According to inductivism, genuine new synthetic or empirical knowledge can only be obtained through inductive inferences.
Their content-enlarging and truth-preserving nature permits the drawing of inferences from "known" domains to "unknown" ones thus genuinely enlarging knowledge about the world.
Since the conclusions of inductive premises are logically stronger than their premises, they provide genuine additions to knowledge, quite in contrast to deductive inference which are analytical and capable only of unfolding what the premises already contain.
As essences are uncovered by studying historical development, laws of historical development describing them can be obtained by inductive inferences; in this view, theoretical social science is theoretical history.