Any reasoning about the world external to your mind of the form "I see X therefore Y is true" is necessarily not deductive, not just because you can't prove that your senses are perceiving reality as it is, but also because even if they are, you are only perceiving a small fraction of reality, and thus you can never know when you have *all* the facts relevant to a particular conclusion. If you were to exercise pure deduction in your daily life you'd be paralized from being unable to make any decisions.

I'd say it's a form of inductive reasoning. The premise you're failing to mention is that (I assume) you've seen things that you knew were trash dumps and looked mostly similar to this thing that you saw in this instance. That's inductive reasoning.
* P(A)
* P(B)
* P(C)
Therefore P(x) for all x that are similar to all three of A, B, and C.

For abductive reasoning, you'd need to consider all the things that could possibly look like a bunch of huge plastic containers by the roadside in a shallow natural pit (from now on, "Bunch"), weight their relative probabilities of this Bunch being that, and conclude that this Bunch must be that thing with the highest probability. E.g.:
Knowing that there's a Bunch here, there is:
* A 70% probability that it's a trash dump.
* A 5% probability that it's a plastic container storage site
* A 25% probability that it's something else I'm failing to consider.
Therefore this Bunch is a trash dump.

>>16680
I see.

But just because there's no pure deductive reasoning, it's still valid?

And wouldn't inductive reasoning be to explore the entire roadside and see what artifacts lay there? Because a lot of the stuff could've been explained by it blowing off from pickup trucks. But plastic containers blowing off and landing in the same area, not so much.

> But just because there's no pure deductive reasoning, it's still valid?

No, logically speaking only deductive reasoning is valid. That's not to say you can't fairly reliably arrive at a correct conclusion using non-deductive reasoning. Just that you have no way to verify that you're not making a mistake prior to testing your conclusion with reality. The point of a valid reasoning is that as long as your premises as correct you can be sure that your conclusion will be correct.

> And wouldn't inductive reasoning be to explore the entire roadside and see what artifacts lay there? Because a lot of the stuff could've been explained by it blowing off from pickup trucks. But plastic containers blowing off and landing in the same area, not so much.

Let me clarify my previous explanation. When I said "you've seen things that you knew were trash dumps" I didn't mean "along the same road", or "in that general area at that time". I meant that you've seen them in your life. You've seen things that you were told were trash dumps and you learned the general appearance of a trash dump.
But to answer your question, exploring the entire roadside would be gathering data (premises). It's what you do with that data that counts as one form of reasoning or another.

Either way, based on your description, I feel your conclusion was in error.

"Huge" plastic containers, based on what I would define as "huge", as in "not just a little bigger than average plastic containers (ie: milk jugs) but MUCH larger, by at least two factors of magnitude" would be somewhere between the size of small cars and the size of standardized shipping containers. Such containers (were they still in condition adequate enough to be "containers" and not "broken pieces") would be too valuable to throw away so carelessly.

Second, landfills are isolated in an area owing to their being planned and often very large, so are removed from a highway. Being manmade for this purpose means they are deep and also not often put in a natural pit. A natural pit of sufficient size would be too valuable for geologic or astrological study to go filling with garbage. Finally, you did not describe anything other than the containers, and landfills (at any other time other than when they first begin, which mathematically you are very unlikely to be there for given their long lifespans of decades) have more than just a few items in there.


I can only conclude that they were put there as a form of temporary storage, and their owner intended to retrieve them at a later time. Perhaps they were for roadside construction.

If I am incorrect in my assessment, it is only because I have misinterpreted the scenario owing to a confusion based on your use of language. This style of communication of reality is terribly restrictive and subjective, after all.

>>16712
> "Huge" plastic containers, based on what I would define as "huge", as in "not just a little bigger than average plastic containers (ie: milk jugs) but MUCH larger, by at least two factors of magnitude" would be somewhere between the size of small cars and the size of standardized shipping containers.

I assumed OP was talking about plastic dumpsters, not that the containers themselves were the refuse.


> Second, landfills

OP didn't say "landfill", they said "trash dump". I.e. a place where trash or waste is dumped or stored, not necessarily permanently. The purpose of a landfill is not just to store the garbage, but also to process and degrade it biochemically.

> are isolated in an area owing to their being planned and often very large, so are removed from a highway. Being manmade for this purpose means they are deep and also not often put in a natural pit.

All this should have clued you in that OP wasn't talking about a landfill.


> A natural pit of sufficient size would be too valuable for geologic or astrological

"Astrological"? Even if you'd said "astronomical", I have no idea what you're talking about.

>>16714
>I assumed OP was talking about plastic dumpsters
There is no such thing as plastic dumpsters. They make them out of steel because plastic in that size is not structurally sound enough. Also, why would there be dumpsters on the side of the road in the first place? It still raises the same question of who put them there, and for what purpose.

>>16715
>There is no such thing as plastic dumpsters.
All you needed to do was search "plastic dumpster" in Google Images to fact-check yourself.

>Also, why would there be dumpsters on the side of the road in the first place?
The point of a dumpster is that a garbage truck can pick it up and empty it. Garbage trucks generally drive on roads, so the logical place to put a dumpster, if it's desirable that a garbage truck can reach it, is as close to the road as possible.

>>16716
>they actually do make plastic dumpsters
Color me surprised Pedantic: they have a plastic shell and steel reinforcement. And while you're technically correct, it doesn't change that those that I saw are smaller containers, generally for household rather than commercial/industrial use. Most people do not BUY dumpsters; they rent them from the garbage company who picks up the garbage from them on a set schedule, and those dumpsters ARE made of steel. 99% of the dumpsters you're going to see are made of metal; personally I've never seen one of these plastic ones. You're begging to put holes in the fucking thing because people throw concrete chunks and shit in there.

I'm sure there's some retard online out there selling dumpsters made of wood or who has made one of papier mache as an art project. But that changes nothing. OP never stated "dumpsters" to begin with, which would be fairly obvious given that they have a distinctive shape. So one could conclude these "containers" likely were not dumpster-shaped.

>the logical place to put a dumpster, if it's desirable that a garbage truck can reach it, is as close to the road as possible
But not randomly on the side of a road where there's nothing else! There's no trash sitting around there to put IN the containers in the first place. If there were a warehouse or a restaurant right next to it, then it would make sense. But that definitely would not be a "trash dump", it would be "a little concrete pad on their property where sit the dumpsters".