I struggle to imagine any educated person in North America admitting that they do not possess the power of critical thought. Few uneducated people would say "Oh yeah, I'm a total rube." I have heard doctors say that they would only trust other doctors to raise their children in case of an accident because medical training imbues critical thought. Complaints about "stupid people" being allowed to vote are widespread. I am a teacher, and literally every teacher I have ever met believes that it is their core mission to "teach kids to be critical thinkers." The fact that not one of those teachers shows any evidence of critical thought suggests either that I am the world's most arrogant man (possible) or that I do not understand what critical thought actually is.
So what is critical thought? This is an honest question. Some uncritical googling gives these definitions:
-the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment
-self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of mind
-the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.
-Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe.
The problem with these is that pretty much everyone would say that their own thought meets the criteria in the definitions and few people would accept that their own thought is irrational, shallow, unclear, etc if you tried to point it out. Consequently, critical thought comes off as a sort of cool kids club, where we, the in-group, are right about important things because of our superior something-or-rather, and the erroneous out-group is deluded by their own biases and lack of discipline. The definitions are either so vague or so inclusive that they boil down to "I know it when I see it." I don't see it very much, though. Perhaps it is only me who lacks this understanding, since it is probably impossible to imagine anyone smarter than oneself (because if you'd imagine their thoughts and then you'd be that smart too). Maybe I just can't imagine anyone more critical(?) than me.
Below are some possibilities and the reasons why I don't think they work. Tell me why I'm wrong, and how to be right.
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Formal logic: A sound deductive argument provides true conclusions, but even a little work with formal logic raises the question of GIGO. "All men are mortal" is pretty uncontroversial, so Socrates must be mortal. Beyond that, however, very few premises are solid enough to merit insertion into logical argument. Induction is famously self-defeating (Hume), enough to lead to hypotheses that we're just hard-wired to believe in it (Kant, Schopenhauer). Abduction (Sherlock Holmes-style reasoning) is a nice idea, but boils down to experience and breadth of knowledge.
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Avoidance of fallacies: Fallacies are obviously bad, but day-to-day thought is just not very prone to fallacies of any consequence. Again the big danger is untrue or misunderstood premises. When someone brings up the Bible, for example, and says "The Bible says that the Bible is true, lol," they aren't really taking issue with the question-begging reasoning; if some Biblical council proved that that line was a later addition, the fedora guys wouldn't all become Christians- they just don't believe the Bible is true. The object-level debate over the facts is the root of the issue.
Furthermore, formal fallacies are of very limited applicability and informal fallacies are fallacies in limited enough circumstances that their fallaciousness is at very least debatable (the slippery slope, for example, happens all the time).
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The stuff stupid teachers tell students: "If the website ends in .edu you can trust it," "If bad people funded the study it's not true," "Check the credentials of the author," etc. List of tips on how to spot fake news are full of this. If these tips are even true, they depend on you either blindly trusting that PhDs (or whoever) are right about everything, which even someone as confused as I am can tell is not critical thought, or they depend on you knowing which PhD's are trustworthy and which aren't, who the bad study-funders are and why, which parts of .edu are part of the replication crisis, and so on. This doesn't take a PhD, but it takes a ton of subject knowledge.
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Fighting The Man: Big corporations are lying to you, Manufacturing Consent, AdBusters, cui bono, don't trust anyone over 30, and so on. This is all true enough, I guess, but the people who are the loudest about critical thinking are now The Man themselves (See the Disinformation Governance Board). Fighting The Man these days involves not getting vaccinated, driving your truck in a freedom convoy and rooting for Putin. If critical thought is the power of telling truth from falsehood, or Truth from Falsehood, then it doesn't shift as the culture shifts. And if it shifts as the culture shifts, then it would seem to be no more than a proclamation of tribal allegiance.
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Avoidance of cognitive biases: You shouldn't embrace them, but are they even real? Did most of that stuff not come out of questionable psych research?
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LessWrong-style rationalism: Even if Bayesianism is questionable, much of what is written in the Sequences is still true. That whole line of thinking, however, depends on knowledge of statistics, engineering, computer science; lots of knowledge of subject matter. Furthermore, it has severe blind-spots with regard to morality and metaphysical stuff because stats and programming don't lead that way. This is a sort of "I'm looking for my keys out front because the light is better" solution, where the meta-problem ("We don't have a solution") gets solved, but the actual problem ("How can we be right?") doesn't. That's why it's called LessWrong, and not just Right.
