Difference Between Induction And Induction

A large proportion of human knowledge is derived by way of induction, both in laboratories and in day-to-day settings. For example, after seeing that water boils when the temperature hits 100 degrees Celsius a huge number of times, scientists confidently claim that “water boils at 100 degrees Celsius”, and after seeing the sun rise every morning for years, a father would explain to his child that “the sun rises every morning”. Induction is one form of logic that is usually opposed to deduction and there are different ways of explaining the difference between them. We often distinguish the two by saying that when one is using induction, he or she goes from specific instances to make general rules, while in deduction, he or she goes from general rules to describe specific instances.

We can think of countless bits of knowledge we take for granted but that are derived from experience and for which we cannot hold a solid argument without recourse to perception for example. When we stand in the sun, we sweat. Children develop teeth in their first few years. The threshold of human hearing is 20 000 Hz. Had we not felt ourselves sweat every time we stood under the sun for a considerable amount of time, seen children’s teeth bud every time one of them hit a certain age, and repeatedly heard tones only below 20 000 Hz in experimental manipulations, we would not have come to the above conclusions. They are a posteriori; one can spend all the time on their hands to explain how we can get to them by pure reasoning, in absolute vain. It might seem weird, but definitely plausible, to imagine a world in which it rains without the ground getting wet, in which children do not develop teeth until age 34, and in which humans hear tones above 20 000 Hz just fine. Thus, these matters of fact are just as possible, logically, as conclusions that differ from