Anfal M.

Alowaishez 212504643 October 6, 2011

King Faisal University College of Arts Foreign Languages Dept. Higher Studies Applied Linguistics Program

Research Methodology Course

Dr. Alaeddin Hussain

Inductivism, Deductivism, and Hypothetic-deductivism

What are the differences between the 3 research approaches? (inductivism, deductivisim, and hypothetico-deductivism) Humans can not stop thinking. Whether is a personal decisions, a scientic problems or a new discoveries, there is this need to prove our reasoning. Inductive, deductive, and hupothetico-deductive are all approaches which can be used to evaluate information. They are used on a daily basis by people all over the world for tasks which range from solving the math homework to developing new theories in the science. Each approach is very different. The brain is so adept at many kinds of reasoning that it often does it on a level which people are not fully aware of. They use reason to make sense of the world and the things observed in it. Induction is a form of reasoning in which one arrives at general principles or laws by generalizing over specic cases; takes a series of specic observations and tries to expand them into a more general theory. A simple example of an inductive generalization is the generalization that the sun comes up every day. We arrive at such generalizations by observing specic events, such as the sun coming up on a specic day, and then generalizing over other events which are thought by the observer to count as instances of the same type of event, for example, the sun coming up on subsequent days. Hume argued that these types of proposition are less certain. He claimed that inductive generalizations are not well-founded in logic. From the fact that the sun has come up on all the preceding days of our lives, it does not follow logically that it will come up tomorrow, or, more generally, that there is a valid general law which states that it comes up every day. A clear example of the uncertain nature of inductive generalizations is the case of the generalization that all swans are white. From the fact that all swans one has previously observed were white, it does not follow that the next swan one will observe will be white. The discovery of black swans in Australia showed that this particular inductive generalization, once held to be true, was in fact false. In stating that inductive generalizations have no basis in logic, one need not deny that such generalizations are well-founded psychologically, and Humes theory of induction was indeed a psychological theory: he argued that repeated observation of the same event causes us to arrive at inductive generalizations. In a famous example of inductive reasoning, some people in the ancient world believed that meat spontaneously gave rise to maggots. Their conclusion was based on the observation that if meat was left out, maggots would appear on it. Someone else decided to test this theory by seeking for disproof: Would it be possible to leave meat out and not have maggots appear? By sequestering meat in various containers next to fully exposed meat, the scientist realized that the maggots were, in fact, the result of eggs laid by ies. Inductive reasoning is commonly seen in the sciences when people want to make

sense of a series of observation. Isaac Newton, for example, famously used inductive reasoning to develop a theory of gravity. Using observations, people can develop a theory to explain those observations, and seek out disproof of that theory. As can be seen in the meat example above, one of the major aws with inductive reasoning is that it is dependent on observations, and when observations are incomplete, unsound results may be formulated.

Deduction, on the other hand, is a form of reasoning in which one proceeds from general principles or laws to specic cases. Deduction reasoning is different in kind from induction reasoning, since deduction is founded in logic: in the syllogism All men are mortal; Peter is a man; therefore Peter is mortal. The conclusion that Peter is mortal follows logically as a deduction from the premises. Whether the premises are wellfounded is another matter: the argument is logically sound. For deductivists, the road to science was collecting and studying as many theories as possible. With deductive reasoning, one takes a general theory or idea, tests it, and moves through a sequence of ideas to arrive at a specic conclusion. It is possible to arrive at an unsound result by using an initial premise which is false, as in this case: Every animal that eats mice is a cat. Rover eats mice. Therefore, Rover is a cat. The goal of deductive reasoning is to arrive at a valid chain of reasoning, in which each statement holds up to testing, but it is possible for deductive reasoning to be both valid and unsound. hypothetico-deductive

approach is the deductive approach on its extreme. It aims to minimize the errors to zero by continuous testing. The hypothetico-deductive method rejects the idea of conrming theories, since there are always alternative hypotheses that can account for the same data and thus can be just as well conrmed. This method supporters argue instead that scientists formulate hypotheses and then test them by making predictions on the basis of the hypotheses and checking the validity of their predictions. If the predictions are inaccurate, the hypothesis must be rejected; if they are accurate, the hypothesis is accepted, but only tentatively as a hypothesis that has withstood the test and has not yet been falsied. According to Popper, the mark of a scientist is his or her willingness to subject a hypothesis to refutation. Scientic theories are those in which refuting instances can be specied. Hypothetico-deductivism rejects the context of discovery so crucial to the inductivist. As the inductivist places a high degree of credibility in the senses and observation to derive observable facts from the perceptions, the hypothetico-deductivism resists this belief. Hypothetico-deductivism asserts that facts are not always observable. In microbiology, physics, and other elds, things are more often too small to be observed by the human eye alone, not to mention microscopic organisms that have been discovered in recent years. Furthermore, a hypothetico-deductivist would point to the fact that many things have come to scientists not by observation, but rather by accident, through dreams, visions and preexisting theories. Hypothetico-deductivism rejects the notion that facts are neutral and objective. Facts are theory-laden and dependent. Human eyes are not passive receptors, and this criticism is only conrmed upon showing the same picture to two people, getting two different results. The context of discovery, so important to the observationally dependent inductivist is set aside, scientic progress is interpreted by examples of accidental discovery, conrmed conjectures, and theory-derived-hypotheses. Hypothetico-deductivism requires no such specic process, instead relying on conrmation of a particular theory. The more a scientic theory is conrmed, the better, and every subsequent test that reafrms the original hypothesis gives more credibility to the original theory. The status and role of these forms of reasoning inference in human thought have been much discussed in the history. No-one doubts that human beings are capable of both kinds of reasoning, but there has been much debate as to exactly what role they play in establishing human knowledge. It may seem that inductive arguments are weaker than deductive arguments because there must always remain the possibility of their arriving at false conclusions, but that is not entirely true. With deductive arguments, our conclusions are already contained, even if implicitly, in our premises. This means that we don't arrive at new information at best. We are shown information which was obscured or unrecognized previously. Thus, the sure truth-preserving nature of deductive arguments

comes at a cost. Inductive arguments, however, do provide us with new ideas and thus may expand our knowledge about the world in a way that is impossible for deductive arguments to achieve. While deductive arguments may be used most often with mathematics, most other elds of research make extensive use of inductive arguments.

References
Shuttleworth, M. (2008). Hypothetico-Deductive Method. Experiment Resources. Retrieved October 5,2011, from http://www.experiment-resources.com/hypothetical-deductive-method.html Stump, D. J. (2005) Scientic Method. In Gale New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Vol. 5, pp. 229-230). Farmington Hills: Thomson Gale. Carr, P. (2009). Deduction/ Induction. In Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (pp. 60-63) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.