Critical Thinking Debate Guide

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Contents

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Introduction

Critical thinking is the use of rational skills, worldviews, and values to get as close as possible to the truth.

Critical Thinking from [Skeptical Inquirer]  


Critical thinking involves developing some emotional and intellectual distance between yourself and ideas — whether your own or others’ — in order to better evaluate their truth, validity, and reasonableness. Critical thinking is an effort to develop reliable, rational evaluations about what is reasonable for us to believe and disbelieve. Critical thinking makes use of the tools of logic and science because it values skepticism over gullibility or dogmatism, reason over faith, science over pseudoscience, and rationality over wishful thinking. Critical thinking does not guarantee that we will arrive at truth, but it does make it much more likely than any of the alternatives do.

What is Critical Thinking? from [About.com]  

Critical thinkers can gather such information from observation, experience, reasoning, and/or communication. Critical thinking has its basis in intellectual values that go beyond subject-matter divisions and which include: clarity, accuracy, precision, evidence, thoroughness and fairness.

However even with the use of critical thinking, mistakes can happen due to the thinker not being in possession of the full facts. Plus there is always the possibility of Human error. One can regard critical thinking as involving two aspects: 1. a set of cognitive skills 2. the ability and intellectual commitment to use those skills to guide behavior.

Critical thinking does not assure that one will reach either the truth or correct conclusions. First, one may not have all the relevant information; indeed, important information may remain undiscovered, or the information may not even be knowable. Second, one's bias(es) may prevent effective gathering and evaluation of the available information.

Critical thinking may be distinguished, but not separated, from feeling. Refusal to recognize their interaction in real life leads to various forms of self-deception, individually and socially; and at the left, right, and mainstream of economic, political, and religious issues.

Critical Thinking from [Wikipedia]  

  • Discussion Question
1. What is critical thinking and why should we use it? Do you agree with William Graham Sumner’s following summary of critical thinking?

Critical thinking is the examination and test of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not. The critical faculty is a product of education and training. It is a mental habit and power. It is a prime condition of human welfare that men and women should be trained in it. It is our only guarantee against delusion, deception, superstition, and misapprehension of ourselves and our earthly circumstances.
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Skills Required

Someone with superb critical thinking skills:

• Understands the structure of an argument

• Effectively examines the reasons (inductive and deductive) to support conclusions

• Recognizes errors in reasoning

• Checks and examines assumptions

• Understands how assumptions about values can undermine arguments

• Understands how ideal values differ from real or practiced values

• Understands how common rationalizations are used to support unethical practices

• Has basic understanding of statistics (correlations vs. cause and effect)

• Understands the credible use of controlled studies, expert testimony and generalizations from analogies

• Differentiates between “real” vs. “pseudoscience”

• Examines the power of language and how it can be used or misused in an argument

• Is aware of the power of suggestion in all types of media

• Listens and responds to opposing viewpoints with empathy and fairmindedness

• Is aware of geocentricism, sociocentrism, and role of emotions on judgment

• Researches available information to the best of his or her ability

• Can advocate judiciously for his or her beliefs/conclusions

Becoming a Critical Thinker from [Prentice-Hall]  

  • Discussion Questions
1. As ethical citizens, are we responsible for learning critical thinking skills to elect our leaders and make other choices in society and in our personal lives? How far should this go—should we learn the basics of statistics, for example (even though many people are afraid to do so or don’t have the time)?
2. What are the minimum skills needed to be a critical thinker?
3. Consider these two quotes:
a. "It is strange that we expect students to learn, yet seldom teach them anything about learning."
Donald Norman, 1980, Cognitive engineering and education, in Problem Solving and Education:Issues in Teaching and Research, edited by D.T. Tuna and F. Reif, Erlbaum Publishers.
b. "We should be teaching students how to think. Instead, we are teaching them what to think."
Clement and Lochhead, 1980, Cognitive Process Instruction.
Do you believe that our educational and social systems support the proper development of critical thinking? Why or why not?
4. Do you think the (print and electronic) media as a general rule employ critical thinking? What does this mean for our society? What is meant by “media literacy” and how does it impact critical thinking?
5. Can you separate the "cognitive" side of critical thinking (e.g. informal logic) from the "values" side?
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Challenges and Strategies

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, by Thomas E. Kida

Mistake #1: We prefer stories to statistics.

Mistake #2: We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.

Mistake #3: We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events.

Mistake #4: We sometimes misperceive the world around us.

Mistake #5: We tend to oversimplify our thinking.

Mistake #6: Our memories are often inaccurate.

Not Very Comforting

A book review by David Ludden

I generally include a demonstration of visual illusions in my psychology classes. After several examples in which I induce students to see things that are not there, and to not see things that are there, I end with a discussion of how we can never trust that our senses are telling us what is actually out there in the real world.