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All of these put together: Maybe the task is so huge that you need all of this. It seems to me that that would compound the flaws in each approach and result in amalgamating everything good into "Just know tons of stuff about the world. Like, literally everything, if possible." And if that's the case then "critical thinking" just means "breadth and depth of knowledge." It would also correlate with knowledge, though, which plainly isn't the case. Lots of polymaths are very wrong about things outside their specific fields, and one hears of them being wrong even within their fields.
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All of this plus intelligence: This seems like we're back to the cool kids club: "We just know more and we're smarter." This would, however, explain why some very knowledgeable people don't seem to fit the definition (?) vibe (?) aura (?) of critical thought- they just aren't smart enough. But it takes a certain intelligence to become very knowledgeable, so it would be surprising to find very many knowledgeable people without this power. This would also explain why many smart people don't fit the definition- they just don't know enough. It would suggest, though, that you could take smart people and have them read Wikipedia all day for 2 years and then everyone would agree that they were critical thinkers. I can't be sure that this isn't true, and I don't have an argument for why. But I really don't think it's true.
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All of this, plus wisdom. Well, what is wisdom? And so we go back 3000 years and start the entire conversation over again and hope for a better result the second time. Let's not.
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Emotion: When I consider the many defects I see in other people's thought and consider the ways I have avoided those exact defects (not all defects- you can't imagine anyone smarter than you, remember) I get:
-Intelligence
-Breadth of Knowledge of "facts."
-Familiarity with philosophy and religion (breadth of knowledge of "ideas," maybe?)
-Suspicion of consensus
-Love of conflict
-Hatred of error
-PROFOUND suspicion of any comforting thought/EXTREME fear of motivated reasoning. Like, crippling fear.
The last 4 are at best aesthetic preferences and at worst emotional tendencies. Is that what it takes? If so, is there any hope for someone without them?
TLDR:
-Is that what it takes?
-Is there any hope?
-What is critical thought?
-Are my objections flawed?
-Have I missed something?
-And I guess, is it possible to imagine anyone smarter than oneself?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's tempting to respond to these questions with a bell curve meme:
"Teach critical thinking" is a substantial portion of my real-life job description. It is the putative raison d'etre most often offered for humanities education generally, in the face of ever-increasing pressure from industry to transform university education into purely vocational training. On this basis, we teach logic, avoidance of fallacies, research skills like source identification and credibility evaluation, but the truth is not one student in ten completes an undergraduate education with the ability to generalize such skills beyond a narrow domain. For most people, education is the process of being inducted into the vocabulary and traditions of a particular field; they then spend their lives applying what they've learned, mostly uncritically, while knowledge is then left to progress (if at all) one funeral at a time.
This is most evident if you model "critical thinking" as the process of ascertaining possible paths from undesired status quo A to desired status quo B, either in the absence of known paths, or in the event of seeking alternative paths. This is done in part by systematically eliminating possibilities, both through thinking counterfactually and in the alternative, and by systematically eliminating candidate paths through hypothesis testing. This ability is critical in environments where a desired outcome is clear but the contributing factors are multivariate and entwined: health care for certain, the work of designers and technicians on complex machinery (e.g. cars, computers), and of course the crafting of effective (as distinct from merely spoils-distributing) social policy. But as such, "critical thinking" is a tool, and sometimes it might not be the right tool for the job.
That is: the ability to think objectively, counterfactually, hypothetically, etc. is often a social liability. The tradeoff is that it can be a material asset. It is interesting to wonder about this as a possible kind of natural limiter on the evolution of human IQ: we produce occasional wizards, but mostly we produce canon fodder. We produce some remarkable leaders, but mostly we produce sheep.
What your questions really reflect, I think, is the interplay between different camps of critical thinkers (which appear to be indistinguishable from "groups of high-IQ individuals") looking for ways to fence out their rivals. Even the idea "no one can truly undertake objective analysis" is the kind of idea at which one can only arrive by at least temporarily conducting objective analysis; if it were truly impossible to conduct objective analysis, then what reason would we have to believe someone who claims that objective analysis is impossible? Wouldn't we have to instead conclude that they are just biased against the idea of objective analysis?
