 Bertrand Russell Quotes 366 |
Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.
Source: Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy, 1912, cahpt. 6: On Induction
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This is one of Russell's famous parables. Even if you think it is absolutely true, there can be no absolutes in nature. Even Einstein's theory of relativity has recently been observed in phenomena that are suspected to be not valid.
In logic and mathematics, it is likely to be absolutely true, but "1 + 1 = 2" is a promise or a rule that humans have decided so, and "A = A" is a tautology, and we might say that it does not actually assert anything.
Even animals can be pets or food, depending on the country, region, and people.
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