Induction: God created the heavens and the earth; therefore, God must be very powerful.
Deduction: God is omnipotent; therefore, he could have created the heavens and the earth in six 24-hour days if he had wanted to.

As I recall, the word used in Sherlock Holmes was “deduction,” and that has created confusion in the general understanding of the term. I think what Holmes was most famous for was actually his powers of induction — observing clues and drawing conclusions from them. He probably did both, of course. Predicting what a suspect would do, based on prior knowledge of the suspect, would be deduction.

Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but the definitions are NOT “practically saying the same thing.” They are, very clearly saying the exact opposite from one another.

Inductive reasoning, to follow the classic argument, says “I have seen several Swans. They are all white, thus all swans are white.” Wittgenstein, and others, have all dealt with the “problem of induction” which is, primarily, we cannot ever prove induction. This is where Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Feyerabend, and all have gone in trying to distill out the philosophy of science as scientists can never observe “everything” and thus must (according to Popper) rely on falsification as their “crutch.”

Of course, Deduction, working in reverse, starts with the very weakness that is induction’s undoing–how can we know with certainty a generalizable point without having accounted for (and counted, measured etc) every instance?

So I will concur at least in this. For all practical purposes both induction and deduction suffer from the same fatal flaw-the inability to “know” with certainty the data to support the general statement.

Although interestingly the definitions of “inductive” and “deductive” are practically identical. Inductive- “characterized by the inference of general laws from particular instances.” Deductive – “characterized by the inference of particular instances from a general law.” This from the Dictionary built into Apple’s Mac OS X, the New Oxford American Dictionary.

So perhaps “deductive” is an appropriate term after all.