Category: Critical Thinking

The absurdity of this argument is clear. In the Critical Thinking biz, we’d call this a reductio ad adsurdum, an argument that signals its own flaws through reaching a preposterous conclusion. This instance doesn’t proceed from false premises so much as from a faulty understanding of freedom.

And yet seemingly smart people like Elon Musk endorse exactly this line of argument when it comes to free speech. Never mind that many of the people who endorse this simple-minded free speech absolutism are blatantly hypocritical in their application of it. That inconsistency is a feature not a bug. As we are invited to get our knickers in a knot over censoring talk of DEI or climate change, we are distracted from the sloppy analysis of free speech the absolutist pays lip service to. The general effect is stupefying, which is a key part of how authoritarianism works. Keep people sufficiently confused and they will go along with just about anything.

So, let’s focus, people, focus! Let’s focus on just what freedom of speech might reasonably mean. This is not a question of defining words. Words are notoriously ambiguous, and we can often define them to suit our purposes. The issue here is one of conceptual analysis. We have some grasp on concepts of freedom, such as free speech. But that grasp is tenuous, which is to say that our understanding of freedom is unclear and requires some inquiry if we are to wield such concepts in an intelligent and ethical fashion. We can begin to clarify our conceptual understanding through thought experiments where we test proposed analyses and then weed out the bad analyses when they lead to absurd results.

Thought of in simple and absolute terms, freedom to do this or that tends to be self-defeating. I am free to move my body according to my will, yes, but most of us are much less free to move our bodies around if some of us are moving our bodies like Jake Paul in the octagon. Or to take another example, many people are enchanted with the idea of a free market, though any absolutely free market will soon collapse under the weight of fraud, extortion, insider dealing and such.

Markets need rules and regulations in order to function. And the salutary effect of these rules and regulations can only be realized with the cooperation of good faith participants, meaning businesspeople that adhere to high standards of honesty and integrity. Similarly, laws against assault and battery help to enhance our freedom to move our bodies about the surface of the planet. The effectiveness of these laws also depends on upholding social norms of basic decency and consideration towards others. When edgelords go around testing the boundaries of these liberties, they corrode liberty for the rest of us by undermining the basic norms we all depend on.

Similar reasoning applies in the case of free speech. We do lots of different things with words through speech. Sometimes we express our considered opinions, and this has great value for facilitating understanding and reaching reasonable compromises and accommodations. But we can also use words to demean, confuse, or assault others (yes, threatening speech meets the legal criteria for assault). These uses of words do not enhance liberty. To the contrary these forms of speech poison discourse and thereby undermine liberty.

John Stewart Mill provides a classic statement of the sort of liberty limiting principle that serves to enhance liberty overall in Chpt. 3 of On Liberty when he says, “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.” Of course, the analysis of liberty is hardly completed by incorporating this liberty limiting principle since we need to look into just what constitutes a nuisance. Mill is firm in denying that offensiveness limits liberty. The problem here is subjectivity. Some are offended by things others find benign. But then the problem here is with mere offensiveness. Sometimes people are offended by speech because it is genuinely harmful; for instance, if it belongs to a well-established tradition of rhetoric aimed at marginalization, as in the case of racist or sexist language. So, banning things like hate speech actually enhances freedom of speech overall.

Many people are struck by a sense of paradox at the idea that rules, regulations and norms might enhance rather than restrict liberty. Hopefully we’ve dispelled some of that here. A little conceptual analysis, testing our ways of understanding liberty through simple hypothetical cases, goes a long way towards a better understanding of freedom and the crucial role of rules and norms in sustaining and enhancing liberty.

People generally have reasons for believing the things they believe. Sometimes those are good reasons and sometimes not. When we believe something, we typically take our reasons to be good ones. It would be hard to sustain belief for reasons we know to be bad. Perhaps people sometimes do this, but the problems with this sort of willful thinking are apparent and won’t get much comment here. The more common problem occurs when people mistake bad reasons for good reasons yet remain reluctant to testing those reasons. This is a failure of intellectual courage.

