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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Turbocharge your reasoning with Critical Thinking Just what are the ingredients of a great argument? What is the secret to communicating your ideas clearly and persuasively? And how do you see through sloppy thinking and flim-flam? If you've ever asked any of these questions, then this book is for you! These days, strong critical thinking skills provide a vital foundation for academic success, and Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies offers a clear and unintimidating introduction to what can otherwise be a pretty complex topic. Inside, you'll get hands-on, lively, and fun exercises that you can put to work today to improve your arguments and pin down key issues. With this accessible and friendly guide, you'll get plain-English instruction on how to identify other people's assumptions, methodology, and conclusions, evaluate evidence, and interpret texts effectively. You'll also find tips and guidance on reading between the lines, assessing validity - and even advice on when not to apply logic too rigidly! Critical Thinking Skills for Dummies: * Provides tools and strategies from a range of disciplines great for developing your reflective thinking skills * Offers expert guidance on sound reasoning and textual analysis * Shows precisely how to use concept mapping and brainstorming to generate insights * Demonstrates how critical thinking skills is a proven path to success as a student Whether you're undertaking reviews, planning research projects or just keen to give your brain a workout, Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies equips you with everything you need to succeed.
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Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, www.wiley.com
This edition first published 2015
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Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies®
Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/criticalthinking to view this book's cheat sheet.
Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part I: Getting Started with Critical Thinking Skills
Chapter 1: Entering the Exciting World of Critical Thinking
Opening the Doors to the Arguments Clinic
Developing Critical Thinking Skills: Reading between the Lines
Understanding What Critical Thinking Isn't
Chapter 2: Peering into the Mind: How People Think
Thinking Logically or Instinctively: Evolution and Consciousness
Watching How the Brain Thinks
Getting Inside Scientists’ Heads
Answers to Chapter 2’s Exercises
Chapter 3: Planting Ideas in Your Head: The Sociology of Thinking
Asking Whether You're Thinking What You Think You're Thinking
Thinking and Indoctrination: Propaganda
Appreciating the Difficulties of Staying Impartial
Appealing to Feelings: The Psychology of Argument
Manipulating Minds and Persuading People
Answers to Chapter 3’s Exercise
Chapter 4: Assessing Your Thinking Skills
Discovering Your Personal Thinking Habits
Busting Myths about Thinking
Exploring Different Types of Intelligence: Emotions and Creativity
Answers to Chapter 4’s Exercises
Part II: Developing Your Critical Thinking Skills
Chapter 5: Critical Thinking Is Like . . . Solving Puzzles: Reasoning by Analogy
Investigating Inventiveness and Imagination
Confused Comparisons and Muddled Metaphors
Becoming a Thought Experimenter
Answers To Chapter 5’s Exercise
Chapter 6: Thinking in Circles: The Power of Recursion
Thinking Like a Computer Programmer
Combining the Thinking Spheres
Sort, Select, Amplify, Generate: Using Design Skills to See New Solutions
Ordering Yourself a Nice, Fresh Argument! (Exercise)
Answers To Chapter 6’s Exercises
Chapter 7: Drawing on Graphical (and Other) Tools for Thinking
Discovering Graphical Tools: Mind Mapping and Making Concept Charts
Putting Graphical Tools To Use
Considering Other Thinking Tools
Answers to Chapter 7’s Exercises
Chapter 8: Constructing Knowledge: Information Hierarchies
Building the Knowledge Pyramid with Data and Information Blocks
Turning the Knowledge Hierarchy Upside Down
Maintaining Motivation: Knowledge, Skills and Mindsets
Answers to Chapter 8’s Exercises
Part III: Applying Critical Thinking in Practice
Chapter 9: Getting to the Heart of the (Reading) Matter
Appreciating Critical Reading as a Practical Skill
Reading between the Lines
Playing Detective: Examining the Evidence
Filtering out Irrelevant Material
Answers to Chapter 10’s Exercises
Chapter 10: Cultivating Your Critical Writing Skills
Structuring Your Thoughts on the Page
Choosing the Appropriate Style of Writing
Getting Down to the Specifics of Critical Writing
Answers to Chapter 10’s Exercise
Chapter 11: Speaking and Listening Critically: Effective Learning
Getting the Most from Formal Talks
Participating in Seminars and Small Groups
Noting a Few Notes
Democratising the Learning Environment
Answers to This Chapter
Part IV: Reason and Argument
Chapter 12: Unlocking the Logic of Real Arguments
Introducing Real-Life Arguments
Delving Deeper into Real Arguments
Chapter 13: Behaving Like a Rational Animal
Setting out Laws for Thinking Logically
Seeing How People Use Logic
Putting Steel in Your Arguments with Logic
Answers to Chapter 13’s Exercises
Chapter 14: Using Words to Persuade: The Art of Rhetoric
Introducing Rhetoric: When an Argument Isn't an Argument
Winning When You're Right
Debating Successfully When You're Wrong
Discerning a Message
Answers to Chapter 14’s Exercise
Chapter 15: Presenting Evidence and Justifying Opinions
Challenging Received Wisdom about the World
Digging into Scientific Thinking
Counting on the Fact that People Don't Understand Numbers: Statistical Thinking
Answers to Chapter 15’s Exercise
Part V: The Part of Tens
Chapter 16: Ten Logical Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Claiming to Follow Logically: Non Sequiturs and Genetic Fallacies
Making Assumptions: Begging the Question
Restricting the Options to Two: ‘Black and White’ Thinking
Being Unclear: Equivocation and Ambiguity
Mistaking a Connection for a Cause: Correlation Confusion
