A joke I first heard from the physicist Josef M. Gaßner, in one of his YouTube posts:
A man once wanted to eat an apple, took a bite, chewed and swallowed, and when he went to take a second bite, he noticed that half a worm was sticking out of the apple. Hm, he said, I ate half a worm. Then he took another apple, and after biting, he noticed that a quarter of a worm was coming out of the apple. Ah, he said, now I have eaten three quarters of a worm. He took another apple, took a bite, and saw that no worm was coming out of this apple. That’s terrible, he said, now I’ve eaten a whole worm!
My comment:
In our empirical intuitions we do not intuit the individual but the general.
We have contact with a single object, but what we associate in our mind with that object is a general scheme of recognizing it (in Kant’s terms).
We do not need to eat all the red mushrooms in the forest to realize (by the method of complete induction) that they are poisonous. We do not need to know all Cretans to conclude that all Cretans are liars (Epimenides’ paradox). It is enough for one man to do you harm once, and after that you become circumspect of all men who resemble him in one respect or another.
In a way empirical experience provokes in us a kind of paranoia, a prejudice that will polarize all our subsequent experiences. True knowledge is the result of our striving to free ourselves from the domination of our empirical prejudices and rising to the height of some universal judgments, which cannot be otherwise than essentially ambiguous.
After the first bite, the experimentalist physicist in us says that in every apple there must be a worm. After the second bite, the experimentalist physicist in us believes that he has received empirical confirmation of the hypothesis and can generalize it as scientific truth. After the third bite the experimentalist physicist in us deduces a “reality”, which, in fact, exists only in his head.
Kantinomus Verlag 