This exactly illustrates Aristotle’s conception of the function of
induction, or comparison of instances, in fixing attention on a
universal principle of which one had not been conscious before the
comparison was made.
Now comes in the point where Aristotle differs wholly from all
empiricists, later and earlier. Mill regards the instances produced in
the induction as having a double function; they not merely fix the
attention on the principle, they also are the evidence of its truth.
This gives rise to the greatest difficulty in his whole logical theory.
Induction by imperfect enumeration is pronounced to be (as it clearly
is) fallacious, yet the principle of the uniformity of Nature which Mill
regards as the ultimate premiss of all science, is itself supposed to be
proved by this radically fallacious method. Aristotle avoids a similar
inconsistency by holding that the sole function of the induction is to
fix our attention on a principle which it does not prove. He holds that
ultimate principles neither permit of nor require proof. When the
induction has done its work in calling attention to the principle, you
have to see for yourself that the principle is true. You see that it is
true by immediate inspection just as in sense-perception you have to see
that the colour before your eyes is red or blue. This is why Aristotle
holds that the knowledge of the principles of science is not itself
science (demonstrated knowledge), but what he calls intelligence, and we
may call intellectual intuition. Thus his doctrine is sharply
distinguished not only from empiricism (the doctrine that universal
principles are proved by particular facts), but also from all theories
of the Hegelian type which regard the principles and the facts as
somehow reciprocally proving each other, and from the doctrine of some
eminent modern logicians who hold that "self-evidence" is not required
in the ultimate principles of science, as we are only concerned in logic
with the question what consequences follow from our initial assumptions,
and not with the truth or falsehood of the assumptions themselves.
The result is that Aristotle does little more than repeat the Platonic
view of the nature of science. Science consists of deductions from
universal principles which sensible experience "suggests," but into
which, as they are apprehended by a purely intellectual inspection, no
sense-data enter as constituents. The apparent rejection of
"transcendental moonshine" has, after all, led to nothing. The only
difference between Plato and his scholar lies in the clearness of
intellectual vision which Plato shows when he expressly maintains in
plain words that the universals of exact science are not "in" our
sense-perceptions and therefore to be extracted from them by a process
of abstraction, but are "apart from" or "over" them, and form an ideal
system of interconnected concepts which the experiences of sense merely
"imitate" or make approximation to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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