ShmoopTube

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Inductive versus deductive reasoning a la shmoop as you may have

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heard there is a more than one way to skin a cat although none of them are [Cat appears by a bunch of flowers]

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endorsed by peta in the same vein there is more than one way to apply reason for

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example you may decide that it wouldn't be a good idea for you to skin a cat

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because all living things are precious and you may be incurring the wrath of [God in the sky]

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God by so callously torturing one of his creatures or you might just realize that

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you got too much homework to do tonight either way there's cats somewhere

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sighing a huge meow of relief when it comes to reasoning there are two ways to

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do it by using inductive reasoning or by using deductive reasoning those are the

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main ways of reasoning and of course you could also try using

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seductive reasoning but you better look good in a nightie yeah sorry there pal [Man in a pink nightie on a bed]

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well deductive reasoning starts with a statement about something big and then

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it whittles it down to something smaller for example if you say that all tractors

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are red and your dad has a tractor well you can deduce that your dad's tractor [Man on a tractor]

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is red and there's like a communist subtext in there somewhere people we're

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sure of it all right well however in order for it to work the original

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statement has to be true otherwise you're practicing faulty reasoning and

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you're gonna arrive at an untrue conclusion as it so happens your dad's

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tractor is pink although he insists that it's called light salmon thank you very [Dad driving a pink tractor]

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much inductive reasoning on the other hand starts with something small and

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then moves outward to something bigger like my sister has a pierced ear she is

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in a band so everyone in the band has a pierced ear well we haven't interviewed [Band members with pierced ears]

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everyone in the band but that we find that

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conclusion unlikely inductive reasoning tends to result in some sloppy

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conclusions like the one demonstrated here it isn't without merit though

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inductive reasoning is a good way to come up with a hypothesis about

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something and then you can use deductive reasoning to apply that hypothesis and

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see if it sticks like you might say that anvils are affected by gravity and [Anvil falls]

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feathers are affected by gravity therefore everything is affected by

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gravity it all seems pretty legit unless one day we find something that isn't

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affected by gravity a concept that would probably hit us like a ton of bricks and [Brick hits man in the face]

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yeah in that case we have to revisit our conclusion let's try another example and

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see what happens inductive reasoning the Sun is a star

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the Sun is not in my coffee mug therefore no stars are in my coffee mug

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all right first of all it's just kind of weird now let's use deductive reasoning

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in the reverse order isn't that an add subtly for Starbucks

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and maybe not...all right and we say there are no stars in my coffee mug the Sun is

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a star the Sun must not be in my coffee mug haha success! [Man discussing sun and stars with coffee mug]

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the Sun is indeed not in my coffee mug although our tongues beg to differ

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ouch

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