Message #29653

[Bianca]

And whatever the data, it can be handled in different ways. A natural scientist tends to use the kind of logic called inductive. That is, a common part of the scientific method is to observe many instances of something happening a particular way—and if the something happens or is observed the same way each time, a scientist may assume with some degree of reliability that it will always happen that way. A predictive theory is so constructed. This is thinking proceeding from specific cases to a general statement, a hypothesis. This is one way of moving from evidence to proof.

Although all thinkers use induction to a great degree, the humanities tend to be deductive. They take a specific happening or statement, combine it with other facts derived from other happenings, and draw inferences or conclusions. (A majority of people in Hidalgo County speak Spanish; people in Hidalgo County who speak Spanish are of Mexican descent; therefore, the majority of people in Hidalgo County are of Mexican descent.) Deduction works well unless any part of the process is invalid or a statement is not true—as in the example above. Then, the whole construction turns out to be logically unsound, or false, even though the truth of the final conclusion may still be “true” if proven by other means.

The social sciences—sociology, psychology, much education these days—are in the middle of all of this. Some workers in these fields try to establish general, reproducible facts through experiments in the same manner as physicists.(2)

Of course, some statements are true because they are definitions: “A red traffic light means stop,” or “all bachelors are unmarried.” These statements are true by arbitrary definition. But everyone is aware that most of the statements of history are hardly definitions—they are questioned, changed, and reinterpreted in different centuries even when taken from the same data.