Chapter 1 Critical Thinking and Belief

1.1 Are We Responsible for Beliefs?

Perhaps you’ve heard people say that they have the freedom to believe whatever they want. This might be true in the sense of having the political right not to have our thinking interfered with by the government. But this is a question of social organization and political right. Here, we are concerned with the best methods of thinking, aimed at true belief. We might begin by considering, “When is a person responsible for what they believe?” If we reflect on this question, certain difficulties present themselves. For one thing, it suggests that you have choice about what to believe. But let’s consider whether you have choice about what you believe. If that is the case, then how can we make sure we are chooising what is most reasonable to believe? You might think that if you knew what was true, then you could choose to believe that, but this just obscures what is at issue. If you know something to be true, then you already believe what you are apparently choosing, so you don’t really have any choice after all (you already believe it, and since you know it, you cannot reasonably give it up). This is what is so frustrating about so-called alternative facts.1 If it is a fact, then it seems like we shouldn’t have alternatives to choose from.

Let’s consider a different tack. Imagine a case where you don’t know what is true. Then, on what basis do you choose whether to believe or not? On the evidence? Well, in one sense, evidence is just further belief, and so one might ask whether you should believe the evidence and thus end up back where we started. Maybe we should focus on the kind of evidence we have for what we believe to be true. Suppose the evidence is sufficiently strong and that it dictates what to believe; in that case, it seems that you have no real choice. The idea would be that if there’s sufficient evidence, then how can you think otherwise unless you are deliberately going against what is clear? For example, if all the evidence points to rain but you really want to have a picnic so you decide to believe that it will be sunny, you have only yourself to blame when you get wet at the beach. In cases like this, talk of choosing what to believe just sounds silly.

Oftentimes the evidence isn’t that strong, and it doesn’t fully dictate what to believe. Then, maybe you do have a choice about what to believe (as opposed to hoping or wishing something to be true). Suppose that you have bet on a horse at the track, and you want it to win, but the evidence you possess doesn’t dictate what you should believe about which horse will win.

If you choose to believe that your horse will win when the evidence doesn’t support the belief, it appears that you would be misguided. This is because the evidence available to you doesn’t provide enough grounds for belief. Further, if you were to borrow the family rent money to bet on the horse, you are even worse than misguided—you’ve acted irresponsibly on insufficient evidence. Believing without evidence or in spite of the evidence or in just plain inadequate evidence leads to bad consequences. In this case, it is more like self-deception that you are using as grounds for belief because you truly did know that the belief wasn’t justified. It appears then that you never have a choice about what to believe.

Then we come back again to the question, How can you be responsible for what you believe if you don’t choose it? But it seems like we do hold people responsible for what they believe, and we demand good reasons from them. We can also be taken in by false or misleading evidence, which will be addressed throughout this book. This underscores the need for each of us to be self-examining: Why do I believe what I believe? What is my evidence?

1.2 The Causal Character of Belief

One way to approach these issues is by thinking of ourselves as part of the causal fabric of the universe. This means considering how we are sensing, moving, material beings connected to all living and nonliving beings. You have a body and sense organs, which are sensitive to certain phenomena in the world and not others—for example, many of us can tell what colour a thing is just by looking at it (at least if there is light available and so on), but you cannot smell carbon monoxide even if it is present in quantities sufficient to kill you. These are just facts about how most bodies work. Whatever the causal story is about how your eyes and brain work, you are by and large stuck just trusting that your eyes are working normally the majority of the time. It is not as though your eyes give you evidence and then you make a judgment to believe them—typically, you just see how things look or sense how things feel. Your beliefs about the colours of things are caused in you by processes. These processes work whether you know anything about them or not—we get beliefs from a process we might not have beliefs about! The general reliability of those causal processes and the predictability of the environment in which you find yourself, and not the choices that you make, by and large dictate what you believe. If you can see red and thus have beliefs about what things are red, it’s because a part of you is, in effect, a functioning red detector.

So far, we have been considering beliefs generally on a perceptual model—beliefs about how we perceive (see, hear, taste, smell, touch). More general beliefs are of course a different story. A lot of our beliefs are not solely or even primarily based on sense perception. Nonetheless, what we have seen here is that you have at least some of your beliefs because they are caused in you by processes that you have no access to. And isn’t this true of all your beliefs, at least to some degree? So what’s the point of a course about critical thinking if we are just caused to believe what we believe? And doesn’t this make the idea that you choose what to believe (and are thus responsible for what you believe) an absurd thought?

