CONTENTS

Preface

Note to Instructors

1 The Nature and Value of Critical Thinking

1.1 THE NATURE OF CRITICAL THINKING

1.2 CRITICAL THINKING AND KNOWLEDGE

1.3 CRITICAL THINKING AND PERSONAL AUTONOMY

1.4 MISTAKES TO AVOID

1.5 PRACTICAL STRATEGIES

1.6 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: APPLYING WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED

2 Clarifying Meaning

2.1 THE PLACE OF DEFINITIONS IN CRITICAL THINKING

2.2 ASSERTION

2.3 CONSTRUCTING AND EVALUATING DEFINITIONS

2.4 THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT FRAMEWORKS

2.5 CLARIFYING BELIEFS AND PROBLEMS

2.6 TECHNICAL DEFINITIONS

2.7 MEANING IN ADVERTISEMENTS

2.8 MISTAKES TO AVOID

2.9 PRACTICAL STRATEGIES

2.10 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: APPLYING WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED

3 Sufficient Reasons

3.1 CRITICAL THINKING AND ARGUMENTS

3.2 IDENTIFYING PREMISES AND CONCLUSIONS

3.3 DEPENDENT AND INDEPENDENT REASONS

3.4 SUBARGUMENTS

3.5 EVALUATING LOGICAL SUPPORT

3.6 MISSING PREMISES

3.7 PRACTICAL STRATEGIES

3.8 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: APPLYING WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED

4 Acceptable Reasons

4.1 RELIABLE EVIDENCE

4.2 OBSERVATION

4.3 MEMORY

4.4 TESTIMONY

4.5 MEASUREMENT

4.6 MISTAKES TO AVOID

4.7 PRACTICAL STRATEGIES

4.8 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: APPLYING WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED

5 Reasoning about Alternatives and Necessary and Sufficient Conditions

5.1 REASONING ABOUT ALTERNATIVES

5.2 REASONING ABOUT NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS

5.3 REASONING WITH DEFINITIONS AND STANDARDS

5.4 REASONING ABOUT CAUSAL CONDITIONS

5.5 MISTAKES TO AVOID

5.6 PRACTICAL STRATEGIES

6 Reasoning by Analogy

6.1 REASONING BY ANALOGY

6.2 REASONING USING REPRESENTATIONAL ANALOGY

6.3 MISTAKES TO AVOID

6.4 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: APPLYING WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED

7 Critical Thinking in Action

7.1 THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT A DISCIPLINE

7.2 CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS

7.3 THINKING CRITICALLY IN YOUR OWN DECISION MAKING

7.4 THINKING CRITICALLY IN DISCUSSION

7.5 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: APPLYING WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED

Appendix A Mistakes to Avoid

Appendix B Practical Strategies

Index

Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Hunter, David A„ 1965–

A practical guide to critical thinking: deciding what to do and believe / David A. Hunter. p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-16757-1 (pbk.) 1. Critical thinking. I. Title.

BF441.H86 2009

121—dc22

For Jane,
my beloved and my friend.

PREFACE

This book has been a long time in the making, and has benefited from the influence of a huge number of colleagues, friends, and family. Here is an inevitably incomplete accounting of some of these debts.

I first began to think systematically about the nature, value, and pedagogy of critical thinking as an assistant professor of philosophy at Buffalo State College and it would be difficult to overstate the influence of my colleague George Hole on my thinking. He is one of the most gifted philosophy teachers I have ever known and I learned a good deal from him on how to teach philosophy. But even more than this, I am indebted to him for the way he so easily mixes philosophy, wit, and good humor in equal parts. I learned more from him than from anyone about how to teach critical thinking, and about the central role it ought to play in education and in a full life. I also owe a great deal to Gerry Nosich, whose work on critical thinking is without equal. Gerry joined us at Buffalo State College as we were designing and implementing a required first-year critical thinking course, and his gentle and wise advice proved invaluable. While with SUNY, I worked on a statewide committee to design a rubric for the assessment of critical thinking. I learned a lot in this time about the importance of teaching critical thinking across the curriculum, and I am especially indebted to Shir Filler.

Since beginning the writing of this book, I have learned a good deal from my new colleagues at Ryerson University, where the philosophy department teaches several sections of a critical thinking course that is required by students in several programs. I owe special debts to Andrew Hunter, Klaas Kraay, David Ciavatta, Jim Dianda, and Paul Raymont.

I am indebted to Steve Quigley, my editor at Wiley, for gently persuading me to write the book, to Jackie Palmieri, an editorial assistant at Wiley, for gently persuading me to complete it on time, and to several anonymous referees who provided useful feedback on my initial proposal.

I am enormously indebted to my family. I learned as much about how to think critically from my parents as from anyone. They showed me that critical thinking begins at home, and that is a lesson that Miranda and Emily, my wonderful daughters, now champion with exhausting ingenuity.

My greatest and deepest debts, however, are to Jane, whose love and support has never been conditional on sufficient and acceptable reasons. Or on anything else.

NOTE TO INSTRUCTORS

Teaching students to think critically is more about imparting a set of skills and habits than about teaching bits of theory. In developing this textbook, I tried to incorporate several features that I thought would make teaching critical thinking both easier and more effective.

Most significantly, I steered clear of any formal notation aside from the very simplest. It is not that I doubt the value of learning formal logic. In fact, I think that many students not only can benefit from it but can also thrive by studying it. But in my experience there is so much that most students need to learn before they can see the value of mastering a formal system, and so much more benefit they can derive from a non-formal approach to critical thinking. Instead, I tried to think of the text as like an introduction to practical epistemology: offering systematic advice, and lots of practice, on the best way to go about deciding what to believe and what to do.