Intellectual courage consists in being willing to examine the quality of our evidence and arguments. Intellectual courage is typically exercised in a social context. It involves submitting our views and reasoning to the scrutiny of others, embracing peer review in spite of the possibility of humbling results. Left to our own devices, we aren’t so likely to spot and correct the mistakes in our thinking. We wouldn’t think the way we do to begin with if we thought it was flawed. And confirmation bias is liable to highlight evidence and reasoning that confirms our prior ways of thinking. So, without peer review from others, we are likely to become entrenched in our opinions and the reasons that support these, whether or not these reasons are well founded.

But subjecting our opinions to peer review from people who see things differently can be a frightening proposition. We risk a good deal when we do so. Not only do we risk finding that we might be wrong about something, we also risk public discovery of this embarrassing state of affairs.

Courage generally is a willingness to take risks when the potential benefits warrant doing so. Acting courageously does not mean acting without fear. It means acting in full awareness of what is at stake, including the possibility of failure. Perhaps a person who is has developed courage through a long-standing practice of reasonable risk taking won’t be phased by fear. But people will generally have to face down lots of fear in getting to that point.

People who are very concerned about what others think may inflate the risk of others discovering they are wrong. Sometimes people have powerful reasons to be concerned about what others think. We live in an age where not having the right opinions can get you kicked out of your group. Conservative former congressman Adam Kinzinger describes this as the current situation for republican politicians when he remarked on a recent Atlantic podcast (Autocracy in America) that “many people would rather die than not belong.” And so, we have the spectacle of republican politicians who can’t admit that the last presidential election was fair, even when they know better. Intellectual courage appears to be off the table for people who care more about belonging than truth and find themselves in social situations where holding the right opinion is required for belonging. Intellectual courage can remain a big ask when holding the wrong opinion merely lowers your status slightly in the eyes of some others. This, I’d submit, is the basic dynamic of groupthink. When the group in question insists on orthodoxy, this dynamic will be intellectually oppressive. The rare person who insists on thinking independently and speaking her mind in spite of intellectually oppressive group dynamics does so at a very high price, as Adam Kinzinger might attest.

A healthier environment for exercising intellectual courage would be one where people can respect each other across differences of opinion. This isn’t quite what happens when people “agree to disagree” or when they dissolve disagreement by taking people to “have their own truth.” Demanding that others agree without is obviously disrespectful. But fencing off that part of another that doesn’t agree with you isn’t so much better. It’s a defensive maneuver which involves declining to understand the other. Respecting others does involve being open to reasonable disagreement. But disagreement is only reasonable when it is the result of reasoning together. Discovering disagreement should be a starting point for critical thinking aimed at greater understanding, not the occasion for a kind of truce or avoidance.

When I meet a philosopher I disagree with, I’m eager to understand why. This is how inquiry and research proceeds in philosophy. In trying to understand a view that differs from my current opinion I stand to learn about some new evidence or argument. The payoff for exercising intellectual courage is deepening my understanding of others and learning new things, sometimes learning from my own prior mistakes. Of course, philosophy is a pretty safe space for this kind of risk taking. Out in the real world we often encounter people who aren’t interested in understanding or being reasonable. So, it is up to us to cultivate community among critical thinkers.

We are fallible beings, and nobody likes to find they are in error. So, we will always have need of intellectual courage. But we can significantly lower the stakes and make it easier for people to exercise intellectual courage by seeking to understand differing points of view and making a shared project of reasonably evaluating our respective evidence and arguments. This is one of the key goals in teaching critical thinking.

Arguments are commonly regarded as tools of persuasion. Seen this way, arguments are sales pitches for believing something. In our consumer society, we are all skilled at negotiating the constant onslaught of sales pitches. Our default is the hard no. Any of us would soon be broke without rejecting the vast majority of sales pitches. And yet, we buy often enough. Whether we buy, consider, or reject a sales pitch, we make this determination in reference to ourselves, what we want, what matters to us. We are passive in our mode as consumers. We accept the sales pitch, or we don’t. Perhaps we step back and do some research when the stakes are high. Sellers would generally prefer that we not. And typically, there is no need to reach beyond ourselves, to actively engage the world beyond our needs and wants. We know how to operate as customers, it’s a comfortable space for us denizens of late-stage capitalism. It also misses the point of argumentation.

