Wednesday, August 10, 2011

I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

Day Three of School.

Lesson Two of Geometry.

I was stumped on problem number two. This does not bode well for the school year.

Sweetling, fortunately, got through all twenty problems without any difficulties.

The lesson is "Evaluating the Validity of Statements and Arguments"

In the student exercise, we were to apply the concepts taught in the lesson (changing "all" statements to "if...then" statements, using the Law of Detachment and the Law of Syllogism, and finding counterexamples), to determine whether a series of 20 statements were true or false.

I resorted to just marking the statements as true if I liked them. I got 16 out of the 20 correct. Sweetling actually used logic and did much better, only missing one where she had misread the greater than/less than sign.

However, I am turning for help to my good friends for one of the statements. Sweetling marked it, correctly, as false, but I want to know why, using the basic rules of logic, this statement is false.

The statement is: "There is a unicorn on Saturn who loves pepperoni pizza."

We encountered this past spring, doing some sample pages of the text to determine if this was the text we wanted to purchase for our upcoming school year. Sweetling marked the statement as 'false' both times we have encountered it.

Because, she says, hello? Unicorns?

I have two cute webkinz (which Sweetling brought to me to console me at the end of the lesson) which say, yes, thank you very much, unicorns.

Our textbook agrees with Sweetling that the statement, is in fact, false.

I fail to see anything inherent in the statement that would necessarily mandate that it is false.

Could someone else please explain to me, in simple easy to understand terms, how that statement is logically false?


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

All I can say logically is, Unicorns are extinct (Yes I believe they existed. I even think there is a bible verse for it, however I don't know what they looked like..)And there is no breathable oxygen on Saturn and I believe that unicorns were probably plant eaters if they indeed looked like horses, so I don't think a unicorn would like pepperoni. :) Hows that for logic. giggle :)