“Well, that’s not very comforting,” blurted out one of my students not too long ago after one of these demonstrations. And she was right — much of what we have learned in cognitive psychology is discomforting. Six of these uncomfortable facts about human thinking are explored in psychologist Thomas Kida’s new book, Don’t Believe Everything You Think. Throughout the book, Kida shows how these errors permeate our thinking, leading us not only to paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs but also to more subtle cognitive errors that are dangerous to our health and wealth, both as individuals and as a society.

The first error is that we prefer stories to statistics. Kida illustrates this with an example of car shopping. Although Consumer Reports rates the car you are considering as very reliable, a colleague of yours owns that model and complains that it has been nothing but trouble. Would you still buy the car? In general, people trust unique personal experiences over “impersonal” data, even though the statistics represent the aggregated experiences of many people.

The second error is that we seek to confirm rather than question our beliefs. Furthermore, we are more likely to remember evidence that supports our beliefs rather than evidence that does not. This confirmation bias leads to stereotypes and prejudices as well as to pseudoscientific thinking. For example, if you believe in moon madness, you will notice the occasional crazy driver on a moonlit night without noticing all the other drivers (including yourself) that are driving normally.

The third error involves a general misunderstanding of the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events. Few people understand how to calculate the probabilities of events, and so people generally rely on intuitions developed from personal experience. This leads to cognitive errors such as the gambler’s fallacy, in which people believe, for example, that tails is “due” after a run of heads, and the hot-hand fallacy, in which people believe that a basketball player who makes several shots in a row will likely continue making shots. Neither belief is true, and they are logically contradictory as well, but both beliefs are commonly held.

Trusting the reliability of our senses is the fourth error Kida discusses. “I know what I saw” is a common assertion, but in fact we never know for sure that our senses are accurately reporting what is going on around us. This is because perception is a reconstruction by the brain of the external world based on limited sensory inputs, and as such is subject to error. Not only is our perception influenced by our expectations, hallucinations are far more common than people think and are not just the product of drug abuse or psychosis.

The fifth error is that we have a tendency to oversimplify our thinking. The heuristics we use to guide our thought processes help us prevent information overload and let us make decisions in a timely manner. However, these mental shortcuts can also lead us widely astray and leave us vulnerable to deception by those who wish to manipulate us.

Finally, we need to be aware that our memories are faulty. We all know that we forget things sometimes, but we generally assume that what we do remember is an accurate representation of past events. However, a vast program of memory research has shown that human memory is exceedingly unreliable. The average person views memory as a type of video recording, but in fact it is a reconstruction based on current beliefs and expectations as well as the suggestions of others. Over-reliance on memory recall has serious consequences. For instance, the criminal justice system still places inordinate weight on eyewitness testimony in spite of all the evidence showing how unreliable it is.

These six errors in thinking are part of our evolutionary makeup, and so there is little we can do to change them. However, Kida is not pessimistic. Rather, he maintains that we can overcome these weaknesses with a two-step approach. First, we need to be aware of our cognitive biases so that we can anticipate when we are likely to fall victim to them. Second, we need to take a skeptical approach in all aspects of life. The skeptical approach Kida espouses is none other than the scientific method. Thus, Kida rejects the idea that there are various ways of knowing, depending on the field of inquiry. Although our beliefs may comfort us, Kida maintains that “we must learn to accept how much we don’t know” (p. 237). It is only through the skeptical evaluation of evidence that individuals as well as societies can make informed decisions.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think provides an excellent review of the literature on the psychology of belief, touching on all the standard topics of paranormal and pseudoscientific thinking. However, Kida also discusses important topics not always covered in the skeptical literature. For example, Kida’s examination of the role of the media in perpetuating pseudoscientific thinking among the general public is excellent. Furthermore, Kida’s examples of fallacious thinking in investment and finance are new to the skeptical literature and likely to challenge the assumptions of even the hardest skeptic. Kida’s demonstration of the folly of financial forecasting is thoroughly convincing, and readers of this book will be asking their stock brokers and financial analysts some hard-hitting questions.

Although it is always uncomfortable to be reminded of just how fallible we are, Kida does provide his readers with a modicum of solace by offering copious advice on how to anticipate and work around our innate cognitive biases. Don’t Believe Everything You Think is essential reading for anyone interested in the psychology of belief and pseudoscientific thinking. It also provides one of the best arguments around for the importance science literacy — the scientific method is the antidote to our fallible minds.

Not Very Comforting from [Skeptic]  

Barriers to Sound Reasoning

• Crude Emotions

• Mental short cuts

• Patterning

• Bias and Assumptions

• Mindset

• Need for explanations

• Narrow focus

• Stubborness

Guidelines for Making Sound Decisions

• Think critically

• Restate the problem

• Focus on major factors

• Collaborate

• Encouragine creativity

• Focus in and out

• Structure the analysis

• Determine what info, if available, would change the decision

• End w/100k foot review: does my choice make sense?