Resorting to Double Standards: Special Pleading
Thinking Wishfully
Detecting the Whiff of Red Herrings
Attacking a Point that Doesn't Exist: Straw-Man Arguments
Redefining Words: Playing at Humpty Dumpty
Chapter 17: Ten Arguments that Changed the World
Suggesting That Only a Small Elite Is Clever Enough To Be In Charge
Crossing the Line: An Argument for Breaking the Law
Staying on the Right Side of the Law: An Argument for Always Obeying the Law
Arguing that Human Misery is Due to a Greedy Elite Exploiting Everyone Else
Proving That, ‘Logically’, God Exists
Proving That, ‘in Practice’, God Doesn't Exist
Defending Human Rights
Making Everything Relative
Getting All Relative with Einstein
Posing Paradoxes to Prove Your Point
About the Author
Cheat Sheet
Advertisement Page
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Introduction
Critical Thinking! Now that sounds like a good idea. Because it's a kind of souped-up, laser-sharp powerful thinking, just waiting to zap rotten arguments and churn out some pretty brilliant insights instead. And don't worry if people tell you that it is a rather high-level kind of thinking, and that only a few can do it, mainly tweedy professors who tell jokes in Latin (dimidium facti qui coepit habet — ‘he who has begun, has the work half done’), because Critical Thinking certainly isn't like that. Critical Thinking is not just for the tweedy few — but for the curious, the imaginative, the creative many. In fact the only thing that is really deeply mysterious about Critical Thinking is why everyone's not doing it. But I've got a theory about that, and it is to do with education and the kind of ways of working that people are corralled into, like so many sheep — supposedly as a preparation for life outside. But life outside is rarely just a business of unreflectively following set procedures and instructions — but rather something where you need constantly to reflect on what you are doing, and why — and act not as a machine, but as a person. So the first skill a Critical Thinker needs to learn is how to think ‘the unthinkable’, to think outside the box, to ‘free their mind’ no less.
Sounds idealistic? A bit 60s and hippies wearing flowers? Well, yes, there's a bit of idealism in Critical Thinking, just as there is in all the best things. But there's also a lot of structure, and solid research backing it too. This book will give you what you need of both — plus plenty of opportunities to develop and test your own skills. I've done both my bit of being taught and of teaching over the years, and another rather mysterious thing is why so many people seem to imagine that thinking, let alone Critical Thinking, is something that can be learned by rote: that is, by writing down and memorizing a collection of facts (a body of knowledge) with right and wrong answers. Critical Thinking guides that create obscure distinctions and list technical terms for you to learn are promoting passive, not active, thinking. Rote learning is fine if all you ever intend to do is deal with past problems, but won't get you many new insights or ideas. And, in fact, it is the opposite of what Critical Thinking is all about. Critical Thinking is really a set of transferable skills — learned for one thing, equally useful for another — that cuts across the whole swathe of academic disciplines and is applicable in all spheres of human activity. This is why you will find Critical Thinking useful as part of learning design skills, nursing studies, economics, and even playing good football: it is really a toolbox for making the most of life.
About This Book
In this book you can find both the conventional material on Critical Thinking Skills, which is broadly about avoiding logical fallacies and following the rules of good essay structure, and a lot more besides. Most other books focus on these bits of Critical Thinking because they are easy to talk about, but rather harder to actually get anyone to do. In fact, like philosophy itself (and Critical Thinking is traditionally a branch of philosophy), properly understood the only way to learn the method is to use the skills in practice. So what I try to offer here is a kind of map or guide book that will come in handy as you actively start using Critical Thinking in whatever areas you want to. I include enough of the background to the academic debates for you to see the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’, plenty of hands-on tips and advice so that you have the ‘how’, and I certainly include some opportunities to try things out in practical exercises.
Foolish Assumptions
One of the key skills in Critical Thinking that too often gets overlooked is ‘knowing your audience’ — and indeed empathising with them. In this case, that means understanding what motivates them. So as I write this book, just as when you write an essay or prepare a report, the crucial thing is to know what the interests and needs of the likely reader are. I assume that you:
Are interested in ideas, and in how to communicate them.
Already know there is a difference between Critical Thinking and just criticising without thinking.
Want to be able to see through a bad argument.
Know how to construct a persuasive argument — although I don't make any assumptions about
what
you will be arguing about or the context that you are studying or working within.
Whether you're young or old, male or female, an engineer or a philosopher, makes no difference to me — the book is zero jargon and open access.
You could be a CEO or the prime minister, but you won't get special sections for that reason. However, I do anticipate that you might be a student, perhaps starting your studies or perhaps having progressed to the point where you are being asked to produce longer dissertations. Because, believe it or not, Critical Thinking is a skill that even PhD students often fall short in. This ‘thinking gap’ is behind a lot of dodgy research and public policy all over the world. So really, I also assume that the likely reader has a moral purpose too. You want to think better and more clearly: to get things right, not just know enough to pass the exam.
