Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers

by Philip Stokes

Bacon was less interested in the problem of justifying inductive generalisations, than in how to generate good inductive hypotheses out of the masses of data collected by observation. Bacon devised a new method. To illustrate it, Bacon shows how one might generate an hypothesis on the nature of heat. One should, Bacon tells us, list all those things in which the property under investigation, in this case heat, is present, then all those things in which the property is absent and finally all those cases which admit of varying degrees of the property in question. From such a list, Bacon believes the natural hypothesis will present itself, which in this case, as he well knew at the time, is that heat is produced according to the movement or excitation of molecules within a body. Although Bacon’s method is undoubtedly one way of applying order to a body of data, and even perhaps a useful way in some cases, it nevertheless seems unlikely to fulfil his ambition, which was to find a systematic way of deriving scientific hypotheses from the arrangement of data. It is unlikely that there ever could be such a system. Bacon failed to take into account the creativity and imaginative aspect of scientific theory building. No matter how systematically one organises data, inductive hypotheses cannot be guaranteed to appear out of them. One may find that some facts deductively follow from a certain ordering of data, but that is not what Bacon was after.

Consider data science ...

Kant had solved the problem of how the mind acquires knowledge from experience by arguing that the mind imposes principles upon experience to generate knowledge. This idea was later to have great influence on the phenomenologists and gestalt psychologists of the twentieth century.

Pinker

Paine not only invented the term ‘United States of America’, he inspired the revolutions both there and in France.

This has led critics, notably Popper, to question the scientific status of Freud’s procedure. Since the interpretation by the doctor is neither objective nor ‘testable’, in the ordinary scientific sense, and is moreover protected from scrutiny by the ethos of doctor-patient confidentiality, there is no objective way of measuring the results of psychoanalytic practice.

‘Socrates is wise’ can be analysed into two distinct parts. First, the subject of the sentence, ‘Socrates’, and second a property ascribed to the subject, namely ‘being wise’. This had been the received wisdom for over two thousand years and gave rise to some notoriously intractable philosophical puzzles, not least concerning the notion of substance and the ontological status of universals and particulars. Frege swept all this away by analysing sentences on a mathematical model of function and argument. Using this form of analysis, the sentence ‘Socrates is wise’ contains a function, ‘( ) is wise’, with ‘Socrates’ taking the place of argument for that function; in other words, filling the gap in the incomplete functional expression, ‘( ) is wise’. In mathematics, sentences such as ‘2 + 3’ may be analysed in terms of a function ‘( ) + ( )’ being completed by the arguments ‘2’ and ‘3’.

Functional programming