ABSTRACT
William Whewell, in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) dealing with the progress of scientific knowledge, portrayed induction as a process of discovery of increasingly comprehensive systems of explanation leading to the isolation of explanatory laws of nature of universal and necessary validity. On his view, science progresses from low-order empirical generalisations of observed particulars to more and more comprehensive and inclusive theoretical generalisations such as Newton’s Gravitational Law. It is essential to be clear on the central place accorded deduction in the inductive programme: ‘each of the lower order generalizations is derivable deductively from the one of next highest order, and is the inductive evidence for that higher order generalization’ (Butts 1968:17).2 Whewell’s celebrated ‘Table of Induction’ (his stratification of individual hypotheses) can be read downwards to indicate ‘the deductive movement from higher-level to lower-level hypotheses, and from the latter towards the data’ (Buchdahl 1971:345). Indeed Buchdahl represents Whewell as deductivist par excellence in the sense that his basic procedure is the fitting of hypotheses to the data in which all ‘logical’ movement is unidirectional, from hypotheses to the data which are demonstrated to be their deductive consequence; ‘inductive inference’ for Whewell means no more than that ‘verifiable deductions have been successfully fitted to the corresponding hypotheses’—no further ‘proof of the hypothesis is required. On the other hand, hypotheses (at least at the upper reaches) are generated under the guidance of what Whewell called ‘Fundamental Ideas’; or ‘conceptions’ existing apart from empirical evidence and implying an a priori intuitional dimensionalthough as Strong points out, such conceptions are historically conditioned, occurring to minds ‘variously conditioned and equipped in particular ways within epochs or stages of the progress of scientific knowledge’ (Strong 1955:231).3 And the ‘colligations’ of facts by the formulation of hypothesesinto which the intuitive element intrudes-are subject to controversy and trial by prediction, so that in the course of scientific advance erroneous hypotheses are transformed and the body of true propositions augmented. Accordingly,
Strong too is led to play down the peculiarly inductive dimension; it was unnecessary even for Whewell to have called his general philosophy of discovery an inductive philosophy, since all he intended was the ‘modus operandi of discovery’ (231). And, to repeat what was said at the outset, his philosophy is a progression towards the arrival (with the aid of fundamental ideas) at axioms which reflect ‘substantial general truths’ or ‘universal or necessary truths’; since associated with Whewell’s fundamental ideas are his necessitarian axioms (Buchdahl 1971:352-3; cf. 360).
