air is to human; white is to snow as black is to coal. Analogies can be helpful in solving problems. They help us in identifying and visualising the salient attributes of an object or event, which would otherwise go unnoticed. D ECISION - MAKING Inductive and deductive reasonings allow us to make judgments.
In judgment we draw conclusions, form opinions, evaluate events, objects, based on knowledge and available evidences. Consider this example, the man is very talkative, likes to mix with people, can convince others with ease — he would be most suitable for a salesperson’s job. Our judgment of this person is based on the specific characteristics of an expert salesperson. Here we will discuss how we make decisions and judgments.
Sometimes judgments are automatic and require no conscious effort by the person and occur as a matter of habit, for example, Thus deductive reasoning begins with making a general assumption that you know or believe to be true and then drawing specific conclusion based on this assumption. In other words, it is reasoning from general to particular. Your general assumption is that people run on the railway platform only when they are getting late for the train. The man is running on the platform.
Therefore, he is getting late for the train. One mistake that you are making (and generally people do commit such mistakes in deductive reasoning) is that you (they) assume but do not always know if the basic statement or assumption is true. If the base information is not true, i.e. people also run on the platform for other reasons then your conclusion would be invalid or wrong.
Look at the mouse in Fig. . . Another way to figure out why the man is running on the platform is to use inductive reasoning.
Sometimes you would analyse other possible reasons and observe what the man is actually doing and then draw a conclusion about his behaviour. Reasoning, that is based on specific facts and observation, is called inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is drawing a general conclusion based on particular observation. In the earlier example, you observed