Education

Critical thinking: We are bombarded with information all the time so I think it's very important to use "critical thinking" but it's not easy. So my question is: what are the basics in critical thinking?

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This is difficult to answer briefly. And there are certainly books and courses that will give you a comprehensive and useful answer. As a start, though, critical thinking involves scrutinizing and evaluating the reasons given (in a newspaper, on TV, in conversation, etc.) for believing some claim or piece of information. Broadly speaking, these reasons come in two flavors. First, certain claims are said to follow from others "logically": the given claim has to be true given the other claims that have already been accepted. (The butler did it because all the other suspects have now been ruled out.) Second, the claim is true because it is grounded somehow, often statistically, in empirical data like observations. (Polls suggest that the president's popularity went down because of the response to Hurrican Katrina.) In practice, these two types of reason--deductive and non-deductive--are often mixed together and difficult entirely to separate. It's useful, though, to separate them in the study of critical thinking: not only have philosophers, mathematicians and many others discovered systematic features of these types of reasoning, but it is possible to isolate particular ways"fallacies"--in which things can go awry in both departments.

I think it is also useful to think about the separate skills that are necessary for applying the concepts and techniques that Joseph described to complex real-life situations.

Alas, we often have the most need for critical thinking when confronting the situations where this is the hardest to do: situations that are really complex, that matter a lot to our lives, which involve complex emotional dynamics or serious interpersonal conflict, and so on.

So, to best use critical thinking in our own lives we need to be able to handle "messy" situations like those. For example, it is useful to understand your own and others' agendas and motivations, the emotional dynamics of a situation, how to act in ways that have the best chance of making a difficult discussion more rational and more constructive.

When I teach critical thinking, I prefer to teach the reasoning skills that Joseph describes together with serious reflection on the "messy real life" issues that I sketch out above. The best critical thinking text I've seen that does this is Douglas Walton's Informal Logic, which adopts an interesting dialogical approach (Amazon.Com link is here). Walton’s text is difficult for my students at first, but most come to love it and over the years many have told me that they have purchased copies for spouses, children, or parents.

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