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The External World and Induction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Everett J. Nelson
Everett J. Nelson*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

The problem of induction is to validate inferences from some experiences or data to others. By experiences or data I mean such things as red patches, sounds, tastes, pains. Distinctions between private and public data, between internal and external impressions, between data and objects, are not epistemologically primitive or given but are modes of categorizing the given. The application of categories and the construction of objects are cases of, and so presuppose the validity of, induction.

To hypostatize a construction, or a system of constructions, is in fact to generate what may be called an external world. Examples are physical objects, and scientific objects. And when analysis proceeds, as it often does, by replacing the original subject by constructs, a hierarchy of external systems is generated. Thus, physical objects—e.g., our bodies—are external to data, and scientific objects are external to physical objects.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , July 1942 , pp. 261 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1942

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References

1 A slightly revised version of a paper read at the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philophical Association at Vassar College, December, 1941.

2 “Induction and the external world,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 5, pp. 181-188.

3 “Probability and the theory of knowledge,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 6, pp. 239ff.

4 “The inductive argument for an external world,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, pp. 237-249.

5 “The nature and variety of the a priori,” Analysis, Vol. 5, pp. 85-94.

6 Feigl, “The logical character of the principle of induction,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1, pp. 20-29.

7 P. 147.

8 For suggesting that a proposition may have no probability, I have been accused by Mr. Williams of violating the Law of Excluded Middle. By “no probability” I do not mean 0-probability as construed either by Keynes or in the frequency theories. If we have no evidence, or, in terms of frequency, if a series of frequency ratios has no limit, then I say there is no probability. This is very different from saying that a proposition is incompatible with given premises or that a series of ratios has 0 as a limit. We must not confuse the non-exemplification of the probability concept with a particular measure of that concept.