On the other hand, if you are sort of a reluctant Critical Thinker, heck, let me have a go at converting you. Because I know there is an awful lot of boring stuff out there on informal logic and structuring essays, and I certainly don't intend to add to it here. So if you are starting off by wanting ‘just the minimum to pass’, you've still come to the right place. If Critical Thinking is sometimes a diet of thoroughly stodgy skills, here you should find plenty of flavouring has been added to the stew that makes it all much more tasty.
Icons Used in This Book
I use this icon to point you towards more detailed explanations of important ideas or theories that shed light on Critical Thinking techniques and skills.
There's a lot of jargon used in some Critical Thinking circles. I attach this icon near the plain English explanation of a term.
I use this icon to highlight key facts and ideas that — literally — you may want to remember. If you know it already, sometimes it will come across more as a reminder.
This flags up a simple idea that can be used to achieve both academic Critical Thinking aims (how to dissect an argument, for example) and also broader CT skills such as how to give space to other people to develop their ideas, rather than switch off at the first point of disagreement.
And last, but definitely not least, this one flags up an opportunity for you to try your skills out!
I reserve this scary icon to indicate both practical ‘pitfalls’, and theories that have downsides.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the material in the print or e-book you're reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the Web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/criticalthinking for some helpful tips and hints.
You can also access some fun critical thinking exercises at www.dummies.com/extras/criticalthinking .
Where to Go from Here
You can read this book any way you want — I don't mind if you just try a few bits that seem particularly relevant, or if you plough through the whole thing in one evening (take it to bed with you), or if you skim read it while eating chips and watching TV.
In fact, I'd recommend that you don't treat it as a textbook, with lesson one leading to lesson two, because the smart reader knows — and the Critical Thinker is a smart reader — that information is best digested when it connects to something you have a current, real need to know. Only you can say what it is at the moment you're looking at, or thinking about, or interested in. So use the index, the contents page or that valuable method known as ‘flicking through’ to find bits that seem relevant to you, and take it from there. (Because I assume many readers will only dip into or out of this book, so I have tried to group material into clearly labeled sections, each with its own 30-second intro, so that you can quickly check out particular aspects as and when you need to.)
However, if you want my advice about where to start, and why not, I wrote the book so I ought to know a bit about it, I'd say some good places to go are:
Chapter 1
:
Because that is where I ‘Welcome you to the Arguments Clinic’ and say a bit about what Critical Thinking is.
Chapter 4
:
Which is on ‘Assessing Your Thinking Skills’, because it contains a pretty cool test of the kind that evil employers may give you, and is quite fun too. But don't read if for that reason, because all of the book is fun.
Chapter 9
:
‘Getting to the Heart of the (Reading) Matter’: another possible jumping in point.
It sounds a bit serious, but it's also a good place to start as it is through reading that most people get new ideas and develop their views. Don't forget, that's probably why you're looking at this book in the first place. What could be better than just reading this book, than reading it while thinking critically!
Part I
Getting Started with Critical Thinking Skills
For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Go to www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.
In this part . . .
Find a quick overview of what this newfangled idea called Critical Thinking is really all about, and why everyone's doing it.
Measure your existing thinking skills, and get a big nudge towards broadening your outlook to include emotional intelligence and awareness of everyone's inbuilt biases.
Discover why most people's brains are happier reaching quick answers than they are at reaching the
right
answers — plus tips on how to avoid that tendency for yourself.
Learn how unscrupulous folks, from political extremists to talented advertisers, have always taken advantage of
uncritical
thinkers.
Chapter 1
Entering the Exciting World of Critical Thinking
In This Chapter
Getting the big picture on thinking skills
Picking up cool tips for problem solving
Steering clear of common misconceptions
There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts.
—François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613–1680)
Critical Thinking is about pressing points, sniffing a bit more sceptically at issues and generally looking more closely at everything. Not only at factual claims but also, and most importantly, at the ways in which people arrive at their views and ideas.
Harrumph, you may think! Why bother? Good question! I've failed plenty of job interviews in my time by being a Critical Thinker. Equally, the world has no shortage of successful people who scrupulously avoid any appearance of not only thinking critically, but thinking full-stop. My short answer is that being a Critical Thinker is still the best kind of thinker to be, even if it does sometimes mean that you're the odd one out on many issues.
In this chapter I provide an overview of Critical Thinking and what you can find in the rest of this book. I'll also cover the importance of ‘reading between the lines’ and also set the record straight on what Critical Thinking isn't.
Opening the Doors to the Arguments Clinic
You may well have been brought up not to argue. At school you were probably encouraged to sit quietly and write down facts — I was. When I was five, one teacher even used sticky tape to shut children's mouths up in class! (Yes, I was one of them.) Since then I've had some very enlightened teachers, who encouraged me to use my imagination, to solve some problems or do research. But still not to argue.
So welcome to a very different way of seeing the world — Critical Thinking. This is truly the ‘arguments clinic’ in which punters can pay for either 5-minute or hour-long arguments (as the famous Monty Python sketch has it). No, it isn't. Yes it is. Still say that it isn't? But, yes it is! (If you like, check out Chapter 17 now to discover ten of the world's most influential arguments — don't worry, I'll still be here when you get back!)
Of course, as the sketch says, this isn't proper argument at all, merely contradiction: nothing like a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. If an ability to contradict people is all you come away with after reading this book then you, like the man in the sketch, would be entitled to your money back. Don't worry, here you will find so many new ways of looking at issues that you'll soon be having the full, hour-long arguments on everything under the sun.
