Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy

CHAPTER VI

ON INDUCTION
IN almost all our previous discussions we have been concerned in the
attempt to get clear as to our data in the way of knowledge of existence.
What things are there in the universe whose existence is known to us
owing to our being acquainted with them? So far, our answer has been
that we are acquainted with our sense-data, and, probably, with
ourselves. These we know to exist. And past sense-data which are
remembered are known to have existed in the past. This knowledge
supplies our data.

But if we are to be able to draw inferences from these data -- if

we are to know of the existence of matter, of other people, of the past
before our individual memory begins, or of the future, we must know
general principles of some kind by means of which such inferences can
be drawn. It must be known to us that the existence of some one sort of
thing, A, is a sign of the existence of some other sort of thing, B, either at
the same time as A or at some earlier or later time, as, for example,
thunder is a sign of the earlier existence of lightning. If this were not
known to us, we could never extend our knowledge beyond the sphere of
our private experience; and this sphere, as we have seen, is exceedingly
limited. The question we have now to consider is whether such an
extension is possible, and if so, how it is effected.

Let us take as an illustration a matter about which of us, in fact,

feel the slightest doubt. We are all convinced that the sun will rise to-
morrow. Why? Is this belief a mere blind outcome of past experience, or
can it be justified as a reasonable belief? It is not find a test by which to
judge whether a belief of this kind is reasonable or not, but we can at
least ascertain what sort of general beliefs would suffice, if true, to
justify the judgement that the sun will rise to-morrow, and the many
other similar judgements upon which our actions are based.

It is obvious that if we are asked why we believe it the sun will

rise to-morrow, we shall naturally answer, 'Because it always has risen
every day'. We have a firm belief that it will rise in the future, because it
has risen in the past. If we are challenged as to why we believe that it
will continue to rise as heretofore, we may appeal to the laws of motion:
the earth, we shall say, is a freely rotating body, and such bodies do not
cease to rotate unless something interferes from outside, and there is
nothing outside to interfere with thee earth between now and to-
morrow. Of course it might be doubted whether we are quite certain
that there is nothing outside to interfere, but this is not the interesting
doubt. The interesting doubt is as to whether the laws of motion will
remain in operation until to-morrow. If this doubt is raised, we find
ourselves in the same position as when the doubt about the sunrise was
first raised.

The only reason for believing that the laws of motion remain in
operation is that they have operated hitherto, so far as our knowledge of
the past enables us to judge. It is true that we have a greater body of
evidence from the past in favour of the laws of motion than we have in
favour of the sunrise, because the sunrise is merely a particular case of
fulfilment of the laws of motion, and there are countless other particular
cases. But the real question is: Do any number of cases of a law being
fulfilled in the past afford evidence that it will be fulfilled in the future?
If not, it becomes plain that we have no ground whatever for expecting
the sun to rise to-morrow, or for expecting the bread we shall eat at our
next meal not to poison us, or for any of the other scarcely conscious
expectations that control our daily lives. It is to be observed that all such
expectations are only probable; thus we have not to seek for a proof that
they must be fulfilled, but only for some reason in favour of the view
that they are likely to be fulfilled.

Now in dealing with this question we must, to begin with, make

an important distinction, without which we should soon become
involved in hopeless confusions. Experience has shown us that, hitherto,
the frequent repetition of some uniform succession or coexistence has
been a cause of our expecting the same succession or coexistence on the
next occasion. Food that has a certain appearance generally has a
certain taste, and it is a severe shock to our expectations when the
familiar appearance is found to be associated with an unusual taste.
Things which we see become associated, by habit, with certain tactile
sensations which we expect if we touch them; one of the horrors of a
ghost (in many ghost-stories) is that it fails to give us any sensations of
touch. Uneducated people who go abroad for the first time are so
surprised as to be incredulous when they find their native language not
understood.
And this kind of association is not confined to men; in animals
also it is very strong. A horse which has been often driven along a
certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different direction.
Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them.
We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are
liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day
throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more
refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to
the chicken.

