WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING?


Thinking vs. Feeling

To begin with, critical thinking is a kind of thinking as opposed to feeling. Thinking has to do with comprehending ideas and concepts, seeing how they relate to one another and to the world and using them to understand objective reality. Feeling has to do with subjective sensations and emotions which may or may not represent reality. That uneasy feeling you are getting from a stranger coming toward you late at night on a deserted street may be based on something real, or it may be based on an irrational fear based on fragments of old movies you’ve seen or the way the local TV news leads with crime stories to drive up ratings.

Sometimes, especially in crisis situations, it makes sense to go with a “gut feeling” but feelings are notoriously unreliable guides to life. Ask anyone who’s been in a bad relationship. Early on, when infatuation sets in, she would tell you that she had an idealized view of her partner, being blind to his faults; otherwise, she never would have stayed wit him. Later, she felt that she couldn’t live without him, even though she realized he was bad for her, and even after he became abusive. This is an all-too common story that afflicts both men and women when they put their feelings in the driver’s seat.

Feelings are great. Our desires and preferences tell us what’s important to us and help us set goals. Deep emotions of compassion or righteous indignation help motivate us to do the right thing. But to discover how to obtain our goals or what actually is the right thing to do in a particular situation, feelings fail us. That’s because feelings are essentially subjective and relate, at most, indirectly to the objective world. They are at best indirect and thus imprecise guides to how life is going and what things might be harmful or helpful to us. They can also easily be clouded by our own biases and or cleverly manipulated by others.

Objective vs. Subjective

Critical thinking calls us to be objective, guarding against subjective biases, prejudices, preferences and wishes, and to dispassionately weigh the evidence. The goal of critical thinking is knowledge of the truth. You consider various beliefs or entertain different ideas over, say, whether God exists or Bitcoin is a good investment, who to vote for in an upcoming election or whether to go vegetarian and then you either make a decision or withhold judgement until you can gather more evidence. Because you have to act in the world and because windows of opportunity pass with time, you can’t withhold judgement on all things until you have perfect information. Apart from the basic self-evident rules of logic, you’ll never have complete certainty about anything anyway, so eventually you make a judgement. What are you doing when you make such decisions? You are giving your assent to a belief. You accept it as true. You are saying to yourself, “The world is such and such a way.” Note that beliefs are not about you or your feelings; they refer to objective reality. If you make a mistake and reality is otherwise, your belief is false. You probably won’t know that it’s false. Despite complex psychological mechanisms of self-deception and rationalization, most of the time people don’t intentionally form false beliefs. But if it is at variance with reality, then it is still false, no matter how strongly you may believe it and no matter how convincing your reasons for believing it are.

Small children have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. They think that their subjective perceptions and beliefs can affect objective reality. A cat will stick its head in a box and because it can’t see you, thinks you can’t see it. Play peek-a-boo with a child. Cover its eyes and the whole world disappears. Uncover them again and it appears, like magic. Some adults in mental institutions are under the delusion that the world is a manifestation of their mind and complete masters of reality. Neurotic people who are more functional have the expectation that things will always go their way and are frustrated and surprised when they find it doesn’t. Many people with psychological difficulties have suffered trauma and then developed coping mechanisms of denying reality, of lying to themselves or others. A well-adjusted, rational human being adjusted his beliefs in accordance with reality and doesn’t expect reality to adjust itself to her beliefs.

Why is Bias Bad?

We are all affected by bias of various kinds. Why is bias bad? Because it gets in the way of having an objective assessment of the evidence and thus the truth about reality. You are predisposed to accept some beliefs and reject others based on your upbringing, culture and personality. But all these thing are accidents of brith. Why should it be that you had the good fortune to be born with the world’s most reliable parents and teachers, who infused you with the best beliefs of a best culture on the earth? Why should it be that your religion, your political beliefs, your beliefs about society and human nature and science should happen to be the true ones and all contrary beliefs false? That’s an irrational assumption, though one that we are predisposed to make because of the way learning and socialization work. Critical thinking tries to make us aware of these biases and attempt to step outside of the narrow confines of our existing assumptions and examine them to see whether they are true. Socrates, the father of philosophy, said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He devoted his life to critical examination of his own beliefs and those of his fellow citizens. If we are to be rational, self-respecting human beings and want to have successful lives based on an accurate understanding of the world, we need to devote at least some portion of our lives to honing our critical thinking skills.