When we treat arguments as tools of persuasion, our default stance is to resist persuasion. Persuasion, after all, feels like an assertion of someone else’s will, which we will naturally want to resist unless it aligns with our own will. In such self-referential assent or dissent, our will is engaged in reactive mode. But reaction is not the same thing as exercising agency.

Our general reluctance to change our minds about things is known as epistemic conservativism. Perhaps without a healthy dose of epistemic conservativism, we’d be changing our mind all the time and wind up confused (or confusing). A degree of epistemic conservatism can be a healthy thing. But it is healthy only when we are reluctant to give up beliefs that are themselves rigorously examined and well supported by evidence and argument. Otherwise, epistemic conservatism leads straight to confirmation bias, the tendency to endorse or reject arguments on the basis of how we already feel about the conclusion.

How are things different for the critical thinker? A distinguishing mark of the skilled critical thinker is that she treats arguments as instruments of inquiry rather than instruments of persuasion. An argument is a set of premises offered as a reason for thinking some conclusion is true. We should find good arguments persuasive simply because it’s good to believe things that are true. What is operative for the critical thinker, though, is inquiry, the active search for truth and understanding. Not the passive consumer’s role of being persuaded, or “buying” the conclusion. The critical thinker may still want others to find her arguments persuasive, but only if they are good arguments. For the critical thinker, the desire to persuade is conditional on the quality of her reasoning being good, not on her own will.

Critical thinkers aren’t just concerned with determining whether the conclusion of an argument is true. Rather they are more broadly concerned with what can be learned from the argument. This starts with aiming to understand the viewpoint embodied in the argument. We aren’t in a good position to evaluate and argument without first clearly understanding what it says. Beyond this, learning from arguments often takes the form of learning from our mistakes. When the critical thinker finds a flaw in an argument, she will straight way consider whether this signals a compelling countervailing argument, or whether that flaw points the way to a better argument. Whether the conclusion of an argument is true or false is not the primary concern for the critical thinker. The primary concern is to see how the argument can help us get closer to understanding and truth, even if this only amounts to recognizing that some line of argument is a dead end.

Critical thinking is not really about figuring out what views to “buy” or “not buy.” It’s about building a robust understanding of the world and each other. It’s about getting clear on all sorts of issues, from those our well-being depends on to those that simply engage our wonder (though I’d argue that the latter is itself an aspect of well-being). The critical thinker is actively engaged in the project of building a mind that focuses and clarifies her understanding generally, including her understanding of herself, her interests, and values. The skilled critical thinker is not a consumer of arguments, ideas or beliefs. She is a gardener, cultivating her own mind, producing her own intellectual sustenance and delight, and nourishing her own community of fellow critical thinkers. Our ability to act in ways that realize our considered interests depends on engaging inquiry actively. In this regard, critical thinking replaces reactivity with agency.

This charge is being leveled at higher education frequently. The idea that colleges are in the business of indoctrination is a standard trope in attacks on higher education. Foes of education aren’t just preaching to the choir with this indictment. The appeal of the indoctrination charge is significantly wider, since many of our students aren’t in a good position to tell the difference between education and indoctrination. This is worrisome. Educators face a bind in responding. Some of the conclusions we argue for in disciplines like biology (evolution, vaccines), earth science (climate change) and several of the social sciences (racism and sexism are real) have become sites of culture war conflict. How do we defend those disciplines and the uncomfortable truths they reveal without appearing partisan, taking sides and thereby confirming the assessment of colleges as indoctrination centers?

