A few comments on Inductivism and Scientific Methodology from JP Moreland:
"Although inductivism continues to persist in the popular conception of science and even in the minds of many scientists, very few, if any, philosophers of science accept it. It fails to grasp the variegated texture of science, and the objections against it are severe.
"First, one cannot merely start observations without some guiding hypothesis or background assumptions to guide in deciding what is and is not relevant to observe. (An example by Karl Popper followed...)
"Second, the same point can be made about classifying and arranging assumptions. Without some framework about what is going on, there is no way to decide what factors should serve as the basis on which to classify particular facts...
"Third, scientific laws are not formed, accumulated, or justified by the progressive addition of brute, uninterpretated observational data. Rather these processes involve a mixture of observation and theory in several different ways. Sometimes a shift in theory can turn seeming facts into falsehoods (An example by Harre on Prout's hypothesis of atomic weights followed...)
"Fourth, inductivism pictures the formation and justification of scientific laws after the pattern of plotting points on a graph and curve fitting... The difficulty is that there is a set of potentially infinite and empirically equivalent curves consistent with these points...
"Several other problems have been raised against inductivism: the problem of Induction itself (What justifies the inference from 'All observed A's are B' to 'All A's are B'?) the difficulty of deciding between accidental and lawlike generalizations, a decision that can be made against the backdrop of a causal theory that is not a mere summary of observational facts (eg 'plants grow from the sun's warmth' vs 'plant's grow from the sun's light', the former an accidental generalization , the latter a causal law based on the theory of photosynthesis), and the fact that science does not try merely to describe phenomena by generalizations but also to explain them with theories about the underlying mechanisms." |
