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 characterize Critical Thinking in one specific way rather than another, but they will be quite peaceable conversations that shed more light than heat.
There is a small community of faculty at BC that have studied Critical Thinking. Beyond this 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 education enrollment patterns over recent decades, I would estimate that maybe 10% of this broader group of faculty have taken a course in Critical Thinking. Nor have we been particularly attentive to professional development around Critical Thinking.
This is not meant as a disparaging judgment of anyone. It is just the situation we have grown accustomed to across higher education. The problem of neglect when it comes to Critical Thinking is systemic. 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 routinely 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 who teach that subject to have graduate degrees in the subject. Even “writing across the curriculum” is supported by the years of required English composition we’ve all been through. But when it comes to Critical Thinking, which we all seem to deem important, we don’t even track data on who is at least somewhat prepared. We simply assume adequate knowledge and skill. This is hardly what critical thinkers would do.
Among the much larger community of educators who have little background in critical thinking, conversations about what critical thinking is are rare and likely to be contentious. 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. Perhaps because of 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, something anyone owns, or something we can just decide on by consensus.
For instance, we are all vaguely on to the same concept when we talk of love. There is an unfinished body of literature dating back thousands of years inquiring into the nature of love. Analyses vary and evolve because we still have more to learn. To take another example, 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 in our slowly evolving, often 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. And yet there remains a great deal to learn about the targets of our conceptual analysis and the more we learn, the better positioned we are to give an informative analysis.
Since a concept is not a subjective thing (as subjects, we can get on to a concept, understand it well, or miss it entirely) or something we can all just decide on through a process of consensus building, varying “definitions” from different people who have thought carefully about the matter is to be expected, at least when an interesting concept is at issue. 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 at issue. In other cases, we might find differing analyses among people who are just as far along but focused on differing aspects of a complex and multi-faceted concept. And yet others may just have different ways of expressing the same basic idea. Well-informed conceptual analyses often differ in ways that are mutually illuminating. 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 well-informed perspectives in a 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 some 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. The magnetism of conformity is also a hazard. Too often we cede thinking for ourselves or expressing our perspectives in favor of the comfort of group cohesion. Conceptual analysis of Critical Thinking itself is certainly a worthy project. But it is not going to go well without first cultivating the relevant Critical Thinking skills.
A basic skill for testing proposed analyses of some concept is the method of counterexample. Most of us are acquainted with Critical Thinking in the familiar sorts of examples it we have encountered or teach as part of our curriculum. A good analysis of Critical Thinking will apply to all the genuine cases of critical thinking, but not to other things. So, in testing a proposed analysis we can look for clear cases of critical thinking that don’t fit the proposed analysis or things that do fit the proposed analysis that clearly aren’t critical thinking. Counterexamples of either sort might lead us to reconsider or reformulate our analysis.
What we are looking for in a conceptual analysis is an appropriate set of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for falling under the concept we are interested in. Looking for counterexample’s is a way of testing for this. But beyond this, we want necessary and sufficient conditions that are constitutive of the concept at issue. A famous set of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a human being is being a featherless biped. Perhaps this proposed analysis provides necessary and sufficient conditions, but it doesn’t provide a very informative analysis of what it is to be human. So beyond looking for counterexamples, we want to think about how our proposed analysis explains the nature of the concept at issue.
So, there is the briefest outline of the sort of critical thinking skill we’d want to bring to the project of defining critical thinking. Applying these skills is not a mechanical process. Just what counts as a counterexample is often not so clear. Further inquiry may be called for. And formulating analyses that illuminate the essence of a concept sometimes takes real understanding and insight. Again, it can be good to study a thing before attempting to define it.
Some resources for Critical Thinking development:
- Pick up any Critical Thinking textbook. There are many fine ones. I’m currently spending some time with Think with Socrates, by my friend Paul Herrick at Shoreline College. Moore and Parker’s Critical Thinking is widely used, PDFs of older editions can be found online. Lewis Vaughn’s The Power of Critical Thinking is another highly recommended text.
- The best compact primer on Critical Thinking I’ve found would be Giving Reasons, by David Morrow. This tiny volume is cheap and short, clear and informative for students as well as educators.
- 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 6-module curriculum on their own.
- 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. It also has the virtue of being free, for now. I’m looking forward to developing it into a book while on sabbatical next year. Thoughts and feedback are most welcome