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From the point of view of rhetoric (the first academic discipline ever taught in schools in Western Civilization), philosophy (the second academic discipline taught in schools in Western Civilization) and rhetoric are oppositional. Philosophy (at least according to its founders--Plato and Aristotle) believes in one, universal, discoverable, and knowable truth. Science is the child of philosophy (as it also holds that objective truths about the world can be discovered and known through the scientific method and can then be described through the language of mathematics--i.e. F(g)=Gmm/r(squared)). Rhetoric, on the other hand, holds that on all the questions that really matter to humans, there is no truth, and if there were some truth, people couldn't know it, and if people could know it, they couldn't communicate it. This notion was expressed by Gorgias of Leontini circa 400 B.C. It's called the Gorgian trilemma. It says this: "Nothing exists. If something did exist, we could not know it. If we could know it, we could never communicate it."
Both points of view (you might call rhetoric "relativism"
survive in Western academics (although philosophy has overshadowed rhetoric for a long time). A practical scientist, i.e. an engineer--one who applies science--is, naturally, a philosopher at heart. Philosophy, science, and engineering all seek one, discoverable, knowable, and communicable answer to questions. An attorney is a practical rhetorician. Rhetoric doesn't really believe in a discoverable truth. As such, there is seldom one, right, true and discoverable answer in a courtroom. That's what we have juries for. Flawed, less-than-fully informed people have to make a decision with incomplete knowledge and without any certainty that they have discovered any "truth." Instead, as we all do with most decisions, we do what we think and feel is right and then hope for the best. That's rhetoric. It's also politics. Neither discipline is scientific in any way. They're "arts" that have their foundations in the rhetoric taught in Ancient Greece at the birth of democracy.
Hope that helps.
For more, see this: Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict: An Historical Survey - HERE.
-Laelth
"In science, you have a theory that you test. There is one right answer."
In testing a theory, you have one of two outcomes: confirmation (the theory is accepted) or denial (the theory is rejected). Mythbusters allows middle ground with "plausibility". Does any of this help? Do you want to re-phrase the question? 
Last edited Tue Sep 2, 2014, 09:05 AM - Edit history (1)
Inductive logic is the scientific method, which collects anomalies, patterns, cause-effect phenomena and draws (upward in the specific-to-abstract sense) a generalization. Over time, Big Theories emerge.
Deductive reasoning is the Premise Frame for collecting phenomena and classifying. Based on a range of Premises (yesterday's inductions are the new premise frames, such as laws, rules, definitions of gender, persons, property, rights, etc.), new cases come forward and are deduced to logically or not logically fit them. Over time, Bodies of Judgments called law emerge. The reliable, sound, valid judgments are one desired outcome (external validity). Correctness is the other desired outcome (internal validity). They each have more or less value and utility, depending on the context they are applied to, and so are often seen as two right answers.
Inductive and Deductive are not schools of thought, however. Most schools of thought and humans use both, but they are the dominant modes of logic in the two examples you describe.
I have long nurtured the lingering belief that "deduction" is deeply flawed. Deduction only works if the major and minor premises are true. As a rhetorician, I have my doubts about whether any premise is "true" in the philosophical sense.
From what I can tell, most of what humans "know" comes from the process of induction. Deduction is a nifty, clever, and precise tool--but it's subject to massive error because the "truth" of any major or minor premise can never be finally determined and proven. Induction, on the other hand, is inherently flawed--but it's honest about the fact that it can never guarantee "truth." All the same, people use induction all the time, and there's a certain sense in which every major premise and every minor premise used in "deduction" was first arrived at through induction.
-Laelth
males) but no external validity to the other humans on the receiving end (girls, kids, women, gays, etc) unless the external context is somehow 'programmed' to work hard to conform to some internally valid mindset.
Just fucking around here with recent thread talk. 
-Laelth
