What is the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning?
Deductive reasoning involves logically extrapolating from a set of premises or hypotheses. You can think of this as logical “if-then” reasoning. For example, IF an asteroid strikes Earth, and IF iridium is more prevalent in asteroids than in Earth’s crust, and IF nothing else happens to the asteroid iridium afterwards, THEN there will be a spike in iridium levels at Earth’s surface. The THEN statement is the logical consequence of the IF statements. Another case of deductive reasoning involves reasoning from a general premise or hypothesis to a specific instance. For example, based on the idea that all living things are built from cells, we might deduce that a jellyfish (a specific example of a living thing) has cells. Inductive reasoning, on the other hand, involves making a generalization based on many individual observations. For example, a scientist who samples rock layers from the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) boundary in many different places all over the world and always observes a s
