Month: October 2025

This is one of my favorite bikes (I have 8 and they are all my favorites). This is the one I ride to places like this where I like to camp out in the woods. I can move freely around on this bike, but only because its mechanisms turn freely. This bike is a fully deterministic system. The wheels are determined to turn efficiently when I pedal them, but only because the drive train of the bike is clean, well lubricated and well adjusted. It is much harder for this bike to move around in the world if the gears are poorly adjusted, or if the bearings are worn out, the chain is dirty or rusty, the wheels aren’t true, etc. etc. This bike rolling freely and taking me where I want to go depends on several functional modules working well and being well integrated with each other. Whether the bike’s mechanisms function freely doesn’t depend on violating deterministic laws of motion. Nor would the bike function more freely if it could behave other than it is caused to behave. To the contrary, the bike rolling freely depends on it functioning in accordance with laws of nature. In particular, its functioning freely depends on causal inputs it receives when I do regular maintenance and repair.

A mechanism like this bike affords a helpful analogy for understanding how compatibilist and incompabilist conceptions of free will differ. Incompatibilists take having free will to be incompatible with causal determinism, the view that every event is causally determined in accordance with laws of nature given the prior state of the world. Every event includes our own actions. So according to causal determinism, when we make a choice and formulate a will to act in a particular way, we could not have made a different choice or acted differently. Our traditional western way of thinking about free will takes acting of our own free will to mean we could have chosen to act differently. This is known as the “libertarian” conception of free will (not to be confused with the political philosophy of the same name).

The libertarian view of free will takes the will to function independent of the broader causal fabric of the world. The will is conceived to be determined only by us as agents. This requires some philosophical understanding of how agents like us could be uncaused causes of our will and action. No viable theory of “agency causation” has emerged. Meanwhile, biology and neuroscience now provide a decent understanding of how causal biological processes do shape our will and action. So, the libertarian view of free will, as appealing as it is to our self-aggrandizing egos, is pretty-much dead in the water.

However, as far back as Hume, philosophers have proposed compatibilist conceptions of free will, ways of understanding what it means to have free will that are compatible with causal determinism.

On various compatibilist conceptions of free will, having free will is more like having (or perhaps being) a well-maintained bicycle, one that functions freely (which in turn allows you to ride far, efficiently and joyfully). So, what does this look like in more detail. We will need to build a picture of how the mind functions in formulating our will and motivating our choices and actions. Here’s a simplified model. We make our choices and formulate our will through the operation and interaction of a couple of mental modules. One generates representations of how things are in the world. Another generates motivating desires based on our tastes, values, and the things we care about. We then reflect on what matters to us most and how best to achieve that given what we believe. Through this deliberation process we formulate a will to act. 

What we’ve just described is basic belief/desire “folk psychology.” It should seem pretty familiar since we ordinarily explain peoples’ choices and actions in terms of what they believe and what they desire (hence “folk” psychology). There are three mental modules involved in this picture of will formation, the representational module (responsible for belief formation), the motivational module (responsible for desire formation based on the things you care about) and the deliberation module (responsible for integrating the other two in determining how to maximize desire satisfaction based on beliefs). For your mind to be functioning freely (like my favorite bicycles), is for each of these modules to be functioning well and interacting well with the others. Critical thinking is about tuning up your representational module (forming beliefs on the basis of the best reasons and evidence). Your desire generating module functions best when you critically reflect on what you care about, get clear on your values (ethical and otherwise), and generate desires in line with these (see Harry Frankfurt for more on this). You deliberate well when you formulate your will in line with beliefs that are the product of critical thinking and well considered desires that align with your values and the things that you care about. For our will to be free is just for our mind to be functioning well in each of these modes.

So, there you go. Free will, according to a compatibilist conception, isn’t about how you could have done otherwise, but rather it’s more like riding a bike. And what more joyful freedom could a person ask for!

I’m sure you see the limits of my analogy. My bike camping bike still requires a rider with a will. So, of course, you aren’t just like that bike. Your mind is more like an autonomous self-riding bike. We could frame the analogy in terms of more autonomously functioning mechanisms like weathervanes, but I like bikes.

