I can understand if the following request seems, perhaps, a little misplaced on this website but I think it could help a lot of people. If you deem it appropriate, I wish to request some basic guidelines within the realm of critical thinking for students writing essays. You could talk about things like basic logical fallacies (straw man, false dilemma, ad hominem, red herrings, etc) and standardization of arguments.
I noticed that many of the moderators post threads that are not really inspired by any particular request but are made to give general writing tips about different subjects such as grammar, flow, and thesis development. Why not do something like that for critical thinking? An experienced professor can usually see logical mistakes in an essay and may lower its grade if he/she feels it is important enough. This thread could potentially help students to form more well thought out and defensible arguments in their papers (especially the ones that are supposed to be persuasive!)
Gautama, What an excellent suggestion! Actually, two excellent suggestions: critical thinking and logical fallacies are each important topics on their own. Let's handle critical thinking in this thread and then you, I, or someone else can start a separate thread on logical fallacies.
Before going into technical details, let me say first that mindset is the most important aspect of critical thinking. The key is to be skeptically open-minded. In order to think critically, one must first be open to new ideas and to the possibility that one's own preconceptions may be in error or askew, whether this be due to prejudice or to faulty or incomplete knowledge. At the same time, one cannot uncritically accept everything one hears or reads.
Assuming that one is open to new knowledge or ideas, how should these be processed? Well, first it is necessary to ensure that one has correctly understood the new information or perspective. That means reading and listening actively.
In active listening, one deliberately sets aside distractions and preconceptions in order to attend closely to what is being said. While listening, take notes by jotting down key points rather than by trying to reproduce what has been said word for word. Reflect your understanding of what has been said back to the speaker, asking "Is that right?" so that you can be sure you heard correctly. Do this especially with things that are surprising to you or with which you may disagree. (Don't voice your feelings of disagreement until you are sure you have understood correctly, as this can lead to useless conflict based on misunderstanding.)
Also while listening, make connections and frame questions in your head, jotting these down along with your notes. By "make connections," I mean think actively about how what you are learning relates to other things you know or have heard about. By "frame questions," I mean not only wonder about what you don't understand but also ask questions like, "How reliable is the speaker?" and "Does this make sense?" and "What are the implications of this information?"
It is in the process of making connections and framing questions that one begins to think critically. By comparing what you are hearing to what you already know or believe to be true, you are essentially asking whether what you are learning is consistent with other known facts and, if not, wondering how to reconcile the old information/perspective with the new -- that's thinking critically! And, of course, assessing the credibility of your source and the internal logic of what you are hearing are also elements of critical thinking.
The same process holds true for reading, although there it is not possible to directly ask in order to make sure you have understood. You may, however, wish to use the wonderful resource that is the internet to see what other people have thought or written about what you've just read and, in so doing, check that your conception of what the work says is consistent with that of other readers.
All of the other steps hold true for reading as well as listening: Make connections. Consider the credibility of the source. Ask how what you are reading fits -- or doesn't fit -- with what you know or believe to be true. Think about the implications of this fact, idea, or viewpoint. Take notes in your own words rather than by quoting, because doing the work of putting the information/ideas into your own words will force you to think clearly and will lead you to discover any gaps in your understanding. (Of course, to avoid later plagiarism, you still need to note the citation information so that you can give proper credit when when writing anything based on the ideas you got from the text.) Copy down direct quotes only when the writer has expressed something in a very original manner or in especially clever words. (In that case, be sure to put quotation marks around the quote so that, again, you do not accidentally commit plagiarism later.)
Doing these things when reading and listening will improve your writing in two ways. First, critical thinking while researching will give you more and better things to say when it's time to start writing. Then, when you do write, you can apply the same skepticism to your own prose, asking yourself whether you really are making sense, whether you have cited credible sources for assertions of fact, and the like.
Those are just some of the suggestions I usually give to speech and composition students. I'd be interested to hear other thoughts on the subject. And, I am certainly open to a new thread on logical fallacies, which are among my favorite topics to teach.
This is an excellent thread. Developing critical thinking skills is the main goal of a liberal arts education. In addition to Simone's advice, I'd say one of the most important critical thinking skills is the ability to identify and to question people's premises. If you don't do this, you can find yourself mired in a debate that seems bogged down in misunderstanding, without really knowing why.
