Knowledge and Reasoning

Why do we want to know the world?

There are levels to knowing. At the most primitive level, we need to know what’s out there, which is the study of ontology. For that, we describe things as they are through matter-of-fact propositional statements such as “X is Y.” However, this can’t be the only level of knowing because most individuals can’t remain perpetually satisfied believing what they know about the world to be doubtlessly true. So, it becomes important to also investigate the best ways of knowing or knowing how to get to know our ontological truths. This is the realm of second-order thinking, and epistemology is the branch of philosophy dedicated to examining the very nature of belief, knowledge, and the justifications of beliefs as knowledge.

Moreover, deduction and induction are two widely known and established methods of reasoning within epistemology. Deductive reasoning works from general principles toward particular instances/statements and arrives at conclusions with certainty, while inductive reasoning moves in the opposite direction, from particulars to general statements. Both reasoning methods have their strengths. However, an American logician, Charles Sanders Peirce, found that no process of scientific inquiry could be complete without a third type of reasoning. He called it abductive reasoning. Let’s understand the three forms of reasoning and their interrelationship through an example.