The Latin means “to lead out”: e or de, both meaning “out” + ducere (which is the root of the British “Duke” and where Mussolini got his title Il Duce, the leader, too). Today we’re looking at three words with the same root:
Educate, educe, deduce.
On the face of it they’ve not got much in common, so how can they be so closely related?
Well, educate doesn’t actually mean “stuff with facts”, despite what most curriculae seem to imply. It actually means to draw out the latent talent in people, to lead them to knowledge. Socrates did it by asking a whole lot of questions and getting people to work out the answers as a result. It’s only in the past few hundred years that cramming has been thought the right way to go about it – and now the pendulum is swinging back, with more teachers showing pupils where to look for information and letting them discover it fully for themselves. Which is a Good Thing if they’re bright but possibly not helpful if they’re struggling. I don’t know – I’m neither a teacher nor a parent.
Educe has the same meaning, still, as the Latin: “to draw out; to extract; to make appear; to elicit; to develop; to infer”, according to Chambers Dictionary. Dr Johnson’s Dictionary adds “to bring out”. It’s usually used in the sense of “to infer” these days, which is where it gets muddled with “deduce”.
Deduce, according to Chambers, means “to derive, work out logically (that); to infer from what precedes or from premises [no, not buildings: elements of logic], clues, remarks, etc.”. Johnson quotes three sources for his definition: “1. To draw in a regular connected series. Pope. 2. To form a regular chain of consequential propositions. Locke. 3. To lay down in regular order. Thomson.”
But did he educe or deduce?
So the difference between educe and deduce is subtle. Both rely to some extent on logic, but deduction is a more rigorous process. In order to deduce something you have to work it out from clues; to educe something you merely infer it which, to my mind at least, has something of the “hunch” about it.
And yet, and yet… If you look up “infer” in Chambers, it says: “to derive from what has gone before; to arrive at as a logical conclusion, to deduce; to conclude”. Johnson gives “To bring on; to draw in”; the latter was part of his definition of “deduce”. So are the words really different, or are they the same thing in disguise?
To find the answer I went to yet another dictionary, the Penguin English Dictionary, which defines educe as “to draw out; deduce, infer”. So that settles it: educe and deduce are now interchangeable, and only the most educated will cavil if you use one instead of the other. Probably only the most educated will ever have heard of “educe”, so be prepared for some blank looks if you do use it.
Or not? Let me know below if you regularly educe, deduce, or indeed educate (in the original or any other sense).
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References:
The Chambers Dictionary, 11th edition, London 2008.
A Dictionary of the English Language, new edition, Samuel Johnson LL.D., London 1819.
The Penguin English Dictionary, 3rd edition, Harmondsworth, 1979