Asking the Right Questions | Lesley’s Blog

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Mar 25, 2024

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What is critical thinking

Listening and reading critically—that is, reacting with systematic evaluation to what you have heard and read

1. awareness of a set of interrelated critical questions;

2. ability to ask and answer these critical questions in an appropriate manner; and

3. desire to actively use the critical questions.

Why do we need critical thinking

In our daily lives, as humans, we are faced with the task of making decisions. Naturally, we strive to make wise choices and often seek guidance from others and experts in order to do so. However, it is important to recognize that these opinions may not always be as reliable or comprehensive as we initially believe. Here's why:

The information we receive from others is frequently biased and incomplete due to the inherent biases of human nature.

While wise individuals and experts are expected to possess superior knowledge, they too are fallible beings who can be mistaken and even contradict one another. Ultimately, they are still subject to the same human errors.

Therefore, it becomes evident that the information we gather cannot always be relied upon entirely; instead, we must trust in our own judgment when making decisions

WE MUST ASSERT RATIONAL CONTROL OF OUR BELIEFS AND CONCLUSIONS. THE ALTERNATIVE IS BEING THE MENTAL SLAVE OF WHOEVER IMPRESSES OUR SYSTEM 1 BRAIN.

How can critical thinking help us tackle the problem

Critical Thinking teaches you skills and attitudes that make you proud to have rationally discovered answers that make sense to you.

Termiology

Thinking pattern: pan for gold or sponge

Did I ask “why” someone wants me to believe something?

Did I take notes as I thought about potential problems with what was being said?

Did I evaluate what was being said?

Did I form my own conclusion about the topic based on the reasonableness of what was said?

Weak-Sense and Strong-Sense Critical Thinking

defending your present beliefs, you are engaged in weak-sense critical thinking

strong-sense critical thinking requires us to apply the critical questions to all claims, including our own: protect ourselves against self-deception and conformity

When applying critical thinking…

Critical thinking is a social activity, we need other people’s feedback to improve ourselves.

Values, are ideas thatsomeone thinks are worthwhile, it is the importance one assigns to abstract ideas that has the major influence on one’s choices and behavior.

Usually objects, experiences, and actions are desired because of some idea we value. For example, we may choose to do things that provide us with contacts with important people. We value “important people” (concrete idea) because we value “status” (abstract idea). When we use the word value in this chapter, we will be referring to an (abstract) idea representing what someone thinks is important and good.

Understand our own values

Ask yourself how you expect your friends to be. What standards of conduct would you want your children to develop? Answers to these questions should help you enlarge your understanding of values

While we naturally gravitate towards those who share similar values, it's essential to actively engage with differing viewpoints to broaden our understanding and challenge our own perspectives.

Primary Values of a Critical Thinker

This book is dedicated to help you become a critical thinker. As a critical thinker, you will be pursuing better conclusions, better beliefs, and better decisions. Certain values advance your effort to do so; others do not. By knowing and appreciating the primary values of a critical thinker, you have some mental muscle that you can use to remind yourself of the necessity of your paying close attention to those who do not share your value priorities. Let’s examine these primary values.

1. Autonomy. We need other peopls’s opinion to form sound decisions and conclusions, gaining a comprehensive understanding of a topic requires considering various viewpoints, even those that contradict their own beliefs.

2. Curiosity. actively listening, reading, and engaging with others.

3. Humility. each of us is very limited in what we can do, and at honest moments, we echo Socrates when he said that he knew that he did not know.

4. Respect for good reasoning wherever you find it. When you find strong reasoning, regardless of the race, age, political party, wealth, or citizenship of the speaker or writer, rely on it until a better set of reasoning comes along.

By all means, act with confidence based on your beliefs, but hold your conclusions with only that degree of firmness that permits you to still wonder to yourself, “Might I be wrong?”

Keep the conversaion going

People might feel offended when you challenge their opinions.

