Week 14 Day 3 - Inductive and Abductive Reasoning
0Today we talked about your Capstone essay, which needs to use the three main forms of reasoning.
1) Deductive Reasoning - what we've talked about before in logic. Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens.
2) Inductive Reasoning - when you make a generalization from observations made in the past. For example, if the sun always rises in the east in the past, you can predict (through inductive reasoning) that the sun will rise again in the east in the future.
3) Abductive Reasoning - using all of the available evidence to figure out what the most likely explanation is. For example, if you walk in to a room and your dog is sitting there looking guilty with spaghetti sauce on his face, your plate of spaghetti on the ground, and most of the noodles missing, then using abductive reasoning we would say that the most likely explanation is that the dog knocked the plate off the table and ate it.
Inductive and Abductive reasoning can be wrong. (Deductive reasoning can't be wrong, if the logic is valid and the premises true.) Just because a friend has been reliable in the past doesn't mean they will always be reliable in the future. Just because you see spaghetti sauce on your dog's mouth doesn't mean that it knocked the plate off the table. After all, your kid could have done it, and then the dog just capitalized on the situation.
We also talked in class today about set theory, and briefly introduced the concept of Aleph Null, which is the size of the infinite set of integers.