The Thinker's Toolkit from [Amazon.com]  

Cognitive Bias

There are many types of bias, but cognitive bias is one of the more common that individuals can make:

A cognitive bias is any of a wide range of observer effects identified in cognitive science and social psychology including very basic statistical, social attribution, and memory errors that are common to all human beings. Biases drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence. Social biases, usually called attributional biases, affect our everyday social interactions. And biases related to probability and decision making significantly affect the scientific method which is deliberately designed to minimize such bias from any one observer. An English proverb, 'Watched pot never boils', might be highlighting one of the classic examples.

List of Cognitive Biases from [Wikipedia]  

Informal Fallacies of Reasoning

  • Informal Fallacies
  • Straw Man
  • False Dilemma
  • Slippery Slope
  • Denying the Antecedent
  • Affirming the Consequent
  • Equivocation
  • Begging the Question
  • Appeal to Force
  • Appeal to Pity
  • Ad Hominem
  • Tu Quoque or "You Too"
  • Appeals to Authority

Informal Fallicies from [Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum Project]  

The Socratic Method

One might use the Socratic method to evaluate an argument, asking open questions, such as the following:

• What do you mean by_______________?

• How did you come to that conclusion?

• Why do you believe that you are right?

• What is the source of your information?

• What assumption has led you to that conclusion?

• What happens if you are wrong?

• Can you give me two sources who disagree with you and explain why?

• Why is this significant?

• How do I know you are telling me the truth?

• How do you know you are telling me the truth?

• What is an alternate explanation for this phenomenon?

Critical Thinking from [Wikipedia]  

  • Discussion Questions
1. List common mistakes made in thinking as well as examples of each.
2. Do you think humans are highly prone to reasoning errors? Why or why not?
3. Why are people biased? Does bias ever serve a useful purpose? What kinds of bias mistakes do people typically make and what are their consequences?
4. What are examples of common strategies you can use in critical thinking? When should these be deployed?
5. Is it necessary to consider feelings when doing critical thinking? Why might it be important to practice empathy and understand underlying values (yours as well as the other side’s)?
6. How important is use of creative thinking during critical thinking?
7. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Blink , argues that snap decisions made on minimal info can be more accurate than decisions that take longer w/more info.
Do you agree? If not, what’s potentially could go awry with intuitive/instinctual/impulsive decision making?
8. Is "seeing" really "believing?"
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Epistemological Foundations and Implications

Logical Positivism

Logical positivism is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world we live in—with a version of rationalism—the idea that our knowledge includes a component that is not derived from observation.

A central tenet of logical positivism is the principle of verification, where a sentence is meaningful only if it can be verified by its method. This is in contrast to metaphysical, theological, and ethical sentences which are considered "cognitively meaningless,"[1] and serve merely to express the feelings or desires of a speaker, which cannot be verified. Only mathematical, logical and scientific statements are literally meaningful, or have truth values.

Basic tenets

Although the logical positivists held a wide range of beliefs on many matters, they were all interested in science and skeptical of theology and metaphysics. Early on, most logical positivists believed that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" grounded in observable facts. Many logical positivists supported forms of materialism, philosophical naturalism, and empiricism.

Logical positivism is perhaps best known for the verifiability criterion of meaning, which asserts that a statement is meaningful if and only if it is either analytically or empirically verifiable. One intended consequence of the verification criterion is that all non-empirical forms of discourse, including ethics and aesthetics, are not "literally" or "cognitively" meaningful, and thus belong to "metaphysics".

Logical Positivism from [Wikipedia]  

Critical Thinking and Its Relation to Science and Humanism

Bigotry and pseudoscience are the result of not practicing critical thinking! Humanism is one of the few philosophies of life that encourages--in fact, demands--critical thinking and the scientific method in the human quest for truth. Bigotry and pseudoscience could be avoided if humans would learn and practice critical thinking.

Critical Thinking and Its Relation to Science and Humanism from [Free Inquiry.com]  

Humanism and Beyond the Truth

By Micheal Werner

Provides some answers to the question of what is there beyond truth–making of value for humanists. It sees truth-making as only one, possibly overemphasized, tool in the service of the good life. It explores such aspects as motivation, emotional intelligence, intuition, inspiration, consciousness raising, art, imagery, story telling, supportive thinking, compassion, and metaphor as tools in our larger and multiple humanist goals.

