2. Poincaré and others commonly describe the deductive and inductive process of logic as movement up or down stairs. Deduction moves down, step by step, from the general to the particular; whereas induction moves up, step by step, from the particular to the general. I argue, in a forthcoming book, Why The Readymades Aren't Readymades: Decoding Duchamp's Paradigm Shift, that Duchamp's famous work, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), is a schematic diagram of deduction; whereas his earlier work, Nude Ascending (1911) depicts induction. |