For instance, consider the debate over gay marriage. The debate generally breaks down into three camps -- those that oppose any form of same-sex unions, those that don't mind same-sex civil unions but oppose same-sex marriage, and those who support same-sex marriage. The distinction between the last two camps hinges entirely on a matter of semantics. Thus, in the "civil union" camp, you hear statements such as
"gay people should have the same legal rights as everyone else, but marriage should be only between a man and a woman"
whereas, in the "marriage" camp, you hear statements such as
"only when gay people can marry will they be fully equal before the law"
If you stop and think about these statements, you begin to realize that the disagreement seems very odd. Both sides are saying that they agree that gay people should be equal before the law. But, the one side believes that civil-unions can do this, while the other believes only marriage can. The difference lies in a premise. Namely, to the civil union side, marriage is primarily a religious sacrament, one that the government happens to reward in certain ways. To the marriage side, marriage is primarily a secular social structure that is sometimes celebrated with in a framework of religious faith.
Thus, to the civil union side, permitting gay marriage means potentially forcing religious institutions to administer sacraments to those God has decreed should not get them. They don't object to civil unions that offer same-sex couples the same legal benefits of marriage, though, as that poses no threat to their religious convictions. Whereas, to the marriage side, marriage is a secular term that happens to have roots in religion, but that is certainly not exclusively religious. To call marriages civil unions for same-sex couples therefore only highlights an unnecessary difference likely to perpetuate subtle, or even not-so-subtle, forms of homophobia.
To enter into the above debate without realizing that both sides are using the word "marriage" differently can only lead to frustration and misunderstanding. Unfortunately, though, premises are often not stated. So, in the above example, both sides often just assume a single definition of "marriage" shared by all.
So, to think critically, it helps to tease out the premises behind people's arguments, which often includes figuring out how they are using words that might mean something different to them than they do to you.
This is already a long post, so I'll end it for now, but later I'll add a post about critically interpreting statistics, which come just after "damn lies" in the pantheon of deception.
I think one important thing to keep in mind is the difference between arguing from logic and arguing from emotion. This may seem obvious but many people use certain arguments (especially during debates about morality) that they believe logically make sense but are, in actuality, just humanity's collective emotional response to something. For instance, I feel that most debates over abortion are differences in emotional thought rather than logical thought.
Where do you personally draw the line where a human life begins? (can you make a logical argument for that?)
Why should we consider human life to be sacred no matter the cost? (what logical arguments can you form for that?)
Why is it immoral to kill a fetus? Who suffers from this? (you may find examples of people who suffer from abortion but can you really prove logically that killing a fetus is immoral?)
This means that such debates and arguments are in some ways pointless from a logical standpoint and are almost impossible to counter. However, we base a lot of our laws on emotional arguments that cannot be logically proven. Many people try to argue these points but in the end you cannot use logic to argue emotional ideas.
In the case of abortion, the arguments hinge over a difference in premise, namely whether or not human life has inherent value. If you believe that it does, then that value has to be there from the very beginning, i.e. from conception, as it would be logically incongruous to argue that the "inherent" value somehow gets added at some other arbitrarily chosen point in human development. Once you believe that human life has inherent value, then, you are forced to believe also that the fetus is a human life with the same value as any fully developed human adult. Destroying that fetus then becomes murder, by just about any definition of the term, and is certainly immoral. If you do not believe that human life has inherent value, though, then there is no reason why you cannot place arbitrary limits on when a human being is granted rights, including the right to life.
The great irony is that most abortion rights advocates hold positions on other issues in which they will readily invoke the idea that human life is inherently valuable, whereas most pro-life supporters hold views on other issues that seem to indicate that they believe life is not inherently valuable. I've always found this fairly amusing, as it indicates to me that most of these people, on both sides of the debate, haven't really thought through their beliefs. The important thing to realize, though, is that the abortion debate is really a debate over premises, which is why it never gets resolved. The two sides build up two very different logical cases starting from two very different premises, and so end up talking past each other rather than to each other.