You're not wrong, exactly--you can certainly model these competing camps as "cool kids clubs." But that doesn't eliminate the possibility that some of them are at least honestly "on the road" to objectivity, or are occasionally successfully objective. Provided one is honest, one can with plausible objectivity say, "this is what I conclude, given the best evidence available to me at this time." And measuring oneself against one's past self will often be more informative than weighing one's own perceived objectivity against the perceived objectivity of others. It's not hard to imagine someone smarter than yourself--just imagine anyone who can see the path from A to B more quickly, clearly, or effectively than you can. The hard part is not imagining them doing it, but imagining how they do it.
So for example: if someone shows you how to change your car's oil, then you have procedural knowledge of changing the oil. There's no critical thinking there. Many medical procedures are today like changing the oil of a car. Since bodies are complex and often different in surprising ways, navigating the surprises that can arise in medical practice requires more critical thinking than, say, being an auto mechanic. But sometimes auto mechanics are faced with problems that don't match standard diagnostic procedures, at which point "critical thinking" comes into play: mentally modeling the car, forming hypotheses, testing those hypotheses in ways that at least get you closer to a solution if they prove to not be the solution. In other words, thinking about how things might be, instead of leaping directly to where they are.
You may or may not have seen this play out in real life, but I have some family members who are very good at jumping to conclusions. And when you ask them to explain how they reached that conclusion, they are at a total loss. "It just makes sense," they might say, "don't you think so?" They seek agreement rather than understanding. They're not always wrong! And I know that I myself have, through critical reflection, reached incorrect conclusions which I then allowed myself to get too attached to, before realizing I hadn't grasped the whole picture. So even people who are capable of critical thought, will not always use it, or necessarily use it well.
Given the best evidence available to me at this time, "critical thinking" correlates most strongly to IQ, and secondarily to experience/education--but also that secondarily-acquired "critical thinking" is often limited to a single domain (e.g. great at troubleshooting cars, but can't apply the same process to computers, or interpersonal relationships). Some people are able to demonstrate critical thought in some contexts but not others; how this may apply to the question of "artificial general intelligence" and the possibility that some humans lack plausibly "general" intelligence, I leave as an exercise for the reader. But having staked out that position: I remind you that I have already observed that sometimes "critical thinking" is the wrong tool; I am not trying to be insulting when I suggest that some people are naturally bad at it.
Thanks for engaging. It sounds like you agree with me that CT can't really be taught and that it's just subject matter knowledge.
I have some questions!
When you say "objective," do you mean "impartial" or "in touch with noumenal reality," or something else?
If you think, to take the mechanic example, that it's some blend of creativity/counterfactuals or whatever which exists on top of just brute knowledge, is there anything an omniscient car mechanic would be unable to do (with a car) if he lacked only the power of critical thought? Is critical thought an easier substitute for knowledge? A harder substitute?
Paths from Status Quo A to SQ B seems too narrow a definition. Critical Thinking is invoked most often as a synonym for "epistemology," but that doesn't involve any transit from one SQ to another- it just tries to figure out what SQ A is. Is that use of the term "critical thinking" a mistake?
Well, no, not exactly... it can be "taught" to a certain degree, insofar as an inherently smart person who receives no education is unlikely to develop it (or develop it greatly), but it can't be taught to just anyone. And while subject matter knowledge is often the stuff of critical thinking, it is not the process of critical thinking. When I "teach" critical thinking, what I am mostly doing is giving students a wide array of opportunities to think critically, and giving them as many hints about the process as I can--like showering sparks onto material of unknown flammability. Some students "catch," most do not. Without the sparks, there would often be no fire, but the sparks are not sufficient, and for some students may not even be necessary.
I think the standard meaning of "objective" in this context is something like "truth-seeking without regard for one's preferences or biases or..." The words "objective" and "subjective" actually have a complicated history (my understanding is that their connotations have switched meanings twice in the history of philosophy) but that seemed like an unnecessary distraction to develop here.
For certain values of omniscient, maybe not? I don't know enough about how automotive engines work to be very confident in my example here, so let me use a desktop PC example instead. Suppose that my desktop PC functions as expected for about an hour, then hard-locks. It does this no matter what I'm doing (gaming, word processing, surfing the web) but sometimes it doesn't--maybe sometimes it runs for two hours, or six, before hard-locking. How would I fix that problem?
The problem for an "omniscient" computer technician is that, so far, we don't actually have enough information to know what the problem is. In my experience, the described symptoms could easily be caused by a bad OS install, a faulty power supply, a faulty motherboard, a faulty CPU, a faulty GPU, faulty RAM, and less commonly even other faulty peripherals, including peripherals attached via USB (or whatever). There is no single answer to the question, "my computer keeps hard locking, usually after an hour but not always." To get from status quo A ("computer hard locks") to status quo B ("computer does not hard lock"), you're going to go through a series of steps that probably looks something like this:
Google the problem for a while, see if anything obvious sticks out.
