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Types of evidence
Direct evidenceof an occurrence is perceived by a witness using their senses.For example: a witness who testifies that he saw the defendant shoot the victim.
Indirect evidenceestablishes immediately collateral facts from which the main fact may be inferred e.g. Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin have accumulated indirect evidence for an object that’s more than twice the diameter of Earth, but 10 times as far from the sun as Pluto.
Circumstantial evidenceconsists of a fact or set of facts which, if proven, will support the creation of an inference that the matter asserted is true e.g. a fingerprint at the scene of a crime.
In the crime fiction novel Presumed Dead, evidence of these types is used to reconstruct the crime.
Induction and deduction
In deductive reasoning, if something is true of a class of things in general, it is also true for all members of that class. Reasoning proceeds from the general to the particular with certainty.
In inductive inference, we go from the specific to the general. We make many observations, discern a pattern, make a generalization, and infer an explanation or a theory. Reasoning proceeds from the particular to the general with uncertainty.
In the crime fiction novel Presumed Dead, the investigation alternately employs induction speculatively and deduction conclusively.
