Science Volume - Modern Teacher Reader

Author: Zhou Honglin / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: Historically, those who study science have been either empiricists or dogmatists. Empiricists are like ants—they merely collect and use. Rationalists are like spiders—they build their webs from themselves. But bees take a middle path: they gather materials from flowers in gardens and fields, yet use their own strength to transform and digest these materials. True philosophy is also like this. It relies neither solely nor primarily on the power of the mind, nor does it merely collect materials from natural history and mechanical experiments and preserve them in their original form in memory. Instead, it transforms and digests these materials, storing them in the intellect. Therefore, from a closer and purer combination of these two abilities—experimental and rational—something never before achieved, we can hope to gain much. When establishing axioms, a different form of induction must be devised, one distinct from what has been used before. This form is not only meant to prove and discover (what are called) principles but also to prove and discover lower axioms, intermediate axioms—that is, to prove and discover all axioms. Because induction based on simple enumeration is quite naive, its conclusions are unstable; they are in danger as soon as a contradictory example is encountered. It generally relies on only a few, and only on those facts at hand, to make decisions. However, the useful induction rules for scientific and technological discoveries and proofs must analyze nature through appropriate rejection and exclusion methods, then draw conclusions based on positive examples after obtaining a sufficient number of negative examples. P18