Almost every website that talks about it says, “Inductive reasoning is a bottom up” approach while “deductive is a top down approach”.
Can anyone explain to me the THE DIFFERENCE? What makes these two forms of reasoning so different? Examples are always appreciated as well.
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Deductive reasoning gets you to absolute truth’s and falsehoods. You get certainty from deduction. “All bachelors are unmarried men” is an absolute fact. You cant argue it. If you see a man who is unmarried, you can say with absolute certainty that that man is a bachelor. It’s simply something that proceeds logically from the definition.
The problem is that most stuff isn’t as certain as a definition. This is where inductive reasoning comes in. “The sun will rise tomorrow” is a thing we’ve seen happen on a consistent basis for all human history, but can we claim beyond *any doubt whatsoever* that it will rise tomorrow? Most people would but if you talk to philosophers they’ll tell you we are *overwhelmingly confident* the sun will rise, but that we don’t capital-K ‘***Know’.*** We can eliminate 99.9% of uncertainty, but can never eliminate 100%. There is always something we can come up with to doubt a conclusion (what if the world blows up? what if a wormhole opens and sucks our sun away? what if we wake up and realize our whole life, including the sun, was a simulation?).
Scientists perform inductive reasoning. They subtract uncertainty to get closer to knowledge. They chip away at what they do not know, and what they’re left with is closer to the truth, but there’s always something else that can be chipped. They can tell you what the truth *probably* is, and give you an insane level of detail into exactly how ‘probably true’ it is.
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