Science Takes Us Beyond Our Experience
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.
Notes:
The act of inference is positing behaviors and laws onto things we have no experience of yet.
Folksonomies: inference experience
Taxonomies:
/science (0.408113)
/religion and spirituality (0.297512)
/law, govt and politics (0.141554)
Keywords:
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Concepts:
Scientific method (0.959620): dbpedia | freebase
Reasoning (0.719000): dbpedia | opencyc
Logic (0.680513): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Sources of knowledge (0.669154): dbpedia
Nature (0.588243): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Knowledge (0.582737): dbpedia | freebase
Social sciences (0.555467): dbpedia | opencyc
Concepts in metaphysics (0.539816): dbpedia
Lectures and Essays, by the Late William Kingdon Clifford