Reflection on The Session of Logical Thinking

This session was an enjoyable and informative experience, as it served as a reminder for me on how to perceive things. During my secondary education I studied sciences, so this session presented me with information that I was already familiar with and practiced. Although my degree is currently in Fine Arts, specifically Design, my passion and intrigue for the sciences has stayed with me throughout the years. In this lecture session, we discussed logical thinking and what classifies a method as scientific; the three scientific methods being induction, deduction and hypothetic-deduction. Despite being a bit unfamiliar with the exact scientific terms used, this session kept my interest and provided me with new knowledge. Induction has a bottom-up approach, in which an empirical observation is made, empirical in this case referring to an experience. A pattern then develops, and a hypothesis is made, which ultimately concludes a theory. For example while working at a pet store I observed that many Pitbull owners complained about their dogs having allergic reactions after consuming Purina dog chow. Therefore, a hypothesis was made that all Pitbull are allergic to Purina dog chow.

Using induction poses an issue because a theory is stated without any experimentation or questioning, but solely due to observation. Exceptions may disprove the law induction cannot be justified on logical grounds, number of observations that is “enough” varies, number of variations required could be infinitely large, observations cannot be completely objective. There is a high possibility that one's theory may be proven to be invalid.

Deduction, however, has a top-down approach, where the theory is given, the hypothesis is then tested and further observations are made to prove the theory to be valid or invalid. For example, all Pitbull are allergic to Purina chow; Purina chow consists of chicken, therefore all Pitbull are allergic to chicken. A premise is a statement which supports a conclusion. Hypothetico-deduction differs from the other methods in the sense that it involves more testing and hypothesizing. A question is posed based on observation, theory is researched from both primary and secondary resources, a testable hypothesis is constructed based on the observation, experiments are conducted, and qualitative and quantitative data are observed and collected from observations.

The concluding results are analysed, the hypothesis is stated to be true or false, and finally confirmed, reported and published. For example, I own a Pitbull but refused to give him chicken based chow due to my previous observations. I inquired about it with the vet and other Pitbull owners, and I also Google searched the best chow to feed Pitbull. I experimented with different types of chow as well as with actual chicken meat, and looked for any allergic reactions; surprisingly there were none. In this case the hypothesis was falsifiable, meaning it was able to be tested or proven wrong. I then reported my experiment to the vet.