Science is an exercise in inductive reasoning: we are making observations and trying to infer general rules from them. Induction can never be certain. In contrast, deductive reasoning is easier: you deduce what you would expect to observe if some general rule were true and then compare it with what you actually see. The problem is that, for a scientist, deductive arguments don’t directly answer the question that you want to ask.
Induction, philosophy’s toughest zombie
- By PeterM in .Colquhoun, David, “The problem with p-values”
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17 October 2016
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3 comments
Author
Then maybe you should ask smarter questions…
I have more problems wrapping my head around abduction.
Author
That’s possibly because abduction is nothing but lots of hand-waving around a core of bog-standard, naive induction. 😉