The important point of the analogy still holds. Free will, on compatibilist conceptions, can’t be taken for granted as a built-in part of human nature (if there even is such a thing). Rather, free will, as an aspect of a freely functioning mind, is something we can attain to greater or lesser degrees depending how it is cultivated and nourished. Whether your mind functions freely, whether you have free will, has a great deal to do with the care it receives. The care and maintenance of the freely functioning mind includes lots of things like education, friends and family, community, health care, spiritual nourishment, economic opportunity (the ability to participate in the reciprocal “taking care of” that happens in healthy communities) and probably a good deal more. A society that doesn’t help to maintain all these things in good working order for its citizens will be a society of less freely functioning people with less free wills. At this point, the philosophy of free will leads us to broader issues of ethics, epistemology, moral psychology and political philosophy.

There is research on Critical Thinking, notably on how it can be taught effectively. Several key findings are reported in Jonathan Haber’s Critical Thinking (published by the MIT Press, several copies are available to check out in our Faculty Commons). In 1989 Robert Ennis outlined 4 possible approaches to teaching critical thinking as follows:

• The general approach, where Critical Thinking is taught as a set of general reasoning skills and dispositions in a dedicated course.
• Infusion, where Critical Thinking is taught across disciplines and Critical Thinking principles, skills and dispositions are made explicit.
• Immersion, where students are immersed in Critical Thinking through subject matter across disciplines but where Critical Thinking Principles, skills and dispositions are not made explicit.
• A mixed approach which includes dedicated instruction as in the general approach plus infusion or immersion across disciplines.

Two and a half decades later, a team of researchers led by Philip Abrami conducted a meta-analysis of subsequent research utilizing. This analysis of the substantial body of research conducted in the intervening two and a half decades produced some clear findings concerning how to most effectively teach critical thinking. Not surprisingly, the mixed approach, combining dedicated instruction in Critical Thinking as a set of general skills and dispositions is the most effective of improving student’s critical thinking. And the immersion approach is least effective.

While we have always thought of our approach to critical thinking in our legacy General Education program as the infusion approach, the lack of collaboration and professional development around critical thinking strongly suggests that what we have in fact been doing is closer to the immersion approach. No doubt this varies from instructor to instructor. But while the concept of infusion appears to presuppose that there is something that gets infused, we have never paid much attention to Ennis’ distinction between infusion and immersion. Given this lack of coordination, I suspect we have by and large defaulted to the later.

Our current effort at building a new program of Institutional Learning has aimed to bring us more in alignment with what Ennis calls an infusion approach. This is still not the most effective way to teach critical thinking skills, but it seems to be the best we are capable of given the remoteness of the prospect of adopting a Critical Thinking course requirement at the institutional level. While well short of ideal in terms of critical thinking education, adopting a well-developed infusion model would be a big step for us in terms of making critical thinking a meaningful part of a BC education.

A further unsurprising finding of the meta-analysis led by Abrami is that student mastery of critical thinking skills is substantially enhanced when faculty engage in significant professional and curriculum development focused on Critical Thinking. From the report,

When instructors receive special advanced training in preparation for teaching CT skill, or when extensive observations on course administration and instructor’s CT teaching practices were reported, the impacts of the interventions were greatest. By contrast, the impacts of CT were smallest when the intention to improve students’ CT was only listed among course objectives and there were no efforts at professional development or elaboration of course design and implementation.

Abrami et al. quoted in Haber

As we reimagine our approach to teaching Critical Thinking across the college, I hope we will develop more deliberate and collaborative efforts at professional and curriculum development in Critical Thinking. It would be great to see the occasional Campus Community Day feature some outside expertise on Critical Thinking in a keynote role (Professional development efforts like this, by the way, would help to address our accreditation recommendation concerning resource allocation based on the results of assessment).

I should say something about how Abrami et al. understand critical thinking. While critical thinking experts and educators do employ a variety of definitions of critical thinking, these typically don’t so much embody points of dispute as differences in detail and emphasis. The definition employed in the meta-analysis led by Abrami is the widely cited definition produced by the Delphi panel (organized by the American Philosophical Association):

We Understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgement which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. . . . The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgements, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeing results which are as precise as thee subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit.

Delphi Report

This very involved definition lists a robust range of Critical Thinking skills and dispositions involved in inquiry. Of course, there is little hope of expecting students to recall all of this or for faculty to address all of this in the context of our program of Institutional Learning.

The Critical thinking Working group here at BC has opted for something a bit more manageable and memorable:

Critical Thinking is the careful assessment of any position by clarifying and evaluating reasons for and against the position.

A careful reading of the articulation we have offered for our Critical Thinking ILO will reveal that much of the Delphi Report’s definition is invoked in the critical clarification, analysis, and evaluation of reasoning. More here:

Articulating Critical Thinking: – General Education Reform at BC