Category: Critical Thinking

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.

We all agree that open-mindedness is a good thing. But exactly what is open-mindedness. Conventional thinking on open-mindedness is roughly that we should consider other points of view. The open-minded person doesn’t just dogmatically assert, but also listens to other points of view, maybe without presuming other points of view are wrong. I suspect every educator who has asked this of students has seen performative open-mindedness, where a student will address opposing views, perhaps seeding them with some straw man distortions, only to eventually raise objections and revert to the cherished position.

The educator might push back on this, asking this student to consider opposing views seriously and resist the urge to dismiss them summarily. If this works, it is liable to yield a sort of performative wishy-washy relativism, where the student allows that others have “their own truth” for their own reasons and deserve to be respected even though “I still have my own truth.” Perhaps at this point we have succeeded in teaching politeness. But this remains far short of open-mindedness as a virtue of critical thinkers. So long as the shallowly reasoned foregone conclusion remains untouched, no critical thinking is really happening.

Considering other views is a good first step. but it doesn’t get us very far. This exercise alone seldom penetrates the fog of confirmation bias. Worse, open-mindedness on the conventional view is easily abused. I first started thinking about just what open-mindedness is about 20 years ago when it was fashionable for climate skeptics argue that climate scientists are not open-minded because they won’t consider the possibility that warming is caused by sunspots, or cycles, or whatever. Of course, climate scientists had considered all these possibilities and found good reason to dismiss them. But the fallacy I’ll dub “spurious appeal to open-mindedness” serves to keep debunked ideas alive in the service of casting doubt on real expertise. According to conventional thinking about open-mindedness, there is nothing wrong with this. The result is not critical thinking, but uncritical skepticism.

So conventional thinking about open-mindedness faces a couple of problems that lead students away from critical thinking and towards either wishy-washy relativism or uncritical skepticism. And indeed, many of our students go to college and wind up in one of these epistemological no-man’s lands on any number of issues. This is not critical thinking. Skepticism on some matters is a reasonable position when the best available reasons yield a toss-up. But there is nothing in conventional thinking about open-mindedness that suggests anything about seeking out the better reasons; the very thing that critical thinking is about.

So let me formulate an improved conception of open-mindedness that avoids the problems with the conventional take and integrates open-mindedness with the rest of critical thinking. On the new and improved conception, to be open-minded is to be persuadable by the better reasons, but not by the worse. On this view, open-mindedness is a virtue of critical thinkers, not just a steppingstone in that direction. Sorting the better reasons from the worse does require starting with a good inventory of reasons, so considering diverse viewpoints is included in this conception. But now there remains a next step. The open-minded person doesn’t stop at cataloging the various reasons for and against. She evaluates these reasons fairly and ultimately yields to the better argument, adopting the most reasonable view (assuming there is a clear winner). Holding the most reasonable view doesn’t mean one isn’t open-minded (as it would when this is thought to mean “open to other views”). Holding the most reasonable view is the product of being open-minded on the improved conception (where this means identifying and yeilding to the better argument). On the new view, genuine expertise (where this is actually knowing what one is talking about, not merely a matter of credentials, reputation or status) is the product of open-mindedness. Genuine expertise is not ossified closed-minded thinking, as the anti-intellectuals among us sometimes delight in suggesting.

Open-mindedness on the conception I’m recommending will not be readily discernible to people who lack developed skill at sorting the better reasons from the worse. But those who do have good reasoning skills will be well positioned to recognize when others are open minded and know what they are talking about as a result. Skilled critical thinkers can recognize genuine expertise in people who traffic only in high quality argument. Game knows game.

Exhortation to be open-minded on the conventional understanding does little for our students. The way to cultivate open-mindedness that contribute to reasonableness is to teach reasoning skills. Open-mindedness requires learning how to tell the difference between good and shoddy argument. Here, we can up our game.

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 an 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.