[6] Evolving in phases, inductivism's conceptual reign spanned four centuries since Francis Bacon's 1620 proposal of such against Western Europe's prevailing model, scholasticism, which reasoned deductively from preconceived beliefs.
Kant intuited that necessity exists, indeed, bridging the world in itself to human experience, and that it is the mind, having innate constants that determine space, time, and substance, and thus ensure the empirically correct physical theory's universal truth.
[17] Thus shielding Newtonian physics by discarding scientific realism, Kant's view limited science to tracing appearances, mere phenomena, never unveiling external reality, the noumena.
In its milder variant, Rudolf Carnap tried, but always failed, to find an inductive logic whereby a universal law's truth via observational evidence could be quantified by "degree of confirmation".
[19] In any case, during the 20th century, philosophers of science accepted that scientific method's truer idealization is hypotheticodeductivism, which, especially in its strongest form, Karl Popper's falsificationism, is also termed deductivism.
[20] Extending inductivism, Comtean positivism explicitly aims to oppose metaphysics, shuns imaginative theorizing, emphasizes observation, then making predictions, confirming them, and stating laws.
[24] In hypotheticodeductivism, the HD model, one introduces some explanation or principle from any source, such as imagination or even a dream, infers logical consequences of it—that is, deductive inferences—and compares those with observations, perhaps experimental.
In 1620 in England, Francis Bacon's treatise Novum Organum alleged that scholasticism's Aristotelian method of deductive inference via syllogistic logic upon traditional categories was impeding society's progress.
[14] But, as Bacon provides no clear way to frame axioms, let alone develop principles or theoretical constructs universally true, researchers might observe and collect data endlessly.
[13] For this vast venture, Bacon's advised precise record keeping and collaboration among researchers—a vision resembling today's research institutes—while the true understanding of nature would permit technological innovation, heralding a New Atlantis.
Nicolaus Copernicus proposed heliocentrism, perhaps to better fit astronomy to Aristotelian physics' fifth element—the universal essence, or quintessence, the aether—whose intrinsic motion, explaining celestial observations, was perpetual, perfect circles.
[35] Rather, Hume sought to counter Copernican displacement of humankind from the Universe's center, and to redirect intellectual attention to human nature as the central point of knowledge.
[37] Though skeptical at common metaphysics or theology, Hume accepted "genuine Theism and Religion" and found a rational person must believe in God to explain the structure of nature and order of the universe.
[40] Reasoning that the mind contains categories organizing sense data into the experiences substance, space, and time,[41] Kant thereby inferred uniformity of nature, after all, in the form of a priori knowledge.
[47] Comte considered, enumerative induction to be reliable, upon the basis of experience available, and asserted that science's proper use is improving human society, not attaining metaphysical truth.
[45] According to Comte, scientific method constrains itself to observations, but frames predictions, confirms these, rather, and states laws—positive statements—irrefutable by theology and by metaphysics, and then lays the laws as foundation for subsequent knowledge.
During the 19th century, French chemists were influential, like Antoine Béchamp and Louis Pasteur, who inaugurated biomedicine, yet Germany gained the lead in science,[48] by combining physics, physiology, pathology, medical bacteriology, and applied chemistry.
[48] Before Germany's lead in science, France's was upended by the first French Revolution,[48] whose Reign of Terror beheaded Lavoisier, reputedly for selling diluted beer, and led to Napoleon's wars.
[48] Herbert Spencer helped popularize the word sociology in England, and compiled vast data aiming to infer general theory through empirical analysis.
Carl Hempel, who had studied under Reichenbach, and would be a Vienna Circle alumnus, would later lead the movement from America, which, along with England, received emigration of many logical positivists during Hitler's regime.
With this program termed verificationism, logical positivists battled the Marburg school's neoKantianism, Husserlian phenomenology, and, as their very epitome of philosophical transgression, Heidegger's "existential hermeneutics", which Carnap accused of the most flagrant "pseudostatements".
[81] Herbert Feigl as well as Hans Reichenbach, apparently independently, thus sought to show enumerative induction simply useful, either a "good" or the "best" method for the goal at hand, making predictions.
[93] Willard Van Orman Quine's 1951 paper "Two dogmas of empiricism"—explaining semantic holism, whereby any term's meaning draws from the speaker's beliefs about the whole world—cast Hume's fork, which posed the analytic/synthetic division as unbridgeable, as itself untenable.
[90] Among verificationism's greatest internal critics, Carl Hempel had recently concluded that the verifiability criterion, too, is untenable, as it would cast not only religious assertions and metaphysical statements, but even scientific laws of universal type as cognitively meaningless.
[97] Lacking such heavy use of mathematics and logic's formal language—an approach introduced in the Vienna Circle's Rudolf Carnap in the 1920s—Kuhn's book, powerful and persuasive, used natural language open to laypersons.
[110] The tentative solution is improvised, an imaginative leap unguided by inductive rules, and the resulting universal law is deductive, an entailed consequence of all, included explanatory considerations.
[111] Enumerative induction obviously occurs as a summary conclusion, but its literal operation is unclear, as it may, as Popper explains, reflect deductive inference from an underlying, unstated explanation of the observations.
[104] On the other hand, likened to economists of the 19th century who took circuitous, protracted measures to deflect falsification of their own preconceived principles,[49] the verificationists—that is, the logical positivists—became identified as pillars of scientism,[118] allegedly asserting strict inductivism,[119] as well as foundationalism,[99][100] to ground all empirical sciences to a foundation of direct sensory experience.
[69] Yet the Vienna Circle had pioneered nonfoundationalism, a legacy especially of its member Otto Neurath, whose coherentism—the main alternative to foundationalism—likened science to a boat that scientists must rebuild at sea without ever touching shore.
[6] Feyerabend investigated, eventually concluding that even in the natural sciences, the unifying method is Anything goes—often rhetoric, circular reasoning, propaganda, deception, and subterfuge—methodological lawlessness, scientific anarchy.