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Understanding Of Terrestrial And Cosmological History Essay

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While I did approach Big History: Connecting Knowledge with an intent to gain a greater transdisciplinary understanding of terrestrial and cosmological history, in retrospect I can see that I have more so gained from the critical thinking aspects of the course and in particular the four claim tester tools: (1) Intuition, (2) authority, (3) logic, (4) evidence. As Jenny Duke-Yonge comments in her lecture segment ‘How do we decide what to believe?’ in which she introduces the claim tester tools: “Even our best scientific theories are subject to revision in the light of new evidence. So, although what you 're being presented with here is the best scientific knowledge we have now, it may turn out that some of it 's false. It 's very likely to turn out that it 's at least incomplete. So as well as providing you with information through the course, we want to provide you with tools to help you deal with information effectively, to help you be selective and discerning about the kinds of things you believe. These questions are important for us because our society is one in which we are constantly bombarded with information from a variety of often conflicting sources.” Certainly when adopting a transdisciplinary approach and being presented with vast quantities of mind-boggling and headache-inducing information, it is very easy to become seduced by knowledge that seems to offer a shortcut and comfortable explanation, but which could in actuality be the completely wrong solution,

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