Friday, February 11, 2011

Current Plans for My "Inductive Quest"

So here's a preview of what will be appearing on the blog in the next few months (and years)!

Induction of Objectivity (Ayn Rand) -- I'll present how Ayn Rand used her knowledge of concept-formation to reformulate Aristotle's theory of logic and conception of "objectivity."

Part 3 of John Herschel's theory of Baconian Induction -- I finish my series on the famous astronomer/philosopher of science, recounting his views on inductions of causal laws, the role of hypotheses, and analogical reasoning.

The rest of the lecture course, "Objectivism Through Induction" -- I only have three lectures left to cover, so I'm really excited about nearing the end, which leads to...

Inducing all of the principles of Objectivism -- one of my "Big Projects": I plan on working through all of the principles of Objectivism, and putting them together so that the result will be what the philosophy actually is--not words or books, but a system of inductive principles, axioms, theorems, and deductive conclusions. I'm guessing that this will take quite a few years, and "Objectivism Through Induction" is just the starting point.

William Whewell's "History of the Inductive Sciences" -- a three volume work describing how various sciences rose up from their beginnings, a work from which Whewell built his theory of induction. My second "Big Project," as I plan to work through and understand the inductions he will present in this work. I can't wait!

Whewell's "The Elements of Morality, Including Polity" and "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences" -- These two present Whewell's inductive moral-political theory, as well as his theory of induction, "Discoverer's Induction."

John Stuart Mill's theory of induction -- presented in his work "A System of Logic," this is the theory that gave induction a bad name in science, and ended the view that the true scientific method was some form of induction. I don't think anyone should endorse this view, but it is important in the history of induction.

Induction of Mathematics -- at some point, I want to work on inducing the branches of mathematics, with a view toward understanding why we have the fields of mathematics that we do have. What problems were these fields created to solve? "Big Project" #3.

Induction of Economics -- "Big Project" #4 is working through four schools of economics: the Classical, Marxist, English Historical, and Austrian schools.

Karl Popper and the Logical Positivists -- their negative view of induction permeated 20th century philosophy of science, and thus post-modern science was further disconnected from the inductive past of modern science.

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