주제

Deduction makes us feel safe: If and when we know all the elements of the problem situation and how they hang together, then we can confidently deduce the outcome. This is rationality at its most unassailable. In professional practice, this type of thinking expresses itself in the belief that we can produce "logical" strategies and blueprints, or the claim to base ourselves on "best practices" and "evidence-based interventions." But this gold standard of pure logic can only be achieved in a closed world, in which we are absolutely sure we know all the elements of the problem situation and completely understand all the relationships at play beforehand. In the real world, this never happens ─ and when it does, we are talking about quite uninteresting, mechanical, routine reasoning. In practice, all problems are messy. Yet it is tempting to claim that we have used deduction in dealing with a problem; this claim to pure rationality is so strong that we don't even have to defend the result. It is "logical," after all.