Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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The Demise of Deduction Logic is based on deduction,
a method of exact inference. Its main advantage is that its conclusions are
exact. That is the reason why we use it to build bridges or airplane wings. But
deduction is not the only type of inference we know. We are very familiar with
induction, which infers generalizations from a set of events, and with
abduction, which infers plausible causes of an effect. Induction has been
used by any scientist who has developed a scientific theory from her
experiments. Abduction is used by any doctor when she examines a patient. They
are both far from being exact, so much so that many scientific theories have
been proved wrong over the centuries and so much so that doctors make frequent
and sometimes fatal mistakes. The power of deduction is
that no mistake is possible (if you follow the rules correctly). The power of
induction and abduction is that they are useful: no scientific theory can be
deducted, and no disease can be deducted. If we only employed deduction, we
would have no scientific disciplines and no cures. Alas, deduction works only in very favorable
circumstances: when all relevant information is available, when there are no
contradictions and no ambiguities. Information must be complete, precise and
consistent. In practice, this is seldom the case. The information a doctor can
count on, for example, is mostly incomplete and vague. The reason we can
survive in a world that is mostly made of incomplete, inexact and inconsistent
information is that our brain does not employ deduction in everyday life. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Common Sense" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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