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IBM Professor of Psychology and dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University. Author of Thinking Styles, The Triarchic Mind, and others.AllBritannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....Historyproblem solvinginductioninductionreasoninginferencespremisesinferenceinduction, problem ofanalogyanalogousRobert J. SternbergJudgmentrealistic thinkingdecision makingalternativesefficiencyRedundancyfacilitatesConcept attainmentlearninghypothesesconcept formation
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- Thought - Induction, Reasoning, Logic: Many aspects of problem solving involve inductive reasoning, or induction. Simply put, induction is a means of reasoning from a part to a whole, from particulars to generals, from the past to the future, or from the observed to the unobserved. Whereas valid deductive inferences guarantee the truth of their conclusions, in the sense that it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false, good inductive inferences guarantee only that, if the premises are true, the conclusion is probable, or likely to be true. There are several major kinds of inductive reasoning, including causal inference, categorical