Hypothetical reasoning

“ If the senses cannot be used, because the event is in the future, or out of reach, how can reasoning take their place? Apparently, at least, we must infer the unknown from the known, and the mind must itself create an addition to the sum of knowledge. ”

“ For one thing, we have found that every step towards Truth is a step away from vague possibilities, and towards determinateness of idea and of experience. Our very ideas themselves, even when expressed as hypotheses, or as universal definitions, or as a priori mathematical constructions, or as judgments of hypothetical or of universal type, are from the outset destructive of vague possibilities, and involve Determination by Negation. ”

“ Every phenomenon or so-called 'fact' has an infinity of aspects or properties, as we have seen, amongst which the fool, or man with little sagacity, will inevitably go astray. But no matter for this point now. The first thing is to have seen that every possible case of reasoning involves the extraction of a particular partial aspect of the phenomena thought about, and that whilst Empirical Thought simply associates phenomena in their entirety, Reasoned Thought couples them by the conscious use of this extract. ”

“ Truths which we know, by way of inference, are occurrences which took place while we were absent—the events of history and the theorems of mathematics. But the truths known by intuition are the original premises from which all others axe inferred. Our assent to the conclusion being grounded upon the truth of the premises, we could never arrive at any knowledge by reasoning, unless something could be known antecedently to all reasoning.
'Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility of question. ”

“ The traditional Logic of the text-books, when it reasons from universals to their subalternate particulars, or derives particular conclusions from universal premises, does so by tacitly and, in general, by unjustifiably assuming the external existence of the objects reasoned about, while all the time still sundering external and internal. Reasoning itself is, to be sure, experience, but is, by hypothesis, experience of internal meanings, not of the external meanings which are taken, by this sort of thinking, to be the Reality. ”

“ This is why the true universal judgment has long been seen by logicians to be essentially hypothetical, and why, again, thought or knowledge always appears to the common-sense man to be dealing with realities which have previously been given independently of the “work of the mind.” ”

“ The nearest approach which human theories can make to perfection is to diminish this residue, this caput mortuum of observation, as it may be considered, as much as practicable, and, if possible, to reduce it to nothing, either by showing that something has been neglected in our estimation of known causes, or by reasoning upon it as a new fact, and on the principle of the inductive philosophy ascending from the effect to its cause or causes. ”

“ Our conception of logic wishes to show that all causes and effects are matter of the same kind, and that our faculty of reasoning is a matter of fact thing which brooks no mysteries or metaphysical dreams. ”

“ This manner of reasoning starts from the present mind, from what is our own, whether it be within or without us, since the feelings which we have, the experiences which fall directly within us, are the principles. This philosophy of reasoning thought is that which has now become universal, and through which the whole revolution in the position taken up by mind has come to pass. ”

“ It will be seen, after giving the matter a little thought, that the actual formation of the hypothesis is more than a mere grouping together or synthesis of facts or ideas—there is another mental process which actually evolves the hypothesis or theory—which gives a possible reason. ”

“ Most of our empirically derived general notions are spotted with such defects. What relation have these facts to induction? We claim that general notions should be experimentally formed; that is, by a gradual collection of concrete or illustrative materials, and that the logical concepts are the final outcome of comparison and reasoning toward conclusions. In other words, we must begin with psychical concepts with all their faults; we must make mistakes and correct them as our experience enlarges, and gradually work out of psychical into logical methods and results. ”

“ Apart from particular observations, science need presuppose nothing except the general principles of logic, and these principles are not laws of nature, for they are merely hypothetical, and apply not only to the actual world but to whatever is possible. ”

“ To this we reply, that our inquiry must be, whether the Facts have the same relation in the Hypothesis which they have in reality;—whether the results of our suppositions agree with the phenomena which nature presents to us. For this purpose, we must both carefully observe the phenomena, and steadily trace the consequences of our assumptions, till we can 68 bring the two into comparison. The Conceptions which our hypotheses involve, being derived from certain Fundamental Ideas, afford a basis of rigorous reasoning, as we have shown in the Books of the History of those Ideas. ”

“ But instead of thus looking mainly without, it is possible for a man chiefly to take account, let us say, of the consequences of his own hypothetical assumptions—assumptions which may possess but a very remote relation to the physical world. Or again, it is possible for such a student to be mainly devoted to reflecting upon the formal validity of his own inferences, or upon the meaning of his own presuppositions, or upon the value and the interrelation of human ideals. ”

“ The conclusions of theory can not be trusted, unless confirmed by observation; nor those of observation, unless they can be affiliated to theory, by deducing them from the laws of human nature, and from a close analysis of the circumstances of the particular situation. ”

“ The attempt is made to resolve certain laws of nature into a more general law, that law not being one which, though real, is inappropriate, but one wholly imaginary.210.Professor Bain.211.This sentence having been erroneously understood as if I had meant to assert that belief is nothing but an irresistible association, I think it necessary to observe that I express no theory respecting the ultimate analysis either of reasoning or of belief, two of the most obscure points in analytical psychology. ”

“ What is the precise effect of our argument on the subject of the human mind? Its precise effect and bearing is to turn us to the study of fact—of a clear and a peculiar fact—from the contemplation of an object which is either an hypothesis, or else no object at all (not even an hypothesis but a contradiction) , or else an irrelevant object of research, and one which cannot by any conceivability contain the fact which it is our business to investigate. ”

