A few days ago I had to give my students a very informal explanation of the notion of logical possibility: an entity or a state of affairs is 'logically possible' if its description does not involve a logical contradiction. As usual, I started with a trivial example. I said:
"I'll tell you the beginning of a story - just a couple of sentences - and then I'll stop and ask you if I should continue because you accept the beginning as describing something that is possible. So, yesterday I was at a garage sale where I saw a coffee table in the shape of a square circle, i.e., the shape that is both a genuine square and an honest-to-goodness circle. I bought this coffee table and brought it home."
Then
I stopped and asked if I should continue. One student, a cheerful
young woman, immediately
raised her hand and declared "No!"
"Good," I said encouragingly. "Now tell us why not?"
"Because who on earth would want to buy such a weirdly shaped coffee table!"
3 comments:
Don't be too harsh with the cheerful young woman. She has not been taught to think and solve problems by reasoning But, is that not one of the two main purposes of education (the other being basic skills in math and language)? Please tell me, just where is thinking, reasoning, and problem solving taught to students in schools?
Robert,
I wasn't being harsh on the student. On the contrary, I found her response delightfully entertaining because it was utterly unexpected and almost perversely (if unintentionally) deep - in a Steven Write sort of way("You can't have everything. Where would you put it?!" or "The Universe is expanding. That should ease up the traffic.") It almost made me feel guilty about focusing on highly abstract reasons when far more concrete and basic reasons would suffice.
:)
THE CRITICAL REASONING YOU CITED IS, OR WAS, REFERRED TO AS THE "GRACIE ALLEN''
SCHOOL OF LOGIC...
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