Month: July 2025

The essential difference between rhetoric and critical thinking is that rhetoric is about power, critical thinking isn’t. Critical thinking is about inquiry. In both rhetoric and critical thinking, we traffic in arguments. But arguments play very different roles in rhetoric and in critical thinking. Rhetoric is about persuasion, and as such it is concerned with a kind of interpersonal power. From the rhetorical perspective, a good argument is a persuasive one, one that exerts an influence on the minds of others. An argument that fails at this is a rhetorical failure. In critical thinking, a good argument is one that provides good reason for the truth of its conclusion. It’s an open question whether people will find such arguments persuasive. If people did reliably find arguments that are good by critical thinking standards persuasive, it would be much easier to persuade people of truths and much harder to persuade people of falsehoods. Sadly, this is not the case. Whether people find arguments that are good by critical thinking standards persuasive has a great deal to do with their own critical thinking skills. Our educational system is quite haphazard about the cultivation of these.

Seen rhetorically, an argument that fails to persuade can simply be discarded. Nobody who finds a sales pitch unpersuasive wants to hear it again. But as an instrument of inquiry, an argument that we find unpersuasive remains a useful instrument of inquiry. We can learn much from examining how an argument fails.

An argument is just a set of premises from which we infer a conclusion. Given this, we can see that an argument can fail to provide a reason for the truth of its conclusion in one of two ways: by having false premises or by making faulty inferences on the basis of those premises. If we think the conclusion of an argument is false, we can learn from any mistakes made in the argument by looking into these two things. Does the argument have false premises? Does it draw a faulty inference on the basis of those premises? If no affirmative answers can be found to either of these questions, then we have a reason to accept its conclusion. Of course, that reason might not be conclusive and we may still not be persuaded. We might continue to search for flaws in the argument or stronger arguments against its conclusion. But in the absence of success in this endeavor we should at least be able to see the conclusion as reasonable and understand why a reasonable person might endorse it.

Attempts to engage in critical thinking conversations can fail as a result of one or more parties failing to track the appropriate role of the argument. When an argument offered in the spirit of inquiry is taken for a piece of rhetoric, people may feel uncomfortably pressured or dominated. “Who does this person think he is, telling me how to think.” When the argument is then rejected out of hand as unpersuasive, a person aiming to engage in inquiry is liable to feel frustrated and misunderstood. “Why can’t we examine the reason according to its own merits?” It may appear that people are simply more interested in holding their opinions and not being persuaded than in inquiry.

Similarly, when a person offers an argument as a piece of rhetoric, aiming to persuade, only to find it critically evaluated as an instrument of inquiry, they are liable to feel dismissed. Worse, when a person self-identifies with their attempt to persuade, “This is My reason for holding My position,” they may feel put down when some flaw in the argument is pointed out.

Personalizing arguments and ideas renders one vulnerable to feeling harmed when these come under critical scrutiny. A critical evaluation of an idea or argument you like is not an attack on you. Taking it as such, however, may lead you to personally retaliate. Here we can see the psychological roots of the ad hominem fallacy. In the mode of critical thinking, we will do much better if we think of ideas and arguments generally as the commonwealth of intellectual beings like us.

Such are the hazards of mixing rhetoric with critical thinking. The critical thinking conversation will go much better when we bear in mind the role of the argument as an instrument of inquiry. Regardless of how we feed about the conclusion, arguments to are to be examined. Are the premises true? Do the premises support the conclusion? Good arguments are hard to come by. A great many arguments, including many quite popular ones, are flawed. The idea in critical thinking is to learn from these mistakes. In the context of critical thinking, making a mistake is not losing. Mistakes are no cause for shame or feeling socially diminished. Mistakes are opportunities for discovery.

This is much easier to explain than it is to put into practice. The world we’ve made for ourselves is rhetorically hyper-saturated. Most of us are firmly in the habit of thinking of arguments as bits of rhetoric and simply dismissing arguments for conclusions we don’t like, or worse, personalizing things and retaliating against the people that make those arguments. This can make critical thinking rather hazardous. Given this, critical thinking may require some special effort to explicitly establish and sustain a conversational context of shared inquiry. Staying focused on understanding and fairly evaluating arguments isn’t easy for most people. Ample low stakes practice can help a great deal. This is what developed critical thinking curriculum aims to provide.

We occupy a rhetorically oversaturated world. The world we’ve shaped now shapes us. For hours a day our thinking is dominated by the great AI powered god of persuasion in the cloud. And we choose this by choosing our rhetoric, algorithmically tailored to affirm our sensibilities, digging our preferred neural pathways into deep unbridgeable gorges. Arguments we like get a “like” and deliver a reliable dopamine hit. Arguments we don’t like we seldom see. Persuasion is power, and we traffic in the power of persuasion chronically with every swipe and comment. This conditions us to treat arguments as rhetoric only. As instruments of persuasion, we either buy an argument, or dismiss the argument reflexively as contrary to our way of thinking. Arguments as rhetorical devices are instruments of persuasion and social power. They suck us into power struggles where defeat is personally destructive and cannot be countenanced. We are thereby rendered unpersuadable. Rhetoric’s power ultimately becomes merely the power to personally affirm or frustrate and thereby digs us deeper into our ideological ruts.

