What s the difference between induction and deduction?

Answer 1

Inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning are terms used to describe logic processes.

In general, the inductive process involves a small amount of input observation or information to arrive at a larger conclusion. The deductive process, on the other hand, involves a view of the entire picture to arrive at a conclusion.

Example:

Our farm has a number of chickens and pigs, all kept in the same barn. Each morning we go into the barn and find (among other things), eggs. We are trying to determine where the eggs are coming from, so we separate the chickens and pigs into different barns and voilá! we find eggs only in the chicken barn!

From this, having seen the overall picture, we deduce (deductive reasoning) that chickens lay eggs, and pigs do not (at least our chickens and our pigs). We wait a very long time and still the pigs do not lay eggs, so we further deduce that our pigs neverlay eggs. The longer we wait, the more accurate our conclusion will be, for our pigs.

Now we want to know if all chickens lay eggs, so we separate each chicken into its own cubicle and, after a number of days, we find at least one egg in each cubicle. We now know that all our chickens lay eggs, and with this small bit of information, we use inductive reasoning to conclude that allchickens lay eggs. The more chickens we test, the more likely we are to be correct, but with a such a small sample, we stand a very good chance of being wrong.