Compare and contrast deductive vs. inductive reasoning.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Deductive reasoning is the making and evaluation of arguments following a logical set of rules or principles. Generally, two types of reasoning have been the focus of philosophical and psychological investigation: syllogistic and conditional reasoning. Syllogistic reasoning is a process by which a conclusion follows necessarily from a series of premises (statements). Conditional reasoning has a similar formal structure with the inclusion of connective words like if and then as part of the first premise. Other types of deductive reasoning that have been identified include conclusion interpretation approaches, representation-explanation approaches, and surface approaches. Deductive reasoning is about absolute truth, which is rare in our day-to-day lives. On the other hand, inductive reasoning examines the likelihood of a conclusion being true, rather than its absolute truth. This is something we do often in everyday reasoning. There are many forms of inductive reasoning. What ties them together as a cohesive set is that they involve reasoning from specific data (based on both observation and knowledge) to broader generalizations. A result of these is the generation of new information. Types of inductive reasoning that have been identified include analogical reasoning, category induction, causal reasoning, hypothesis testing, and counterfactual thinking.