My aim by the end of this section is to give you the big picture of Critical Thinking.
Defining Critical Thinking
If you look up Critical Thinking in a dictionary, you see that it's called the philosophical examination of arguments, and I'm a philosopher. But — at the risk of annoying the Ivory Tower experts straight away — I say that this kind of philosophy isn't the sort most of them do or have a clue about. Yes, as Chapter 12 shows, Critical Thinking does have one foot in the realm of logic, in tidily setting out arguments as premises followed by conclusions. But if that were all it was, you might as well give the job to a computer.
No, Critical Thinking is really about a range of skills and understandings, including an ability to play with words, a sensitivity to context, feelings and emotions, and (the hardest skill to develop) the kind of open-mindedness that allows you to make creative leaps and gain insights.
I know that developing these skills sounds rather like a tall order for one book to achieve. But Critical Thinking is also team thinking, and I draw on the ideas of many other thinkers, including a lot of input from my editors at Wiley. As a result, you don't get my opinion of Critical Thinking Skills, but a carefully researched and lively introduction to the subject.
Spotting how the brain likes to think
Professors may sniff, but I prefer to work on exercises that are fun or interesting, which is why I have tried hard to make the ones in this book like that. Here's a rather trivial little exercise, which nonetheless illustrates something important about how the human mind operates.
Should you say ‘The yolk of the egg is white’ or ‘The yolk of the egg are white’?
When I first saw this question, I thought for a minute — and then I gave up and looked for the answers. That's my method with written exercises; it conserves my limited brain power for things like watching TV and eating crisps — at the same time! But I digress (not good in Critical Thinking). This question may form the subject of a 5-minute argument, but it shouldn't stretch to an hour, because neither version is correct: egg yolks are yellow. Boom, boom! Caught you out?
This exercise reveals that people's normal mode of thinking is bound within the parameters of certain rules and systems — due to thousands of years of evolution. In the jargon of psychology, human thinking uses certain heuristics (mental shortcuts for solving problems and making judgements quickly).
The trouble is that automatic and well-established ways of thinking can stop you from seeing new possibilities or avoiding unexpected pitfalls. Plus, the great majority of people's thinking goes on without them being aware of it. Although sometimes quick and efficient, in certain circumstances it can rush people to the wrong conclusions.
Critical Thinking is your insurance policy against these dodgy, but more or less universal, thinking habits.
Evaluating what you read, hear and think
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
—Bertrand Russell (‘The Triumph of Stupidity’ in Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell's American Essays, 1931–1935)
Critical Thinking is about actively questioning not only the conclusions of what you're reading or hearing, but also the assumptions — be they open or hidden — and the overall frame of reference. (Critical Reading is discussed in detail in Chapter 9.)
Critical Thinkers approach an issue without preconceived assumptions, let alone prejudices, towards certain conclusions. As Professor Stella Cottrell, author of a popular guide to the subject, says, Critical Thinkers are quite prepared to acknowledge a good argument that goes against them, and will refuse to resort to a bad argument even if it looks like the only one available to support them.
Ingredients that make a Critical Thinker
If you're building a Critical Thinker, à la Dr Frankenstein, here are the abilities and attributes you need:
Tolerance: Critical Thinkers delight in hearing divergent views, and enjoy a real debate.Analytical skills: Critical Thinkers don't accept just any kind of talking. They want properly constructed arguments that present reasons and draw sound conclusions.Confidence: Critical Thinkers have to be a little bit confident to be able to examine views that others present — often people in authority.Curiosity: Critical Thinkers need curiosity. It may have killed the cat, but curiosity is the essential ingredient for ideas and insights.Truth-seeking: Critical Thinkers are on mission ‘objective truth’ — even if it turns out to undermine their own previously held convictions and long-cherished beliefs and is flat against their self-interest.Developing Critical Thinking Skills: Reading between the Lines
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism.
—Thomas Huxley (On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge, 1866)
Critical Thinkers know that real debates take place ‘between the lines’, and, all too often, ‘under the mental radar’. The Critical Thinkers’ job is to pull the real issues into plain view and, if necessary, shoot them down!
I introduce you here to some of the core skills of Critical Thinking: ‘reading between the lines’, examining the evidence and quickly deconstructing texts. (The chapters in Part III provide loads more info on how to do just that.)
Challenging people's rationality
Do you know people whose views don't seem to be based on any sort of rational assessment of the world, but rather on dodgy information easily imbibed — or even on blatant prejudices? Me too. And what's more, at least some of my views — and some of your views — also fall into this rather illogical category. The fact is, even though Aristotle called men (not women, he was emphatically prejudiced) ‘rational animals’, people rarely use their rational facility in practice. (I discuss this subject in more depth in Chapter 13.)
More subtly, people often present good reasons for their positions, but in reality arrive at their views for quite different ones. The good reasons are irrelevant, as you sometimes find out if you present some solid arguments that tend to disprove them. For example, suppose your neighbours buy a 4-wheel drive, all-terrain car, and insist that it is vital for when the family goes mountaineering and camping. Yet the fact is that they rarely go anywhere more remote than the nearest supermarket and hate getting their shiny car dirty. Could the real reason be that having a tank-sized car bolsters their sense of self-importance?