We have just looked at two arguments that conclude the idea of choosing what to believe is absurd. First, because we can’t just believe anything we want, and second, because beliefs are caused in us by our belief-forming processes and the predictability of our environments.

Let’s spend a moment thinking about where these arguments lead. First of all, if you were not, indeed could not be, responsible for what you believe, then it wouldn’t be any kind of mistake to believe things without evidence or to believe things merely because you wanted to. But as we have already said, we are committed to the idea that believing without adequate evidence is irrational (recall betting on the horse race with insufficient evidence). And so, we do seem committed to the idea that some beliefs are better than others—that’s why they merit belief. Again, without that, the whole idea of a critical thinking course wouldn’t make much sense; to take this even further, the whole idea of education wouldn’t make much sense.

In other words, we need to be able to imagine different courses of thought that would end in different beliefs. As well, we need to see belief as aiming at truth. Let us return to the vision example for a minute. You are caused to see things as having the colours you see; you look at a red piece of paper and believe it is red. But if you notice that a red light is shining on the paper, realizing this will just block you from forming the belief that the that the paper is red—your sense organs did all the work! If you have taken a piece of white paper and placed it in the red light, the case will be even clearer, since you already know that the paper is white.

If you are near-sighted and without your glasses things look fuzzy, you won’t be caused to believe that the things you see really are fuzzy. Similarly, if looking over the edge of your glasses at someone shows you they have two heads, you are not led to believe that the person actually has two heads! Examples like these show that even though vision is an automatic process that causes visual beliefs, the visual beliefs that are formed are almost always automatically adjusted to cohere with other beliefs you already have. There is an important lesson in this. There is no necessary conflict between the causal character of belief-forming processes and what a person believes because it is rational to do so given other beliefs. This underscores how important other beliefs are in helping us know what is true at any given moment.

Let us make the following assumptions as we work on developing critical thinking skills:

1. 1. Let us think of beliefs as the outcomes of pieces of reasoning or as the products of thought processes.
2. 2. If different thought processes or pieces of reasoning can be evaluated for successfulness in aiming at the truth, and if they can be analyzed for the principles that guide them in that aim, then we can compare those different principles with each other and determine which aim more successfully at the truth.
3. 3. In comparing those principles with each other, we should not only evaluate which principles aim more successfully at the truth, but we should find meaningful ways of implementing these principles.

Not every creature can reason. Chickens and dogs can learn from experience, but they cannot abstract general principles from their learning successes and failures and then apply them to new situations. But human beings, and quite possibly only human beings, can, at least to a limited degree. Thus we have a definition of what we are doing in trying to improve our thinking.

Human beings are capable of critical thinking. Not only can human beings learn from experience; human beings can learn to learn more effectively. Critical thinking rests on the search for good methodological principles, something that both student and teacher need to be equally engaged in. So in this text, we will need to direct our attention to questions about what beliefs are, how thinking can be disciplined by reasonable methods, what makes methods good, and what makes arguments successful vehicles for disciplining thought.

1.3 The Functional Model of Belief

Let us now look more closely at our concept of belief by way of a functional model of belief. We have already referred to belief in two ways: (1) as a thought or mental state expressible by a sentence and (2) as behaving as though a sentence is true. How do these two characterizations fit together, and what does it mean to act as though something is true? Clearly how an agent will act given a certain belief will depend on the other things that the agent believes as well as upon the agent’s values. In describing beliefs in terms of the actions of an agent, we want to highlight several important facts about beliefs:

1. 1. that the primary significance of belief lies in the guidance of action
2. 2. that action is rooted in evaluation
3. 3. that for a being that did not experience comparative values—who did not experience some things as more worthwhile than others—the very idea of deliberate action would be pointless

The functional model of belief allows us to explain and understand the actions of rational animals in terms of their needs and the way they represent the world. Every organism exists in an environment upon which it is substantially dependent for the satisfaction of its needs. Although many organisms are incapable of learning as individuals—trees and other plants are largely at the mercy of their environments—they nonetheless depend on a natural fit between their needs and what their environment can provide. Organisms that are capable of learning as individuals and thus acting upon their environments, as most animals are, must develop stable habits of behaviour that are successful in leading to need satisfaction. Such animals implicitly represent the world as being one way rather than another. Their consciousness of the surrounding environment is a representation of opportunities and dangers—a kind of map of the world as it impinges on the life of the organism.

