deductive vs inductive

Deductive reasoning is when you start out large and go to small. This means that you start with general open but truthful statements and combine the statements to form a truth, or formula. This conclusion must be accepted as truth, as truth and if it is not true, then it is not deductive logic.

The two truth statements are: 1) Penguins are black and white and 2) Some old TV shows are black and white. Both of those statements are true and using inductive logic the statement "Therefore, some penguins are old tv shows" can be seen as true though it is not.

Inductive reasoning is when you start with two statements that are both true and reach a conclusion. This type of reasoning does necessarily mean that the conclusion will be true.

Things I May Have Learned

These past two weeks in scientific inquiry have been pretty insane. I wondered at times what the point was and was often quite happy when it was revealed. Standing in a line in a hallway while a girl acted out "The swift brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", and making paper footballs seemingly have no relationship to each other; add in the "sex salad bars antelope" words written on the board and connections to anything relevant seem pretty scarce. Somehow, it DID all make sense and come together for a common cause. My favorite activity was the cat's cradle and I feel that this exemplified everything we did. Communication is a key to knowledge. How we know what we know, and don't know, and how we don't know what we don't know, all comes from how we have taken information in, via communication from someone or something. This communication can either come in an easy way to process, or a difficult way, but nevertheless it is taken in and processed. cat's cradle required many different forms of communication in order to be clear. The directions must be shown as well as stated and physically done in most cases in order to understand what was going on. Simply watching the video did nothing if you did not participate. Perhaps words were not necessary in order to understand but in the case of my friends, showing someone a step was not always as helpful if it was not told to them and perhaps even done for them as well. These weeks have been about knowledge via communication. They have been highly enjoyable and enlightening in a way that was way too fun to actually be called class.

Jump, Jump, Jump

Communication in today's world is important to every facet of life. Visual, audio, and sensory communication are all basically instant and have transformed the importance of communication. Without these forms of communication, knowing anything, even the slightest detail, about the world around us would be completely impossible. The human abilities to take in information in so many different mediums as well as decipher it is one of the things that sets us apart from animals.