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MyWikiBiz, Author Your Legacy — Friday April 19, 2024
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Accordingly, if we are engaged in symbolizing and we come to such a proposition as "Neat, swine, sheep, and deer are herbivorous", we know firstly that the disjunctive term may be replaced by a true symbol.  But suppose we know of no symbol for neat, swine, sheep, and deer except cloven-hoofed animals.  There is but one objection to substituting this for the disjunctive term;  it is that we should, then, say more than we have observed.  In short, it has a superfluous information.  But we have already seen that this is an objection which must always stand in the way of taking symbols.  If therefore we are to use symbols at all we must use them notwithstanding that.  Now all thinking is a process of symbolization, for the conceptions of the understanding are symbols in the strict sense.  Unless, therefore, we are to give up thinking altogeher we must admit the validity of induction.  But even to doubt is to think.  So we cannot give up thinking and the validity of induction must be admitted. (Peirce 1866, "Lowell Lecture 7", CE 1, 469).
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<p>Accordingly, if we are engaged in symbolizing and we come to such a proposition as "Neat, swine, sheep, and deer are herbivorous", we know firstly that the disjunctive term may be replaced by a true symbol.  But suppose we know of no symbol for neat, swine, sheep, and deer except cloven-hoofed animals.  There is but one objection to substituting this for the disjunctive term;  it is that we should, then, say more than we have observed.  In short, it has a superfluous information.  But we have already seen that this is an objection which must always stand in the way of taking symbols.  If therefore we are to use symbols at all we must use them notwithstanding that.  Now all thinking is a process of symbolization, for the conceptions of the understanding are symbols in the strict sense.  Unless, therefore, we are to give up thinking altogeher we must admit the validity of induction.  But even to doubt is to think.  So we cannot give up thinking and the validity of induction must be admitted.</p>
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<p>(Peirce 1866, Lowell Lecture 7, CE 1, 469).</p>
 
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