RB 65

servations will provide the foundation, premisses, for apodictically valid deductive predictions regarding the nature and content of future observations, or the formulation of absolutely valid general laws, or the definition or formulation of an immutable concept.When it comes to the question of the certainty of inductively established synthetic knowledge, the problem is that past empirical observations of given phenomena may only constitute premisses that on a strictly logical basis neither allow us to make apodictically certain predictions of the future nor allow us to make apodictically certain determinations of how a specific class of objects necessarily must be constituted. In other words, the enumerative induction does not allow the assumption that we can establish or have absolute empirical knowledge. The only demonstratively valid conclusion that we can infer from the enumerative material is tautological and refers to the investigated material itself, allowing us to conclude that if it is true that a certain class of observed objects shares a common property, then it is true that each and every observed member of that class has and shares that common property.An example of the previous train of thought is that if each and every observed swan definitively was white, then each and every of the observed swans must have been white, which of course is a truism of no real epistemological or scientific value in any discourse outside pure logic. Since the subject matter of Hägerström’s theory of science is object sciences and, in accordance with the prevailing paradigm of modern science, the creation of a valid synthetic judgment, then induction must be defined in such a manner as to allow us to reach beyond induction’s specific empirical material, particular facts, as it is only such a definition of induction that will allow induction to become synthetic rather than analytic.The problem, however, is that this must be conducted in a manner that does not sever the epistemological link between the conclusion, the inference, and its empirical material, the facts. In order to safeguard the correspondence between mind and matter, judgment and a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 119

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=