Induction

In life we experience the world in small pieces. We see one rabbit, then two, then three. We begin to build a stereotype of what a rabbit it. It is a model for all future rabbits. Our mind (might) begin to erase the features of each individual rabbit and replace them with those of the model rabbit. Perhaps, the model rabbit is at the core of our memories and meaning for all rabbits. Significant individual rabbits are then remembered as variations off of the model. In constructing the model rabbit we have conducted rabbit induction, we have generalized from the specific to the universal.

Because humans see the world in small pieces like his, it seems to me that induction is the major approach that we would take to managing our own knowledge about the world. It is a means of reducing the amount of detail that we remember and creating a map of the world that is more organized and easier to deal with. For example, if we see a brown rabbit named Chocolate eat a carrot we know that Chocolate likes carrots. Then we wonder whether the white rabbit named Snowflake likes carrots. We feed Snowflake a carrot and discover that it too like carrots. We now have two pieces of information. If we have a dozen rabbits, do we have to experiment with each of them to discover that each likes carrots? If we do this and get a positive answer on each, do we then store this information a dozen times in our brains? If so, then we are implying that we must experiment on every rabbit before we could possibly know whether each likes carrots? This is a lot of memory storage and a lot of experimentation to be able to deal with the world. This is where we need induction. We need a tool to help us reduce repetitive work and to make room in our minds for other information. Dr. Watson once mentioned the Prime Minister to Sherlock Holmes. To which Holmes said “Who?” Watson was incredulous that Holmes would not know this. Holmes explained that the mind is like an attic. There is a limited amount of space and one has to be careful what one puts up there. One should only remember the important and essential things. Since the Prime Minister’s name was of no use to Holmes in solving crimes, it was a useless piece of information to him and was ejected from his attic mind in favor of understanding the chemical properties of blood (or some such tidbit).

Harrison argued that induction was an improper way to do science. In the first chapter he explains his reasoning. But he does not provide a solid alternative. This idea is too radical to accept from one chapter. Since people experience the world in small pieces, I think induction is their primary tool of understanding the world at large. In fact, today, I think that deduction is really a later phase of thinking that is enabled only after lots of induction has taken place. One cannot deduce from the general without having used induction to create an understanding of the general in the first place.

It will be interesting to see what alternative Harrison can provide in later chapters.

It occurs to me that most of our language is based on induction. Without induction there is no such thing as “rabbit”, there are only Chocolate, Snowflake, and a million other unique animals.