Inductivism

Inductivism is the traditional model of scientific method attributed to Francis Bacon, who in 1620 vowed to subvert allegedly traditional thinking. In the Baconian model, one observes nature, proposes a modest law to generalize an observed pattern, confirms it by many observations, ventures a modestly broader law, and confirms that, too, by many more observations, while discarding disconfirmed laws. The laws grow ever broader but never much exceed careful, extensive observation. Thus freed from preconceptions, scientists gradually uncover nature's causal and material structure.

At 1740, David Hume found multiple obstacles to use of experience to infer causality. Hume noted the illogicality of enumerative induction—unrestricted generalization for particular instances to all instances, and stating a universal law—since humans observe sequence of sensory events, not cause and effect. Humans thus perceive neither logical nor natural necessity or impossibility among events. Later philosophers would select, highlight, and nickname Humean principles—Hume's fork, problem of induction, and Hume's law—although Hume accepted the empirical sciences as inevitably inductive, after all.

Alarmed by Hume's seemingly radical empiricism, Immanuel Kant identified its apparent opposite, rationalism, as favored by Descartes and by Spinoza. Seeking middle ground, Kant identified that the necessity bridging the world in itself to human experience is the mind, whose innate constants thus determine space, time, and substance and determine the correct scientific theory. Though protecting both metaphysics and Newtonian physics, Kant discarded scientific realism by restricting science to tracing appearances (phenomena), not unveiling reality (noumena). Kant's transcendental idealism launched German idealism—increasingly speculative metaphysics—while philosophers continued awkward confidence in empirical sciences as inductive.

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