An argument is a combination of two forms of statements: a conclusion and the reasons allegedly supporting it

1. Try to clarify your understanding of what the other person intends by asking, “Did I hear you say?”

2. Ask the other person whether there is any evidence that would cause him to change his mind.

3. Suggest a time-out in which each of you will try to find the very best evidence for the conclusion you hold.

4. Ask why the person thinks the evidence on which you are relying is so weak.

5. Try to come together. If you take that person’s best reasons and put them together with your best reasons, is there some conclusion that both of you could embrace?

6. Search for common values or other shared conclusions to serve as a basis for determining where the disagreement first appeared in your conversation.

7. Try to present a model of caring and calm curiosity; as soon as the verbal heat turns up, try to remind yourselves that you are learners, not warriors.

8. Make certain that your face and body suggest humility, rather than the demeanor of a know-it-all.

Creating a Friendly Environment for Communication

Writer and speaker can either create an environment that welcomes disagreement and discussion or one that is hostile to opposing views. While the preferred approach is openness, there are reasons to opt for a hostile tone, such as dismissing challenging questions easily or appearing authoritative.

Speed bumps on the way to be a critical thinker

When asking other people questions

Many people are not used to being questioned about their beliefs. We have to be aware of how our questions affect the people we are interacting with. If critical thinkers are not careful, they can damage or lose relationships due to the discomfort of those around them. Therefore, in the interest of preserving relationships, we must know our audience and use our critical thinking diplomatically.

Fast thinking and slow thinking

Our System 1 thinking, on the other hand, makes snap judgments based on what little information is available without any deep, conscious thought. Without slow, methodical thinking about the judgments we make, there is a lot of room for error.

System 2 thinking has the ability to overrule the judgments made by System 1. Our task is training our System 2 to not rely on System 1.

Common thinking errors

Sterotypes When we stereotype, we allege that because a person is a member of a particular group, he must have a specific set of characteristics.

Halo Effect The halo effect refers to our tendency to recognize one positive or negative quality or trait of a person, and then associate that quality or trait with everything about that person.

Belief Perseverance You feel defensive about your personal beliefs. This tendency for personal beliefs to stick or persevere is a major obstacle to critical thinking. We are biased from the start of an exchange in favor of our current opinions and conclusions.

Confirmation bias Our tendency to see only that evidence that confirms what we already believe as being good evidence.
Why we would have belief perseverance: our exaggerated sense of our own competence. We tell ourselves that we see things as they are, while others look at the world through foggy, colored lens. Our biggest bias may be that WE are not biased, but those with whom we disagree are
Counter belief perseverance: We can never permit ourselves to be so sure of anything that we stop searching for an improved version.

[w]hen we change our minds in light of a superior argument, we deserve to be proud that we have resisted the temptation to remain true to long-held beliefs. Such a change of mind deserves to be seen as reflecting a rare strength.
Francis Bacon

Availability Heuristic Part of the laziness associated with System 1 thinking is that we naturally rely on the information we possess, instead of information we need to make a better decision. Obtaining and processing additional information requires time and energy. The availability heuristic refers to the mental shortcut we use again and again of forming conclusions based on whatever information is immediately available to us.

recency effect. What is immediately available as a basis for our thinking is often the most recent piece of information we have encountered.

Answer the wrong question When we find the question is hard to answer, we will substitude it with a easier question.

Egocentrism Egocentrism refers to the central role we assign to our world, as opposed to the experiences and opinions of others. The temporary emptiness of our own pantry is often much more compelling to us than the fact that more than 35,000 people starve to death each day on our planet. We think our experiences, our opinions, and our needs somehow move the world or at least deserve to move it.

You would need to be very engaged with the lives of many people quite different from you.
You would need to listen to them and ask them again and again “so, is this what you are saying, and is this why you are saying it?”
You would be forced to get inside their heads to see whether there is some strong basis for the conclusions they have.
curse of knowledge we cannot recall what it is like when we did not know what we now know

Wishful thinking

We wish for the world to have certain characteristics. Things could be much more fair and kind and productive. But in place of wondering about whether such a world is even close to reality, many of us just form beliefs to match our make believe world. What we wish to be true, we simply declare is true. Because we think that things should be different than they are, we believe that indeed they are different.

