Post by PapaSmurerf on Jan 15, 2008 2:27:40 GMT -5
Excerpt from Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
Benefits
Is critical thinking worth the costs? Consider for a moment how costly uncritical thinking can be. Stephen Jay Gould (1997, x, xii) calls attention to two precious human potentials that together constitute "the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known":
"Only two possible escapes can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark potentialities-the side of human nature that has given us crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly enough. The second foundation must come from the rational side of our mentality. For, unless we rigorously use human reason . . . we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising "true" belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action . . . Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism-and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency."
According to this striking claim, critical thinking is one of the most important resources a society could develop. This is because bad things do not emanate only from bad people. Bad things can also occur because of the mistaken thinking of decent people. Even when a bad idea originates with a psychopath, the real danger occurs when it is accepted by the gullible and condoned by the sincere who have little more than a child's understanding of what intellectual due process entails.
It is likely that an important link exists between critical thinking, broadly defined, and democracy itself. The American jurist Learned Hand (1952, 190) described this connection as follows:
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it . . . . The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias."
So by cultivating genuine critical thinking, we strengthen the crucial underpinnings of democracy (Kuhn 2003). People who are careful about the truth are less likely to be fooled by the ideologies that justify illiberal practices or promise simple solutions. Moreover, such people are more likely to recognize the value of intellectual and ideological diversity-they understand that the truth comes in pieces and is unlikely to be found all in one place. They are the best counterweight to true believers of all stripes. Ultimately, intellectual due process is no less integral to democracy than is due process of law.
Within a democracy, the social world remains a deceptive place-for the sophisticated and the innocent alike. The tendency of leaders and large numbers of citizens to underestimate this fact is a source of enormous human misery.
Here is an example. In his book a few years ago and in the 2003 Oscar-winning documentary by Errol Morris, The Fog of War, former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara (1995) identifies the mistakes made by him and others that led to calamity in Vietnam. His account describes confident, mostly decent men who did what they thought was best, but who fell prey to a chilling list of errors that could serve as chapters in a textbook on critical thinking: dualistic thinking, wishful thinking, absence of intellectual humility, underestimating complexity, groupthink, childlike credulity, rigid adherence to orthodoxy. These were intelligent, educated men whose logical reasoning skills were far above average. Yet McNamara finds it "incredible" that "[w]e failed to analyze our assumptions critically."
Perhaps the architects of the Vietnam war went wrong because they indulged in what Thomas Sowell (2002) calls "shibboleths" as substitutes for critical thinking. A shibboleth is a belief that serves the purpose of identifying the believer as one of the good guys, prominently planted on the side of the angels. Shibboleths "transform questions about facts, causation, and evidence into questions about personal identity and moral worth":
"Mere facts cannot compete with shibboleths when it comes to making people feel good. Moreover, shibboleths keep off the agenda the painful question of how dangerous it is to have policies which impact millions of human beings without a thorough knowledge of the hard facts needed to understand just what that impact has actually been. . . . Shibboleths are dangerous, not only because they mobilize political support for policies that most of the supporters have not thought through, but also because these badges of identity make it harder to reverse those policies when they turn out to be disastrous."
Like many other forms of uncritical thinking, shibboleths derive their power from the fact that humans are designed to be social animals more than truth-seeking ones. For all the societal benefits of critical thinking, at the individual level, uncritical thinking offers social and psychological rewards of its own.
Promoting Critical Thinking
If the societal benefits of multidimensional critical thinking are great, so is the task of raising the level of such thinking in our society. On whose shoulders does this responsibility fall?
Thomas Gilovich (1991, 193-194) has argued that social scientists, by virtue of their "way of looking at the world, the habits of mind that they promote," are in the best position to educate others about the importance of "question[ing] our assumptions and challeng[ing] what we think we know."
This is not encouraging, since social scientists appear to be as prone to orthodoxies, wishful thinking, ad hominems, and shibboleths as anyone else (Horowitz 1996; Berger 2002; Goldberg 2003). As our glimpse inside the sociology texts suggested, there are problems with trying to teach genuine critical thinking in disciplines that are several parts social for each part science.
Are the hard sciences doing much better? In the first place, science education is not producing high levels of scientific literacy in the population (National Science Foundation 2004). Besides, there appears to be only a weak relationship between science knowledge and disbelief in various forms of nonsense (Walker and Hoekstra 2002; Johnson and Pigliucci 2004).