Run your system in "safe mode" for a while, see if that fixes anything.
Make sure your drivers are up to date, or maybe reinstall them even if they are. Do the same for any flashable BIOS or similar. Test for a while.
Wipe your system drive, give your OS a fresh install. Test for a while.
Remove all unnecessary peripherals, internal and external. Test for a while.
Swap out a suspected part. Depending on the availability of parts, you might start with easy swaps (RAM), or more convenient swaps (you happen to have a PSU on hand). Iterate until the problem goes away.
Now you might say "well by ominscient I mean someone who knows all the troubleshooting procedures, not just everything there is to know about how computers work." But then you're just throwing a modified Chinese Room problem at me, which I certainly can't solve for you. You can say the words "infinite knowledge but no reasoning capacity" but I haven't got the first idea what that would actually look like, in practice. Nothing I've ever encountered has infinite knowledge.
Your question does remind me of studies showing that younger people are more flexible in their thinking, but older people have more (and more developed) "scripts" to draw from when faced with novel problems. So there does seem to be a meaningful difference between "thought" and "knowledge," even though the two often serve similar practical uses for their wielders. It's not "easier" or "harder" to be young versus old in such cases--more like, you have different tools that will work differently on different problems.
Sure, but I wasn't offering a definition, just a way of modeling critical thinking. There are other ways to model it, for example as an "answer generator" or similar--critical thinking might be something you do when you're trying to decide the truth of some matter. In the transition model I used above, you could still say "well that's taking you from status quo 'don't know' to status quo 'do know'" but that seems a bit stilted, so in such a case you might prefer a different model.
I have never seen "critical thinking" used as a synonym for "epistemology" and yes, I would regard doing so as a mistake. Epistemology is generally concerned with what makes a "true justified belief." But Gettier problems introduce difficulty with even that definition of knowledge, and I have not personally encountered any response to them that I find wholly convincing. "Critical thinking" is a process of arriving at conclusions, so it's mostly focused on the "justified" part--since it does not guarantee truth, only offers (Bayesian?) assurances. "Critical thinking" is the phrase we use to describe something that people clearly do (process information in a truth-seeking way), and this is the "what" question in your topic line. How, precisely, it is done is a related but different question, and a much more difficult one.
Would you be willing to summarize one of the cases you use to teach critical thinking, just as an example of the sort of lessons you’re talking about?
A standard exercise would be to have them explain what a certain scholar thinks about something, and then ask them to explain whether they agree or disagree, and why. A very basic example from an introductory ethics class might be to give them the standard trolley problem, then ask them (1) what Jeremy Bentham would recommend (and why), and (2) whether they agree or disagree (and why). Knowing about utilitarianism and its contents is the main thing, but giving them an opportunity to say "I do/don't like how this comes out, and let me explain why that is" furnishes a chance to critically reflect.
If I've done my job at all, most students will get past (1) easily enough (though it's a little depressing, sometimes, the number of students who can't even be coached to this point). But for (2), most students will say something like "I agree because 5 is greater than 1," which is actually less of an answer than Bentham gives (roughly, "it's always best to do what brings about the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, and therefore you should save the five you can"). Where I start to see something like "critical thinking" is in students who say things like "I think I disagree because it seems like I'm not to blame if the five die, but I might be to blame for one death if I pull the lever. But in a different lecture we talked about the difference between killing and letting die, and I thought I agreed that there was no difference, which seems to suggest I should agree with Bentham after all." Responding to the push and pull between disparate positions is a noticeable improvement over leaping to dogmatic conclusions without hesitation, based on something you memorized from the textbook.
My feedback to students who just parrot "five is greater than one" would be an attempt to prompt them to change their mind in some way--not because they're wrong, necessarily, but because I don't see any thought behind their answer, so I try to say something to encourage them to think a little more deeply about the problem. This is the meat of "critical thinking" education--you can talk about thinking strategies, you can classify fallacies, you can read critical essays, but the real value is in the opportunities you give students to practice critical thinking, by giving them interesting problems to engage with on their own terms. No single problem could possibly contain every facet of critical thinking, and thinking about one issue may not improve your ability to think about other issues. But as you work through a variety of issues, in a variety of contexts, the hope is that you will gradually develop beneficial thinking habits.
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