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VOLUME XII, NUMBER 21

INNOVATION ABSTRACTS

PUBLISHED BY THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND Cention DEVELOPMENT, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN=:-*

WITH SUPPORT FROM THE W. K. KELLOGG FOUNDATION AND THE SID W. RICHARDSON FOUNDATION

 

Explanation Games: If He’d Seen the Sawdust...

An explanation game is a game in which participants
have to discover an explanation for a scenario or series
of events, supplied at the outset by the game leader.
Participants ask questions which the leader may answer
“yes,” “no,” or “irrelevant.” Participants have, then, to
formulate general hypotheses about the form of the
hidden explanation and to reject or modify them in
response to answers from the leader, until the correct
hypothesis is reached. There is no guarantee (far from
it!) that the correct hypothesis will be the most reason-
able: the correct answer is simply the explanation
which the game leader had in mind.

An example of an explanation game begins with the
clue: “If he’d seen the sawdust, he wouldn’t have
died.” The answer, it turns out, is as follows: “he” was
the shortest man in the world, in the habit of checking
this status by measuring himself with a wooden stick of
the same length as his height. His rival, the second
shortest, had engineered a heart attack by shortening
the stick, thus leading the deceased to believe that he
had grown, and that his livelihood was in jeopardy.
(He makes his living from his lack of height, e.g., ina
circus.)

I use these games in teaching philosophical critical
thinking at my community college. (The original idea
from using them in this context came to me from Dr.
Lawrence Resnick at Simon Fraser University.) They
are suitable, however, for incorporation into a wide
range of disciplines where the attempt is to encourage
critical thinking among students. Here I'll try to
motivate a belief in their usefulness in teaching both
philosophy of science and science subjects in general.

First of all, they constitute active, student-centered,
and collaborative learning. Students are actively
engaged in thinking in the classroom and must draw on
previously-gained knowledge and understanding of the
world, working collaboratively, to maximize the effi-
ciency of the solution process. Asa result, the games
are fun; and the affective responses of curiosity, puzzle-
ment, success, and realization set the tone for other
learning activities later in class.

Second, the games promote the development of a
number of important reasoning abilities, valuable in

academic as well as ordinary life. The kinds of reason-
ing abilities these games require, and therefore develop,
include: memory/recall; precision in choice of expres-
sion; attention to consistency and implication; aware-
ness of assumptions behind questions (avoidance of the
fallacy of “dubious assumption” or “loaded question”);
attention to the generality and specificity of questions
with respect to their efficiency in approaching a correct
hypothesis; and use of metaquestions (e.g., “Would it
help me if I asked...?”).

The games can be played with or without instructive
comment on questioning strategies; this is very useful
once the basic idea has been assimilated by the stu-
dents. Also valuable is trying to reconstruct the reason-
ing processes at the end of the game. The assumption,
supported by metacognition research, is that self-
conscious understanding of the logical processes
involved in the games enables students to develop the
corresponding reasoning abilities.

Third, the process of the game models the hypothet-
ico-deductive picture of science described by, among
others, Karl Popper. At some point in the term I make
this explicit, in the hope that familiarity with the games
will add to the understanding of scientific method
which I wish to convey.

The hypothetico-deductive model of science can be
explained through the use of the games by developing
the following analogy: in science, hypotheses are tested
by developing the logical consequences of one hypothe-
sis which are not also those of another, and finding out
by experiment whether these logical consequences are
true; if so, the hypothesis receives more support, thoug!
there is seldom a final “answer” to this “problem” until
one brings in extra-scientific considerations. In the
games, players test their hypothetical explanations by
thinking of a logical consequence of a hypothesis they
have in mind and asking if it’s true. The instructor,
who plays the role of “Nature,” gives more definite
answers than she, but the confirmation of a hypothesis
is still a gradual process involving the rejection of
alternative explanations.

This analogy raises the possibility of modelling
scientific reasoning in a parallel sort of game, in which

 

     
 

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