Ask anyone who teaches a full course on Critical Thinking what Critical Thinking is and you’ll get a pretty straightforward answer. “Critical Thinking is informal logic.” Or, “Critical Thinking is an integrated suite of reasoning skills aimed at understanding and truth.” Or perhaps, “Critical Thinking is just applied epistemology.” The answers will vary some, but this is just what we should expect from thoughtful people characterizing something complex and interesting. These people aren’t facing some pressing disagreement that suggests they don’t know what critical thinking is, they are just offering varying descriptions of something they all understand pretty well. We might have interesting conversations about why we “define” Critical Thinking in one specific way rather than another, but they will be quite peaceable conversations that shed more light than heat.
There are maybe a half dozen such faculty at Bellevue College. They all reside in the Philosophy Program where PHIL& 115 Critical Thinking is one of our two regular offerings on reasoning skills. At least half of these people have penned OEM Critical Thinking texts or primers of their own. We all have banks of exercises, assignments, lecture notes and other course materials ready to go.
Beyond this tiny community, there are hundreds of faculty at Bellevue College who are officially designated as teaching Critical Thinking at Bellevue College as an infused General Education Outcome under our legacy Gen Ed program. Based on typical higher ed enrollment patterns over the past decades, I would estimate that maybe 10% of these people have ever studied critical thinking or done significant professional development in this area. This is not meant as a disparaging judgment of any of our colleagues. It is just the situation we have grown accustomed to across higher education. But it is a quite remarkable situation, one worth reflecting on for a moment. It is hard to think of any other significant bit of curriculum in higher education where we employ faculty to teach without the slightest concern for qualifications and preparation. Pick any other subject matter, chemistry, sociology, writing, and we fully expect people to have graduate degrees in the subject. But when it comes to Critical Thinking, which we all seem to deem important, we don’t even track data on who is well prepared to do so. We simply assume adequate knowledge and skill. This is hardly what critical thinkers would do.
Among this much larger community of educators conversations about what critical thinking is are rare are likely to get heated. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising since these conversations tend not to follow well established critical thinking practices where we stay focused on the issue at hand and evaluate clearly formulated analyses and reasons on their own merits. After all, most educators, like most people in our society, have never had significant dedicated training in how to think critically. And yet despite the unpleasant contentiousness of uncritical conversations about how to define critical thinking, this is where educators tend to get stuck. I’d strongly urge against this.
Generally speaking, I’d want to learn as much as I can about a thing before I set out to define it. Definition, it turns out, is common topic in critical thinking courses. We want to pay close attention to the target of definition; are we just out to define a word, or a concept (not the same thing). In principle we can define words however we like; they are just symbols that can be used to designate anything. We could, in principle, define the words “Critical Thinking” to refer to goldfish who have been posthumously flushed down the toilet. Of course, for such a definition to be useful we’d need to get the whole linguistic community on board. The definitions of words are trivially conventional. Semantic meaning is ultimately a matter of linguistic use. Definition in this sense is a matter of choice, but one that also requires broad consensus.
But then sometimes we talk about definition when what we are aiming for is a better understanding of some concept we have a loose grasp of, but don’t yet fully understand. It might be better to refer to definition in this sense as “conceptual analysis.” Conceptual analysis is a kind of inquiry that proceeds dialectically by formulating proposed analyses and then critically evaluating these. While the concept is expressed with our language and it is at least vaguely the content of our thought, it is not subjective, or something anyone owns, or something we just have to decide on by consensus. We are all vaguely on to the same concept when we talk of romantic love, for instance. There is an unfinished body of literature dating back thousands of years inquiring into the nature of romantic love. Analyses vary and evolve because we still have more to learn. John Rawls produced a theory of justice back in the 70s. That conceptual analysis was the crowning achievement of years of scholarship, and it constituted just one recent installment of our slowly evolving, ever improving, and open-ended understanding of what it means for a society to be just. In both of these cases we kind of sort of get what the thing is. Many of us have been in love, even if we didn’t fully understand just what that meant. We all recognize clear cases of injustice when we see them.
Since the concept is not a subjective thing or something we all get to decide on through a process of consensus building, varying “definitions” from different people who have thought carefully about the matter is to be expected. Some of this just reflects human fallibility. Some of us are further along in the inquiry than others and have a more developed understanding of the concept. Some may be just as far along but focused on differing aspects of a complex and multi-faceted concept. Others may just have different ways of expressing the same basic idea. Their conceptual analyses may differ in ways that are mutually enlightening. Varying understandings here don’t represent conflict that must be contentiously hashed out any more than the differences between two master painters’ depiction of the same landscape demand honoring one and trashing the other. Differing perspectives in the project of conceptual analysis often produce lively conversation, but what heat you find among skilled participants will more often be the enthusiasm of creative friction than the contentiousness of personal conflict or power struggle.
Conceptual analysis relies on a good deal of critical thinking skill. Participants need to be prepared to learn from their mistakes. It’s the ideas and arguments we are critically evaluating not the person who brought them to the table. Conceptual analysis of Critical Thinking itself is certainly a worthy project. But it is not going to go well without first cultivating critical thinking skill. This will be something of a prerequisite to thinking critically about critical thinking.
So, I imagine educators who haven’t studied critical thinking trying to define critical thinking to be pretty much in the position of the nonmusician patrons of a jazz club debating what it means to be a saxophone player. Off in the corner sits a grizzled old sax player sipping his whiskey and waiting for his set. Maybe the patrons are drunk enough to ask him how he would define his vocation. Here’s what they should hear: “I’m not going to define what it means to be a sax player for you. If you want to know, get yourself a horn, take some lessons, practice your scales and charts every day. Then, after a couple of years, maybe join a combo, or a marching band, if that’s your thing. Then you’ll know what it means to be a sax player.”
One final thought: the argument here is emphatically not for the elitist conclusion that defining or teaching critical thinking should be left to philosophers. We don’t want to “own” critical thinking. We want all of us to own critical thinking. This would serve our students well, as well as ourselves, our BC community, and our struggling democracy. But owning critical thinking isn’t just a matter of claiming it. Ownership involves some significant investment, maintenance and upkeep. Just as we would expect for any other curriculum, we take responsibility for teaching.
Or, in the immortal words of Steely Dan, “learn to work the saxophone.”
Some resources for Critical Thinking development over the summer:
- Pick up any Critical Thinking textbook. There are many fine ones. I’ll be spending time this summer with Think with Socrates, by my friend Paul Herrick at Shoreline College.
- I’m a big fan of Think Arguments, an online competency based Critical Thinking curriculum designed for infusion across the curriculum. Instructors can create a free account and review the 10-module curriculum on their own. Very deep exercise banks here.
- And then there is my own OEM Critical Thinking primer How to Be a Reasonable Person. This work has grown out of conversations with BC colleagues about Critical Thinking over many years and I’m looking forward to developing it into a book while on sabbatical next year. Thoughts and feedback are most welcome