Socratic Logic - Induction

Generalization from Experience

The following are the notes I have taken from Peter Kreeft's wonderful Socratic Logic textbook. I highly recommend you buy it. This is a book which deals with classical logic (as opposed to modern symbolic logic.) It is easily the best overall book on logic I have ever read and one of the few I have that are worth making notes from. I even have a small duotang with these notes in it I can carry around and reference on a regular basis.

This is induction by simple enumeration.

The probability of the conclusion being true is affected by:

A.  How many observations, cases, examples are there?

B. What proportion of whole class do the cases observed constitute?

In generalization you arrive at some conclusion though a process of reasoning that begins with some particular truths and ends with a universal truth. You can only arrive at a probably conclusion by doing this though.