Analysis and Induction as Methods of Empirical Inquiry
摘要
This chapter traces the history of the notions of analysis and induction in German-language accounts of scientific inquiry between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Many eighteenth-century scholars perceived analysis and induction as intertwined and tied to methods of empirical inquiry and discovery, as they had been perceived in the early modern period. Until well into the nineteenth century, the terms “(scientific) induction” or “inductive science” referred to any experience-based science (as opposed to a science based on first principles). Inductive science, thus understood, encompassed the making, evaluation, and testing of hypotheses—even of hypotheses about unobservable things—and “reduction” rather than “deduction” was its opposite. While the Kantian understanding of analysis influenced the notions of induction and scientific method, it did not wholly alter their interpretation. After Kant, formal logic and philosophy gradually became independent, but a more applied philosophy of empirical inquiry also persisted, linked to scientific practice while rooted in older ideas about analytic and inductive methods. Several authors recommended evaluating and testing hypotheses by deriving testable consequences but did not consider hypothesis testing to be a strictly deductive process opposed to, or more powerful than, induction. Inductive inquiry and the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) method are both integral to the inductive sciences, according to these pragmatic theories of empirical inquiry.