It is worth noting here that I treat what is sometimes called enumerative induction as a form of reasoning by analogy. It seems to me that using samples to draw a conclusion about an entire group or population just is reasoning by analogy, and that it can be usefully taught as such. I also say, and this perhaps is more controversial, that reasoning by analogy can be valid. Of course, I do not mean that it is formally valid in the way that modus ponens is formally valid. Reasoning is valid when it is not possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. The fact that some reasoning can be known to be valid just from its form alone is, of course, important, and I discuss some of these forms in chapters 5 and 6. But it is important to keep in mind that not all valid arguments are formally valid (e.g., The table is blue, therefore it is colored), and not all arguments that are formally invalid are really invalid (e.g., If Jones is a male, then he is a bachelor; Jones is a bachelor; so, Jones is a male.) Judgment is always needed, it seems to me, in assessing the strength of a piece of reasoning, and this judgment is better taught by focusing on the idea of validity itself. I also think that what I say in Chapter 6 makes a reasonable and pedagogically responsible case for my view that reasoning by analogy can be valid.

I had originally planned to dedicate a chapter to thinking critically about what to do. But I worried that much of it would simply repeat points that had been made earlier and, in so doing, would make deciding what to do seem like a lesser cousin to deciding what to believe. As I worked (and then re-worked) the first six chapters, it seemed to me that I could elegantly discuss deciding what to do as we went along, when the topic at hand seemed relevant. I have thus included several "boxes" discussing various aspects of deciding what to do.

The book includes several other kinds of boxes as well. Some identify important mistakes that a good critical thinker ought to avoid. Some provide summaries of the discussion in the body of the text. Some offer examples of critical thinking across the curriculum. Some offer practical tips and rules of thumb. All are intended to make the text more readable and the concepts and skills more accessible.

I also decided that rather than dedicate a chapter to informal fallacies I would discuss them in what struck me as their proper context. It seems to me that there is no easy way to organize the different kinds of mistakes into a small number of categories without distorting their differences or exaggerating their similarities. Some of the mistakes have to do with clarifying meaning; others with ascribing views to others; some with assessing evidence; others with assessing validity. Several mistakes can occur at several otherwise quite distinct stages in deciding what to do or to believe. Rather than try to force the various mistakes into artificial categories, it seemed to me better to discuss them as we went along. For easy reference, though, I have collected them all in an appendix at the end of the book.

Careful training and repeated practice are crucial to learning any skill, and critical thinking is no exception. I have tried to include a large and varied collection of exercises. But I strongly encourage you to bring your own exercises to class and to encourage your students to seek out arguments and reasoning to share during the class time. In my experience, students learn far more when they are required during class time to participate in the construction, analysis, and assessment of examples of reasoning about what to do or believe. I have included, at the end of most of the chapters, exercises that are specially designed to help students transfer the concepts and skills they are learning to other corners of their lives. My thought is simply that there is little point in teaching someone to think critically if they see no place for it at home, in their own discipline, or at work. Over the years I have experimented with all of these exercises, making adjustments as I went along. The exercises are in a form that I find to be both effective and not overly intrusive. But I encourage you to adjust, alter, add, subtract, and modify as you see fit. The important thing is to find ways to help students see that they are learning skills and concepts that have application and value after the final exam.

1

THE NATURE AND VALUE OF CRITICAL THINKING

This book is a practical guide to critical thinking. It might seem unnecessary to be reading a guide to something you do all the time and are probably already pretty good at. When I tell people that I am writing a book on critical thinking they sometimes tell me that they consider themselves to be very good critical thinkers. At the very least, they say that they consider critical thinking to be very important. I am sure that they are right on both counts. We think critically a good bit of the time, and on the whole we do it pretty well. Still, I think there is always something to learn from thinking hard about what one is already good at.

In this chapter, we will explore the nature and value of critical thinking. We will ask what critical thinking is and how it differs from other kinds of thinking. We will explore what it means to think critically; what makes that kind of thinking critical. As part of this, we will consider whether critical thinking varies from one discipline to the next. Is critical thinking in geology different from critical thinking in design or the humanities? We will see that while the concepts, methods, and standards may differ from one discipline to the next, there is a basic essence or core of critical thinking that remains the same across all disciplines. Whether one is doing chemistry, design, astrology, or philosophy, there are common standards that you should strive to maintain, and practical strategies to help you make sure that you do. This book is designed to introduce you to this essential core of critical thinking while at the same time providing you with the tools you need to identify the concepts, methods, and standards distinctive of different disciplines.

Once we have said what we mean by critical thinking, we can then ask what place this kind of thinking does or should occupy in our daily lives, both in and out of the classroom. When is it appropriate to think critically, and are there some parts of our lives where critical thinking tends to dominate or where it tends to be ignored? We will see that critical thinking is appropriate whenever we are trying to decide what we ought to believe about some matter of fact or whenever we are trying to decide what to do or what course of action to adopt. In short, critical thinking is needed whenever we reason about what to believe or what to do.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we will ask why being a critical thinker matters. What makes critical thinking valuable? Why should we engage in it? We will see that being a critical thinker is valuable for several reasons. Perhaps most obviously, thinking critically about a question or problem can help one get the right answer or solution. By thinking critically about what to believe or what to do we increase our chances that our beliefs will be true and our actions effective. Thinking critically may not guarantee that you get the right answer; however, a good case can be made that unless you think critically you will get the right answer only by luck, and relying on luck is not a wise policy. But critical thinking has a deeper value than just its ties to truth. Critical thinking is also closely tied to one variety of freedom. By thinking critically, one can make up one’s own mind and making up one’s own mind is essential if we are to be the master of our own lives. Critical thinking, we will see, is essential to personal autonomy.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!