Consider the issue from the perspectives of students. Many of our students lack well developed reasoning skills. Their education in critical thinking has many gaps and leaves much to be desired. A student who has never really been taught how to track and process reasoning for themselves is not in a good position to tell the difference between good arguments for conclusions they may find uncomfortable and mere indoctrination. In the absence of robust education in critical thinking, the best we can hope to do with many of our students is preach to the already converted. And to whatever degree we are successful at that, we will at the same time affirm in other students the false appearance that indoctrination is all we are up to.

It’s hard to say how many students will quietly be put off due to lacking the reasoning skill needed to appreciate how evidence and argument lead to conclusions they find uncomfortable. But I’d suggest the uncertainty here is cause for more concern, not less. Students who fail to appreciate the strength of good arguments bearing on culturally sensitive topics aren’t just missing an educational opportunity. These are students who will emerge into the broader world vulnerable to the disingenuous manipulation of forces that would very much like to refashion institutions like ours into indoctrination centers. How better than to suggest that we already are, just not the right sort of indoctrination center.

Students need a robust education in critical thinking if we want them to recognize the difference between reasoning based on good evidence, and merely telling them what to think. Granted some of our students, those with high cultural capital, those who grew up around the highly educated or were educationally fortunate themselves, those students may arrive in our classrooms well-prepared to respond to reasons. We face an equity gap between these few and the rest of our students. What shall we do to close it?

In everyday language we often treat “subjective” and “biased” as synonyms and likewise “objective” and “unbiased”. But we don’t really need two different words to say the same thing, and this way of speaking about subjectivity and objectivity leads to a good deal of confusion by obscuring important things about how our minds relate to the world.

We aim for greater clarity in philosophy. Among philosophers, “subjective” and “objective” are understood in a more specific way that doesn’t invite confusion with being biased or not. The subjective is what pertains to subjects. Or, as Oxford puts it, the subjective is “dependent on the mind or on an individual’s perception for its existence.” According to this definition, all of our mental states, our beliefs, opinions and perceptions, are subjective. But all we are saying here is that these are states of subjects. On this way of understanding what it means for something to be subjective, it remains an open question whether the contents of our beliefs, opinions and perceptions represent the objective world accurately, that is, truthfully.

We are subjects. Out there in the world are various objects (including our bodies, so really, we are both subjects and objects). Being a subject carries the with it the potential for being biased. We are shaped by our experiences and ways of thinking. These can present a rich variety of obstacles to forming a clear understanding of what’s happening out there in the objective world. And yet the goal of critical thinking is to negotiate these obstacles in order to get at the truth more clearly in the ways that we can, or at least improving our understanding of things by degrees.  That is to say, the goal of critical thinking is to filter out the biases in our representations of the world and get our subjective representations of the world more accurately aligned with the ways things are objectively.

Sometimes the obstacles to objectively true beliefs are not very significant. So let’s start with an easy case. A glance at my surroundings makes it pretty obvious to me that I am currently at home in my living room, in my favorite chair with a laptop on my knees and my feet propped up on the fireplace hearth. The content of my subjective perception and resulting belief is objectively true (barring bizarre Cartesian skeptical hypotheses). To say my belief about where I’m currently at is objectively true is just to say that the content of this subjective mental state represents objects in the world as they are. When it comes to medium sized objects and events, we usually have little trouble getting our subjective perceptions and beliefs into good alignment with objective reality.

Getting my belief (which is subjective in the sense that it pertains to me, a subject) well aligned with objective reality (the external world of objects) is so straightforward in many cases that we would ordinarily deem it not worth mentioning. Until we have to deal with the notion that “people are always biased because our perspective is always subjective.” This bit of fashionable nonsense is the product of the confused but commonplace way of thinking about “subjective” and “objective” we mentioned at the outset. Perspectives are always subjective simply because they are the perspectives of subjects. But this doesn’t mean that a person’s perspective can’t provide them with an accurate representation of how things are objectively. That remains an open question.

We typically aim for holding beliefs that provide accurate, truthful representations of the world. We are quite good at this when it comes to medium sized events and objects. We have a harder time when things get very big, fairly subtle, or abstract. But let’s not generalize from the hard cases. We aren’t hopelessly doomed to bias and distortion just because some cases aren’t as easy as realizing your presence in your own home. We have, over the course of millennia, developed some pretty good techniques for expanding our reach and grasping ever more universal, subtle or abstract objective truths. Indeed cultivating skill in using these techniques is exactly what critical thinking is all about. 