Is that true because I want it to be true, or is there convincing evidence that it’s true?

magical thinking. People tend to rely on magic as a causal explanation for explaining things that science has not acceptably explained, or to attempt to control things that science cannot.

Magical thinking tends to be greatest when people feel most powerless to understand or alter a situation. In the face of great need, any belief in the randomness or accidental aspects of life is set aside as grim and replaced with the promise of magical causal relationshipsSimply listen to the promises of political candidates.

We believe them not because of any evidence for their claims, but because we so much want to believe them.

the wish for a just world is often transformed in our minds into the belief in a just world.

In a just world, no one would ever build a dwelling that contained dangerous amounts of radon gas; to do so would not be just.

In a just world, no one would play with our emotions like that. Thus, some assume we can automatically trust expressions of love.

Issue and Conclusion

In general, those who create Web pages, blogs, editorials, books, magazine articles, or speeches are trying to change your perceptions or beliefs. For you to form a reasonable reaction to their persuasive effort, you must first identify the controversy or issue as well as the thesis or conclusion being pushed onto you. (Someone’s conclusion is her intended message to you. Its purpose is to shape your beliefs and/or behavior.)

Issue

An issue is a question or controversy responsible for the conversation or discussion.

Descriptive issues

Does musical training improve a person’s ability to learn math?

What is the most common cause of domestic abuse?

Is Paxil an effective way to treat depression?

They require answers attempting to describe the way the world was, is, or is going to be.

Descriptive issues are those that raise questions about the accuracy of descriptions of the past, present, or future

Prescriptive issues

Should intelligent design be taught in the public schools?

What ought to be done about Medicaid fraud?

Must we outlaw SUVs to reduce increasing rates of asthma?

All of these questions require answers suggesting the way the world ought to be.

Prescriptive issues are those that raise questions about what we should do or what is right or wrong, good or bad.q'y

Conclusion

A conclusion is the message that the speaker or writer wishes you to accept.

In short, the basic structure of persuasive communication or argument is: This because of that. This refers to the conclusion; that refers to the support for the conclusion. This structure represents the process of inference.

Should I accept that conclusion on the basis of what is supporting the claim?

How to find conclusion

Ask what the issue is

Look for indicator words

Look in likely locations

Remember what a conclusion is not

Check the context of the communication and the author’s background

Critical thinking in your own speaking and writing

Narrowing Your Issue Prior to Writing

Cluing Your Reader into Your Conclusion

Reason

Reasons are beliefs, evidence, metaphors, analogies, and other statements offered to support or justify conclusions. They are the statements that form the basis for creating the credibility of a conclusion.

You cannot determine the worth of a conclusion until you identify the reasons.

Focusing on reasons requires us to remain open to and tolerant of views that might differ from our own. If we reacted to conclusions rather than to reasoning, we would tend to stick to the conclusions we brought to the discussion or essay, and those conclusions that agree with our own would receive our rapid agreement. If we are ever to reexamine our own opinions, we must remain curious, open to the reasons provided by those people with opinions that we do not yet share.

An Argument = reason (≥1)+ conclusion (=1)

Argument

They have intent. Those who provide arguments hope to convince us tobelieve certain things or to act in certain ways. Consequently, they call for a reaction.

Their quality varies. Critical thinking is required to determine the extent of quality in an argument.

They have two essential visible components—a conclusion and reasons. Failure to identify either component destroys the opportunity to evaluate the argument. We cannot evaluate what we cannot identify.

Questioning process

Find: the conclusion

Why: why the conclusion makes sense

Kinds of reasons

Many reasons will be statements that present evidence. By evidence, we mean specific information that someone uses to furnish proof for something she is trying to claim is true. These include the facts, research findings, examples from real life, statistics, appeals to experts and authorities, personal testimonials, and analogies.

