The Principle of Experience

Abstract

WHEN Locke attacked the doctrine of innate ideas and the view that one could deduce the nature of the external world from certain first principles to be accepted a priori, he offered an alternative aid to the advancement of knowledge — experience. It is my understanding that he held that reliance on experience constituted a positive principle to be used in inference. Yet as things have turned out, those, who claiming to be empiricists have endeavoured to develop a system of inductive logic, have, oddly enough, not relied much, or at all, on this principle itself; they have not made it do work in the process of inference. Hume made a formidable attack on the validity of the principle. Nineteenth-century logicians tended to look elsewhere for the major premises of inductive reasoning. They brought into play the principles of Universal Causation and the Uniformity of Nature. But this was quite a different mode of approach. If every cause must have its unique effect and every event must have one of a limited number of causes, it was held that by a careful scrutiny of certain phenomena and by using methods of elimination, one could establish that an event (B) was certainly an effect of an event (A) in a class of cases; then, by applying the principle of the Uniformity of Nature, one could generalize and hold that an event of character A would invariably be followed by an event of character B.