Types of Reasoning
Our thoughts form a conclusion and a conclusion is formed by reasoning. Reasoning enables us to assess a situation and an answer to it.
Despite its importance, we neglect it. We don’t think thoroughly as to why and how we reached a conclusion. By understanding that though, we can change our lives completely. After all, reasoning remains with us from birth till death.
There are three types of reasoning: Deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning.
Deductive Reasoning
Deductive reasoning is the most straightforward one. This is the one we have studied in mathematics at school. It relies on the premises being true and if the premises is true then we can draw a conclusion to be true depending on the situation.
If the question is whether Rahul is a mammal then we can go to our premise that all humans are mammals so we conclude that Rahul is a mammal.
However, it must be noted that in this reasoning we assume that the premise is valid and under such an assumption, we form a conclusion. If the premise is false then the argument may be logically correct but is false and the premise and conclusion cannot be the same since if they were, it would be circular reasoning.
Inductive Reasoning
Inductive reasoning is mostly deductive reasoning. The only difference lies in the premise. In deductive reasoning, the premise is certainty whereas in inductive, it’s a probability.
Generally, if we know something has a high probability of being true and we draw conclusions based on it then it’s inductive. For example, if the car is wet then we conclude that it rained. While this is true most of the time, in this specific scenario, the car was wet because someone accidentally sprayed it.
Of course, this example is a bit nonsensical because if it rained then the surrounding region would be wet as well but this is a theoretical example.
On another note, inductive reasoning can be said to be used a lot regarding past data and guessing the present. If the country’s GDP was xyz and it’s growth a% last year then we can guess what it will be this year.
Abductive Reasoning
Abductive reasoning can be said to be under inductive reasoning or vice versa. Abductive reasoning has a far more personal taste to it. It’s about dealing with an incomplete set of premises and making a conclusion.
This type of reasoning can be seen in Sherlock Holmes mostly.
When we say an incomplete set of premises, we don’t know if a premise is even related to the conclusion. We guess based on our expertise and its likelihood of relation to it.
For example, if Sherlock is investigating a crime scene at a house then he may see an open chest, a person dead and other observations he noted such as the weather, the timing of the murder and the closest friends to the person dead.
Considering the open chest, he may assume and infer that this was a case related to theft of jewelry but in fact the culprit destroyed an important document in the dead person’s laptop that Sherlock didn’t think of and was led astray by the culprit.
In this scenario, the false premise was the chest whereas the true premise is the laptop riddled with the culprit’s fingerprints. But since Sherlock considered the false premise, his conclusion thereby was false as well.
As bad as an example that was, I hope you understood what I mean. Moving on, it seems like people are confused with inductive and abductive the most.
Inductive involves dealing with a set of premises we are highly confident are related while abductive is a blind man guessing the premises through his expertise related to the conclusion.