What kind of evidence is needed to support this claim?

keeping the reasons and conclusions separate and in a logical pattern.

reason first, then conclusion

Critical Thinking and your Own Writing and Speaking

Words and phrases that’s ambiguous

Because we rely on words to get our points across when we communicate, there is no way to avoid ambiguity.

Before you can determine the extent to which you wish to accept one conclusion or another, you must first attempt to discover the precise meaning of the conclusion and the reasons

We often misunderstand what we read or hear because we presume that the meaning of words is obvious.

Locate key terms and phrases

Key terms: terms that you know must be clarified before you can decide to agree or disagree with the communicator

Review the issue for possible key terms

Look for crucial words or phrases within the reasons and conclusion

Keep an eye out for abstract words and phrases (A term becomes more and more abstract as it refers less and less to particular, specific instances)

Use reverse role-playing to determine how someone might define certain words and phrases differently (Ask yourself, if you were to adopt a position contrary to the author’s, would you choose to define certain terms or phrases differently? If so, you have identified a possible ambiguity.)

Checking for ambiguity

The next step is to focus on each term or phrase and ask yourself, “Do I understand its meaning?”

One obstacle is assuming that you and the author mean the same thing.

“Do I understand its meaning?” What do you mean by that?

A second obstacle is assuming that terms have a single, obvious definition.

“Could any of the words or phrases have a different meaning?”

How to make sure you identify the right term

substitute the alternative meanings into the reasoning structure and see whether changing the meaning makes a difference in how well a reason supports the conclusion.

Procedure of checking ambiguity

Advertising is often full of ambiguity. Advertisers intentionally engage in ambiguity to persuade you that their products are superior to those of their competitors.

Try to create a mental picture of what these phrases represent. If you can’t, the phrases are ambiguous.

Context and ambiguity

Context

the writer’s or speaker’s background,

traditional uses of the term within the particular controversy,

the words and statements preceding and following the possible ambiguity.

Using this critical quesetion

Terms and phrases have both denotative and connotative meanings. The denotative meaning refers to the agreed-upon explicit descriptive referents for use of the word, the kinds of meanings we have emphasized thus far in this chapter. The connotative meaning is the emotional associations that we have to a term or phrase.

Terms that trigger strong emotional reactions are called loaded terms.

Limits Of Your Responsibility To Clarify Ambiguity

You are not required to react to unclear ideas or options.

Value and descriptive assumptions

Assumptions are:

1. hidden or unstated (in most cases);

2. taken for granted;

3. influential in determining the conclusion; and

4. potentially deceptive.

How to identify assumptions

Look for both value and descriptive assumptions in the movement from reasons to the conclusions.

Value conflicts and assumptions

For ethical or prescriptive arguments, an individual’s values influence the reasons he provides and, consequently, his conclusion.

From value to value assumptions

What leads you to answer a prescriptive question differently from someone else is the relative intensity with which you hold specific values.

A person does not have the same value priorities without regard to the issue being discussed.

Typical value conflicts

“Why are the particular consequences or outcomes presented as reasons so desirable to the person?”

How to identify value conflicts

Investigate the author’s background

Ask “Why do the consequences of the author’s position seem so important to him or her?”

Search for similar social controversies to find analogous value assumptions

Use reverse role-playing. Take a position opposite the author’s position and identify which values are important to that opposite position

Look for common value conflicts, such as individual responsibility versus community responsibility

The value of knowing other people’s value priorities

Most of our sources of information such as the media, our universities, and our friends rarely announce the value assumptions underlying their opinions. In many cases they may not be conscious of them.

creating a greater appreciation of where people are coming from

Descriptive assumptions

Descriptive assumptions are beliefs about the way the world was, is, or will be; prescriptive or value assumptions, you remember, are beliefs about how the world should be.

Clues For Locating Assumptions

Keep thinking about the gap between the conclusion and reasons.

Look for unstated ideas that support reasons.

Identify with the writer or speaker.

Identify with the opposition.

Avoid stating incompletely established reasons as assumptions.

Fallacy

Fallacy: Ad Hominem: An attack on the person, rather than directly addressing the person’s reasons.

