★英語TOKの授業を紹介★　「考えること」の難しさを生徒は感じています。次年度は、中学生にもこのTOKの授業を開講予定です。

   There are many things in life that we tend to take for granted. One of these things is the movement of the sun. We assume that the sun will come up in the morning, stay for a few hours (when it will be daytime) and then go down for a few hours (when it will be nighttime), and that this process will repeat itself indefinitely in the future.
   But how reasonable is this assumption? Pretty reasonable, you might think, because every day we have lived so far, we have seen the sun rise, and we have never lived a day where it didn’t. Now, letting x stand for ‘a particular day in the past’ and xf stand for ‘any day in the future’, our reasoning can be illustrated as follows:
 

  1. On day x1 (in the past), the sun rose.

  2. On day x2 (in the past), the sun rose.

  3. On day x3 (in the past), the sun rose.

  4. So on day xf (in the future), the sun will rise.
 

  What this means simply is that our belief that the sun will rise on any given day in the future is the result of our previous experiences of it rising in the past. Since we cannot look into the future, this is naturally the only evidence that we could possibly have. But now consider a similar example:

 

  1. On day x1, Jane walked her dog past the market at 8am.

  2. On day x2, Jane walked her dog past the market at 8am.

  3. On day x3, Jane walked her dog past the market at 8am.

  4. So on day xf, Jane will walk her dog past the market at 8am.
 

   The evidence and the reasoning used to arrive at the conclusion in this second example is exactly identical to that used in the first. In both cases, some event is experienced a number of times, and this limited number of experiences leads us to make a more general conclusion that the same event will happen again in the future, whether this event is the rising of the sun or the walking of the dog.
   The problem is that we seem perfectly able to doubt that Jane will in fact walk her dog past the market at 8am on a particular day in the future? There are in fact any number of things that might happen to her or her dog that would mean she would be unable to walk it at 8am. In such a case, we would have no warning that she wouldn’t show up at the market, it is just something that would fail to happen on that particular day. In other words, we can never know whether Jane will walk her dog on a given morning until after we have seen her either (a) do it, or (b) fail to do it.
   Is the sunrise any different? The only evidence we have to support the belief that it will rise in the future is that it has risen in the past, which is the same kind of evidence we had in the Jane and the dog example. But as this second example has shown, events that happen in the past cannot predict events in the future. You might say, ‘well, we cannot say for sure, but surely the sun rising every day in the past at least makes it more likely that it will also rise tomorrow’? Unfortunately we can’t even say this, because in order for it to be more likely, it would have to be true that the past has some effect on prediction about the future, which is precisely what it in doubt.
   This brings us neatly back to the question: How confident can we be that the sun will rise tomorrow? That’s a question for you to think about.

 　　　　　　　　　　　　　

-Mr. Dutson