I concur completely with your distaste for people asserting that a reasoning process supports what is actually a clump of dogma painted green, Mrrz.

There is a gray area, of course, which arises in the frequent situation when an individual does not have enough data to do a rigorous deduction. He therefore has to induce, and estimate probabilities, based on a higher order of generalization or a higher principle of some kind. He has to guess where the final dots are going to be when he runs out of known dots to connect. The reasons for his doing so will always have some element of subjectivity in them. Trying to objectify the decisions supporting extrapolation of this kind (unless it is a purely mathematical graph extrapolation) leads you around and around in circles.

Another gray area is the inclination toward optimism and hope in predicting futures when there are too many variables to deduce precise outcomes. Or pessimism, for that matter.

Another gray area is when one is consciously creating data from whole cloth, which usually occurs in the arts rather than the sciences, I would hope. There's an element of faith in the forward projection of one's creative impulse that could be called faith-based.

A