You are right, though in your suspicion that many of these premises boil down to matters of personal preference. In this case, though, I would say that the idea of "inherent value" is logically flawed -- something is only ever valuable to someone for some reason. This puts me firmly in the pro-choice camp, where, ironically enough, most of the people on my side of the debate would fiercely disagree with my premise, which is the only one that can support a logically coherent pro-choice stance. In many other cases, though, the stances we take are rooted in what sort of world we want to live in, and once you get down to matters of wanting and desire, you are looking at matters of personal preference, rather than logic, and can only hope to agree to disagree.
The judges in Roe v. Wade did use critical thinking, and the continuing controversy does, I think, show the limits of logic in questions like this. That decision hinged on the question: When does the developing embryo become a person with rights of his or her own? They answered this by determining that so long as the embryo/fetus could not exist apart from the mother, it was still part of her body rather than a separate being vested with rights. Women get to decide what to do with their own bodies. Hence, abortions in the first trimester are entirely at the discretion of the mother. After the first trimester, when the embryo/fetus could (with assistance) live outside of the womb, a balancing of rights must be made, and thus abortions are permitted when carrying the child to term would threaten the physical or mental health of the mother but not otherwise. What's interesting to me is that very few people on either side of the question discuss this aspect of that decision.
Aye, they came down squarely on the side of human life not having inherent value. Their choice of the ability of the fetus to survive separately outside of the mother was an interesting arbitrary point for the justices to choose as the moment at which the fetus should be vested with rights. I assume few people discuss this aspect of the discussion because it is irrelevant to them -- if you believe that life is inherently valuable, then you believe that the judges were wrong, so it doesn't much matter what point after conception they picked. If you believe that life is not inherently valuable, then the judges were free to pick whichever arbitrary point they wanted. A point that is late enough in the pregnancy to allow a woman plenty of time to decide to get an abortion, but early enough that the prenatal images of the fetus aren't likely to make the idea of its destruction provoke a visceral reaction of disgust even in those who aren't particularly religious, seems like as good a one as any.
The women being free to decide what to do with their own bodies argument has always seemed to me to be something of a red herring. Society is based on liberty, not freedom, and liberty is freedom with responsibility. There are only so many ways a woman can get pregnant, and, outside of cases of rape, she is at liberty to avoid all of them. As to whether or not, having created a human life, she should then be free to dispose of it, that depends mostly on whether or not you believe that life to have an inherent value that would give the fetus the most fundamental of human rights -- the right to life. If you believe that it does, then it becomes very difficult to argue that a woman, having freely engaged in an act that created human life, has no responsibility to preserve it, merely because it cannot survive outside her body. This is much the same argument one would make against a woman who gave birth to a child, then let it starve because it could not feed itself and she found the expense of feeding it herself too inconvenient. Having freely accepted the responsibilities of motherhood, she has a responsibility to the infant, one that no one would think of denying.
And this once again demonstrates the importance of premises. If you begin with the premise that life has no inherent value, then the fetus is not fully human until some point determined by society (and indeed, even infants already born could in theory be properly slain, as was practiced in many ancient cultures). At that point, it makes a certain amount of sense to talk about abortion in terms of women's rights, and about women having control of their own bodies, because really, then there is no reason to see the fetus as anything other than a part of the woman's body until it is born (or some earlier point picked at random by society). If you believe life does have inherent value, then the language of choice and freedom is a perversion of the very concept of liberty. And so no meaningful dialogue between the two sides is possible. Maybe, just maybe, a dialogue could be opened about the premise itself, but any discussion about the matter at a higher level must inevitably break down into slogans and hardened ideological positions as the two camps keep talking in terms the other can never accept or understand.
By the way, I never meant to imply that the judges in Roe vs. Wade had not engaged in critical thinking. I was merely pointing out that the opinions of many people on both sides of the debate often don't line up. Think of how many pro-lifers have no problem with the death penalty, for instance, or how many pro-choicers embrace environmentalism on the grounds that nature is inherently valuable (though of course there are other, much better arguments, for many environmental positions).
Also, note that this is an excellent way to develop your critical thinking skills -- learn to be able to argue the stances you disagree with on an issue as well as you can argue those you agree with. Although I take a pro-choice position personally, as you can tell from the rest of this post, I could readily argue the pro-life case with some effectiveness.
