“Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation.”

—  Simon Blackburn

Source: Think (1999), Chapter Six, Reasoning, p. 225

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 "Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experienc…" by Simon Blackburn?
Simon Blackburn photo
Simon Blackburn29
British academic philosopher 1944

Related quotes

“Beethoven is the first composer to represent the complex process of memory-not merely the sense of loss and regret that accompanies visions of the past, but the physical experience of calling up the past within the present.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 3 : Mountains and Song Cycles

Rudolf Rocker photo

“Every process which arises from our physical being and is related to it, is an event which lies outside of our volition. Every social process, however, arises from human intentions and human goal setting and occurs within the limits of our volition.”

Rudolf Rocker book Nationalism and Culture

Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 1 "The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism"
Context: Every process which arises from our physical being and is related to it, is an event which lies outside of our volition. Every social process, however, arises from human intentions and human goal setting and occurs within the limits of our volition. Consequently, it is not subject to the concept of natural necessity. … We are here stating no prejudiced opinion, but merely an established fact. Every result of human purposiveness is of indisputable importance for man's social existence, but we should stop regarding social processes as deterministic manifestations of a necessary course of events. Such a view can only lead to the most erroneous conclusions and contribute to a fatal confusion in our understanding of historical events.
It is doubtless the task of the historian to trace the inner connection of historical events and to make clear their causes and effects, but he must not forget that these connections are of a sort quite different from those of natural physical events and must therefore have quite a different valuation.

William Stanley Jevons photo

“In a certain sense all knowledge is inductive. We can only learn the laws and relations of things in nature by observing those things. But the knowledge gained from the senses is knowledge only of particular facts, and we require some process of reasoning by which we may collect out of the facts the laws obeyed by them. Experience gives us the materials of knowledge: induction digests those materials, and yields us general knowledge. When we possess such knowledge, in the form of general propositions and natural laws, we can usefully apply the reverse process of deduction to ascertain the exact information required at any moment. In its ultimate foundation, then, all knowledge is inductive—in the sense that it is derived by a certain inductive reasoning from the facts of experience.”

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

Marie-Louise von Franz photo

“To sum up: numbers appear to represent both an attribute of matter and the unconscious foundation of our mental process. For this reason, number forms, according to Jung, that particular element that unites the realms of matter and psyche. It is “real” in a double sense, as an archetypal image and as a qualitative manifestation in the realm of outer-world experience.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Number and Time (1974), p. .52

Michael Halliday photo

“Traditionally, grammar has always been a grammar of written language: and it has always been a product grammar" ['Product' is here used as one term of the Hjelmslevian pair process/product. ] A process/product distinction is a relevant one for linguists because it corresponds to that between our experience of speech and our experience of writing: writing exists whereas speech happens.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Michael Halliday (1985, p. xxiii) cited in: David Brazil (1995) A Grammar of Speech. p. 10.
1970s and later

Hermann Weyl photo

“Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and takes place in space.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Source: Space—Time—Matter (1952), Ch. 3 "Relativity of Space and Time"<!-- p. 217 -->
Context: The scene of action of reality is not a three-dimensional Euclidean space but rather a four-dimensional world, in which space and time are linked together indissolubly. However deep the chasm may be that separates the intuitive nature of space from that of time in our experience, nothing of this qualitative difference enters into the objective world which physics endeavors to crystallize out of direct experience. It is a four-dimensional continuum, which is neither "time" nor "space". Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and takes place in space.

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

Richard Nixon photo

“The important thing in our process, however, is to play the game,”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, Remarks on Being Reelected (1972)
Context: The important thing in our process, however, is to play the game, and in the great game of life, and particularly the game of politics, what is important is that on either side more Americans voted this year than ever before, and the fact that you won or you lost must not keep you from keeping in the great game of politics in the years ahead, because the better competition we have between the two parties, between the two men running for office, whatever office that may be, means that we get the better people and the better programs for our country.

“Coming directly to the topic of projective methods of personality study, we may say that the dynamic conception of personality as a process of organizing experience and structuralizing life space in a field leads to the problem of how we can reveal the way an individual personality organizes experience, in order to disclose or at least gain insight into that individual's private world of meanings, significances, patterns, and feelings.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Source: Projective methods for the study of personality (1939), p. 402 as cited in: Jerry S. Wiggins (2003) Paradigms of personality assessment. p. 33

“Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.”

Martha Stout (1953) American psychologist

Source: The Sociopath Next Door

Related topics