I arrived home to find the birthday cake crudely eaten. Nobody was home besides my dog. My dog must have eaten the birthday cake.

The statements above are a good example of ______________________.

Question

I arrived home to find the birthday cake crudely eaten. Nobody was home besides my dog. My dog must have eaten the birthday cake.

The statements above are a good example of ______________________.

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

The question presents a scenario: returning home to find evidence suggesting a dog ate the birthday cake, with the dog as the only possible eater.

Because the answer options are not provided in the input, I cannot evaluate specific alternatives. In a typical multiple-choice setup, you would compare each listed reasoning type against the scenario.

Nevertheless, the situation is a classic example of abductive reasoning: you observe a set of clues (the eaten cake and the dog being the only likely actor at home) and form the best explanation that accounts for those clues (that the dog ate the cake). Abduction focuses on generating the most plausible explanation given the evidence, even though it isn’t proven beyond doubt.

To illustrate why this fits abductive reasoning, consider how other common reasoning types would approach the scenario:
- Deductive reasoning would attempt to derive a necessity from general rules to a specific conclusion (e.g., if all dogs always eat cake then this dog must have eaten it). In real life, such universal rules rarely apply with certainty, so deduction would be overly strong here.
- Inductive reasoning would generalize from observations (e.g., noting that dogs sometimes eat cake and then concluding this dog did), which yields a probability-based conclusion rather than the strongest single explanation given the available clue set.
- Analogical reasoning would draw a comparison to a similar past situation (e.g., ‘like the time the dog ate the cake before’), which can be informative but is not strictly necessary to explain the current evidence.

Thus, abductive reasoning is the framework best suited for proposing the most plausible single explanation (the dog ate the cake) based on the observed evidence, acknowledging that other possibilities could exist and may be ruled in or out with further information.

MPU3202.4D.JUN2025 Quiz CD (4%)

I arrived home to find the birthday cake crudely eaten. Nobody was home besides my dog. My dog must have eaten the birthday cake. The statements above are a good example of ______________________.

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