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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Inductive reasoning: Suppose I have very large set of items. I want to prove that some property is true for all the items. I first start by proving its truthfulness for the first item, then I prove that for every item for which the property is true, the property holds for the next item as well.
Example: I have a very long strip of LED lights. I want to prove that every single light is set to red. If I can prove that 1) the first light is red and 2) a light cannot turn red unless the light next to it is already red, then I don’t need to check every light color to know the entire strip is lit up in red. That’s inductive reasoning, going from the specific to the general. This example might be a bit unnatural, but many things use inductive reasoning. Pollsters make generalizations about what the population thing based on small sample sizes. It’s the same 2 step process: 1) 60% of a picked sample of people think speed limits are lame 2) what is true for a properly chosen small sample of society must hold true for a larger set of people. So we use induction to say that 60% of everyone thinks speed limits are lame.
Deductive reasoning is simply the reverse process, and it seems very trivial because it’s how we always reason. If I know that all items in a set satisfy a condition, then I know that condition is true for every individual item as long as I can prove it is indeed part of that set that I just described.
If I know that all light sources in a room are blue, and I find a glowstick, then I know that glowstick must be blue as well without needing to turn it on and verify, because a glowstick is a light source. The reasoning goes from the general (all lights are blue) to the special (glowsticks are blue)
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