"Intuitive" induction?
"in judging upon a single instance of the impressions red, orange and yellow, that the qualitative difference between red and yellow is greater than that between red and orange [...] this single instantial judgement is implicitly universal; in that what holds of the relation amongst red, orange and yellow for this single case, is seen to hold for all possible presentations of red, orange and yellow. [the same is true for all equilateral triangles being equiangular, A, C and F are notes in ascending order of pitch, and all moral judgements.]"
(Johnson's Logic, Part II, 1964:193, my emphasis)
Is this a respectable and unique kind of reasoning? Instinctively, something suspicious is going on here. But I can't put my finger on it. This isn't obviously enumerative induction, and nor is it obviously either deduction or abduction. So is it really an original and distinct kind of reasoning?
It seems to me as a normal a
It seems to me as a normal a priori judgment, with the addition of the Berkeley's idea that we can't think of such things as Abstracts, we always think of concrete things, just that we see that some specifics are not important for relation, so the relation we see as holding will hold generally, and not for the individual thing.
Would this be an
Would this be another way of phrasing your point?:
Whilst Johnson talks as though we are here generalising across many instances, this is actually false. Rather, we are making a judgement about a universal, of which there is only one (there is only one red).
Thanks for the comment,
Al
I think actually that
I think actually that Johnson phrasing is pretty straightforward (at least from what I can understand without the context).
Berkeley's idea (afaik) is to deny that there is such thing as universal, but that we: a)make a judgment about the particular instance and b)comprehend that this judgment is independent from some specifics of that particular instance, and hence, comprehend that the same judgment would hold for anything which shares just some of the specifics of this particular instance, and hence we are coming to a general judgment about all such situations.
An example with the triangle would be - we take a concrete triangle, see through some proof that the sum of the angles is 180 degrees, and see that the proof doesn't mention lengths, particular angles, etc.., so we figure out that it will hold generally for all triangles. (so we make general judgment which holds for all triangles, based on analyzing a concrete instance).
Not sure though, if it could work for the color example exactly the same way. The analogy would be that in the concrete case of colors, there are abstract properties (like 'being red', 'being orange' and 'being yellow') which are contained in the concrete case, on base of which we do the judgment, and we see that the exact red, orange and yellow don't matter, so our judgment can hold generally for all yellow, red, and orange colors.