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Updated: May 28, 2025
We have dogmas that were more than half false, passing current for a time as universal truths. We have evidence collected in proof of these dogmas; by and by a colligation of facts in antagonism with them; and eventually a consequent modification.
Whewell’s doctrine of Conceptions might be fully expressed by the more familiar term Hypothesis; and since his Colligation of Facts by means of appropriate Conceptions, is but the ordinary process of finding by a comparison of phenomena, in what consists their agreement or resemblance; I would willingly have confined myself to those better understood expressions, and persevered to the end in the same abstinence which I have hitherto observed from ideological discussions; considering the mechanism of our thoughts to be a topic distinct from and irrelevant to the principles and rules by which the trustworthiness of the results of thinking is to be estimated.
Every great advance which marks an epoch in the progress of science, has consisted in a step made toward the solution of this problem. Even a simple colligation of inductions already made, without any fresh extension of the inductive inference, is already an advance in that direction.
Without the previous colligation of detached observations by means of one general conception, we could never have obtained any basis for an induction, except in the case of phenomena of very limited compass.
Whewell’s term Colligation, provided it be clearly seen that the process is not Induction, but something radically different. What more may usefully be said on the subject of Colligation, or of the correlative expression invented by Dr.
If we had never seen any white object or had never seen any cloven-footed animal before, we should at the same time and by the same mental act acquire the idea, and employ it for the colligation of the observed phenomena.
I only think him mistaken in setting up this kind of operation, which according to the old and received meaning of the term, is not induction at all, as the type of induction generally; and laying down, throughout his work, as principles of induction, the principles of mere colligation. Dr.
Every great advance which marks an epoch in the progress of science, has consisted in a step made towards the solution of this problem. Even a simple colligation of inductions already made, without any fresh extension of the inductive inference, is already an advance in that direction.
The descriptive operation which enables a number of details to be summed up in a single proposition, Dr. Whewell, by an aptly chosen expression, has termed the Colligation of Facts. In most of his observations concerning that mental process I fully agree, and would gladly transfer all that portion of his book into my own pages.
On the present occasion we have chiefly to distinguish this process of Colligation from Induction properly so called; and that the distinction may be made clearer, it is well to advert to a curious and interesting remark, which is as strikingly true of the former operation, as it appears to me unequivocally false of the latter.
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