Luke Carter
The Problem with Inductively Deriving Scientific Knowledge from Our Experience
Introduction
In order to derive scientific knowledge from our experience we must make an inference. As an example, if we wish to understand the motion of the sun we can use our experience to note that for every morning of our life the sun has risen. Scientific knowledge that one may find easy to infer from this experience is that every day the sun rises. We can then use this scientific knowledge to assume that tomorrow the sun will rise and be quite confident in this fact. This is called an inductive argument. Alternatively, if we try to use a deductive argument to derive scientific knowledge from experience it is not possible to establish the truth of factual statements, all that can be offered is that if the premises of the statement are true then so too are the conclusions. For example: “If all humans have three eyes and Luke is a human, then Luke has three eyes” is a logically valid deductive argument regardless of the fact we know that humans do not have three eyes. Therefore it is clear that deductive arguments present significant flaws with regard to deriving scientific knowledge from experience and so I now focus on inductive arguments. “A characteristic of inductive arguments that distinguishes them from deductive ones is that, by proceeding as they do from statements about some
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This is a very limiting property of the inductive argument. If all scientific knowledge were inferred directly from experience/observation then it would not be plausible for us to have the understanding of the natural world that we do today. For example, how could we assume any understanding of the way in which chemicals react at the subatomic level when it is not possible for us to observe such small details of our world? If we cannot observe these experiences then how can understanding be inferred