Twenty four notes into this series, it has been a while since we’ve laid out the basics. So, time for another pass. Critical Thinking is basically about getting at truths and avoiding falsehoods as best we can. So how do we tell if a proposition is true? The simple answer is to examine the evidence and the reasoning based on the evidence. Reasons are arguments and we have pretty well developed methods for formulating, clarifying and evaluating these. This is what logic is all about.

Arguments have some basic parts, premises and a conclusion to be specific. To determine whether an argument provides a good reason for accepting its conclusion as true we need to do two things (and only two things, trying to do other things leads us into the realm of fallacies, mistakes in reasoning).

The two steps involved in evaluating an argument are as follows:

• Determine if the premises are true
• Determine whether the premises support the conclusion

Determining whether the premise of an argument are true may involve evaluating some evidence or it may involve evaluating further arguments. While this may sound pretty straightforward and manageable, getting at the truth of a matter can be an involved process and sometimes our best efforts aren’t entirely conclusive. Critical thinking methods are the best tools we have, but like any good tool, there will be limits to what you can achieve with them. Fortunately, the limits are soft in the sense that with more skill and better evidence we can achieve progressively more in the way of getting at the truth. But we should not expect even the best tools and strongest skills to lead to successful acquisition of knowledge in every instance. Part of being human is coping with our own imperfection and limitations.

There are two standards we can appeal to in evaluating whether the premises of an argument provide logical support for its conclusion. There is the sure fire standard of deductive validity and the pretty good standard of inductive strength. Here are the basic definitions of these two standards:

• A deductively valid argument is one where the conclusion must be true if the premises are all true.
• An inductively strong argument is one where the conclusion is likely to be true if the premises are all true.

The science of deductive validity is precise, formal and pretty well developed. We teach the basics of this science, including formal methods for proving the validity of valid arguments, in PHIL& 120, Introduction to Logic. The fact that this course is not as standard a part of our educational curriculum as basic algebra continues to baffle me. Our world would be a far different place if it were.

Inductive strength is messier than formal deductive logic. There are assorted patterns of argument that aim at inductive strength and each admits of varying methods of evaluation. Unlike deductive validity, inductive strength admits of degrees. Partly because of this, the methods for evaluating inductive argument are often less precise than we’d like. And yet we can cultivate high levels of skill at evaluating inductive argument and the successes of science are testament to this. PHIL& 115 Critical Thinking includes substantial focus on how to evaluate inductive argument.

Our students get precious little dedicated instruction in how to reason well. Students get even less instruction on how to recognize good reasons. What spotty instruction they do receive often focuses on identifying fallacies, or mistakes in reasoning. This is good stuff, and the most thorough investigation of fallacies at BC will also be found in PHIL& 115, Critical Thinking. But when students learn about a few fallacies without the benefit of developing skill at appreciating good reasoning, they often fall into the trap I call the fallacy fallacy, the notion that every argument is fallacious (and especially if you don’t like the conclusion). Spotty instruction in critical thinking that focuses mainly on spotting fallacies is liable to facilitate distrust and unhealthy, cynical skepticism. It is vitally important that students get good training in how to reason well and recognize good reasons.

There is no substitute for focused dedicated training in how to reason well. It remains an open chasm in our curriculum. Every student in the US receives a decade and then some of instruction in how to reason with numbers and only occasional and passing attention to how to reason more generally. The results of this experiment are now manifest. The ongoing degradation of our natural environment, information environment and social institutions, in short the very conditions for human flourishing, would hardly be possible except for our twin failures of critical thinking and love. These twins are conjoined. Arrogance, prejudice and hatred are the end results of inattention and sloppy, self-serving thinking. Compassion and understanding and knowledge are the fruits of active, clear and open inquiry. Critical thinking is at the heart of this.