A NOTE ON 'the SCIENTIFIC METHOD*' 



have always been solved and are best solved by its own prac- 

 titioners, and no more need be said about them here. But 

 several things are Avorth saying about deduction. From the 

 days of Sextus Empiricus onwards philosophers have con- 

 fidently or more or less reluctantly affirmed that the process of 

 deduction is simply the unravelling of tautology. Deduction 

 renders explicit, discloses or makes manifest the information 

 concealed within the axioms from which it issues; so far from 

 adding new information, it merely attenuates it or makes it 

 more dilute.* Thus the theorems of Euclid are but a few of the 

 endless possible reaffirmations of his axioms; they exist as 

 reproachful evidence of the mind"'s imperfection, because for 

 a perfect mind the axioms would be enough. Deduction in- 

 volves no creative act of mind and no imagination. The Mech- 

 anical Brain will one day undertake our deductive reasoning 

 for us; to some extent it already does. The respect that our now 

 queasy Frankensteins show for their intricate but guileless 

 monster may be due to their realization that mathematics is 

 but tautology after all. If that is so, it will serve them right for 

 the qualms they have caused among the laity if such a Brain 

 one day submits its candidature for the Wayneflete or Sadleir- 

 ian Chair. 



A second property of deduction is of the utmost importance 

 for appreciating the validity of what is so often recklessly 

 spoken of as ''proof\ The rigours of deduction are in one way 

 curiously overrated: it proves to be quite a lenient discipline 

 after all. For when it is said that one state ment^/bZZoz£'*yrom 

 another, deduction admits any combination between the truth 

 or falsity of either except just one: that the first statement 

 should be true and the second false. All that it guarantees 

 among alternative possibilities is that what follows from a true 

 premiss should be true. The dilemma of ""proof is simply that an 



*[H. A. Rowlands has put it admirably: deduction obeys a Law of 

 Conservation of Knowledge.] 



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