Original scientific paper

What is Induction to Ruđer Bošković?

Heda Festini ; Rijeka, Hrvatska

Abstract

Induction in the works of Ruđer Bošković is a research topic with extensive tradition.
This article aims to place Bošković’s views of induction within Fermat-Pascal interpretative tradition of induction, whose protagonists were Jakob Bernoulli and Thomas Bayes, along with Wittgenstein, Carnap and Hintikka in the twentieth century.
According to Bošković, induction not only supports the deduction, but is important per se – by its characteristics of “ampleness” and “wideness.” His understanding of induction did not follow that of Bacon, who tended to lean on observation.
This includes him into a more favourable development line of logic, stemming from Fermat and Pascal, across Bernoulli and Bayes until the present day – Wittgenstein, Carnap and Hintikka. Namely, if it is true that Bošković used Bernoulli’s calculus of probability, considering that we also have Carrier’s suggestions on his anticipation of Rudolf Carnap’s inductive logic, it means that his concept of induction rests on two
general principles, and not one, on the basis of which he may rightly earn his place among the disputes on the relationship of the general inductive principle and local characteristics of every induction.
Further, Bošković’s induction, in my opinion, is close to Wittgenstein’s concept of net as an understanding of scientific theory, though with its own specific features. One of them is based on the following insight: what we observe in nature are books “that belong to different kingdoms and are written in different languages.” This evidently reconfirms Bošković’s view of the use of different inductions in different situations.

Keywords

induction; deduction; probability; inductive logic; Ruđer Bošković; Ludwig Wittgenstein; Rudolf Carnap

Hrčak ID:

196169

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/196169

Publication date:

26.3.2018.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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