Free to Learn by Peter Gray

Author:Peter Gray [Gray, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465037919
Publisher: Basic Books

A Playful State of Mind Enables Young Children to Solve Logic Problems

In experiments conducted in England, M. G. Dias and P. L. Harris found that young children could solve logic problems in the context of play that they seemed unable to solve in a serious context.10 The problems were syllogisms, the classic type of logic problem originally described by Aristotle. A syllogism requires a person to combine the information in two premises to decide whether a particular conclusion is true, false, or indeterminate (cannot be determined from the premises). Syllogisms are generally easy when the premises coincide with concrete reality, but are more difficult when the premises are counter-factual (contradictions to reality). The prevailing belief at the time that the British researchers conducted these experiments was that the ability to solve counterfactual syllogisms depends on a type of reasoning that is completely lacking in young children.

Here’s an example of a counterfactual syllogism the researchers used:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.