September 22, 2010 McCaskey, “Professor Higgins’ Philosophy of Science” 1 Professor Higgins’ Philosophy of Science: Why Can’t Induction Be More Like Deduction? John P. McCaskey mailbox@johnmccaskey.com Draft, September 22, 2010 In My Fair Lady, frustrated in his dealings with Miss Eliza Doolittle, Professor Henry Higgins sings, ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man / Men are so honest, so thoroughly square / Eternally noble, historically fair. / . . . / Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ 1 By this thinking, man and woman are two kinds of something, one the ideal, the other the deficient. The more a woman can be made to be like a man—by adding some bits, by suppressing others, by forcible contortion if necessary—the better she will be. Many philosophers have a similar attitude toward induction. It is a type of inference, they say, but not the ideal kind. The ideal kind is deduction. As Nicholas Rescher put it, ‘An inductive inference can always be looked upon as an aspiring but failed deductive inference.’ 2 Like Professor Higgins dealing with Miss Doolittle, the modern philosopher judges induction by the standard of deduction, finds it wanting, and struggles in frustration to correct its shortcomings. The attitude is not just modern. It was standard from Alexandrians of the sixth century to Zabarella in the sixteenth. All conceived of induction as a kind of propositional inference inferior to deduction. John Stuart Mill and countless writers since have shared the view. But it has not been universal. Bacon, Hume, and Whewell did not share it. Neither did Cicero, the man who gave us the term inductio. Not only did they not think of To distinguish verbatim quotations from other text normally marked by quotation marks, verbatim quotations are here marked by single quotation marks. References are always provided. For other purposes, double quotation marks are used. In the notes, older and standardized primary sources, now so widely available in multiple, on-line, and often unpaginated editions, are cited by logical divisions such as chapter, section, paragraph, and so on. Translations are those listed in the bibliography except where noted. 1 Loewe and Lerner, “Hymn to Him,” My Fair Lady. 2 Rescher, Induction, p. 10. Emphasis in original.