Inductive / Deductive / Instructive / Destructive?

Preparing a workshop on “Die Theorie des theoriefreien Ansatzes” — “The theory of the theory-free approach” I had to look up “inductive” and “deductive” reasoning *again* (I don’t know, usually I do well with Latin but this one? In both reasonings you “duct”, draw conclusions from something so why is one “in” and the other “de”? Anyway).

I have sometimes heard the solution focused approach described as “inductive” — meaning working from the specific to the general. In inductive reasoning, you look at specific examples and then come up with a general law. An example might be that you take a walnut, throw it down from the first floor, the second, the third, measuring the time it takes to hit the street. You then find some regularity, a correlation between the height and the time it takes to drop. You build a hypothesis and then test it by throwing the walnut from the fourth and fifth floor. The end result is a mini-theory on the general speed of walnut-dropping in Friedrichsdorf, Germany.

So is solution focus really an “inductive” method? Mark McKergow says “every case is different” (book: the solutions focus) and I fully agree. Insoo and Steve did not start with a theory to find out what works in therapy (which makes their approach non-deductive) but they neither did they set out to discover a general law or theory of what to do in which class of therapeutic cases.

Framing solution focus in terms of “inductive” and “deductive” reasoning in my mind is another case of the “physics envy” of the human sciences (and especially psychology). Researchers in psychology, medicine and other human sciences sometimes forget the difference between researching people and walnuts. Of course, if something works with one group of people, it might also work with another. Can I be sure of that? No. Does it excuse me from having to listen to THEM? Definitely not.

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