As many have noted, we teach science as a collection of facts and theories about a certain category of phenomena, rather than as a set of principles for understanding the world. A course in "Science, Pseudoscience, and Anti-science" would stimulate broader critical thought than the typical Chemistry 101 class. But the problem is deeper than this. Full-blown critical thinking is not coterminous with good scientific thinking. Critical thought is the principles of scientific thought projected to the far reaches of everyday life, with all the attendant demands and complications. This expansive generalization of the scientific method is hardly spontaneous or self-evident for most people. Just as learning the truth about Santa does not shatter the typical child's credulous worldview, learning the principles of science can easily fail to fully penetrate the larger vision of science students-and indeed, of scientists. By themselves, science classrooms are poor competition for the powerful obstacles to highly developed critical thinking that reside in human social life and in the wiring of the human brain.
Multidimensional critical thinking is not simply a byproduct of something else. It must be taught. Well, then, what about the "critical-thinking" trend that has permeated American education across the curriculum at all levels? Are these efforts succeeding in materially strengthening the quality of critical thinking in society at large? Again, the various indicators of uncritical thought in our society suggest not. It is doubtful that what students learn from those classrooms and texts does much to alter their worldviews and values regarding the truth. A primary cause of this shortfall is the antiseptic nature of the "critical thinking" typically taught to students. Either most teachers and authors do not possess a highly multidimensional conception of critical thinking themselves, or they are reluctant (perhaps with good reason) to approach the perilous territory-way past logical fallacies and weeping Madonna statues-to which full-fledged critical thinking inevitably leads. The result is the commonplace teaching of quasi-critical thinking.
It is naive to expect social-science education, natural-science education, or education in general-at least in their present forms-to elevate critical thinking to something more than a pedagogical fashion that everyone applauds but few conceptualize very deeply. This leaves the skeptical community. We identify ourselves as champions of science and reason. But this is a broad mandate. We should avoid concentrating our skepticism too narrowly on the realms of superstition, pseudoscience, and the supernatural-for the ultimate challenge to a critical thinker is posed not by weird things but by insidiously mundane ones. If we hope to realize the promise of critical thought, it is important that skeptics affirm a multidimensional definition of critical thinking -- reasoning skills, skeptical worldview, values of a principled juror -- that exempts no aspect of social life.
Full article Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
Benefits
Is critical thinking worth the costs? Consider for a moment how costly uncritical thinking can be. Stephen Jay Gould (1997, x, xii) calls attention to two precious human potentials that together constitute "the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known":
"Only two possible escapes can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark potentialities-the side of human nature that has given us crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly enough. The second foundation must come from the rational side of our mentality. For, unless we rigorously use human reason . . . we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising "true" belief, and the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action . . . Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism-and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency."
According to this striking claim, critical thinking is one of the most important resources a society could develop. This is because bad things do not emanate only from bad people. Bad things can also occur because of the mistaken thinking of decent people. Even when a bad idea originates with a psychopath, the real danger occurs when it is accepted by the gullible and condoned by the sincere who have little more than a child's understanding of what intellectual due process entails.
It is likely that an important link exists between critical thinking, broadly defined, and democracy itself. The American jurist Learned Hand (1952, 190) described this connection as follows:
"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it . . . . The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias."
So by cultivating genuine critical thinking, we strengthen the crucial underpinnings of democracy (Kuhn 2003). People who are careful about the truth are less likely to be fooled by the ideologies that justify illiberal practices or promise simple solutions. Moreover, such people are more likely to recognize the value of intellectual and ideological diversity-they understand that the truth comes in pieces and is unlikely to be found all in one place. They are the best counterweight to true believers of all stripes. Ultimately, intellectual due process is no less integral to democracy than is due process of law.
Within a democracy, the social world remains a deceptive place-for the sophisticated and the innocent alike. The tendency of leaders and large numbers of citizens to underestimate this fact is a source of enormous human misery.
Here is an example. In his book a few years ago and in the 2003 Oscar-winning documentary by Errol Morris, The Fog of War, former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara (1995) identifies the mistakes made by him and others that led to calamity in Vietnam. His account describes confident, mostly decent men who did what they thought was best, but who fell prey to a chilling list of errors that could serve as chapters in a textbook on critical thinking: dualistic thinking, wishful thinking, absence of intellectual humility, underestimating complexity, groupthink, childlike credulity, rigid adherence to orthodoxy. These were intelligent, educated men whose logical reasoning skills were far above average. Yet McNamara finds it "incredible" that "[w]e failed to analyze our assumptions critically."
