“You can fool all of the people all of the time if the advertising budget is big enough.” Ed Rollins, Republican campaign adviser
What is Critical Thinking?
Critical thinking is about helping ourselves and others. Why?
What is Critical Thinking?
“Critical thinking includes a variety of deliberative processes aimed at making wise decisions about what to believe and do, processes that center on evaluation of arguments but include much more.”
Two primary skills required:
Read carefully
Listen closely
Mistakes: Ambiguity
Secretaries make more money than physicians. What does this mean?
She saw the farmer with binoculars. Who had the binoculars?
I know a little Greek. The language or a person?
Mistakes: Fallacies
Fallacy of composition: “We don’t spend that much on military salaries. After all, who ever heard of anyone getting rich in the Army?” In other words, we don’t spend that much on service personnel individually; therefore we don’t spend much on them as a group.
Mistakes: Fallacies
Fallacy of division: “Congress is incompetent. Therefore, Congressman Benton is incompetent.” What holds true of a group does not necessarily hold true for all the individuals in that group.
“He is old.” Compared to what? Old is a matter of context. Old for first grade? Old in general? The vagueness of a claim is a matter of degree.
Mistakes: A Red Herring
When a person brings a topic into a conversation that distracts from the original point, especially if the new topic is introduced in order to distract, the person is said to have introduced a red herring (see pages 168-169).
Mistakes: Ad Hominem
We commit the ad hominem fallacy when we think that considerations about a person “refute” his or her assertions.
Example: A proposal made by an oddball is an oddball’s proposal, but it does not follow that it is an oddball proposal! See?
Mistakes: Straw Man
The straw man fallacy happens when you “refute” a position or claim by distorting or oversimplifying or misrepresenting it. Let’s say Mrs. Herrington announces it is time to clean the attic. Mr. Herrington groans and says, “What, again? Do we have to clean it out everyday?” She responds: “Just because you think we should keep every last piece of junk forever doesn’t mean I do.”
Basic Critical Thinking Skills
When we take a position on an issue, we assert or claim something. The claim and thinking on which it is based are subject to rational evaluation. When we do that evaluating, we are thinking critically. To think critically, then, we need to know five things:
To think critically, then, we need to know:
1. When someone (including ourselves) is taking a position on an issue, what that issue is, and what the person is claiming their position is on that issue.
To think critically, then, we need to know:
2. What considerations are relevant to that issue
3. Whether the reasoning underlying the person’s claim is good reasoning
4. And whether, everything considered, we should accept, reject, or suspend judgment on what the person has claimed
To think critically, then, we need to know:
Finally, 5. Doing all this requires us to be levelheaded and objective and not influenced by extraneous factors.
Issues: What is an issue?
It is something we have a question about.
A key word is “whether.”
An issue is what is raised when you consider whether a claim is true.
Arguments: What is an argument?
Let us define an argument as an attempt to support a claim or assertion by providing a reason or reasons for accepting it.
What is a claim?
A claim is a statement that is either true or false. The claim that is supported is called the conclusion of the argument, and the claim or claims that provide support are called the premises.
Arguments and Explanations
An argument attempts to prove that some claim is true, while an explanation attempts to specify how something works or what caused it or brought it about. Arguing that a dog has fleas is quite different from explaining how it came to have fleas. Explanations and arguments are different things.
Recognizing Arguments
An argument always has a conclusion. Always. Without a conclusion, a bunch of words isn’t an argument. But an argument also needs at least one premise. Without a premise you have no support for the conclusion and so you don’t have an argument.
An Explanation
An explanation is a claim or set of claims intended to make another claim, object, event, or state of affairs intelligible (but not true or false).
A premise
A premise is the claim or claims in an argument that provide the reasons for believing the conclusion.
Identifying Issues
Before you can really recognize an argument you have to know what the issues are.
An important clue to what the issue is will be to look for the conclusions. The conclusion that is presented refers to the issue being addressed.
