International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

1. The production by a message of a specific reaction in a receiving element.

Interactions seem to be inductive by their very nature. Nothing at all should happen if the receiving element would not be able to decipher the signal.

In biology, St. KAUFFMAN considers induction "as a basic intercellular conversation" (1993, p.540).

As the condition for deciphering messages must preexist, induction seems to depend somehow from organizational closure, or autopoiesis.

2. The obtention by reason of a general statement or law from repeated observations.

Or, in R. AXELROD's words: "Induction is the discovery of patterns in empirical data" (1997, p.17)

"For example, in the social sciences, induction is widely used in the analysis of opinion surveys and the macroeconomic data" (Ibid)

According to E.von GLASERSFELD: "… induction, whether it is conscious in the form of a conclusion we draw, or unconscious, in the form of a behavior that becomes established because of its success, springs always from the same root: a more or less regular recurrence in past experience" (1988, p.43).

On induction as a human mental faculty, POPPER proposed to construct an induction machine that "could by repetition "learn" or even "formulate", laws of succession which hold in its "world "… However he immediately criticized his own argument, stating that: "In constructing an induction machine we, the architects of the machine, must decide a priori what constitutes its "world", what things are to be taken as similar or equal; and what kind of "laws" we wish the machine to be able to "discover" in its "world" (Quoted by L. LÖFGREN, 1993, p.104).

As observed in turn by LÖFGREN, quoting TARSKI and GÖDEL, this is still another case of the fact "that there is no language admitting a theory with its own truth predicate" (p.105).

This is coincidental with Ch.S. PEIRCE statement that "induction has its role not in the forming of hypotheses, but (in certain fields) in testing the hypotheses arrived at by abductive inference"(as quoted by P.R. MASANI, 1994, p. 45)

Abduction is thus the "prime mover", followed by induction as "the inference corresponding to the habit-forming aspect of the mind, and deduction is the inference corresponding to the volitional aspect of the mind (Ibid, p. 46)

In all three stages- but to begin with the abduction process- a pre-active involvement of the scientist mind (see the discussion of this term) is always present (Ibid, p. 47)

We may also observe that the "receiving element" of the definition could not decipher any message without counting with the adequate code, which comes to the same as POPPER's argument.