Consider your two cases: (1) deciding what time it is by using the mechanism of a man-made clock; (2) inferring there's this invisible thing called gravity at w

Consider your two cases: (1) deciding what time it is by using the mechanism of a man-made clock; (2) inferring there's this invisible thing called gravity at work when a tennis ball is thrown that dictates the flight of the tennis ball and that it is predictable enough that you could catch a thrown tennis ball by intuiting the arc from the velocity of the throw. In the first case you deduce the time. And, until the law of gravity is established, in the second case you induce the arc. In the first case it is entirely reasonable to be perform your little verification step because man-made objects sometimes fail. In the second case there is no need to second guess the universe because your intuition that the laws which govern things like the flight of a ball are not susceptible to revision is correct. I don't think you're butchering anything, I just think you have to be able to recognise when you are using the inductive method and when you are using the deductive method. Next question would be: do these two methods exhaust the range of methods we employ to acquire knowledge? If not, what are the other methods?