Examining Your Beliefs/Opinions/Truths using Inductive and Deductive Reas

English 1C Paper #2

Examining Your Beliefs/Opinions/Truths using Inductive and Deductive Reasoning

Overview: You will examine one or more of your beliefs or those of others based on inductive or deductive reasoning. You will break these down and research the points in detail to determine if these beliefs are or are not true. You will arrive at a deeper understanding of how inductive and deductive reasoning works through this project.

Getting Started: To find your topic, begin by listing some beliefs you have developed using your own observations (inductive reasoning) or a “truth” you came up with or heard from someone else and applied in your life (deductive reasoning). You may have learned the beliefs from your experiences or from parents or relatives, or from the media. Topics could include love, friends, cars, college, careers, yourself, other people, sports, music, relationships, morals, movies, illnesses, things you are afraid of, things you love or hate. . . but they must have come from Inductive Reasoning, which is when specific examples lead to a general belief or “truth,” or Deductive Reasoning, which starts with a general belief or “truth” that is applied to specific examples. You could also use the beliefs of someone else in this paper; if you have a relative who claims certain things are true but you are not convinced, you can challenge these beliefs in your paper as well.

Overview: You are going to select one or more of these beliefs, examine them, and do some research and analysis to see if they are really true or if they are examples of faulty inductive or deductive reasoning.

The Process: The pages in our textbook on 303-306 and 309-311 cover Induction and Deduction; use this information in your research, and quote from them in the paper. Most of Chapter One could also be helpful. You will examine how you developed these beliefs. Did your reasons or evidence come from your own experiences, others’ experiences or beliefs, or somewhere else? Let’s say you believe a certain restaurant is pretty bad because the first time you went there you had bad service, and your friend told you he had a bad meal there. So you think the place is a terrible restaurant, which is Inductive Reasoning.
You might want to choose important beliefs that you have questioned or wondered about, and determine through this analysis and research whether they are, in fact, true.

Research and Analysis: Do some research to see if your claims about the restaurant that led to the belief are, in fact, valid. Perhaps you will go to Yelp and read some reviews; you can talk to your friend who used to work there, and you see that you ordered the only items on the found them to be very positive. You now can’t wait for the restaurant to open again after this quarantine period is over so you can try the food.
Evaluating your research: How have these beliefs worked for you in your life? Have they helped you? Held you back? Prevented you from learning something?
You can do more than one belief in the paper; make sure to organize so the reader can follow it clearly.

Format: The introduction should give background information about the beliefs, draw the reader in, be specific, and include a thesis that breaks the parts of the paper down (the topic, the subtopics, and the purpose). Body paragraphs should be specific and follow the ideas above; develop using specifics, and quote from the book and any other sources you want as support or evidence. Do a bit of research when examining the parts of your belief! Is your belief (or beliefs) valid or true? Include a brief analysis of Inductive and Deductive reasoning and how these can be flawed, if that is relevant. The conclusion should be your arrival, but you can have important moments throughout the paper

The link below briefly but accurately explains how we develop beliefs using inductive and deductive reasoning; you can quote from this as you construct your draft.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/engcomp1-wmopen/chapter/text-inductive-reasoning/ (Links to an external site.)

List the sources you used at the end of the paper, using MLA Style.