Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

398 GLOSSARY
induction, eliminative:
induction by simple
enumeration:
induction, summative:
instrumentalism:
intelligences, planetary:
Jansenism:
knowledge, theory of:
—unobserved as well as observed—have this
property. Contrast ‘induction, summative’.
in this, one is looking for what Bacon (Novum
Organum, I, 105) called ‘the contradictory instance’.
That is, one is looking for a member of the class C
which does not have the property f.
here (in contrast with eliminative induction) one tries
to establish the truth of the proposition that all
members of the class C have the property f by looking
for cases in which members of this class have the
property f. Notoriously, this procedure is liable to be
upset by the discovery of a contradictory instance.
unlike ampliative induction (q.v.), this form of
induction merely summarizes the evidence. An
example would be: ‘Mary is tall, and Joan is tall, and
Sally is tall; Mary, Joan and Sally are all the women
in this room; therefore all the women in this room are
tall.’
in the philosophy of science, the view that scientific
theories are not descriptions of the real world but are
simply devices which enable scientists to make
successful predictions on the basis of the data they
have.
in Aristotle’s astronomical theory, the movements of
the Sun, Moon, planets and stars involve the rotation
of spheres to which they are fixed. Medieval
philosophers asserted that each of these spheres is
governed by an ‘intelligence’.
a system based on the writings of the Dutch
theologian Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585–1638).
Jansenism is a deterministic system (see
‘determinism’), denying human freedom. The
reasons for this denial are distinctive, in that they are
based on a view about the grace of God—that is, about
the assistance that God gives to human beings, with a
view to their salvation. The Jansenists argued that,
without the grace of God, human beings could not
obey his commandments, and that this grace was not
something that they could freely accept or reject but
was irresistible. Probably the most famous followers
of Jansen were the mathematician Blaise Pascal
(1623–62) and the philosopher Antoine Arnauld
(1612–94).
see ‘epistemology’.