“ Thus logical knowledge is not derivable from experience alone, and the empiricist’s philosophy can therefore not be accepted in its entirety, in spite of its excellence in many matters which lie outside logic. ”

“ It is therefore necessary, in analysing a belief, to look for some other logical form than a two-term relation. Failure to realise this necessity has, in my opinion, vitiated almost everything that has hitherto been written on the theory of knowledge, making the problem of error insoluble and the difference between belief and perception inexplicable.
Modern logic, as I hope is now evident, has the effect of enlarging our abstract imagination, and providing an infinite number of possible hypotheses to be applied in the analysis of any complex fact. ”

“ And all this is established by abstract logical reasoning professing to find self-contradictions in the categories condemned as mere appearance, and to leave no tenable alternative to the kind of Absolute which is finally affirmed to be real. ”

“ In like manner, we have sufficient reason, judging merely from the observation of previous speculation, to warrant us in abstaining from attempts to deduce a knowledge of material nature from mental concepts. Add to this fact that other, that all knowledge has its basis in experience, and we supplement our empirical conclusion by a deduction from a fundamental law of nature, and show their entire congruence. ”

“ The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning. ”

“ It appears, then, to be a condition of a genuinely scientific hypothesis, that it be not destined always to remain an hypothesis, but be of such a nature as to be either proved or disproved by comparison with observed facts. ”

“ Principles of Evidence and Theories of Method are not to be constructed a priori. The laws of our rational faculty, like those of every other natural agency, are only learned by seeing the agent at work. ”

“ The theoretic principle flashes or slowly dawns upon the mind; and then the deductive faculty interposes to carry out the principle to its logical consequences. A perfect theory gives dominion over natural facts; and even an assumption which can only partially stand the test of a comparison with facts, may be of eminent use in enabling us to connect and classify groups of phenomena. ”

“ A postulate does not become axiomatic until it has been found to be workable and in proportion as it is so. But we deny that the two questions can be separated and logic be cut adrift from psychology and dissipated in the ether of the unintelligible. Psychological processes are the vehicles of truth, and logical value must be found in psychological fact or nowhere. ”

“ The materialistic view, that matter becomes conscious without containing psychic elements, is an assumption without proof and without logical consistency. The idealistic view, that the world of objects is simply a fiction of conscious mind, is equally devoid of proof and probability. ”

“ And so, as we saw, it is possible, at least by way of trial, to undertake to define Being wholly in terms of validity, to conceive that whoever says, of any object, It is, means only that a certain idea, — perhaps an idea suggested by passing experience, perhaps the thought of an empirically discovered law in a natural science, perhaps a free construction of an ideal object in mathematics, — but in any case an idea, is valid, has truth, defines an experience that, at least as a mathematical ideal, and perhaps as an empirical event, is determinately possible. ”

“ Where our consciousness recognizes between two phenomena an inherent distinction; where we are sensible of a difference which is not merely of degree, and feel that no adding one of the phenomena to itself would produce the other; any theory which attempts to bring either under the laws of the other must be false; though a theory which merely treats the one as a cause or condition of the other, may possibly be true. ”

“ It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by such statements as 'Cognition can go no further'; 'Here is the natural and absolute limit of human knowledge.' But 'natural' is the wrong word here. ”

“ Of the science, therefore, which expounds the operations of the human understanding in the pursuit of truth, one essential part is the inquiry: What are the facts which are the objects of intuition or consciousness, and what are those which we merely infer? But this inquiry has never been considered a portion of logic. ”

“ The evil consequences are twofold. The problem of the relation of mind and body has become a part of the problem of the possibility of knowledge in general, to the further complication of a matter already hopelessly constrained. Meantime the actual process of knowing, namely, operations of controlled observation, inference, reasoning, and testing, the only process with intellectual import, is dismissed as irrelevant to the theory of knowing. The methods of knowing practised in daily life and science are excluded from consideration in the philosophical theory of knowing. ”

“ In accordance with this method, theories in all the other sciences are always kept well subordinated to facts; and whenever unequivocal facts are found manifestly contradicting a theory no matter how venerable, the theory must go to make way for the facts. ”

“ The instances of new theories agreeing with and explaining old empiricisms, are innumerable. All the just remarks made by experienced persons on human character and conduct, are so many special laws, which the general laws of the human mind explain and resolve. ”

“ It is no disparagement, therefore, to the science of Human Nature, that those of its general propositions which descend sufficiently into detail to serve as a foundation for predicting phenomena in the concrete, are for the most part only approximately true. ”

“ Since, therefore, in the cases which lay the strongest claims to be examples of knowledge a priori, the mind proceeds from the idea of a thing to the reality of the thing itself, we can not be surprised by finding that illicit assumptions a priori consist in doing the same thing erroneously; in mistaking subjective facts for objective, laws of the percipient mind for laws of the perceived object, properties of the ideas or conceptions for properties of the things conceived. ”

“ Once more the difficulty is in the assumption, so natural to an objective science, of fixed conceptions. Are purpose and social feeling so fixed in their nature, and above all so well understood, that their presence or absence can be established by an experiment or two or ten thousand conducted on strictly objective principles? No conceptions are fixed, and instead of questions of fact we should have, what a strictly objective science cannot have, questions of meaning. ”