But in spite of the misleadingness of such expectations, . they

nevertheless exist. The mere fact that something has happened a certain
number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen
again. Thus our instincts certainly cause us to believe the sun will rise to-
morrow, but we may be in no better a position than the chicken which
unexpectedly has its neck wrung. We have therefore to distinguish the
fact that past uniformities cause expectations as to the future, from the
question whether there is any reasonable ground for giving weight to
such expectations after the question of their validity has been raised.

The problem we have to discuss is whether there is any reason for

believing in what is called 'the uniformity of nature'. The belief in the
uniformity of nature is the belief that everything that has happened or
will happen is an instance of some general law to which there are no
exceptions. The crude expectations which we have been considering are
all subject to exceptions, and therefore liable to disappoint those who
entertain them. But science habitually assumes, at least as a working
hypothesis, that general rules which have exceptions can be replaced by
general rules which have no exceptions. 'Unsupported bodies in air fall'
is a general rule to which balloons and aeroplanes are exceptions. But
the laws of motion and the law of gravitation, which account for the fact
that most bodies fall, also account for the fact that balloons and
aeroplanes can rise; thus the laws of motion and the law of gravitation
are not subject to these exceptions.

The belief that the sun will rise to-morrow might be falsified if
the earth came suddenly into contact with a large body which destroyed
its rotation; but the laws of motion and the law of gravitation would not
be infringed by such an event. The business of science is to find
uniformities, such as the laws of motion and the law of gravitation, to
which, so far as our experience extends, there are no exceptions. In this
search science has been remarkably successful, and it may be conceded
that such uniformities have held hitherto. This brings us back to the
question: Have we any reason, assuming that they have always held in
the past, to suppose that they will hold in the future?

It has been argued that we have reason to know that the future
will resemble the past, because what was the future has constantly
become the past, and has always been found to resemble the past, so
that we really have experience of the future, namely of times which were
formerly future, which we may call past futures. But such an argument
really begs the very question at issue. We have experience of past
futures, but not of future futures, and the question is: Will future
futures resemble past futures? This question is not to be answered by an
argument which starts from past futures alone. We have therefore still
to seek for some principle which shall enable us to know that the future
will follow the same laws as the past.

The reference to the future in this question is not essential. The

same question arises when we apply the laws that work in our
experience to past things of which we have no experience -- as, for
example, in geology, or in theories as to the origin of the Solar system.
The question we really have to ask is: 'When two things have been
found to be often associated, and no instance is known of the one
occurring without the other, does the occurrence of one of the two, in a
fresh instance, give any good ground for expecting the other?' On our
answer to this question must depend the validity of the whole of our
expectations as to the future, the whole of the results obtained by
induction, and in fact practically all the beliefs upon which our daily life
is based.

It must be conceded, to begin with, that the fact that two things
have been found often together and never apart does not, by itself,
suffice to prove demonstratively that they will be found together in the
next case we examine. The most we can hope is that the oftener things
are found together, the more probable becomes that they will be found
together another time, and that, if they have been found together often
enough, the probability will amount almost to certainty. It can never
quite reach certainty, because we know that in spite of frequent
repetitions there sometimes is a failure at the last, as in the case of the
chicken whose neck is wrung. Thus probability is all we ought to seek.

It might be urged, as against the view we are advocating, that we

know all natural phenomena to be subject to the reign of law, and that
sometimes, on the basis of observation, we can see that only one law can
possibly fit the facts of the case. Now to this view there are two answers.
The first is that, even if some law which has no exceptions applies to our
case, we can never, in practice, be sure that we have discovered that law
and not one to which there are exceptions. The second is that the reign
of law would seem to be itself only probable, and that our belief that it
will hold in the future, or in unexamined cases in the past, is itself based
upon the very principle we are examining.

