When I taught critical thinking to beginning students I would always start the same way: by highlighting how much of the field they already knew. "Brakeless trains are dangerous," I would say. "And this train has no brakes. Your conclusion?" That this train is dangerous, came the inevitable response. I'd run though a series of them, eventually landing on some cases - always the same cases - that tripped them up. The woman bank teller, for example. In this interview, Roman Feiman says "a lot of those mistakes are due to how the tests, games, and questions are set up" but my own view is that it's because the students' knowledge of logic is learned from experience using associative reasoning (that is, the kind of reasoning a neural network would perform). They can be taught higher-order logical principles, but it's no something that they possess innately.
Today: 3 Total: 1197 [Direct link] [Share]