Or maybe the government says that it has to charge students tuition fees — otherwise there won't be enough money for everyone who wants to go to college in the future. Good reason! Odd then that the fees system actually costs more to operate than the previous universal grants system. Could the real reason for the change be something to do with dismantling the political edifice of the welfare state?
Arguments may exist for doing that too, but that's straying into politics. I'm not saying one way or the other, but I am recommending the habit of looking a little harder at the reasons and explanations people give.
Dipping into the Critical Thinking skills toolbox
I think of Critical Thinking as a toolbox. Philosophers have a long tradition of seeing argument skills as tools (read the nearby sidebar ‘Totting up Aristotle's tools’ for more).
Critical Thinking isn't one tool, but lots. Plus, its skills can do a lot more than most of its experts seem to be aware of — because most of them come from too narrow a base.
Totting up Aristotle's tools
The most famous writings on ‘how to argue’ are the 2,000-year-old books of Aristotle. His followers gathered them together and called the collection Organon — which is Greek for ‘tool’. Interestingly, this title reflects a controversy at the heart of philosophy that has never gone away: is logic the purest form of philosophy or merely a tool that philosophers use? So this obscure bit of Ancient Greek is surprisingly political, taking sides in an educational controversy that continues to rage today.
Logic is a central Critical Thinking tool. You can see the kind of logic that it uses as a mental screwdriver with two different purposes: it enables you to take arguments completely apart and mend and reassemble them.
Critical Thinking also has creative uses, such as prototyping and brainstorming (see Chapters 6 and 7, respectively). These ‘hammer-and-nails’ skills, with plenty of glue added in, are great for creating new solutions and visualising possibilities. Plus, don't forget the social and emotional components of Critical Thinking (which I cover in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively): I like to think of these as the measuring tools in the kit — maybe as the spirit level too.
Philosophical and mathematical logic is a solitary process: one person (or computer) can take on the world. After churning through a formal proof and finding a contradiction, the matter is closed! But Critical Thinking involves questioning — challenging arguments, methods, ideas and findings, demanding the context and the background. Therefore, it's a more sociable business, where people explore and create truths collectively.
Ordering your thinking: Reason, analyse and then argue
In that order please! Uncritical Thinkers may start by arguing, and then pause to analyse and finally search for reasons, but making the argument follow the reasoning (not the other way around) is much better.
Philosophers prefer to see Critical Thinking as a course in informal logic: the study of arguments expressed in natural language, where an argument being valid isn't enough — the conclusion has to be useful too. The chapters in Part IV are all about that and where I take a good look at the key skills of informal logic (for example, the ‘fallacies’ that many Critical Thinking experts wax long on). But don't be too excited at the prospect of using logic to conquer the world, because as I explain its powers are strictly limited.
The difference between a sound argument and a fallacy is often far from black and white. Which isn't to imply that people don't make lots of silly mistakes and lousy arguments. Check out some logical pitfalls in Chapter 16.
On the other hand, don't let any of these concerns put you off using logic skills in your thinking, writing (check out Chapter 10) and speaking (see Chapters 11 and 14), because a little method can go a long way to making your arguments more persuasive and demonstrating the weaknesses in other people's too.
Which logic for Critical Thinking?
You can encounter plenty of types of logics: Classical logic, Boolean logic, Quantum logic, Sentential logic and how about a bit of Multi-valued logic or Predicate logic too? Sprinkled with Fuzzy logic? No! Breathe again. . . .
Critical Thinking isn't a sneaky way to make students study logic. It's not even a form of logic-lite! A fundamental difference exists between all the usual logics and the one that Critical Thinkers include as one of their tools: informal logic. All the other logics are concerned with the form of the arguments, but only informal logic, as the name suggests, is also concerned with the content of arguments — with issues and applications.
Researchers have often found that when asked, people can't really explain why they hold such and such a view, or what they think would count as suitable evidence for the view. Even more worrying for society, is that these same people are extremely reluctant to have their views challenged. Critical Thinking Skills are your antidote to this very common disease.
Discovering what kind of thinking you do
The one primary and fundamental law of mental action consists in a tendency to generalisation. Feeling tends to spread; connections between feelings awaken feelings; neighboring feelings become assimilated; ideas are apt to reproduce themselves. These are so many formulations of the one law of the growth of mind. When a disturbance of feeling takes place, we have a consciousness of gain, the gain of experience. . . .
—CS Peirce (The Architecture of Theories, 1891)
The quote above is about how building on what you already think is vital for future growth. But it brings problems.
A 19th-century American philosopher, Peirce also indentified three kinds of thinkers, which I shall summarise here (a little creatively) as follows:
Sticklers:
People who form their beliefs by tenaciously sticking to whichever view they liked most originally — whatever evidence is presented to them and even however circumstances change. If asked to justify their view, they can be very thorough in finding facts to support it, while also refusing to look into anything that appears likely to run against it. (I write about facts and opinions in
Chapter 15
.)
Followers: People who respect anyone or anything that presents itself as ‘authoritative’. They form their view in a group discussion on what they think, say, the professor is saying, or in the absence of an authority figure, on what they imagine is the consensuses view. When they look something up on the Internet, they head for the security of Wikipedia (as they imagine it!) and are reluctant to consult websites run by individuals.
