“It is actually impossible in theory to determine exactly what the hidden mechanism is without opening the box, since there are always many different mechanisms with identical behavior. Quite apart from this, analysis is more difficult than invention in the sense in which, generally, induction takes more time to perform than deduction: in induction one has to search for the way, whereas in deduction one follows a straightforward path.”

Source: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 20 as cited in: Yll Haxhimusa (2006) The Structurally Optimal Dual Graph Pyramid and Its Application in Image Partitioning. p. 149

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is actually impossible in theory to determine exactly what the hidden mechanism is without opening the box, since th…" by Valentino Braitenberg?
Valentino Braitenberg photo
Valentino Braitenberg 12
Italian-Austrian neuroscientist 1926–2011

Related quotes

George Henry Lewes photo

“Whatever lies beyond the limits of experience, and claims another origin than that of induction and deduction from established data, is illegitimate.”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

Vol. 1, p. 17
The Foundations of a Creed (1874-5)

“Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 16, Unpacking Information, The computer in the service of physics, p. 138

William Stanley Jevons photo

“I shall endeavor to show that induction is really the inverse process of deduction.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Source: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874) Vol. 1, p. 14

Boris Sidis photo

“The psycho-physiological hypothesis is both inductively and deductively the sine qua non of the science of psychology.”

Boris Sidis (1867–1923) American psychiatrist

Source: The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology (1914), p. 86

Giuseppe Peano photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“I may as well say at once that I do not distinguish between inference and deduction. What is called induction appears to me to be either disguised deduction or a mere method of making plausible guesses.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. II: Symbolic Logic, p. 11
1900s

Simon Blackburn photo

“Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction.”

Simon Blackburn (1944) British academic philosopher

Source: Think (1999), Chapter Six, Reasoning, p. 227

Alfred Jules Ayer photo
William Stanley Jevons photo

Related topics