Ideal Critical Thinkers

Thinking critically is a complicated but important endeavour. It involves acquiring a variety of problem-solving skills, learning how to think clearly, and applying these skills in real-life contexts. Children are great at asking “Why?” and this makes them natural critical thinkers, but they often ask “Why?” when it isn’t helpful. It is an unprincipled questioning. Critical thinking involves learning where and when to ask the right questions about what is reasonable to believe. Critical thinking is applicable to a broad range of contexts, but often, how it is applied depends on the subject matter. This book primarily focuses on skills that can be transferred between contexts or subject matter. These skills are helpful for reasoning well, understanding arguments, and approaching one’s beliefs in ways that reduce error and increase understanding.

Ideally, a critical thinker will have a good mastery of the language they are arguing in, with a large vocabulary and a clear and explicit understanding of what each word they use means. Having a good dictionary on hand or an expert language user you can ask can help you clarify a word’s meaning and select the proper words when offering an argument. A great deal of knowledge can be garnered just by having a good vocabulary, which helps you be better informed. Because what is commonly believed is not always true, a critical thinker will have contextual resources for evaluating the testimony of others and distinguishing reasonable claims from less reasonable ones. These recourses will include skills for evaluating claims on the basis of argument and also skills for evaluating the reliability and knowledgeableness of other speakers, including reflecting on our own biases and taking steps to correct them.

This often means asking good questions: What does a particular claim mean? What follows? Is this justified? Since we have a finite ability to pay attention to the relevant features of an argument, part of being a good critical thinker will be having the diligence to know that focusing on one aspect of an argument isn’t distracting us from other relevant information. The best way to guard against such possibilities is to be methodological and thorough, such as when we write out arguments in standard form as discussed in Chapter 3 or talk through them with a more knowledgeable elder. In order for critical thinkers to form clear conceptions of ideas, it is essential to have skills in analyzing claims for clarity and plausibility.

What does it mean to be open-minded? This is perhaps hard to gauge. Don’t we all think of ourselves as open-minded? Maybe we are in some areas. But we have to be open-minded to the idea that we might not always be open-minded when we should be. This doesn’t mean that we open the floodgates to any set of ideas whatsoever. Scepticism is also important. Scepticism is an approach characterized by doubt and questioning. It is a way of approaching claims that always asks about the foundation or justification of the claims. These two things work together—would you say you are both open-minded and sceptical? How do you choose where to be one or the other?

This is what is so frustrating about whatever it means to be a “devil’s advocate.”1 This seems to mean taking the position of a heavy-handed sceptic as an exercise, not because one has deliberately judged the topic at hand as requiring heavy scepticism. This is different than genuine curiosity or inquisitiveness or earnestness for finding reliable information. If you find yourself wanting to play “devil’s advocate,” it is good to ask yourself a few questions: Is it appropriate in this instance to take on a view I don’t support? Will it make the argument stronger? How do I know? If you can’t answer those questions fairly easily, then it might be that playing devil’s advocate introduces a derailing and inappropriate scepticism—scepticism that is aimed at making the argument interesting or entertaining rather than gaining more reasons for our beliefs.

Above all, the ideal critical thinker should have the motivation to improve their thinking.

What Should I Believe?

Have you ever seen the bumper sticker “Don’t believe everything you think”? The idea here is that just because you think something doesn’t mean you should believe it to be true. To believe something is to take it to be true. For example, to believe it is raining is to take it to be true that it is raining. The natural expression of belief is thus just the assertion of what is believed, so we typically express the belief that it is raining by saying, “It is raining.” Normally, if we tell you it is raining, then you also take us to believe what we just said. In addition, if you have no prior reason to think that we are mistaken or liars, if we tell you that it is raining, then we have given you a reason to believe it too. We are always engaged in some process of giving each other reasons to believe.

Of course, the mere fact that we believe something isn’t all by itself a reason for us to continue to believe it—it is instead a sign that we probably have reasons to believe it (since, after all, we do believe it). So when you come to believe that it is raining because we tell you it is, the reasons you have are grounded in trust: you take us to have reasons, and in the absence of counterevidence, that is good enough for you. That gives you a reason (a different reason than we have) to believe it too. Despite the occasional liars, con artists, and spies among us, for the most part when we speak frankly, we say what we believe, and so human conversation is from the very beginning the business of offering reasons to each other.

The fundamental question for a method of good critical thinking is, “What should I believe?” Answering that question directs us to two fundamental rules.

Since belief is taking something to be true, a belief gets things right—it is materially correct—if what we believe is true. On the other hand, our belief is not made true by wishing or hoping; rather, it is made true by the way the world is. For example, our belief that it is raining is made true, if it is true, by the fact that it is raining. Since our beliefs can be wrong, merely having a belief is not good enough. We need reasons for thinking that we have the belief that we do because what we believe is true.