These kinds of thinkers, as Peirce says, are useful members of society, because they aid social harmony and cohesion. (Although they may also be found egging on tyrants and persecuting minorities.) But they aren't useful as far as ideas go.
System builders:
These are people who try to fit everything into a pre-existing framework. They're a more sophisticated version of the sticklers. Science is obliged — in practice — to operate on a similar principle. Systemisers are willing to consider new information, but if it requires dismantling the pre-existing structure for understanding the world, they're likely to reject it. You can read more on how people process information to build knowledge in
Chapter 8
.
According to Peirce, the smart way to see the world is to accept that everything you know may be wrong and start from scratch if need be. Or indeed end up with all the views on an issue demolished with ‘no working hypothesis’ left. Only a true Critical Thinker would do such a thing.
Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit.
—Erasmus
Bertrand Russell ascribes this quote to Erasmus, and I can see why he liked it. Russell was a philosopher prepared to argue unpopular views (such as that war is a bad thing) and was put in prison — twice.
Russell (refreshingly) took on professors and people in authority, but his point of course applies to everyone. Too few people are really open to new ideas, let alone able to take criticism — unless they've taken and really absorbed the lessons of Critical Thinking.
US philosopher William James made a similar point when he complained that many people think that they're thinking when they're merely rearranging their prejudices. For Critical Thinkers, discerning thought and prejudice is a vital distinction to make and the first step is becoming more aware of your biases. (I examine this issue in Chapter 2.)
James also recommends that in many areas, people should decide their position on the basis of feelings, even if they have no good or relevant arguments to support it. How logical is that? Well, not at all, but it's not a stupid position either. In Chapter 4 I look at some distinctly non-logical ways of approaching problems.
Professors tend to tell people to ‘think’, and complain when they don't — but they fail to offer advice on exactly how to do it. For that, students have to rely largely on their own efforts, or maybe turn to specialist experts such as Edward de Bono. He stresses that thinking is a skill that has to be learned. Critical Thinking definitely owes ‘pioneers’ of thinking skills like him a polite nod, even if the approach here has to be little more, well, scientific.
Speaking of which, here's a scientist to explain about how scientists think:
The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
—Albert Einstein (A. Einstein and L. Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, 1938, p.92)
Well, he has to come in sooner or later. Einstein's point about creativity is absolutely spot-on. Check out the nearby sidebar ‘Thinking outside the box’ for an example.
Thinking outside the box
This anecdote shows how redefining problems can generate new insights.
A gardening equipment firm challenged a meeting of engineers to use their collective thinking power to come up with a new kind of lawn mower. After some humming and ahhing, the engineers came up with . . . not very much. Some tinkering and slightly novel refinements, but nothing to create a splash in the marketplace.
Then one of the engineers suggested that they return to the original problem; but to ‘go back one step’ and express it in terms of function. Instead of the engineers thinking about how to redesign lawn mowers, which meant that their thoughts followed the usual paths, he said they should think about ‘machines to help people maintain lawns’.
This small, even niggly, distinction made all the difference. The engineers even created an entirely new product, based on the imaginative insight of one whose son liked playing with yo-yos. They invented the strimmer, which involves a nylon string whizzing around, thus adding a new annoyance to neighbours everywhere. The power of Critical Thinking!
You can read more about creative brainstorming in Chapter 7.
Understanding What Critical Thinking Isn't
The preceding sections discuss what Critical Thinking is, but I now detail what it isn't.
Critical Thinking isn't about putting arguments and debates into formal language or symbols and then spotting logical fallacies in them (despite what many books say). It is about how to look at issues and problems in the real world, with all their fuzziness and contradictions, and offer relevant, practical and sharp insights into them. It's a skill that lets you, for example, distinguish right from wrong, choose the best business policy and construct a compelling case for action.
Also, Critical Thinking is far deeper than study skills, those set ways of doing things that lecturers often teach students. Instead, it's about what to do when no obvious answers or set methods are available. Look at it this way: a study skill makes sure that you have pen and paper during lectures; Critical Thinking is about what to jot down.
Quantum physicist Richard Feynman said that science is grounded in the conviction that its own experts are often ignorant of what they profess to be experts about. That statement applies, with knobs on, to Critical Thinking too!
People who claim to be experts in Critical Thinking don't automatically know everything about the vast range of skills and material the subject covers or draws upon. Nonetheless, Critical Thinking is a skill, and so whether you're pretty hot on it or not, you can definitely improve through practice.
Critical Thinking isn't about learning an endless series of ‘facts’. Instead, it encourages people to develop their in-built thinking skills by making them active. That's why this book features lots of tricky puzzles (see Chapter 5 for more on puzzles and analogies) rather than platitudes. I want you to start thinking critically and actively from page one. Or from the start of Chapter 2 anyway!
Chapter 2
Peering into the Mind: How People Think
In This Chapter
Testing humans, logical thinking
Staring into the brain while it works
Challenging the notion of rational scientific thinking
We think so because other people all think so . . . or because we were told so, and think we must think so. . . .
—Henry Sidgwick
Some mysteries are best tackled by digging out and looking at ‘the known facts’, but not the issue of ‘how people think’. This one is best tackled (as philosophers have done for centuries) by asking questions.
For example, when you read something — like this paragraph — whose voice do you hear in your head? Is it your own voice, as the reader, or is it an echo of the voice of the author reappearing through the words — or perhaps both? The neurologist Paul Broks identifies a peculiar thing about writing: it seems to allow other people to access and ‘take over the language centres of your brain’. Part of this chapter, the section ‘Thinking Logically or Instinctively: Evolution and Consciousness’, explains how and why that may happen. Being aware of this is useful when you're trying to understand your reaction both to other people's ideas, and to critically evaluate some of your own theories.
One of the key skills, not only of Critical Thinking but in life generally, is the ability to reflect on your own practices. This chapter is your diagnostic manual for checking what's going on inside your head.
In debates about how people think, a gulf in philosophy has long existed between conservatives, who uphold traditional distinctions and assume the brain is a machine (and therefore logical and rational), and radicals, who critique that whole approach (and admire the complexity and illogicality of human thinking). This chapter takes a look at these debates — ones that shape all subject areas — so that you can move towards an effective analysis of your own and other people's reasoning. It's important to realise that even scientists aren't immune to making mistakes in this area.
I also examine a more specific question: to what extent do logical rules and the methods of rational argument underlie people's beliefs and the judgements and decisions they make? Or, on the contrary, are individuals more influenced by what other people think? An understanding of this tendency to groupthink provides you with a key defence against being misled by the opinions of those around you or those in authority, and also a more sophisticated way of interpreting events, debates and decisions.
Read on — but also have a think about what you think about how you think — and then perhaps try not thinking about anything — maybe have a quiet lie down!
Thinking about how people think: Some thoughts!
We think so because other people all think so; or because — or because — after all we do think so; or because we were told so, and think we must think so; or because we once thought so, and think we still think so; or because, having thought so, we think we will think so.
—Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick's contribution to understanding how people think (which I started the chapter with) touches upon the key issues, although it's hardly expressed very elegantly. If students wrote like that in exams, they may not fail but they wouldn't get many marks. It's almost rambling — not clear and authoritative at all!
But then English philosopher Sidgwick didn't write those words at all. You can find plenty of people on the Internet saying that he did, but when you look more closely (as Critical Thinkers always should do) you find that the lines are supposed to be insights that occurred to the great philosopher in his sleep, and are in fact as recorded by his relatives, Arthur and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick. They were probably struck by his idea that thinking is not really an individual matter at all, but rather a complex social phenomenon involving lots of different associations — some of them misremembered and some maybe even imaginary!
Thinking Logically or Instinctively: Evolution and Consciousness
Personally, I don't usually think of myself as having a brain like a lizard or crocodile (unless I've had a particularly bad night's sleep), but in evolutionary terms it seems that I sure do. So if anyone wants to claim that ‘the way that we think is what makes us human’, they'd better try to work out precisely what humans do differently from animals. As I discuss in this section and throughout this chapter, the debate is as much a philosophical one as a biological one.
In the first part of this section I look at how mysterious the inner world of our thoughts still remains, even as scientists discover more and more about the external world. I first of all look at the different tasks human minds and animal minds are asked to do, and then in ‘Jumping to conclusions: The cost of fast thinking’ I'll illustrate how sometimes the two kinds of thinking — human and animal — get muddled up and lead people to make rash judgements and silly mistakes.
Buying beans and composing sonnets: Contrasting views of consciousness
Do monkeys think? Do plants? No, or at least not like humans anyway. They just appear to be thinking as they may follow pre-programmed evolutionary strategies; a bit like computers (or Big Brother contestants). But, unlike computers, they're ‘undoubtedly’ conscious of something. For if nowadays scientists agree that the body, indeed the whole universe, is a machine, still no one is quite able to say that a ghost isn't riding along in the centre of it.
One of the most famous philosophers of them all, Descartes, once wrote ‘I think, therefore I am’, or at least, many people think he wrote that. Of course, Critical Readers will check such quotes very carefully and find that actually he said something a little bit different. But as I say, everyone ‘thinks’ he said that, so in a sense he did. He was suggesting that awareness of the brute fact of existing was the only thing he could be sure of, and he used this nugget not only to get himself up in the morning but also to make sense of and rediscover the world.
The French philosopher was onto something big — and that thing is consciousness, perhaps the central mystery of philosophy. Science can explain many things, but this strange sense of self-awareness it often just dismisses as an illusion.
Celebrating the human mind
I wrote a book a few years ago that was an investigation of consciousness but went under the rather more appealing title of Mind Games. Through such games, I focused on the mysteries that surround the way people think.
The human mind has many inexplicable abilities. It can happily deal with imaginary things that don't really exist, that don't make sense and that can't be explained. Imagine what a disaster it would be if a unicorn ate this book or if it turned out your dad was an alien in disguise! Some people even think the mind can project thoughts instantaneously across distances, cause departed souls to re-materialise and, of course, pass messages directly to a creator God. Yet although mainstream philosophers and hardnosed scientists sneer at such irrationality, that's no reason to throw out the distinction between minds and brains, between consciousness and electrical activity in nerve networks.
Humans do many things that animals don't and they do them for complex, socially defined or aesthetical reasons. As the contemporary philosopher-scientist Raymond Tallis challenges his readers, just consider what's going on under the surface with something as commonplace and seemingly simple as buying a can of beans in a supermarket. Why are people buying them? It may be because they've just seen an advert for it, or because it reminds them of some happy times when they were kids. It might be because they think beans are cheap. Surely animals don't have to worry about things like this when they eat grass or gobble up rabbits.
