Prediction and Induction

Abstract

What is called the problem of ‘Induction’ has interested representatives of very different groups of thinkers again and again. Hume’s renunciation of the induction and causality business did not satisfy research workers, who wanted to have a kind of ‘justification’ for their everyday technique. I should like to call their attitude ‘pseudo-rationalism’ — starting from the assumption that the one may be right, the other wrong, and by some effort they may get nearer to the truth. That is just what Logical Empiricism does not accept. There is no judge in a chair who decides who is nearer to the truth. There is no way of ‘impartiality’ or ‘scientific objectivity’, there is no point outside our life, from which we may finally decide what is ‘impartial’ or ‘scientifically objective’ — we do not see such a point.

[This article was compiled by Marie L. Neurath from notes found on Otto Neurath’s desk after his death, and from quotations from his ‘Foundations of the Social Sciences’ (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. II, No. 1, The University of Chicago Press, 1944).]