This empirical groundwork of Aristotle's logic was accepted by the
Epicureans, who enunciated most distinctly the fundamental doctrine
that all sensations are true of their immediate objects, and falsity
begins with subsequent opinions, or what the moderns call
"interpretation." Beneath deductive logic, in the logic of Aristotle
and the canonic of the Epicureans, there already lay the basis of
empirical logic: sensory experience is the origin of all inference and
science. It remained for Francis Bacon to develop these beginnings
into a new logic of induction. He did not indeed accept the
infallibility of sense or of any other operation unaided. He thought,
rather, that every operation becomes infallible by method. Following
Aristotle in this order--sense, memory, intellect--he resolved the
whole process of induction into three ministrations:--
1. The ministration to sense, aided by observation and experiment.
2. The ministration to memory, aided by registering and arranging the
data, of observation and experiment in tables of instances of
agreement, difference and concomitant variations.
3. The ministration to intellect or reason, aided by the negative
elimination by means of contradictory instances of whatever in the
instances is not always present, absent and varying with the given
subject investigated, and finally by the positive inference that
whatever in the instances is always present, absent and varying with
the subject is its essential cause.
Bacon, like Aristotle, was anticipated in this or that point; but, as
Aristotle was the first to construct a system of deduction in the
syllogism and its three figures, so Bacon was the first to construct a
system of induction in three ministrations, in which the requisites of
induction, hitherto recognized only in sporadic hints, were combined
for the first time in one logic of induction. Bacon taught men to
labour in inferring from particular to universal, to lay as much
stress on induction as on deduction, and to think and speak of
inductive reasoning, inductive science, inductive logic. Moreover,
while Aristotle had the merit of discerning the triplicity of
inference, to Bacon we owe the merit of distinguishing the three
processes without reduction:--
1. Inference from particular to particular by Experientia Literata, in
plano;
2. Inference from particular to universal by Inductio, ascendendo;
3. Inference from universal to particular by Syllogism, descendendo.
In short, the comprehensive genius of Bacon widened logic into a
general science of inference.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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