Friday, November 2, 2007

children logical reasoning and adults.

Two types of logical reasoning are deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. As we know Deductive reasoning is process in which true previous premises or experiences draw a more general conclusion about a problem or reasoning; it's the reasoning that goes from general premises to a particular reasoning. For example,
All roses smell good,
some roses are flowers,
some flowers smell good.
Inductive reasoning is the complement of deductive; it basically goes from generalizing experiences and make a conclusion bases on this general premise or idea. For example.
My nephew when went to Peru, went to this old cemetery. In that place for lack of space instead of burring the deceased citizens on just regular ground, people are buried in cement walls along with many other, each independently in a portion of this wall. Then when he was back from Peru, my aunt asked her if he wanted to go back to Peru. He's answer was " No I don't because I don't want to be buried in a whole in the wall. Of course we laughed but now that I read the inductive and deductive reasoning. I understand that children usually make this mistakes and compare previous experiences and get into conclusion that might be sometimes true as well as erroneous. My nephew thought

All people living here are buried in wholes in the wall; therefore:
I'm going to be buried in wholes here.

Children deductive and inductive reasoning are sometimes considered as guesses. They fail to conclude circumstances that might not happen or might not logically occur. We tend to develop skillful analogies, use better our imaginary representations, and use better our logical reasoning maybe because of experience, instruction in school and the use of basic logic resources and concepts in math problems and physics. As adults we do learn to think more abstractly and test our premises better than children, but adults make also mistake involving deductive and inductive reasoning such as:

When it rains, the floor gets wet; therefore whenever the floor is wet, it rained.

Here we can see the clear evidence that the last conclusion is erroneous.

Another example imght be
If Ben doesn't clean his room, he doesn't get 1o dollars....Then:

if Ben got 10 dollars, it means he clened his room

If his room is clean he gets 10 dollars....

These two other conclusion can be true, but is not certain that every time he room is clean he gets his dollar or whenever he gets 10 dollars, Ben cleaned his bedroom.

Adults can get into conclusions by either using deductive reasoning or inductive reasoning and get erroneous conclusion in our daily life experiences. The most uncertain conclusion or reasoning is to be said inductive because it draws conclusions from general premises to a more particular or specific conclusion.; therefore inductive reasoning is more likely to be not certain.

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