Yet the fact remains that many of the differences between humans and other animals are marginal. The lives of humans and chimpanzees probably looked very similar a few hundred thousand years ago — no tins of beans or supermarkets then, let alone those sonnets and symphonies that philosophers love to cite as proof that humans are something special. Plus humans didn't develop their mysterious minds in an evolutionary blink: The brain evolved over long periods of time, and so Stone Age people must have had pretty much the same kind of consciousness then.
Professor Tallis is near the mark when he says that what's distinctive about humanity is its social environment, bound together by language and tool use. It's utterly different from the world within which animals exist. ‘Artefacts, institutions, mores, laws, norms, expectations, narratives, education, training.’ And although humans share 98 per cent of their genes with chimpanzees, they share precisely zero per cent of their chromosomes — and chromosomes are what actually do things.
Jumping to conclusions: The cost of fast thinking
In this section I'll look at the theory that actually, people are basically illogical, and because of this they often get muddled up, make faulty judgements and silly mistakes. Understanding how people arrive at their opinions and conclusions gives insights into what people say and think — and can even help you anticipate people's behaviour and responses in advance.
The US professor Daniel Kahneman has written about the psychological basis for judgements, reactions, choices, conclusions and much more. His writings (such as Thinking, Fast and Slow) give a significant push to the already pretty widespread view of people as, basically, irrational animals. He was even given a Nobel prize for his research!
Kahneman's thesis is that the human animal is systematically illogical. Not only do people mis-assess situations, but they do so following fairly predictable patterns. Moreover, those patterns are grounded in their ancient origins as simple animals. Survival depended on it. Much thinking is instinctive — and hardwired.
He says that people have two ways of thinking:
A logical mode (which he thinks is good, of course).
An earlier, instinctual mode (which he says is the root of most ‘wrong decisions’).
The human brain doesn't like information gaps, and so people tend to jump at the first answer/solution that looks good rather than take the time to examine all the data, especially in a world where they receive more information every day than they have time to assimilate. Plus, the human brain loves to see patterns and make connections. Although such traits serve people well in many ways, sometimes they mislead people too.
For example, thinking is a complex biological process and requires a lot of energy: the human brain uses up 20 percent of an adult's total energy, and for children it gobbles up almost half their body's energy! (Try multiplying two two-digit numbers in your head while running: 23 × 47 anyone? You're sure to slow down both in your running and your calculating. So, because thinking gobbles up precious mental resources, the body is programmed to avoid it. Instead, human beings have developed, over many thousands of years, a range of built-in, ‘off the peg’ methods for reaching decisions.
You might want to say that the example of the multiplication sum ‘slowing down your running’ is a bit dodgy — maybe that it is the distraction rather than the mental energy that causes any slowing down. Certainly, don't accept anything just because an expert says so! However, the notion of being distracted itself indicates a sort of limit in human thinking powers. That's partly why we admire people who can, say, balance on a monocycle on a rope while juggling!
The problem with fast thinking however is that often it means people don't solve the right problem — they solve the easy problem. A celebrated example is the ‘bat and ball’ quiz.
Test yourself! A bat and a ball together cost £1.10. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? (Answers at the end of the chapter.)
Encountering human illogicality: The Linda Problem
The Linda Problem, one of the most celebrated quizzes in psychological research, is an experiment in unintended bias. It's used to illustrate how illogical everyday judgements are ridden by fallacies anchored in evolutionary history. The original experiment, by two psychology professors, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman was elegantly simple. At the outset, participants were given this information:
Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
On the basis of this character sketch, the researchers asked student volunteers to rank the likelihood (probability) of Linda having one of a list of possible jobs, ranging from ‘teacher in an elementary school’ to ‘insurance salesperson’ by way of ‘works in a bookstore and takes yoga classes’. They had provided a stereotype, and waited to see if the research participants would be influenced by it.
The context seemed to be that of matching a psychological type (as per the short description) to a career choice. By implication, the research was asking the students questions like: Would you be surprised to find a bright philosophy student working in a bookshop and doing yoga? Certainly, for me, the answer to that is ‘no’, and the students were no different. This process, in which people use stereotypes to arrive at conclusions, has a fancy name in psychology called the ‘representativeness heuristic’. That's an off-putting term but it basically just means ‘basing judgements on typical things’. People make a lot of decisions more-or-less subconsciously by applying preconceived stereotypes.
Being a psychology experiment, however, the researchers tucked away a sneaky trick. One of the jobs in the list, ‘bank teller’ (the American term for bank cashier) was entered twice: the first time high up the list just as ‘Linda is a bank teller’ and the second time at the bottom of the list as ‘Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement’.
In essence, therefore, the question being asked of the participants, and that you can ask yourself now, is: drawing on the earlier description of Linda's character, which of these two statements do you think is more likely?
Linda is a bank teller.
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
Tversky and Kahneman wrote their description of Linda to make it seem highly likely that Linda was active in the feminist movement, but unlikely that she'd have taken a job in a bank. Thus, nearly all the students considered the first option, of Linda becoming a bank teller, to be improbable. But by linking the unlikely element of the description of Linda to the likely one, the researchers found that a full 89 per cent of students were persuaded that the description ‘Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement’ was plausible, and certainly much more so than the simpler claim.