Humanism and Beyond the Truth from [Humanism Today]  

  • Discussion Questions
1. What did Carl Jung mean by the following statement?
The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperized. Carl Gustav Jung, as quoted in George Seldes, The Great Thoughts (New York: Ballantine, 1985)
Do you agree with Jung? Does he contradict himself by what he says?
2. What do you think of this quote from George Bernard Shaw: “It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society, it is belief.”? Are beliefs in and of themselves dangerous? What is the role of critical thinking in forming and deforming beliefs?
3. What is skepticism? Is it useful in evaluating all conclusions? Who does (or should) practice skepticism commonly in our society?
4. Do we need to think like scientists in order to be critical thinkers? Do scientists ever err in critical thinking? What should we do, if anything, if and when that happens?
5. Sir Francis Bacon said, “We prefer to believe what we prefer to believe.” Is it always important or even ethical to differentiate emotion from reason when making decisions? If not, why not? What does this mean for the practice of critical thinking?
6. Does using critical thinking mean we are always right? Is it possible for two opposing viewpoints to use critical thinking or is one side usually “better” at it than the other and therefore is more “right”?
7. How does critical thinking help us uncover the “truth?” Do we always need reason and evidence to find “truth?”
8. What are the consequences to society for individuals failing to use critical thinking? What are the consequences to society for groups failing to use critical thinking? What are the consequences if a society consistently practiced critical thinking (and is that even possible)?
9. Are there any areas that are or should be off limits to the use of critical thinking? What do you think about that?
10. What is the role of critical thinking in terms of dealing with pseudoscience (examples considered by many rationalists--belief in UFOs as alien spacecraft, parapsychology, Yeti, astrology, spiritualism, etc.)?
11. What is the role of critical thinking in terms of dealing with the supernatural? What is your definition of the supernatural? Why do superstition and belief in the supernatural still exist? Is it necessary that these beliefs continue? If so, how can they co-exist in people who also practice critical thinking?
12. Do you believe with Carl Sagan that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof or evidence?" Why or why not?
13. Do you think that humanism is the only belief system that truly espouses critical thinking, or can critical thinking be fully embraced by other ways of knowing, including faith-based knowledge systems?
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More Discussion Questions

1. Is there a time when you personally should use critical thinking and times when you should not? Why or why not? And if you choose not to use critical thinking, should you be open about your reasons?
2. If you believe you have effectively used critical thinking about a controversial subject, should you attempt to persuade others of your conclusions?
3. What is the most important thing you have learned during this discussion about critical thinking?
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Exercises

Do one or both of the following exercises (as time allows). Be sure to cover the basic strategies for critical thinking before conducting any of these exercises.


Exercise 1: Statement of Belief (30-45 min)

1. Individually pick a position (political, philosophical, religious, economic, etc.) in which you hold strong beliefs.

2. Describe it on a small piece of paper in a few bullet points or sentences: what do you actually believe, and why do you believe it? Take no more than 5 minutes to do this.

3. Put the piece of paper in the middle of the table and shuffle with the statements from other members.

4. Each person randomly draws from the shuffled pile (if you get yours, redraw).

5. For the position you’ve just picked, read the description and then using the critical thinking strategies you’ve discussed, individually write 3-5 reasons why it might not be true (even if you agree with the position--this may require your Devil’s Advocate hat).

6. When everyone is finished, discuss these reasons with the rest of the group: Do they agree with your line of thinking? Why or why not?

7. Did the exercise help everyone form better arguments and be better critical thinkers?

Exercise 2: For the Brave (30-60 min)

1. As a group, pick a topic from a recent philosophy meeting, or a timely debate from the headlines.

2. Divide into 2 groups: a. discussion group, and b. observing group.

3. The first group debates the topic for 15-20 minutes.

4. The second group only observes the discussion, noting proper uses of critical thinking as well as errors, including the following:

a. Biases
b. Logical fallacies
c. Lack of evidence for arguments
d. Self-deception
e. Wishful thinking
f. Groupthink
g. Oversimplification
h. Inadequate information
i. Unchecked assumptions
j. Jumping to conclusions
k. Other reasoning errors
l. Lack of empathy
m. Misunderstanding of values
n. Failing to forsee possible consequences

5. Debrief the discussion with both groups:

• What critical thinking strategies were effectively used?
• When did errors in critical thinking occur? Did you see any patterns here?
• Did the discussers agree with the observers’ assessments? Why or why not?
• Did the discussion group feel inhibited by the observation?
• Did the observers see areas where they, too, might have made mistakes in critical thinking?
• Did the exercise help everyone form better arguments and be better critical thinkers?
• If time allows, turn the tables so the second group becomes the discussion group with the first observing!
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Other Resources

General

Thinking Strategies

Business

Magazines and Media

Books

Media Literacy

Misc

Examples of Critical Thinking

Please feel free to add to this list--examples should showcase the power of critical thinking regardless of their views.

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