Book Review: Critical Thinking

The 2020 book, Critical Thinking, is a short description (181 pages) about the origins of critical thinking, what it is and what values it has. The author, Johnathan Haber, is an educator and researcher in the field of critical thinking. The book is written for a general audience and easy to read.

The origins and status of critical thinking

The concept started with Socrates and Aristotle. Socrates questioned fixed beliefs and advocated leading a life of self-examination. His activities in this area “earned him the title of father of Western philosophy and well as a death sentence from his annoyed fellow Athenians.” The lesson there is don’t annoy Athenians. (oops, bad logic)

Aristotle went much farther. He gathered and systematized existing knowledge into what are now major fields of inquiry including botany, zoology, political science, rhetoric and logic. His work on rhetoric and logic established key areas of education for the ancient world that lasted until modern times.

A major contribution of Aristotle was to uncouple knowledge from the superstitious and plug it into the empirical. Haber writes that “Aristotle’s method of inferring truths from what the human senses could perceive, rather than explaining natural phenomena as the works of gods, was a tremendous intellectual breakthrough.”  Of course, since human senses can be wrong, manipulated, biased and self-deceived, this was just the first of many intellectual revolutions that flowed from what Aristotle had discovered about how to perceive reality.

The progress of critical thinking as a field of research and education unto itself was significantly derailed in 1892 when the “Committee of Ten” educators, led by Harvard’s president, created a new curriculum for K-12 schools. Reading, writing, math and science were included, but rhetoric and logic were not. After that, teaching of rhetoric and logic declined in public education. Critical thinking education began a significant comeback in 1983 when California state universities imposed a critical thinking requirement for graduation. Since then, critical thinking has gained in importance in K-12 education. The intellectual weaknesses of students unskilled in rhetoric and logic became both apparent and acute in the modern information age.

What critical thinking is

There is no universally accepted definition, but a some of a cluster of concepts tend to be included. The concepts themselves tend to be a bit fuzzy, but usually include structured thinking (roughly, logic), communication skill, argumentation skill, creativity, reasonable background knowledge, and IMO, very importantly, personal dispositions or traits. Haber prefers ‘structured thinking’ over logic to emphasize the importance of organized thinking over any particular form of formal logic. Humans tend not to apply formal logic and instead think in terms of informal logic (I call it reasoning or sound reasoning), which can be informed and shaped by things like the structure of arguments, the social situation, emotions, intuitions and personal morals and biases. Modern critical thinking education emphasizes informal logic over true logic, but true logic remains an important part.

Haber argues, reasonably, that you cannot do critical thinking if you do not know what you are talking about. Hence a necessary component is learning and applying sufficient background knowledge to support clear-headed, sound reasoning.

Two important concepts that underpin critical thinking are the difference and prevalence of deductive and inductive arguments, which are different. Deductive arguments are logic constructs where the conclusion of a valid argument must be true if you accept that the premises are true. If the premises are actually true, the conclusion is both valid and sound. This kind of reasoning is rare because it is rare to have premises that are not disputed.[1]

By contrast, inductive arguments are based on premises that make the conclusion or basis in evidence or logic possibly, probably true or very likely true. The conclusion’s strength can vary from weak to near certainty. The relevance and sufficiency of the premises dictate the strength of the conclusion. By definition, inductive arguments are invalid because it is possible to accept the premises but still reasonably reject the conclusion. Counter examples are possible to imagine and usually too numerous to test. Inductive reasoning dominates everyday life, politics and science.
Not understanding the uncertainty that is common in science allows science deniers to point to almost any level of uncertainty as a basis to deny things that are not reasonably deniable, including climate change and the effectiveness of vaccines.

The value of critical thinking

Haber frames the issue like this:

“Catastrophic decisions like those that lead to .... being ruled by men and women competent in nothing but playing to our weaknesses are just the most dramatic consequences of refusing to develop or use our reasoning ability ..... If we can increase our odds of success by locating and evaluating evidence, putting it into an informative structure, and analyzing the results, why not follow this critical thinking process rather than shooting first, aiming later?”  

He argues that there is now plenty of evidence, e.g., Russian attacks on critical thinking in the 2016 elections, that there are compelling reasons to up our game in terms of our ability to apply critical thinking to politics:

“Many of those ‘others’ [propagandists] are professional skilled at taking advantage of the flaws in our mental faculties, such as the many cognitive biases that prevent us from thinking critically or the ability of emotion and tribalism to overwhelm reason. .... As demonstrated in recent elections, candidates still spearhead this kind of manipulation, but now they are supported by armies of political consultants skilled in techniques for preventing people from thinking clearly. .... Yet, has the public appetite for bad premises (i.e., ‘fake news’), invalid logic, refusal to develop or apply background knowledge, and uncharitable behavior toward out political enemies diminished at all since we learned how vulnerable we make ourselves by basking in our biases?”

The fits with pragmatic rationalism

What Haber describes is a mindset that is applied in a process of organized thinking. The mindset requires personal traits including but not limited to sufficient open-mindedness to look at an issue form at least two points of view, willingness and discipline to do the necessary learning and mental work, and charity as envisioned by the Principle of Charity (discussed here). That sounds a lot like the mindset and process that I designed pragmatic rationalism to be based on and operate with. It also reflects some of the core personal or mental traits and tactics, e.g., viewing multiple points of view, that Philip Tetlock’s superforecasters had in common.

Unless I am misunderstanding something significant, Haber’s description of the critical thinking mindset and approach to reality sounds much like those of superforecasters and pragmatic rationalists. In other words, pragmatic rationalism appears to be rising naturally out of, or mostly overlapping with, separate lines of research. That sort of looks like some sort of consilience to me.

Or, are my biases and/or misunderstandings leading me down a wrong path?

Footnote:
1. When actually true premises are rejected by a person as false because the person does not like the conclusion the premises lead to, the person may reject both the premises and the conclusion. Sociologists call this implicatory denial (discussed here). It is arguably the most common form of logic fallacy in science denial.