Science is about discovering the reasons why things happen in the universe , so it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that scientific knowledge is gained through reasoning. There’s more than a single way to reason, though, and one plays a much bigger role in science than any other.
Deduction is a form of reasoning that uses broad, generalized facts to draw conclusions about specific questions or events. For example, let’s say you got to bed one night, wakeup at dawn, and the ground is covered in a layer of fresh snow. You also see a line of tiny footprints imprinted on the snow. Using deductive reasoning, you know an animal walked there during the night. You reach this conclusion because, a: animals leave footprints when they walk through snow; and b: the snow fell during the night; therefore, c: an animal walked across the snow during the night. If a and be are true, then c must be true.
Deduction doesn’t really lead to new knowledge, though. When a more general truth is already known, deduction simply proves that more specific instances are true as well. You know that gravity causes objects to fall when they’re dropped, and an apple is an object, so concluding that an apple will fall when it’s dropped isn’t particularly informative.
Science is mainly based on induction, which, in a way, is the opposite of deduction. Inductive reasoning uses specific examples to draw more general conclusions. Going back to the tracks in the snow, induction might lead you to conclude that a possum walked across the yard at night. In five years, you've never observed any animals but possums during the night. The tracks also appear to have been made by a small, four-legged animal. Therefore, it was most likely a possum that crossed the yard. Inductive reasoning leads to most likely conclusions, but there's always a chance, no matter how small, that something else is the answer.
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