I’ve never quite known what to do with inductive and deductive reasoning. These concepts always get mixed up in my head, and I finally understand why. Driving to a theory or driving from a theory is a false choice. Theories are landscapes where reason makes up some of the flora. Rather than getting in a logical car and driving to optimally get where I’m going, I prefer to walk among the landscapes and plants; rather than reasoning my way to solutions from problems, I prefer to swim among solutions and problems and re-cast them both when I get back to shore. So I’ve landed on ductive wandering as a more personally satisfying and fitting approach than reasoning by induction or deduction. Duction is an approach that affirms that one is always inside of several tubes at several junctions. And wandering rather than reasoning means that one is not trying to gain advantage from the activity, but just doing it as an end in itself. So I’m wandering around tubes, and this wandering is an end in itself. For example, when one is ductively wandering around a city, it’s most important to recognize the tubes one is in and propagate oneself through them (by taking the subway, entering a bookstore, laying in the grass, each with a bit of awareness). This is different from the inductive reasoner, who might wander around in order to create a theory of the city, observing to try do draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the subway, the quality of the bookstore, or the attentiveness of the city’s parks department. It’s also in contrast to the deductive reasoner, who theorizes that the city is dirty and unsafe and goes into the subway looking for rats and theft, goes into the bookstore looking for offensive books, and does not lay on the grass because dogs and people relieve themselves in this city’s parks (haven’t you heard?). Ductive wanderers don’t deny the possibility of theories, they just ignore the supposed primacy of theory and reasoning. So, I’ll see you in the tubes.
I spent some time in a few different tubes to find myself on the island of Crete. It seems to be mid-afternoon in mid-July here and it’s hot (the proverbially dry heat of dry mountains covered in olive trees). The stray dogs are friendly during the day and mean at night. The stray cats are always friendly. There are grapes hanging above me. The sunrise is delayed by the crown of hills and the sunset is red and hazily glowish. The air smells like mountain-desert-ocean, not quite petrichor because there is less irrigation than petrichorical Napa Valley. But the hit of the smell of the dirt is on the wind, so I couldn’t be much more content. I don’t think it’s afternoon where the tubes started off on my journey, but time and clocks will be blurry and strange for at least another two days. Greek goat yogurt, it turns out, is delicious. There is a thin almost crispy layer on top and it’s nearly sour. My gut bacteria are appreciative. The Europeans do serve food on their flights, but it is not food that makes the digestive systems run on time. The gut bacteria are also used to working while I sleep, so they’re a little frustrated with the schedule lately and making their frustration plain. Hopefully the goats help.
Roman Ryan 