Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of EducationOntario. Department of Education
Science
Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education
Ontario. Department of Education
Education; Educational psychology
In speaking of induction as a process of going from the particular to
the general, this does not signify that the process deals with
individual notions. The particulars in an inductive process are
particular cases giving rise to particular judgments, and judgments
involve concepts, or general ideas. When, in the inductive process, it
is asserted that air holds the card to the glass, the mind is seeking to
establish a relation between the notions air and pressure, and is,
therefore, thinking in concepts. For this reason, it is usually said
that induction takes for granted ordinary relations as involved in our
everyday concepts, and concerns itself only with the more hidden
relations of things. The significance of induction as a process of going
from the particular to the general, therefore, consists in the fact that
the conclusion is held to be a wider judgment than is contained in any
of the premises.
=Particular Truth Implies the General.=--Describing the premises of an
inductive process as particular truths, and the conclusion as a
universal truth, however, involves the same fiction as was noted in
separating the percept and the concept into two distinct types of
notions. In the first place, my particular judgment, that air presses
the card against the glass, is itself a deduction resting upon other
general principles. Secondly, if the judgment that air presses the card
against the glass contains no element of universal truth, then a
thousand such judgments could give no universal truth. Moreover, if the
mind approaches a process of induction with a problem, or hypothesis,
before it, the general truth is already apprehended hypothetically in
thought even before the particular instances are examined. When we set
out, for instance, to investigate whether the line joining the bisecting
points of the sides of a triangle is parallel with the base, we have
accepted hypothetically the general principle that such lines are
parallel with the base. The fact is, therefore, that when the mind
examines the particular case and finds it to agree with the hypothesis,
so far as it accepts this case as a truth, it also accepts it as a
universal truth. Although, therefore, induction may involve going from
one particular experiment or observation to another, it is in a sense a
process of going from the general to the general.
That accepting the truth of a particular judgment may imply a universal
judgment is very evident in the case of geometrical demonstrations. When
it is shown, for instance, that in the case of the particular isosceles
triangle ABC, the angles at the base are equal, the mind does not
require to examine other particular triangles for verification, but at
once asserts that in every isosceles triangle the angles at the base are
equal.
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