Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
You will observe that I do not hold Induction to be in its essence the
derivation of general laws. It is the divination of some characteristics
of a particular future from the known characteristics of a particular
past. The wider assumption of general laws holding for all cognisable
occasions appears a very unsafe addendum to attach to this limited
knowledge. All we can ask of the present occasion is that it shall
determine a particular community of occasions, which are in some
respects mutually qualified by reason of their inclusion within that
same community. That community of occasions considered in physical
science is the set of happenings which fit on to each other—as we say—in
a common space-time, so that we can trace the transitions from one to
the other. Accordingly, we refer to _the_ common space-time indicated in
our immediate occasion of knowledge. Inductive reasoning proceeds from
the particular occasion to the particular community of occasions, and
from the particular community to relations between particular occasions
within that community. Until we have taken into account other scientific
concepts, it is impossible to carry the discussion of induction further
than this preliminary conclusion.
The third point to notice about this quotation from Bacon is the purely
qualitative character of the statements made in it. In this respect
Bacon completely missed the tonality which lay behind the success of
seventeenth century science. Science was becoming, and has remained,
primarily quantitative. Search for measurable elements among your
phenomena, and then search for relations between these measures of
physical quantities. Bacon ignores this rule of science. For example, in
the quotation given he speaks of action at a distance; but he is
thinking qualitatively and not quantitatively. We cannot ask that he
should anticipate his younger contemporary Galileo, or his distant
successor Newton. But he gives no hint that there should be a search for
quantities. Perhaps he was misled by the current logical doctrines which
had come down from Aristotle. For, in effect, these doctrines said to
the physicist ‘_classify_’ when they should have said ‘_measure_.’
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