Mr. Andre Reflection

Please take a moment to REFLECT on Mr. Andre's presentation in ToK. Did you learn something new? Did you enjoy his riddles? Why or why not? How do you think the Riddles about Monopoly and the Explorers relate to the story of Spider and Black Deer? This post must be completed by April 15.

His presentation of the possibilities for Mock Exams as a syllogism and the riddles we had to solve using reasoning and logic seemed confusing at first but after they were explained seemed very clear and simple. I did learn something new, that many more "riddles" or problems than we think can be solved by breaking it down into a syllogism or into a series of True/False statements, and that sometimes riddles are much more simple than we think (i.e. the man is just playing monopoly, he has not maxed out on his credit cards and gotten into a severely damaging car accident and now cannot work). I have a really tough time with riddles, and it never occurs to me to separate it into separate parts to see which ones are true and false and hence what are the real possibilities for an answer. I did not necessarily ENJOY the riddles he gave us because I get very frustrated when I can't think of an answer and then I feel very stupid afterward, but I enjoyed it in the sense that the riddles made me think and made me realize that sometimes you have to think outside the box, but not too far, because the answer could be fairly simple... I also liked how they opened my eyes more to HOW we reason, and the process our brains go through, sometimes without us actually realizing it, to reach a conclusion that seems logical to us.
The riddles about Monopoly and the explorers in the ocean relate to the story of the tribespeople trying to answer the riddle about Spider and Black Deer because we see, in trying to answer all 3, that context (what context the person trying to answer the riddle is thinking in terms of) plays a key part in determining what we see as a logical conclusion. Because the Kpelle people were probably used to folklore and their perspective on reality etc. is different than ours, they were thinking not in the hypothetical context we think in when asked a riddle, but what seems the reality to them. Similarly, when asked the riddle about the man who went bankrupt after arriving at a hotel, we do not naturally think in the context of the game Monopoly, so we assume it must be a real man at a real hotel with real money, and something went awfully wrong. When we gear the riddle about the 2 explorers who see a wild animal, our brains automatically think "jungle" and "tiger" or something to that effect, so we would never think "oh, the one moving faster will get killed because the wild animal is a shark who can sense blood movement."