This post over at De-Conversion, a blog for de-converting or former-Christians, has been at the top of the WordPress Most Read list for a couple of days now.
The premise of the post is this. There common assumption is that a holy book can somehow validate itself. Most Holy Books will tell you that God exists, that there is a right way and a wrong way and that if you don’t toe the line bad things may happen.
The author questions the authorship of the holy books. Who knows if God exists in the first place? The book makes the claim that God exists and then tells you to do live your life in a prescribed manner since “God said so.” That to him is circular reasoning.
I will not go into the merits of holy texts and whether God exists. Our president-in-waiting definitely thinks so. My post is on circular reasoning.
In many classrooms, young learners coming to grips with critical thinking and logical reasoning make this mistake.
e.g. Alcohol is injurious to health because it affects the body.
e.g. Rahul doesn’t like me. Why? Because He doesn’t share his Homework? Why doesn’t he do that? Because He doesn’t like Me.
Question of the day: How does one teach students to avoid Circular Reasoning? Any ideas?
Chicken or the egg, huh? … has always been a tough one, hasn’t it?
First – is circular thinking a problem? Why can’t we accept that some things are indeed circular because they started at a level that we couldn’t see – maybe on the level of thoughts or maybe another universe – who knows?
Having said that, i understand that when the issue at hand is kids and teaching them how to deal with life then it’s important to give them a solution-approach. How about first making the kid think – “when did it all begin?”. Now while it’s difficult to go back millions of years to see the first egg hatch
, it shouldn’t be very difficult to make a child think about when did he first feel that Rahul didn’t like him!… Accept what he/she says and then ask him/her to come up with an idea to set it right.
Maybe the key, as in most cases of solution-approach, is to make the kid stand in the subect’s position & then think. This way one feels in control & not a victim of the subject… the same should work with other subjects as well – alcohol or God – let’s accept them first as a hypothesis to be tested before jumping to true/false
Let’s begin where it all began. Yes, that should do it- taking children back to the origin of their thinking, where they first made an inference or judgment.
I would also posit that it would be useful, especially in the 10-14 year space as children are getting to order complex thoughts and reasoning- let the focus be on explorating, attempting to reason, attempting to logically order. Whether they get it right is not of prime important. Sooner or later, they will. Thank you, Minkle.
[...] bloggers. vivek from “The Red Pencil” blog used the post to raise the question “how does one teach students to avoid circular reasoning?” cole on the “blahblahblah” blog posted an entry entitled “Nothin like a [...]