The principle we are examining may be called the principle of

induction, and its two parts may be stated as follows:

(a) When a thing of a certain sort A has been found to be

associated with a thing of a certain other sort B, and has
never been found dissociated from a thing of the sort B,
the greater the number of cases in which A and B have
been associated, the greater is the probability that they
will be associated in a fresh case in which one of them is
known to be present;

(b) Under the same circumstances, a sufficient number of

cases of association will make the probability of a fresh
association nearly a certainty, and will make it approach
certainty without limit.

As just stated, the principle applies only to the verification of our

expectation in a single fresh instance. But we want also to know that
there is a probability in favour of the general law that things of the sort
A are always associated with things of the sort B, provided a sufficient
number of cases of association are known, and no cases of failure of
association are known. The probability of the general law is obviously
less than the probability of the particular case, since if the general law is
true, the particular case must also be true, whereas the particular case
may be true without the general law being true. Nevertheless the
probability of the general law is increased by repetitions, just as the
probability of the particular case is. We may therefore repeat the two
parts of our principle as regards the general law, thus:

(a) The greater the number of cases in which a thing the

sort A has been found associated with a thing the sort B,
the more probable it is (if no cases of failure of association
are known) that A is always associated with B;

(b) Under the same circumstances, a sufficient number of

cases of the association of A with B will make it nearly
certain that A is always associated with B, and will make
this general law approach certainty without limit.

It should be noted that probability is always relative to certain

data. In our case, the data are merely the known cases of coexistence of
A and B. There may be other data, which might be taken into account,
which would gravely alter the probability. For example, a man who had
seen a great many white swans might argue by our principle, that on the
data it was probable that all swans were white, and this might be a
perfectly sound argument. The argument is not disproved by the fact
that some swans are black, because a thing may very well happen in
spite of the fact that some data render it improbable. In the case of the
swans, a man might know that colour is a very variable characteristic in
many species of animals, and that, therefore, an induction as to colour is
peculiarly liable to error. But this knowledge would be a fresh datum,
by no means proving that the probability relatively to our previous data
had been wrongly estimated. The fact, therefore, that things often fail to
fulfil our expectations is no evidence that our expectations will not
probably be fulfilled in a given case or a given class of cases. Thus our
inductive principle is at any rate not capable of being disproved by an
appeal to experience.

The inductive principle, however, is equally incapable of being

proved by an appeal to experience. Experience might conceivably
confirm the inductive principle as regards the cases that have been
already examined; but as regards unexamined cases, it is the inductive
principle alone that can justify any inference from what has been
examined to what has not been examined. All arguments which, on the
basis of experience, argue as to the future or the unexperienced parts of
the past or present, assume the inductive principle; hence we can never
use experience to prove the inductive principle without begging the
question. Thus we must either accept the inductive principle on the
ground of its intrinsic evidence, or forgo all justification of our
expectations about the future. If the principle is unsound, we have no
reason to expect the sun to rise to-morrow, to expect bread to be more
nourishing than a stone, or to expect that if we throw ourselves off the
roof we shall fall. When we see what looks like our best friend
approaching us, we shall have no reason to suppose that his body is not
inhabited by the mind of our worst enemy or of some total stranger. All
our conduct is based upon associations which have worked in the past,
and which we therefore regard as likely to work in the future; and this
likelihood is dependent for its validity upon the inductive principle.
The general principles of science, such as the belief in the reign of
law, and the belief that every event must have a cause, are as completely
dependent upon the inductive principle as are the beliefs of daily life All
such general principles are believed because mankind have found
innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood.
But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the
inductive principle is assumed.

Thus all knowledge which, on a basis of experience tells us

something about what is not experienced, is based upon a belief which
experience can neither confirm nor confute, yet which, at least in its
more concrete applications, appears to be as firmly rooted in us as
many of the facts of experience. The existence and justification of such
beliefs -- for the inductive principle, as we shall see, is not the only
example -- raises some of the most difficult and most debated problems
of philosophy. We will, in the next chapter, consider briefly what may
be said to account for such knowledge, and what is its scope and its
degree of certainty.

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