So the second rule that the fundamental question for method directs us to can be put like this:

What counts as a reason to believe is worth arguing about. Because truth is the target at which belief aims, we need to aim at the truth, but our aim also needs to be guided by skill if we are to hit the target reliably. The very nature of belief demands that it be guided by good reasons, by evidence.

Belief aims at the truth about the world, and so in most cases, our beliefs must defer to the way the world is. But a lot of the claims we want to make about the world are much more complicated than “it is raining.” We want to have reasoned beliefs about more complex phenomena, and this is where arguments come in. This points us to two domains: one, formal argumentation as laid out in words and symbols, and two, inferences, which occur within our minds among the beliefs we hold. Our own belief-making processes are notoriously difficult to perceive!

And because the inferences we make are situated in the midst of the rest of the things we believe, the question of whether they make sense to us or not depends on, in part, what we already believe. Our beliefs are a network of references that relate to and support each other. When we think about what to believe, we attempt to increase the overall coherence and explanatory power of our beliefs, but part of what makes our beliefs appear more coherent to us depends on what we believe already. When we make inferences, we also aim to increase the overall likelihood that our beliefs are true, and that attempt will also depend in part on what we believe already. Among the things we believe already, there will be views about what is true, there will be views about what makes things more coherent, there will be methodological principles, and there will be models of how the world hangs together. All these factors will affect what makes for an overall coherence of belief for us (see Fig. i.2).

Of course, our beliefs have not been formed in isolation from the influence of others. While inference, being a mental process, is private, the beliefs that we form are deeply influenced by the beliefs of others and our backgrounds, upbringings, and cultures. As a general rule, another person’s beliefs are just as likely to be well considered or true as your own, and on many topics, they will be much more likely than your own, especially if the person has place-based, local, or ecological knowledge. We are always exchanging stories and influencing each other’s inferences. The testimony of others together with our direct experiences and our memory (when it is reliable) are the three great sources of reasons for belief.

Language

The capacity that human beings have to take complex instruction from each other through speech may well be the most important thing that sets human beings apart from other creatures in the world. Like us, other animals have sense organs, so they can perceive the world around them by immediate experience; they have memories so that they can use past perceptions and learn more about what the world is like. What they do not have is robust language, including, for example, storytelling and the ability to pass down oral histories. To have language requires both a specific kind of intellectual capacity—the power to process and thus understand grammar—and a characteristic social nature that makes the members of a community. This is not to say that animals are not part of our community, or that we are not all interdependent! But part of how a community operates is through shared knowledge and understanding about how we can take and give instructions to each other, make meaning, and construct value. Humans alone in the animal world have a particular culture—a great repository of shared beliefs and practices.

While having specific language and culture does make human beings distinct in some ways from other animals, this is not to say that there is a fundamental separation between humans, animals, and the earth. The point here is to talk about how language and culture influences our point of view, not to enforce an ontology of separation. For example, some Indigenous knowledges and worldviews begin from a fundamental living interdependence of all beings. Mi’kmaw educator and scholar Marie Battiste emphasizes that these worldviews are inextricably linked to land and the whole way of life, including “landscapes, landforms, and biomes where ceremonies are properly held, stories properly recited, medicines properly gathered, and transfers of knowledge properly authenticated” (Marie Battiste, “Indigenous Knowledge: Foundations for First Nations,”4 WINHEC: International Journal of Indigenous Education Scholarship, no. 1 [2005]: 1–17).

Human beings begin the journey into language as infants by imitating the sounds that their caregivers and elders make and by connecting these sounds with meanings that have a kind of currency. Learning how to use a word like “table,” for example, is not simply learning how to make a certain sound; it is learning what a table is and how to tell tables from non-tables. Children learn words at the same time as they learn the correct conditions of their use, which requires a sophisticated set of skills. Children need an implicit understanding of how what they respond to is directly experienced, which demonstrates where they are and when they are there. They also learn that other people know things about where they are that are specific to their environment. The child can talk to them about what was happening where they were. This may seem like a simple thing, but to be able to do this, the child needs a sense of time and space and to possess a “theory of mind”; to understand that everyone has a mind and that different people know different things.

By the age of three, children typically develop the capacity to attribute minds to others—they come to realize that others have beliefs about the world that may be either true or false, and more importantly, they come to see others as possessing a point of view of the world that is guided by reasons and that they can take up in imagination. They come to be able to put themselves in the place of someone else and understand what it is like to be where that other person is and thus to have the beliefs that the other person has—beliefs different than one’s own. For example, if only you and your parent are home and you hear the fridge open and after your parent yells, “We are out of ketchup!” You can imagine that they were looking in the fridge for ketchup. You have put together the speech and sounds and spatial arrangements, as well as the motive to look for ketchup to construct a story that your parent opened a fridge and looked for ketchup and found no ketchup at all. It is possible that secretly someone else entered the house (unbeknownst to you) and opened the fridge (which you heard) at the same time as your parent called out, “We are out of ketchup!” because it was the answer to a trivia game they were playing. So we can be wrong. But the point is that all this requires the understanding of other people’s minds as holding perspectives and beliefs. Our ability to put ourselves “in the shoes” of others also makes possible our moral sense. We see how actions affect or harm others and we begin to grasp what is fair, the value of community, and many other necessary social skills.