Systematic vs. Compartmentalized

Critical Thinking is also systematic. An important skill in critical thinking is the ability to ferret out inconsistencies in our own beliefs or those of others. A contradiction can’t be true, so when we hold mutually exclusive beliefs, one of them should go. Typically such beliefs aren’t as obviously inconsistent as A and not-A, and it takes someone else to bring them to our attention. For example, a political conservative might value the U.S. Constitution and take it seriously. He may rail against Federal overreach in areas never intended by its authors, and point out to you that if you say the Constitution means whatever an activist judge says it means, that it is a blank check for government to do whatever it wants and run roughshod over our personal liberties. Words mean thing things, and the words of the Constitution have a meaning, interpreted in historical context and the rules of the English language, and it places limits on what the Federal Government may do. The Tenth Amendment, regarded by the architect of the Constitution, James Madison, as superfluous, says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This means that  the Federal Government has no powers except those 18 enumerated powers granted it by the Constitution. A conservative may quote this in railing against government healthcare or the federalization of education.

But what about the war on drugs? Bring that up, and the conservative may suddenly change his tune. We can’t have a nation of addicts. Drug use imposes huge social costs in terms of increased child neglect, domestic violence, juvenile delinquency, crime, impaired driving, lower worker productivity, unemployed and homeless drug addicts who become a burden the State, etc. He starts to sound like a liberal, and the Constitution goes out the window. Point out that the Constitution was actually amended twice - once to prohibit the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors and a second time to repeal that prohibition - and that no such amendment was ever ratified for illegal drugs, and the problem of federal drug laws to the Constitutional conservative become obvious. The strange thing that the conservative probably holds all of these beliefs already, but never made the connection between them. They are "compartmentalized" in his belief system.

Sometimes it may take new evidence, or it may take the emphasis of certain kinds of evidence to bring out these hidden inconsistencies. You may think about yourself as someone who cares about animal welfare and the environment and would never participate in a system which depended on the suffering of animals and environmental destruction, but if you eat meat and consume dairy and eggs produced on factory farms in the United States, you’re doing just that. You may have heard about the horror of factory farms, but you may have written it off as the ravings of fanatics or joked about PETA standing for “People Eating Tasty Animals.” You probably haven’t done any investigation to see how bad it really is. Maybe you don’t want to know, because meat is so delicious and the thought of giving it up seems unthinkable. Maybe you’d feel like a hypocrite pontificating about Michael Vick’s dog fighting ring after thinking too deeply about how that animal got on your plate. What hidden contradictions might you have in your beliefs?

Critical Thinking is Skeptical

Finally, critical thinking is skeptical as opposed to credulous. To think critically is, as W.K. Clifford puts it, “to guard the purity of your beliefs, with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.” In order to have true beliefs and avoid having them mixed with a sea of falsehoods, you need to learn to ask questions and not be satisfied with the answers unless they are supported by sufficient evidence. Clifford argues that you have a duty not only to yourself and your own self-respect, but to humanity, to only accept beliefs which can be rationally justified. To do otherwise is to be a plague on humanity, like Typhoid Mary, serving up a soup of beliefs infected by superstition, pseudo-science, conspiracy theories and baseless rumors, which could some day prove deadly to the hearers. Take Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple computer, a high-tech pioneer who eschewed modern, scientific medical treatment of his cancer in favor of Buddhist spirituality and a macrobiotic diet until it was too late. Jobs’ case is also a good illustration of the hidden contradictions we may have in our belief systems. Here we have a man who believed in science and knew what technology could do but fell under the spell of superstition when his fate hung in the balance - and paid for it with his life.

What Critical Thinking Is Not

While empathy is to be encouraged and often lead to more productive conversations (i.e. conversations where each party learns), it deals primarily with emotions, not rational thought. Similarly, while civility is virtuous and helps foster more rational, less emotional exchanges, it is a catalyst to critical thinking rather than part of critical thinking itself.

Rhetoric, which is the effective use of persuasive language, is also not a part of critical thinking. Rhetoric plays on emotions and often even relies on logical fallacies in order to convince the target audience. So, while rhetoric can make a logically good argument more convincing, it can also make a logically bad argument more plausible.

Critical Thinking and Philosophy

What relationship does critical thinking have to philosophy? Critical thinking is a method. Philosophy is a method, but also a subject matter and a body of theoretical knowledge with a rich history. Philosophy is turning critical thinking to the big questions in life involving knowledge, reality and moral value. Critical thinking has much wider and more particular and practical implications. Thinking critically about a conspiracy theory or alternative health claim wouldn’t generally be thought as “philosophical.” Philosophy has a broad scope and deals with “meta” or “big picture” issues above the fray of sorting out the particular facts of the world. To be properly philosophical means both to use the philosophical method and to use it in considering certain subjects, or to consider them in broad terms. To ask “What is gender?” or “Is gender a consequence of biological sex or something distinct from it?" is philosophical. To properly analyze a study showing differences in brain function between men and women and correlations of them with masculine or feminine traits would require critical thinking. So, while all philosophy is critical thinking, not all critical thinking is philosophy.