All of this works to the detriment of critical thinking. In critical thinking, arguments are instruments of inquiry, not persuasion. Unlike rhetoric, critical thinking is not about interpersonal power. It’s just about inquiry through evaluating ideas and arguments on their own merits. The critical thinker is the person who yields to the better reason, not the persuasive power of others. Critical thinking skill is largely a matter of learning how to evaluate reasons according to their own merits and then to be persuaded only by the best reasons. Critical thinking is the art of being persuadable by good reasons, but not by faulty ones.

The goal of critical thinking is understanding and knowledge. The best reasons are the ones that lead us in the direction of the clear understanding and truth. The critical thinking curriculum is organized around a clear set of criteria for evaluating reasons. An argument is simply a set of premises offered as a reason for accepting its conclusion as true. Here, nothing fancy is meant by “true.” The conclusion of an argument is true when it corresponds with reality. Even people who go wobbly about the concept of truth in more theoretically charged contexts employ the ordinary idea of truth as correspondence in the rest of their lives.

Your belief is true when it accurately represents how things are in the world. Simply describing an argument in terms of its truth-oriented function indicates the basic criteria for evaluating an argument on its own merits. An argument provides a good reason for thinking its conclusion is true when it proceeds from premises that are true to its conclusion by means of reliably truth-tracking inferences. For any argument, we simply want to consider whether its premises are true and whether these support the truth of the conclusion. Nothing more is relevant. A good reason is simply an argument that makes good inferences from true premises. Whether an argument’s premises support its conclusion is a matter of logic. Learning to apply more specific criteria for evaluating how well the premises of an argument support its conclusion is the focus of the critical thinking curriculum.

Suppose we encounter an argument for a conclusion we don’t like. Thinking of the argument as a piece of rhetoric we can simply refuse to be persuaded and reject the argument outright (maybe taking a jab at the arguer along the way). This is what we are trained to do in our hyper-rhetorical everyday lives. This is contrary to critical thinking.

When we treat an argument as a tool of inquiry, we examine what can be learned from it whether or not we like the conclusion. If the conclusion is in fact false and should be rejected, then the argument likely makes one of two kinds of mistakes. Either it proceeds from false premises, or it makes a faulty inference, one where the truth of the premises would not be a reliable indicator of the truth of the conclusion. If we are not mistaken in rejecting the conclusion, then we should be able to find the mistake in the argument. If we can’t, and we are open-minded, then we will want to consider whether we are mistaken in our inclination to reject the conclusion. Either way, the argument is not to be dismissed, it is to be examined according to critical thinking criteria.

Critical thinking is a struggling craft in our society. Rhetoric is winning. Agreeing to disagree is socially acceptable as a polite means of neglecting to take reasons seriously. From a critical thinking perspective, a thoughtful critical evaluation of an argument can be a gift, an opportunity to learn. A well-thought-out objection to my grounds for holding an opinion can, if I am open and reflective, help me get unstuck from a false opinion. Whatever discomfort I might feel over having endorsed a faulty reason is far outweighed by the benefit of coming to a more reasonable view. And yet, it is common practice now to dismiss the critic of arguments as herself dismissive.

In a rhetorical vein, we are also prone to dismiss the critic or our favored arguments as lacking open-mindedness. We can see this spurious appeal to open-mindedness made by the uncritical thinker who takes the experts to lack open mindedness because the epidemiologist won’t seriously entertain the idea that vaccines cause autism, or the climate scientist rejects the idea that climate change is caused by solar flare.

The problem here is that open-mindedness is not really about what you are willing to allow might be true. Allowing that the world might be flat doesn’t demonstrate my open-mindedness when the evidence to the contrary is clear and compelling. Rather, being open-minded is about being willing to evaluate evidence and argument on its own merits. When the evidence and argument clearly indicate that something is true, the open-minded person should hold that view with whatever degree of confidence the evidence and arguments warrant. The failure of open-mindedness lies in dismissing an argument as a mere bit of rhetoric, a sales pitch for an idea we’d rather not buy into.

The pervasive tendency to personalize our opinions and reasons paves the way for this uncritical thinking. When I regard a way of thinking as mine, as an expression of my style, who I am, or something I buy into, I form an attachment that becomes an obstacle to evaluating the argument or idea on its own merits. But arguments and ideas aren’t personal property or expressions of who we are. In principle, any given idea or argument can be entertained, believed, doubted, celebrated or condemned by any person. The argument or idea is its own thing, it isn’t you.

The critical thinker is the person who holds or rejects an idea based on examining the reasons for or against it and yielding to the best of these. Whatever degree of conviction this results in is not a matter of attachment to an idea. The critical thinker will stand ready to revise that degree of confidence in light of new evidence or argument. However, it will be hard for people unskilled at evaluating arguments to tell the difference between attachment and confidence based on good reasoning. And so, it will be easy for critical thinkers to be assimilated to the rhetorical Borg in the eyes of those in the habit of treating arguments as mere bits of rhetorical persuasion. “After all, everyone has their own ideology, based on their identity and experience.” goes one rationale for this move. So, the thinking goes when we lose the ability and inclination to evaluate arguments on their own merits, according to truth-oriented criteria. The lack of critical thinking skill thereby leads too many of us to dismiss the better reason and the people who would share it. The warm affirmative embrace of postmodern epistemic relativism awaits. Our ability to learn from each other and our mistakes atrophies. Rhetoric wins.