Perhaps the architects of the Vietnam war went wrong because they indulged in what Thomas Sowell (2002) calls "shibboleths" as substitutes for critical thinking. A shibboleth is a belief that serves the purpose of identifying the believer as one of the good guys, prominently planted on the side of the angels. Shibboleths "transform questions about facts, causation, and evidence into questions about personal identity and moral worth":
"Mere facts cannot compete with shibboleths when it comes to making people feel good. Moreover, shibboleths keep off the agenda the painful question of how dangerous it is to have policies which impact millions of human beings without a thorough knowledge of the hard facts needed to understand just what that impact has actually been. . . . Shibboleths are dangerous, not only because they mobilize political support for policies that most of the supporters have not thought through, but also because these badges of identity make it harder to reverse those policies when they turn out to be disastrous."
Like many other forms of uncritical thinking, shibboleths derive their power from the fact that humans are designed to be social animals more than truth-seeking ones. For all the societal benefits of critical thinking, at the individual level, uncritical thinking offers social and psychological rewards of its own.
Promoting Critical Thinking
If the societal benefits of multidimensional critical thinking are great, so is the task of raising the level of such thinking in our society. On whose shoulders does this responsibility fall?
Thomas Gilovich (1991, 193-194) has argued that social scientists, by virtue of their "way of looking at the world, the habits of mind that they promote," are in the best position to educate others about the importance of "question[ing] our assumptions and challeng[ing] what we think we know."
This is not encouraging, since social scientists appear to be as prone to orthodoxies, wishful thinking, ad hominems, and shibboleths as anyone else (Horowitz 1996; Berger 2002; Goldberg 2003). As our glimpse inside the sociology texts suggested, there are problems with trying to teach genuine critical thinking in disciplines that are several parts social for each part science.
Are the hard sciences doing much better? In the first place, science education is not producing high levels of scientific literacy in the population (National Science Foundation 2004). Besides, there appears to be only a weak relationship between science knowledge and disbelief in various forms of nonsense (Walker and Hoekstra 2002; Johnson and Pigliucci 2004).
As many have noted, we teach science as a collection of facts and theories about a certain category of phenomena, rather than as a set of principles for understanding the world. A course in "Science, Pseudoscience, and Anti-science" would stimulate broader critical thought than the typical Chemistry 101 class. But the problem is deeper than this. Full-blown critical thinking is not coterminous with good scientific thinking. Critical thought is the principles of scientific thought projected to the far reaches of everyday life, with all the attendant demands and complications. This expansive generalization of the scientific method is hardly spontaneous or self-evident for most people. Just as learning the truth about Santa does not shatter the typical child's credulous worldview, learning the principles of science can easily fail to fully penetrate the larger vision of science students-and indeed, of scientists. By themselves, science classrooms are poor competition for the powerful obstacles to highly developed critical thinking that reside in human social life and in the wiring of the human brain.
Multidimensional critical thinking is not simply a byproduct of something else. It must be taught. Well, then, what about the "critical-thinking" trend that has permeated American education across the curriculum at all levels? Are these efforts succeeding in materially strengthening the quality of critical thinking in society at large? Again, the various indicators of uncritical thought in our society suggest not. It is doubtful that what students learn from those classrooms and texts does much to alter their worldviews and values regarding the truth. A primary cause of this shortfall is the antiseptic nature of the "critical thinking" typically taught to students. Either most teachers and authors do not possess a highly multidimensional conception of critical thinking themselves, or they are reluctant (perhaps with good reason) to approach the perilous territory-way past logical fallacies and weeping Madonna statues-to which full-fledged critical thinking inevitably leads. The result is the commonplace teaching of quasi-critical thinking.
It is naive to expect social-science education, natural-science education, or education in general-at least in their present forms-to elevate critical thinking to something more than a pedagogical fashion that everyone applauds but few conceptualize very deeply. This leaves the skeptical community. We identify ourselves as champions of science and reason. But this is a broad mandate. We should avoid concentrating our skepticism too narrowly on the realms of superstition, pseudoscience, and the supernatural-for the ultimate challenge to a critical thinker is posed not by weird things but by insidiously mundane ones. If we hope to realize the promise of critical thought, it is important that skeptics affirm a multidimensional definition of critical thinking -- reasoning skills, skeptical worldview, values of a principled juror -- that exempts no aspect of social life.
Full article Committee for Skeptical Inquiry