Daleks, Cylons, and Deductive Reasoning

Amidst all the chaos of moving and the seemingly constant bouts of annoying sickness our family’s been experiencing, some great news arrived this week. My son’s been accepted to a really promising educational program called Room Nine. It’s a multidisciplinary environment that boasts small class sizes, community involvement, and family participation. Who knows how it will pan out, but I’m generally optimistic.

I’m curious about the family participation part. Each Thursday, relatives are invited to offer their knowledge to students. It’s pretty easy to predict what I’d like to talk about: critical thinking. As I collect more resources and continue my own investigation, it’ll find its way here, and then eventually to a sort of pseudo-curriculum of my own.

Here's the same thing, but with a penguin.

Logic Shouldn’t be an Elective Class

Over at Wired’s Geek Dad (thanks David Bailey), Curtis Silver has posted a really great article – The Importance of Logic and Critical Thinking – that serves as a decent primer about deductive reasoning, something in the CT-grab bag that I’ve yet to cover. It’s well articulated and is going into my toolbox:

Valid logic does not always guarantee truth or a sound argument. This is where it gets a little funky. Valid logic is when the structure of logic is correct in the way of syntax and semantics rather than truth. Truth comes from deductive reasoning of said logic. For example:

All Daleks are brown. Some brown things are Cylons. Therefore, some Daleks are Cylons. Sci-fi fan or not, you probably know that this is not true. The basic lesson here is that, while the logic above might seem valid because of the structure of the statement, it takes a further understanding to figure out why it’s not necessarily true: That is, based on the first two statements it’s possible that some Daleks are Cylons, but it’s not logically concludable. That’s where deductive reasoning comes on top of the logic. The underlying lesson here is not to immediately assume everything you read or are told is true, something all children need to and should learn.

This is the direct lesson that needs to be passed on to our children: that of not accepting the immediately visible logic. While not all problems are complex enough to require the scientific method, some of them need some deduction to determine if they are true. (Curtis Silver, edited slightly for content)

If you’re a geeky parent who cares about this stuff, the whole piece is worth your time. Every time I turn my head, I spy uncritical acceptance of some ridiculous stuff. I get whiplash. Ignoring deductive reasoning may gratify the ego (no fuss, no muss), but it achieves little else. Hell, I’m guilty of it plenty and I’m trying to watch for it. I guess I’m saying that vigilance is required.