That map in effect represents knowledge regarding what the world is like (or at least belief regarding what the world is like). The belief that an animal has measure suggests not so much the ultimately real nature of the environment in which that animal exists as much as it measures a set of ways and means of successful life-for-such-an-organism within the environment. For creatures capable of representing their environment, belief, valuing, and doing are internally connected.

From a functional point of view, beliefs ensure the organism’s survival by showing it how to satisfy its needs in its environment. An animal’s beliefs about its environment simply consist in the set of stable habits of behaviour that enable the animal to navigate its world safely. When an animal’s settled habits fail, when the animal meets with the unexpected, the animal will strive to revise its habits to more adequately thrive. There are of course limits to this. The animal may meet with bad luck. Its environment may change in ways that exceed its capacity for adaptation. The ways in which an animal of a particular type can learn are limited by its cognitive capacities.

Because human beings have language and can express their beliefs linguistically, they are capable of rich and complex forms of adaptation. Putting our beliefs into words allows us to stand back from our beliefs and evaluate them. We learn not only from the pressure that the environment exerts on us but by seeing the consequences of our beliefs and what they imply for our other beliefs. This means that we are able to envision alternatives to the things we actually believe; we live not just in the real world but in a wider sea of possibilities. Thus, we must find reasons for what we believe in order to justify and take responsibility for what we believe. Still, all the possibilities that we can envision come down to possible differences in behaviour and the outcomes of behaving in those ways.

1.4 Evaluating Belief

When we reason about what to believe, we employ strategies or methods that are themselves beliefs—beliefs about how to reason successfully, beliefs that we can subject to testing and evaluation and that we presently take to be justified, or to be correct, or at least to work. This raises the question of how we can rationally evaluate our beliefs.

We have a tendency to ask whether beliefs are true or false. While this is an important question in its own way, it is not the most important question for the evaluation of belief. Our beliefs taken as a whole constitute a kind of model or map of what the world is like. This model or map is likely to be widely inaccurate in some places and almost completely blank in others. Yet we manage to function adequately in the world. Our map of the world is also likely to be contradictory in places. But the principal measure of the adequacy of our beliefs, of our map, is just this: How well does it allow us to get along in the world? The primary function of our beliefs is thus the guidance of action. For this reason, the primary evaluative measure of our beliefs is their success in guiding our actions, solving problems, and answering questions. Deliberate thinking is a kind of acting, so the guidance of action includes the guidance of deliberate thinking. The main way we have of telling whether our beliefs are adequate is whether they allow us to get along. As we gain new beliefs, these beliefs change the map or model we have of the world. As the map changes, stresses and strains appear between different parts of the map, and we are forced to make internal adjustments in the attempt to make it more coherent. Some methods of reasoning are better than others at this task, but in any case, it is important to see that the immediate object of this task cannot simply be to arrive at truth. Instead, it is to arrive at increased coherence or better explanations in order to satisfy our doubts and our sense of order. The direct object of reasoning is the settlement of opinion and the increased adequacy of our maps. But neither adequacy nor settled opinion is the same thing as truth. Adequacy is a measure of the successfulness of our maps in guiding our actions.

Still, we do wish to say that some successful maps are more adequate than others. We want to say this roughly in the sense in which we wish to say that contemporary science has a more adequate view of things than sixteenth-century science did. This sense of “more adequate” is often leveraged against science, since science will always be prone to error at the same time as it roots out error. How can we do this? Can we say that more adequate maps are truer, or more likely to be true? The problem with this answer is that the science of fifty years from now will contradict much of today’s science.

One thing we can say though is that contemporary science is capable of dealing successfully with a wider range of situations and problems. So we can say that one map is more adequate than another if it is capable of successfully modelling a wider range of phenomena. This view too has certain problems, but it is good enough for now. In order to be in the critical thinking business, we have to be invested in and willing to improve our map of the world by practicing and adopting accurate methods of belief adoption.