inductive reasoning is not "projection"

Not unless you still carry around all your childhood crayons with you, just so that you can recognise the colours that surround you.

But normatively, we generalise from what we already know. We know what yellow is because we've seen it and identified it at an early age. We don't need to carry around evidence of "the one true yellow" -- the one our mother pointed out to us as toddlers -- to be assured that other objects are genuinely yellow, too.

It's only projection if we don't actually know something, and yet presume we do -- say, in the sense of NEEDING everything to be yellow so that one can feel emotionally brighter about things.

But inductive reasoning is not projection.