Induction, philosophy’s toughest zombie

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.

3 comments

  1. Then maybe you should ask smarter questions…

    • JortM on 27 July 2017 at 17:10
    • Reply

    I have more problems wrapping my head around abduction.

      • PeterM on 2 August 2017 at 20:37
        Author

      That’s possibly because abduction is nothing but lots of hand-waving around a core of bog-standard, naive induction. 😉

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