Chapter 7, On Our Knowledge of General Principles Summary and Analysis

Induction is required for most of our beliefs but it is not proved by experience. It turns out that there are other such general principles that have the same statue. There are other principles of inference that cannot be similarly proved.

Sometimes we arrive at knowledge of general principles by seeing some particular application of the principle, seeing the particularity is irrelevant and then seeing the general proof. We might learn that two and two are four in this way. The fact that two apples and two apples are four apples is not true because the objects in question are apples. Some laws are deductive; if the premises are true, then the conclusion follows immediately.

These include the "Laws of Thought", Identity: "Whatever is, is", Contradiction: "Nothing can both...