I get confused when there two of something. That is, when I am trying to remember the difference between two related but distinct concepts. For instance, there’s the difference between “affect” and “effect” that I wrote about yesterday. Another example is the difference between “inductive” and “deductive” reasoning, which I must have learned about half a dozen times by now in difference college and grad school courses, but which I still can’t remember. Inductive reasoning is general to specific no, I just looked it up and I was wrong. See what I mean?
Inductive reasoning is specific to general, whereby you use a set of facts to arrive at a general conclusion. For example, “all ice is cold” is inductively derived based on the fact that all the ice I’ve ever touched is cold. It’s a useful thing for theory-building.
Deducutve reasoning is the other way around. This is what Sherlock Holmes was famous for — reasoning that the specific person standing before him is a stonemason, for instance, because that person is covered in the type of dust that generally covers stonemasons.
But I digress (I do that a lot). These are just the two examples I can think of right now, but I know there are more. When I can’t quite get something straight in my head I often find thinking, “it’s because there are two possibilities, I just know it — if there were three or five I’d have no trouble remembering this”. It’s as if my brain, hearing that “A” means “fu” and “B” means “bar”, takes a snapshot of the information and then files it upside down and sideways. “Right,” says my brain, “Bar, fu, A, B. got it. No problem, boss!”.
Other people I know don’t seem to have this problem. I don’t know if it’s to do with my learning disabilities or if it’s an unrelated quirk of my brain.
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