New pathways in science / by Sir Arthur Eddington.

  • Eddington, Arthur Stanley, Sir, 1882-1944.
Date:
1935
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: New pathways in science / by Sir Arthur Eddington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    a rule of inference, so that it helps us in further decipherment just as in solving an ordinary cryptogram. I do not know how a logician would classify the process of solving a cryptogram. The decoded message is inferred from the cryptogram, but the method of inference can scarcely be described as logical deduction. In saying that the scientific description of the external world is inferred from our sensory experience, and that the entities of the physical world arc inferences, I use the word inference in this broad sense. Our task then is to discover a scheme revealed by the regularities and recurrencies in our sensory experience. Since these regularities occur in the sensory experience of all men the scheme is presented as an external world Unking together the experiences of different individual consciousnesses. In thus defining the object of our search we determine to a certain extent the nature of that which we shall fmd. The universe of physics must by its very definition have the two characteristics of regularity (or partial regularity) and ex¬ ternality. We do not contest the right of anyone who is interested in other aspects of sense data, or of the conscious¬ ness in which they reside, to pursue his investigations in his own way; but so far as physical science is concerned we drop everything that is inessential to the elucidation of regularities and recurrencies. I must also emphasise the significance of the term “external”. The famihar world of my perception seems to be external; but, in the courts of science, what the famihar story teller says is not evidence. The world of my dreams also seems to be external, but it has no existence outside my mind. The argument that the world containing the entities of physics is external is quite independent. When I examine the content of my consciousness with a view to formulating the recurrencies of my sensory experience, there are two possible ways of treating the data—two ways in which I