Sean, I don't see how the inherent value of life in any way undercuts the judges' reasoning in that case. People are allowed to have surgeries in which they remove living tissue from themselves. The question is: At what point does this particular form of living tissue become a separate being vested with rights separate from those of the being in whose body it is lodged? In some ways, this case shows the limits of Aristotelean logic, with its clear-cut distinctions that are not always consistent with biological reality. (Paradoxes are disallowed by logic but occur in nature all the time.) During pregnancy, the woman-child entity is both one person and two people at the same time. People on both sides of the question have a very difficult time thinking from within that biological reality, tending instead to act as though it's clearly only one person or clearly two people. In Roe v. Wade, the judges tried to parse the problem via science, using the standard of viability outside of the womb as the point at which one person becomes two. It's probably the best we can do, working from within a manner of thinking that is in some ways inimical to thinking complexly about biology and ecology, but it obviously doesn't convince everybody.
Okay, to get my point about why the inherentness of life matters here, imagine a person's life as a line. The starting point of that life is conception. The end point is whenever the person dies. If that life has inherent value, value that is present by its very nature, then it must be present all along the line, from the very first point to the very last point. Otherwise, whatever value the life has is not inherent, its given to it by society. You can argue that the ability to survive outside the womb is a good point at which we should, as a society, invest it with that value. I don't disagree with you on that. But you can't do that if you believe that life has inherent value.
I think you have it backwards about paradoxes. Paradoxes can seem to exist as a matter of logic, but don't exist at all in nature. They merely seem to. By definition, a paradox cannot really exist, and always involves an error of logic or understanding. So, Xeno's paradoxes seem to make logical sense, but in fact involve a misunderstanding of mathematics. They are solved through calculus, as I recall. Avoiding self-contradiction is the key to critical thinking, and taking refuge in paradox is taking refuge in self-contradiction, in the refusal to think critically. The women-child entity cannot be both one person and two at the same time. Either a pregnant woman is one person or two. If she is two, then she can and (given the second person's reliance on her for survival) presumably does have ethical and potentially legal responsibilities to it. If she is one, then she may mutilate herself if she wishes. To understand that the notion of separateness is completely arbitrary, consider that, from the very beginning, an embryo (not even a fetus) is capable of surviving outside the mother's womb. It is not capable of surviving outside of a womb, but embryos can certainly be implanted in new wombs (much as infants cannot survive without a caregiver, though they can survive well enough without any particular caregiver). So the chosen point in the judges' decision has nothing to do with the fetus being able to survive without the mother, only to do with the fetus being able to survive without a mother, in a very narrow sense of what it means to be a mother. Taking a very broad definition of mother, even a two year old couldn't do this, so you begin to see how arbitrary the distinction is.
Out of curiosity, do you believe then that life has inherent value, and if so, how do you justify the concept of inherent value logically (not as regards human life or abortion per se, but in and of itself)?
Well, I certainly do appreciate all of your thoughts about abortion. However, this thread was created as a Critical Thinking thread so I would like it to stay a little more on topic with general critical thinking strategies.
Obviously the abortion debate should be thought of critically and is a valid example for the thread subject but this thread is just turning into an "abortion thread." I would love to debate abortion with you all but I would ask that we do it somewhere else.
We have not been debating abortion. EF_Simone and I are both firmly on the same side of the abortion debate, in that we are both pro-choice. But a change of topic would not be amiss. Perhaps we can review the general critical thinking strategies that have come up throughout the debate.
1. Be aware of the premises behind what you hear and read. This was the original reason that abortion came up on this thread, as an example of their importance, and I think the debate has served its purpose in emphasing that point.
2. Practice debating both sides of the issue. I can see why you might have mistaken our discussion of abortion for a debate of the issue. In demonstrating the importance of a premise, I ended up showing how a case against abortion might be built up from a particular premise, even if it was one I did not agree with. Being able to do that is important. You haven't really critically analyzed the arguments against your point of view if you can't present them as strongly as if they were your own.
