A withholding of confident generalization until enough facts have been integrated so that you can deduce noted properties from the relations of fundamental particularities.

If I'm misunderstanding this rule, please correct me. As I understand you so far, I have a reservation.

Doesn't it seem that scientific generalizations are often reached, and put to work in science and technology, and yet there is nothing any deeper in nature---so far as we are aware---that explains the fact asserted in the generalization. I'm thinking of the principle of inertia, which Newton adopted as the first axiom of his mechanics for the Principia. That principle says that a body will remain at rest or in constant-speed, straight-line motion unless it is acted upon by a force. Descartes (and Galileo almost) was the first to arrive at this important principle. Getting the definition of force right was an accomplishment of Newton, but from then to now, the principle of inertia is a mighty good one.

Couldn't the principle of inertia be a justifiably confident generalization even though we haven't deduced it from "relations of fundamental particularities"? Among our justifiably confident generalizations, could they divide into a few different classes having different kinds of warranty?

[I know that in the case of the principle of inertia we do have something of a deeper explanation for it thanks to Einstein's General Relativity. But lets look at the principle as it looked before that, for the sake of illustration.]

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Concerning getting a copy of my article "Induction on Identity", just let me know your surface-mail address, and I'll send it to you for free.

For the past several months, programmers have been working to put the full text of all twelve issues of OBJECTIVITY online. The writers are very pleased I'm finally having this done. This is an exact reprinting of the journal in the original typesetting and layout. This new site will be freely open to all readers and researchers.

It will be a few more months before Objectivity_Archive is completed. The critical path is the creation of a comprehensive Subject Index for the entire 1777 pages of the journal. Here is a sample entry to that index as it stood when the first four of the twelve issues had been indexed:

Induction V1N2 33–44, V1N3 1–51; Abstractive V1N2 36–37, 44; Ampliative V1N2 36–37, 41, 44, V1N3 15, 17, 21–32, 35–43, V1N4 15; and Categories V1N1 22, V1N3 13; and Concepts V1N1 29, 35–38, V1N2 36, 42–44; Consilience of V1N3 14, 38, 49; and Deduction V1N2 14, 29, 33–36, 40, V1N3 15, 31–32, 36–37, 40–41, 47–48, V1N4 33–34, 50; and Identity V1N2 33–35, 36–44, V1N3 5–16, 21–32, 35–43, 46–49, V1N4 27–28; Mathematical V1N2 41–42, V1N3 46–48; and Object Perception V1N3 7–8, 61; Reflective V1N4 50–52

Stephen

You have 2 dice, and you want to generalize what kind of outcomes you'd get by rolling them. A veridical generalization that can be made -- true for all past, present, and future rolls -- would be that you won't ever get 13. The reason you won't is because of the mechanics of dice rolling. Nothing "deeper in nature" need be understood here -- just this one, limiting, mechanic.

You don't have to understand the positive probabilities of various outcomes in dice rolling, for instance -- in order to understand that you'll never roll a 13. You don't even have to understand the physics behind that last turn of the dice