Induction

Key terms

What it is

Where it begins

In argument

Method and doubt

Generalization from particulars

How do we get from single cases to a general truth? Induction is the passage from particulars to a universal claim. These readings ask what such a step rests on and how far it can be trusted.

4 readings

Book I, chapter 18 of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics takes up the sources of knowledge in demonstrative science, setting “demonstration” beside “induction”, and the universal beside the “particulars”. The Posterior Analytics is the treatise on demonstration and scientific knowing in the Organon. The passage stands under this term as Aristotle’s statement of what “induction” is needed for.

Chapter 1 of the Epistle to the Romans (Douay-Rheims text) is the opening of St. Paul’s argument that Gentiles and Jews alike stand in need of grace. He says that the “invisible things” of God are “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made”. The Church takes the verses as a scriptural basis for the natural knowledge of God, taught by the First Vatican Council. They stand here as the passage from creatures to their cause.

Section II of the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason distinguishes knowledge “à priori” from the empirical. Kant says that “induction” yields only “assumed and comparative universality”, against “strict and absolute universality”. The Critique of 1781 is the founding work of his critical philosophy. The passage stands under this term as his limit on what induction can give.

Section 83 of the encyclical Fides et Ratio of John Paul II (1998), on the relation between faith and reason, falls in the chapter on the current requirements and tasks of philosophy. He speaks of moving “from phenomenon to foundation”, of the “metaphysical dimension of reality”, and of not stopping “at experience alone”. It stands under this term as the Church’s statement that experience alone is not the end of inquiry.