of thought; they are in part analogical inferences and in part inductive inferences in the narrower sense. The former infers from the particular in a present perception, which in previous perceptions was uniformly connected with other particular contents of perception, to a particular that resembles those other contents of perception. In short, they are inferences from a particular to a particular. After the manner of such inferences we logically formulate, for example, the reproductive processes, whose conclusions run: "This man whom I see before me, is attentive, feels pain, will die;" "this meteor will prove to have a chemical composition similar to known meteors, and also to have corresponding changes on its surface as the result of its rapid passage through our atmosphere." The inductive inferences in the narrower sense argue, on the contrary, from the perceptions of a series of uniform phenomena to a universal, which includes the given and likewise all possible cases, in which a member of the particular content of the earlier perceptions is presupposed as given. In short, they are conclusions from a particular to a universal that is more extensive than the sum of the given particulars. For example: "All men have minds, will die;" "all meteoric stones will prove to have this chemical composition and those changes of surface."

There is no controversy regarding the inner similarity of both these types of inference or regarding their outward structure; or, again, regarding their outward difference from the deductive inferences, which proceed not from a particular to a particular or general, but from a general to a particular.

There is, however, difference of opinion regarding their inner structure and their inner relation to the deductive inferences. Both questions depend upon the decision regarding the meaning and validity of the causal relation. The contending parties are recruited essentially from the positions of traditional empiricism and rationalism and from their modern offshoots.

We maintain first of all:

1. The presupposition of all inductive inferences, from now on to be taken in their more general sense, is, that the contents of perception are given to us uniformly in repeated perceptions, that is, in uniform components and uniform relations.

2. The condition of the validity of the inductive inferences lies in the thoughts that the same causes will be present in the unobserved realities as in the observed ones, and that these same causes will bring forth the same effects.

3. The conclusions of all inductive inferences have, logically speaking, purely problematic validity, that is, their contradictory opposite remains equally thinkable. They are, accurately expressed, merely hypotheses, whose validity needs verification through future experience.

The first-mentioned presupposition of inductive inference must not be misunderstood. The paradox that nothing really repeats itself, that each stage in nature's process comes but once, is just as much and just as little justified as the assertion, everything has already existed. It does not deny the fact that we can discriminate in the contents of our perceptions the uniformities of their components and relations, in short, that similar elements are present in these ever new complexes. This fact makes it possible that our manifold perceptions combine to make up one continuous experience. Even our paradox presupposes that the different contents of our perceptions are comparable with one another, and reveal accordingly some sort of common nature. All this is not only a matter of course for empiricism, which founds the whole constitution of our knowledge upon habits, but must also be granted by every rationalistic interpretation of the structure of knowledge. Every one that is well informed knows that what we ordinarily refer to as facts already includes a theory regarding them. Kant judges in this matter precisely as Hume did before him and Stuart Mill after him. "If cinnabar were sometimes red and sometimes black, sometimes light and sometimes heavy, if a man could be changed now into this, now into another animal shape, if on the longest day the fields were sometimes covered with fruit, sometimes with ice and snow, the faculty of my empirical imagination would never be in a position, when representing red color, to think of heavy cinnabar."[^[8]]