3. Avoid self-contradiction. This point came up in my last post, and the more I think about it the more important it seems me. In a way, critical thinking itself is nothing more than a quest to avoid self-contradiction. And I don't just mean that in the sense of managing to get out an argument for a topic such as abortion without saying two things that clearly can't be reconciled with each other. I mean rather that one should strive to ensure that all of ones' beliefs and values mesh with one another, across a range of issues, that any contradictory beliefs, conclusions, premises, or principles must be tracked down, examined, and either reconciled or abandoned.
Sean, I don't think I said what my position is, but you are right in assuming that I support reproductive autonomy for everybody. My personal feeling is close to that of Barack Obama, who uses what's called Rogerian reasoning when talking about this issue. (See! Back to critical thinking!) In Rogerian reasoning, one seeks to resolve a dispute, insofar as possible, by finding common ground. In addition to being a good kind of problem-solving, this allows one, as he does, to state one's own position after one has established some common ground with the opposition. It is thus especially effective in persuasive speech or writing.
How Obama uses Rogerian reasoning concerning abortion is by identifying the reduction of unwanted pregnancies as a goal that both sides can agree is essential. There's so much we could do to reduce unwanted pregnancies -- and, thereby, reduce abortions -- that we could be doing if we weren't spending so much time and money fighting for or against a woman's right to choose abortion. By stating his own antipathy for abortion, even as he respects a woman's right to make that choice, and by showing that he understands that once a woman is pregnant when she didn't want to be, the tragedy has already happened -- she's traumatized no matter what happens next -- Obama gains the ability to be listened to seriously by all except the most extreme on both sides. Hence, Rogerian reasoning is both a practical form of problem-solving and a useful rhetorical device.
Continuing on the subject of critical thinking, most composition textbooks will identify processes such as division and classification, comparison and contrast, and breaking down a process into its component parts as important cognitive abilities associated with good writing. Those who -- as I do -- work from within the perspective of ecocomposition believe that synthetic thinking -- the ability to put things together -- is just as important as critical thinking -- the ability to break things into their component parts. Ecocompositionists stress ecological thinking -- the ability to see the relationships among the components in complex systems -- as a vital cognitive ability whether one is writing about ecosystems or social/economic/psychological processess.
I wouldn't have drawn such a clear distinction between synthetic and critical thinking. The most basic essay format in university used to be "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" after all, so I would tend to see breaking down and synthesizing as two different parts of the same process. Mostly, its a matter of creating a cohesive conceptual framework in which all the unit parts work together in harmony. You have to be able to break down your arguments into their component parts to be able to perform the comparison, but you also have to be able to combine parts from different issues to formulate new ideas on new issues. Put another way, you have to break down the thesis and the antithesis into their component parts before you can recombine them in a way that permits synthesis. Still, this is purely a matter of semantics -- we agree on the general point (that strong thinkers can both break concepts down and build them up), and I don't think we shall ever be at such a loss to find matters where we genuinely disagree that we need to invent causes of dispute :-)
Rogerian argumentation is certainly useful -- there is never anything wrong with trying to find common ground. Often though, that common ground is a rhetorical illusion. In this case, for instance, Obama has completely ignored the basic principles upon which his opponents have based their arguments, which of course lead to just as much disagreement over the issue of what can be done to "reduce unwanted pregnancy" as there is over abortion itself. Not to mention that, from a religious perspective, the very notion of "an unwanted pregnancy" tends to be problematic. Obama's approach does make him seem more reasonable to his own supporters, though, as well as to the majority of people who probably don't really care about the abortion issue that much one way or another. This makes it good politics, I suppose.
I would say the Rogerian approach comes in more useful when discussing issues that are not fundamentally a matter of principle, or where a solution can be cast as fitting two apparently opposed principles. For instance, on one thread here a student was writing on whether or not the government should fund students who want to go to college. I suggested he add an paragraph that pointed out that, as educated people tend to earn far more than uneducated people, over time the government would likely make back the money it spent on tuition in the form of increased tax revenue. Even the staunchest libertarian would have a hard time arguing against a government program that paid for itself. If one further pointed out the savings that could be expected from having a lower crime rate (and lowering the crime rate is one of the few legitimate functions of government from a libertarian viewpoint), then you have a case for the thesis that would appeal even to a group of people who would normally reflexively oppose it on principle. In this case, finding common ground can lead to a compromise position that will make most people on both sides happy.