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Chapter 9: The Forms of Reasoning

FAQ

Here are some questions and objections that you may raise in class, and our answers.

How can I come up with a quick hypothesis when you ask a question that I can’t know the answer to until after I find out something about the topic? Don’t I have to read up on something before I can figure out an answer?
You are probably struggling with one or both of two common problems. The first is that the tasks assigned in the academic world are typically artificial. A teacher tells you to write a paper on some topic you don’t know much about—say, Shakespeare’s attitudes toward women. So you have to research it before you can even begin to see a possible problem that some hypothesis might solve. In other words, if you are inexperienced in a field, you can’t come up with any tentative hypotheses (solutions to a problem) because you don’t yet have any problem in need of a solution. In that situation, it is better to read and think, then think and read some more to find something that you find puzzling, unclear, inconsistent, odd, ambiguous, contradictory, and so on, something that motivates you to think, Hmmm, I wonder why . . . At that point, you might begin to formulate a tentative hypothesis / answer / solution. You have to wait until you get a mental itch that you want to scratch.

The other problem might be that you don’t know where to begin because you have no experience solving the kind of problem that has been put to you. If you had more experience, you could narrow your search for a solution to those like the ones you’ve seen before. The more experience you get solving related problems, the more specifically you can frame them, and so the more specifically you can imagine a solution (or hypothesis). We all have to earn that experience by spending time working on lots of problems. Until then, we not only have to work hard to think up a solution, we even have to work hard to find a problem for which there might be a solution.

Can you explain inductive, deductive, and abductive again?
Abductive thinking requires two distinct steps:

First, you come up with a possible solution to a problem.
How do you do that? Who knows? Maybe it’s inspiration, or memory, or just a lucky hunch.
Once you imagine a hypothesis, you then test it against what you already know and against new data that you gather.

If your hypothesis explains the data better than any other, it’s defensible.

Pure inductive thinking and deductive thinking are harder to illustrate, because we usually think both inductively and deductively to test a hypothesis that we generated through abductive thinking. Let’s say that you face the conceptual problem of explaining why most species of large mammals disappeared from North America about 12,000 or so years ago, about the time that those we call Native Americans first arrived on this continent. You think the extinction might have been a combination of disease and climate change. You test that hypothesis inductively by looking for data that the hypothesis would explain, gathering evidence of big climate changes at that time and of disease in the remains of large mammals. You look for similar mass extinctions in other parts of the world that were also accompanied by evidence of disease and climate change. In that kind of inductive testing you gather individual bits of data and then decide whether your hypothesis explains them better than any other hypothesis.

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