Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Induction moves from particulars to generalisations. An inductive argument can be characterised as one whose conclusion, whilst not following deductively from its premises, is in some way supported by them and rendered plausible in the light of them. Scientific reasoning is held to be the paradigm of inductive reasoning. Inductive logic is of the form:

A is a swan and A is white.

B is a swan.

Therefore B is white.

Well, it may just seem self-obviously and trivially true that swans are white! Some philosophers, amongst them John Stuart Mill, have questioned the assumptions of the logical arguments described in this chapter. For instance, it is necessary to already have the knowledge of swans being white in order to deduce that ‘A is a swan’, so, for them, the argument is circular.

Deduction begins with generalisations and moves to a particular. The logical steps used in deduction are such that the statements derived from the axioms are also necessarily true, although, of course, we have already seen this to be suspect. A deductive argument is of the form:

All swans are white.

A is a swan.

Therefore A is white.

When the conclusion follows from the premises

59