Fallacy: Slippery Slope: Making the assumption that a proposed step will set off an uncontrollable chain of undesirable events, when procedures exist to prevent such a chain of events.

Fallacy:Searching for Perfect Solution: Falsely assuming that because part of a problem remains after a solution is tried, the solution should not be adopted.

Fallacy: Appeal to Popularity (Ad Populum): An attempt to justify a claim by appealing to sentiments that large groups of people have in common; falsely assumes that anything favored by a large group is desirable.

Fallacy: Appeal to Questionable Authority: Supporting a conclusion by citing an authority who lacks special expertise on the issue at hand.

Fallacy: Appeals to Emotions: The use of emotionally charged language to distract readers and listeners from relevant reasons and evidence. Common emotions appealed to are fear, hope, patriotism, pity, and sympathy

Fallacy: Straw Person: Distorting our opponent’s point of view so that it is easy to attack; thus we attack a point of view that does not truly exist.

Fallacy: Either-Or (or False Dilemma): Assuming only two alternatives when there are more than two.

Fallacy: Explaining by Naming: Falsely assuming that because you have provided a name for some event or behavior, you have also adequately explained the event.

Fallacy: The Planning Fallacy: The tendency for people or organizations to underestimate how long they will need to complete a task, despite numerous prior experiences of having underestimated how long something would take to finish.

Fallacy: Glittering Generality: The use of vague, emotionally appealing virtue words that dispose us to approve something without closely examining the reasons.

Fallacy: Red Herring: An irrelevant topic is presented to divert attention from the original issue and help to win an argument by shifting attention away from the argument and to another issue. The fallacy sequence in this instance is as follows:

(a) Topic A is being discussed;

(b) Topic B is introduced as though it is relevant totopic A, but it is not; and (c) Topic A is abandoned.

Fallacy: Begging the Question: An argument in which the conclusion is assumed in the reasoning.

Evidence

Factal claims

Why should I believe it?

Does the claim need evidence to support it?

How good is the evidence?

Can we count on such beliefs?

What is your proof?	How do you know that’s true?
Where’s the evidence?	Why do you believe that?
Are you sure that’s true?	Can you prove it?

Intuition

A major problem with intuition is that it is private; others have no way to judge its dependability.

Thus, when intuitive beliefs differ, as they so often do, we have no solid basis for deciding which ones to believe.

Also, much intuition relies on unconscious processing that largely ignores relevant evidence and reflects strong biases.

Personal Experience

Because a single personal experience, or even an accumulation of personal experiences, is not enough to give you a representative sample of experiences, personal experiences often lead us to

commit the hasty generalization fallacy.

Fallacy: Hasty Generalization: A person draws a conclusion about a large group based on experiences with only a few members of the group.

Case Example

Case examples are often compelling to us because of their vividness and their interesting details, which make them easy to visualize

Testimonial

Testimonials are thus a form of personal experience in which someone (often a celebrity) provides a statement supporting the value of some product, event, or service and the endorsement lacks any of the information we would need to decide just how much we should let it influence us.

Appeal to authorities

Why should we believe this authority?

How much expertise, training, or special knowledge does the authority have about the subject about which he is communicating?

Is this a topic the person has studied for a long time? Or, has the person had extensive experience related to the topic?

Was the authority in a position to have especially good access to pertinent facts?

Is there good reason to believe that the authority is relatively free of distorting influences?

Among the factors that can influence how evidence is reported are personal needs, prior expectations, general beliefs, attitudes, values, theories, and ideologies.

We want to be especially wary when an authority stands to benefit financially from the actions she advocates.

Research Studies

replication

control

Precision in language

1. Research varies greatly in quality.

2. Research findings often contradict one another.

3. Research findings do not prove conclusions.

4. Like all of us, researchers have expectations, attitudes, values, and needs that bias the questions they ask, the way they conduct their research, and the way they interpret their research findings.

