Deductive reasoning

situations, it is necessary to disregard the other ways of knowing and trust our instinct. Take the fight-or-flight response for example. In an intense situation like an encounter with a rapist, we do not have the time to go through inductive or deductive reasoning, to review our emotion at that point, or to try to recall previous information because the situation calls for a fight-or-flight response. I know a person who has encountered a similar situation in real life. She was sitting in a taxi…

Humans’ exploration of knowledge have long before began at Ancient Greek, ever since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle laid the foundations of Western philosophy. Although some of their theories and findings were rightly discarded along the way by later scientists like Newton, their ways of acquiring knowledge remains very much of use today. I will now discuss which texts have greater influence in my reflection of knowledge. Epistemological concern was one of the philosophical issues that Plato and…

In his essay “In Defense of Drones: a historical argument,” David Bell defends the use of drones as a weapon from critics that doubt the moral and political implications of war “waged by one side without risk to the life and limb of its combatants.” Bell’s creates his arguments using comparisons, quotes, and facts. Bell’s first argument addresses the concern of drones “radically change[ing] the political dynamics of warfare” by comparing the purpose of drones to that of past weaponry. He states…

was justified. After carefully analyzing the two texts, the reader realizes that the article “Rough Justice” has the most relevant and sufficient evidence to support it because of the way the author uses various forms of evidence and avoids faulty reasoning. Throughout “Rough Justice”, author Alejandro Reyes gives different types of evidence to support the punishment of caning in singapore. There are instances of empirical,…

conclusions from it. Bottom-up processing, also known as inductive reasoning, starts at the sensory receptors and works up to higher levels of processing. Bottom-up processing enables our sensory system to detect lines, angles, and colors. It works in such a way that what you see is what you get. For example, if someone showed me the drawing The Flowering of Love, I would just see a rose. Top-down processing, also known as deductive reasoning, constructs perceptions from the sensory input by…

Due to the Parthenon desecration and dilapidation on behalf of Great Britain, writer Christopher Hitchens argues that the original Parthenon sculptures must be returned to Greece, in his article "The Lovely Stones". The author uses allusions to history and art, sensory details and actual facts in order to deliver a convincing argument. Hitchens starts the second paragraph off by recounting the Parthenon history. Centuries of perversions, abuse and desecration were suffered by this magnificent…

Machiavelli used inductive reasoning drawing on examples from history as the basis for his arguments. In chapter six of The Prince, Machiavelli begins by stating “...I bring up the greatest examples. For since men almost always walk on paths beaten by others and proceed in their actions…

Three Main Principles of Piaget’s Theory Piaget’s theory of cognitive development was based on three main principles which are assimilation, accommodation and equilibration First it is important to define the term ‘schema’. Schema is a cognitive representation of activities or things (Oakley 2004). For example, when a baby is born it will have an automatic response for sucking in order to ensure that it can feed and therefore grow (Oakley 2004). As the baby grows, this schema will become…

Epistemology, the question of “how do we know what we know?” that has plagued philosophers since Socrates himself. The problem at hand seems to be that we can not be certain of where our knowledge originates. Over the centuries of human thought, many have tried to tackle such a question. To this day, however, there is no sufficient answer at all. The two major schools of thought I am looking at are empiricism and rationalism, both attempts to answer such a complex question that couldn’t quite…

Piaget and peers) believed that infants and toddlers were in the state of precausal reasoning in the preoperational stage which is from twelve months to seven years of age , and afterwards they would then transition to the concrete operational stage where they would now be capable of causal reasoning. Piaget’s theory of precausal thinking believed that infants and toddlers were not capable of performing deductive…