Throughout history there has always been a drive for humans to attain hypothesize and test theories of their world; in order to attain knowledge and truth. And in order to find the truth of their world, scientists have found two main types of reasoning to support these theories; divided into deductive and inductive reasoning. While deductive logic provided a guarantee to the truth, inductive reasoning is much more in the controversial area. It was so controversial to the point that some philosophers, like Karl Popper, rejected the existence idea of inductive reasoning completely; going even further than David Hume’s opinion on its lack of rational justification. In this essay I will first be defining both deductive and inductive reasoning, as a layer of background knowledge, and then moving on to Hume and Popper’s problems with the idea of inductive reasoning, and finally conclude with responses to both philosopher’s rejections, that refute their opinions.
To discuss opinions on a subject there must first be an initial knowledge of the subject. Thus, I will be differentiating between deductive and inductive reasoning, and then move on to Hume and Popper’s rejections. Deductive logic or reasoning, sometimes called the top-down approach, is the favoured
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One of the main criticisms Popper’s peers had, and I had myself, of this idea was the skepticism of falsification; just because an observation does not match its theory does not then mean that the theory is false. One cannot assume that the fault or error resides within the theory; there is the same level of probability the error was within the experiment, and therefore cause irregularities in one’s theory. For example, irregularities in Uranus’ orbit did not falsify Newton’s theory of gravity because the Neptune had not yet been discovered (2012). So, we can say that in fact, it is just as difficult to prove a theory false as it is to prove it