5. Speakers and writers often distort or simplify research conclusions.

6. Research “facts” change over time, especially claims about human behavior.

7. Research varies in how artificial it is.

8. The need for financial gain, status, security, and other factors can affect research outcomes and selection of which studies will be published.

Fallacy: Impossible Certainty: Assuming that a research conclusion should be rejected if it is not absolutely certain.

Surveys

The respondents may not be honest.

many survey questions are ambiguous in their wording

surveys contain many built-in biases that make them even more suspect

survey being too long

Analogies

They rely on resemblance as the major form of evidence. The reasoning is as follows: “We know a lot about something in our world (X), and another event of interest (Y) seems to be like X in some important way. If these two things are alike in one or more respects, then they will probably be alike in other respects as well.”

An argument that uses a well-known similarity between two things as the basis for a conclusion about a relatively unknown characteristic of one of those things is an argument by analogy.

Identifying and Comprehending Analogies

Evaluate analogies

The ways the two things being compared are similar and different.

The relevance of the similarities and the differences.

Strong analogies will be ones in which the two things we compare possess relevant similarities and lack relevant differences.

Another strategy that may help you evaluate reasoning by analogy is to generate alternative analogies for understanding the same phenomenon that the author or speaker is trying to understand.

A productive way to generate your own analogies is the following:

Identify some important features of what you are studying.

Try to identify other situations with which you are familiar that have some similar features. Brainstorm. Try to imagine diverse situations.

Try to determine whether the familiar situation can provide you with some insights about the unfamiliar situation.

Fallacy: Faulty Analogy: Occurs when an analogy is proposed in which there are important relevant dissimilarities.

Rival Causes

Attention: A rival cause is a plausible alternative explanation that can explain why a certain outcome occurred.

When to look for rival causes

You need to look for rival causes when you have good reason to believe that the writer or speaker is using evidence to support a claim about the cause of something. The word cause means “to bring about, make happen, or affect.”

Detecting rival causes

Can I think of any other way to interpret the evidence?

What else might have caused this act or these findings?

If I looked at this from another point of view, what might I see as important causes?

If this interpretation is incorrect, what other interpretation might make sense?

The cause or a cause

The experts may claim to have the answer, but they are not likely to know it. That is because a frequently made error is to look for a simple, single cause of an event when “the” cause is really the result of a combination of many contributory causes—causes that help to create a total set of conditions necessary for the event to occur.

In addition to the likelihood of multiple contributory causes for many events, we need to recognize the possibility of different people’s having very different causes for the same behavior

Fallacy: Causal Oversimplification: Explaining an event by relying on causal factors that are insufficient to account for the event or by overemphasizing the role of one or more of these factors.

Different perspectives

The more familiar you can become with multiple perspectives, the more you will be able to generate possible rival causes for events. As you encounter varied perspectives in your course work, strive to expand your familiarity with possible causes. Also, when striving to identify causes, be wary of the tendency of experts and yourself to engage in the confirmation bias tendency to seek and rely on only that evidence that is consistent with what we already believe.

Fallacy: Confusion of Cause and Effect: Confusing the cause with the effect of an event or failing to recognize that the two events may be influencing each other.

Fallacy: Neglect of a Common Cause: Failure to recognize that two events may be related because of the effects of a common third factor.

Fallacy: Post Hoc: Assuming that a particular event, B, is caused by another event, A, simply because B follows A in time.

Explaining individual events or acts

fundamental attribution error

we typically overestimate the importance of personal tendencies relative to situational factors in interpreting the behavior of others. That is, we tend to see the cause of others’ behavior as coming from within (their personal characteristics) rather than from without (situational forces).

1. Many kinds of events are open to explanation by rival causes.

2. Experts can examine the same evidence and discover different causes to explain it.

3. Most communicators will provide you with only their favored causes; the critical reader or listener must generate rival causes.

4. Generating rival causes is a creative process; usually, such causes will not be obvious.

5. Finally, the certainty of a particular causal claim is inversely related to the number of plausible rival causes. Hence, identifying the multiple rival causes gives the critical thinker the proper sense of intellectual humility