But the focus here is belief. The point is that children come into a capacity for understanding what a belief is, which involves its connection with correctness and the giving and taking—sharing—of reasons for belief, and they do this early in their journey into language use. These developmental powers are not simply grounded in raw intelligence but in the fact that humans take a deep interest in each other’s minds, give each other instruction, and defer to each other’s knowledge. Human beings live in a world of right and wrong even simply with regard to belief.

Grammar

How do human beings communicate and understand information by speaking a language? Because the words in a language are only accidentally or conventionally correlated with the things to which they refer, the cognitive (mental) content of statements must be largely conveyed by the compositional structure of the sentences used to express them. This structure is grammar. Although we live immersed in a sea of language, most of us have only the haziest conception of what this structure is. This is not particularly surprising, since we grow up inside of our individual languages and learn how to speak before we gain explicit conceptual skills. There is an air of paradox about this. Language is essentially a rule-governed activity, and it is hard to understand how we can follow rules without knowing what they are. Yet it seems that we do exactly that. In speaking a language, we obey a vast system of rules that allows us to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical utterances, to correct both ourselves and others in both grammar and pronunciation, and to know what is meant by what is said. This system of rules is grammar. Thus grammar is far more than a set of maxims of correct usage; it is an enabling condition of our understanding of language.

A large part of what makes a statement intelligible to a hearer is the context in which it is made, and that context consists in knowledge—knowledge about the topic or situation being discussed and a vast store of background knowledge that is shared by the speaker and hearer. In short, language is a knowledge-based process of communication in which grammar is a crucial enabling feature. Speakers and hearers rely on their joint possession of grammatical rules that make the context of their speech to the other intelligible; they rely on broadly shared systems of classification and shared definitions of terms. They rely on being members of a community, which consists primarily in a shared language.

We have discussed these facts because they impose important constraints on the critical thinker. Beyond the obvious ones like speaking the truth, not exaggerating, and answering requests for clarification, critical thinkers should always attempt to provide those with whom they are making claims enough information so that what they are saying can be understood.

The Role of Evaluating Arguments

In examining our inferences with the tool of argument analysis, what we do is extract and formalize premises and conclusions and apply rules of logic. In an argument, we attempt to support claims by referencing other claims to which it is reasonable for others to assent, and the clearer and more explicit we can make evidential relations, the stronger our arguments are likely to be. If we are examining inferences in terms of what we should believe, then we are getting into questions of truth and reliability. Philosophers use the term “epistemology”8 to refer to the study of belief and knowledge and how truth, reliability, and justification relate to each other.

Part 3 of this book covers informal patterns of reasoning, looking both at the strengths of those patterns and the ways they can be misused. So what makes something a fallacy? The term “fallacy” is often used rather broadly to indicate any kind of error in inference or belief, but we will use the term somewhat more narrowly. We will use the term not to refer to mistaken beliefs (or “falsity”) but only to refer to some kind of mistake in reasoning or inference.

Fallacy is thus different from simple falsity. A statement or set of statements may be false, but an argument is the transition from a set of premises to a conclusion (which can contain fallacies).

What is fallacious in a fallacious argument is that one or more of the criteria of good arguments are violated. There are many, many ways that arguments can fail compared to the fairly narrow criteria through which they can succeed. This book outlines numerous ways in which the criteria for being a good argument are violated.

There are three fundamental ways in which fallacies can occur, and there are a number of ways that each condition can fail. Formal fallacies, like affirming the consequent (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3), are argument patterns whose form is logically invalid. But arguments can go wrong in many informal ways—for example, by violating important criteria, such as that of relevance, clarity, consistency, and so on. Some are used deliberately to mislead or influence others, but most are simply the result of an incautious use of language or slapdash thinking. They are exceedingly common. In the third part of the book, we will examine and analyze a number of common informal fallacies and discuss ways critical thinkers can avoid them. Fallacies usually have a deceptive appearance and pass for good arguments. In large part, this is due to the fact that they are usually distortions or failed versions of argument forms that are good. So we will not look at fallacies in isolation, but we will also examine the good patterns of reasoning that fallacies distort.

As a matter of fact, we all use fallacious forms of argument many times every day. These fallacies frequently cause no damage because we could, if we were more careful, reformulate our arguments in cogent terms. However, often the very thinking behind our arguments is at fault, and the fallaciousness of our arguments can only be removed by rethinking our opinions and correcting our tendencies for poor critical thinking.

Thus careful critical thinking requires that we make implicit information explicit when reconstructing arguments.

These and other considerations impose burdens on our conception of what an ideal critical thinker is like. Let us therefore start by collecting some characteristics of an ideal critical thinker: