Inductive Reasoning

Throughout this semester I have learned a lot, but if I have to choose one concept that I found to be useful to apply to my daily life would be inductive reasoning. Although there are many different types of inductive reasoning, I think this would be the one chapter I learned most about. The fact that we already consist inductive reasoning in our daily life without us knowing it, is very impressive. Inductive reasoning is generalizing the facts give us an all-purpose idea of particular cases. Many concepts that were covered in the chapter of inductive reasoning were very helpful to understand how generalization, and poll surveys work. Inductive arguments are to be proven to be stronger or weaker whereas deductive arguments are to be only true or false. Deductive arguments are to be more straightforward, but inductive reasoning can be siding with both positions of an argument, debating which to be stronger. I believe this is  very important because it encourages people to be open minded and to elaborate their new ideas on existing ones.

Pros and Cons of This Class

As many of the students who are enrolled in this class, I have a pretty good idea of why we decided to choose this class which would be the fact that this class is being taught online. Due to being a fulltime student and juggling a part time job, it is a advantage to be able to take a class accordingly to your own schedule. The online blogs and comments that are required to be completed in this class was quite simple but very informative as well. However, the least favorite part of this class would be the group projects. Coming into this class, I did not expect to meet up with the students in this class because it is an online class. However, there have been three projects that require us to meet up with our groups in person. Which is a difficult task since most of us who takes this class have other obligations, which makes it hard for us to find a time that fits in everyone’s schedule. Other than the group projects, I found this class to be a very good class.

What I've Learned...

Overall, this class has taught me a lot of concepts of critical thinking that I never knew of before. For an example, one of the concepts that stuck out to me would have to be the false memories in which leads to invalid decision making. This was the most useful to me because I can relate to this type of fallacy. There are often times where I have recalled memories but second guess whether or not this incident really happened. There are also a lot of barriers we have as humans in the process of decision-making such as, narrow-mindedness, and rationalization and double think, cognitive and social dissonance and stress. These particular barriers made me realize that this world are full of people who usually let these factors get in the way of their critical thinking. There are many people out there in society who refuses to change their beliefs or in other words, to be more open minded of accepting certain social issues. Nonetheless, this class has taught me to improve my critical thinking skills by teaching me the essentials of cognitive development.