And Mendeleev’s guesses showed that induction is a more subtle process in the hands of a scientist than Bacon and other philosophers supposed. In sci… - Jacob Bronowski
" "And Mendeleev’s guesses showed that induction is a more subtle process in the hands of a scientist than Bacon and other philosophers supposed. In science we do not simply march along a linear progression of known instances to unknown ones. Rather, we work as in a crossword puzzle, scanning two separate progressions for the points at which they intersect: that is where the unknown instances should be in hiding. Mendeleev scanned the progression of atomic weights in the columns, and the family likenesses in the rows, to pinpoint the missing elements at their intersections. By doing so, he made practical predictions, and he also made manifest (what is still poorly understood) how scientists actually carry out the process of induction.
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About Jacob Bronowski
Jacob Bronowski (January 18, 1908 – August 22, 1974) was a British mathematician, biologist, and science historian of Polish origin. He is remembered as the writer and presenter of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man.
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On the one hand, all science, and indeed all thinking starts from and rests upon notions of order; what marks the Middle Ages is that their order was always a hierarchy. And on the other hand what marks the scientific view is not that it turned to the mechanism of causes, but that it saw the world as a mechanism at all—a machine of events.
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There is today almost no scientific theory which was held when, say, the Industrial Revolution began about 1760. Most often today's theories flatly contradict those of 1760; many contradict those of 1900. In cosmology, in quantum mechanics, in genetics, in the social sciences, who now holds the beliefs that seemed firm sixty years ago? Yet the society of scientists has survived these changes without a revolution, and honors the men whose beliefs it no longer shares. No one has recanted abjectly at a trial before his colleagues. The whole structure of science has been changed and no one has been either disgraced or deposed. Through all the changes of science, the society of scientists is flexible and single-minded together, and evolves and rights itself. In the language of science, it is a stable society.
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