What Is Critical Thinking? — Critical Thinking 1 (C1)

CRITICAL THINKING · LESSON 1

What Is Critical Thinking?

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Three quick questions

Task Work alone, in silence. First write a number for the statement. Then answer the three questions in two minutes. Write your answers down; don't show anyone.

Statement I am better at thinking critically than most people.

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

1

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? (in cents)

2

If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? (in minutes)

3

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? (in days)

The answers

These three questions are the Cognitive Reflection Test, published by the psychologist Shane Frederick in 2005. Each one is built so that a wrong answer arrives first, quickly and confidently.

1 · 5 cents

2 · 5 minutes

3 · 47 days

not 10. If the ball cost 10 cents, the bat would cost $1.10 and the total would be $1.20.

not 100. Each machine takes 5 minutes to make one widget, so 100 machines make 100 widgets in 5 minutes.

not 24. The patch doubles every day, so it covers half the lake one day before it covers all of it.

Frederick gave the test to 3,428 people, most of them students at American universities. About one in six got all three right. At MIT, the best-scoring group, fewer than half did. If you had seen the questions before, notice that too: knowing an answer is not the same as reasoning your way to it.

Why did that feel right?

Task Tell your partner your first answer to each question, even if you changed it. Describe what that first answer felt like. Then agree on one sentence: what made the right answer harder to reach?

1. Did you check your answers? What made you check, or not check?

2. Was a wrong answer a failure of knowledge, or of attention?

3. The wrong answer came with a feeling of certainty. Should that worry us?

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman called this the difference between fast and slow thinking. We return to it in Lesson 5.

READING

Thinking about thinking

The word critical comes from the Greek kritikos, "able to judge". In this older sense, critical thinking is not about finding fault. It is about judging well.

Its most famous ancestor is Socrates, who wrote nothing and is known to us mainly through his pupil Plato. In Plato's Apology, Socrates tells the jury at his trial in Athens how a friend once asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The oracle said no one was. Puzzled, Socrates questioned politicians, poets and craftsmen, looking for someone wiser, and found that each believed he knew far more than he did. Socrates concluded that his own wisdom lay in recognising how little he knew. His method, the elenchus, was to question a confident claim until its contradictions showed. Athens condemned him to death in 399 BCE.

More than two thousand years later, the American philosopher John Dewey gave the idea its modern form.

READING · CONTINUED

Thinking about thinking

In How We Think (1910) he described reflective thinking as "active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it". The key word is grounds: a reflective thinker asks not only what to believe but why. That requires suspended judgment: tolerating doubt long enough to inquire.

In 1962 the philosopher of education Robert Ennis defined critical thinking narrowly, as the correct assessing of statements. He later widened it to reasonable, reflective thinking aimed at deciding what to believe or do, so that decisions and actions count as well as beliefs.

By the 1980s critical thinking had become an educational slogan, and nobody agreed on what it meant. In December 1987 the American

Philosophical Association asked the philosopher Peter Facione to find out what the experts thought. He used the Delphi method, a technique developed at the RAND Corporation and named after the same oracle. Forty-six experts, about half of them philosophers and Ennis among them, answered six rounds of questions between February 1988 and September 1989. Each saw the others' arguments with the names removed, so that reputation could not sway the result. The final report, revised for the last time in November 1989 and published in 1990, became known as the Delphi Report.

One weakness is obvious. A consensus of experts is not the same as the truth, and every member of this panel worked in the United States or Canada.

Build a definition

Task As a group, write a definition of critical thinking in one sentence of no more than 25 words. Count the words. Then write down one thing your group deliberately left out, and why. Be ready to read both out in the main room.

1. Is critical thinking a skill, a habit, an attitude, or all three?

2. Is it about beliefs, decisions, or both?

3. Does it have to be good thinking, or can someone think critically and still be wrong?

What the experts said

The Delphi panel's core definition (Facione, 1990), in paraphrase:

Critical thinking is "purposeful, self-regulatory judgment". It produces interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference, and it can explain the evidence, concepts, methods, criteria and context on which a judgment rests.

The panel added that critical thinking is not the same thing as good thinking, and that it matters as a tool of inquiry, in education, and in personal and civic life.

1. What did your group include that the experts left out?

2. What did the experts include that you missed?

3. The panel's definition never mentions truth, or feelings. Is that a strength or a gap?

4. Forty-six experts took nearly two years to write this. Was it worth it?

Skills and dispositions

The panel listed six core skills:

It also described dispositions: habits of mind that make a person use the skills. The ideal critical thinker is inquisitive, well-informed, open-minded, fair-minded, honest about their own biases, prudent in judging, willing to reconsider, and persistent.

Some panellists warned that teaching the skills without the dispositions could make students close-minded and dogmatic. 83% of the experts agreed that good critical thinkers show these dispositions, but only 61% thought the dispositions belong in the definition itself.

1. Interpretation: working out and stating what something means.

2. Analysis: identifying the parts of an argument and how they fit together.

3. Evaluation: judging how credible a claim is and how strong an argument is.

4. Inference: questioning the evidence, considering alternatives, drawing conclusions.

5. Explanation: stating your results and showing how you reached them.

6. Self-regulation: examining and correcting your own thinking.

Skills and dispositions

SKILLS:

can I?

DISPOSITIONS:

will I?

1. Which of the six skills did your schooling train best? Which did it neglect?

2. Think of a clever person who never changes their mind. Which column are they missing?

3. Should the dispositions be part of the definition, or are they a separate question of character?

• Interpretation

• Analysis

• Evaluation

• Inference

• Explanation

• Self-regulation

• inquisitive

• well-informed

• open-minded

• fair-minded

• honest about biases

• prudent in judging

• willing to reconsider

• persistent

critical thinking

83% agreed these mark a good critical thinker; 61% put them in the definition

Smart but wrong

Task Read the three cards. For each person, decide: was the failure a missing skill or a missing disposition? Name it, using the lists on the Skills and dispositions slide, and write which phrase of the panel's definition failed. Then agree which card worries you most, and why.

Card 1: Linus Pauling and vitamin C (USA)

Pauling is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes: Chemistry in 1954 and Peace in 1962. In the 1970s he championed very large doses of vitamin C, first against colds and then against cancer. With the Scottish surgeon Ewan Cameron he reported in 1976 that 100 terminally ill patients given vitamin C lived longer than 1,000 matched patients from the same hospital. Two randomised, placebo-controlled trials at the Mayo Clinic, in 1979 and 1985, gave patients vitamin C by mouth and found no benefit. Pauling attacked the trials' design and never gave up his claim. Vitamin C given into a vein reaches far higher blood levels than tablets, and is still being tested; it is not an approved cancer treatment.

Smart but wrong

Card 2: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley fairies (England)

The creator of Sherlock Holmes, fiction's most famous reasoner, was a trained doctor and a committed spiritualist who had lost his eldest son, Kingsley, in 1918. In 1920 he learned of photographs taken in 1917 by two cousins in Cottingley, Yorkshire, Elsie Wright (16) and Frances Griffiths (9), showing the girls with tiny dancing fairies. Kodak's technicians found no signs of faking but would not say the fairies were real. Busy with a lecture tour of Australia, Doyle relied on Edward Gardner, a leading Theosophist, and published the photographs in The Strand Magazine in December 1920. In 1983 the cousins admitted that the fairies were paper cut-outs copied from a children's book and held up with hatpins. Frances still insisted that the last of the five photographs was genuine.

Smart but wrong

Card 3: René Blondlot and N-rays (France)

In 1903 Blondlot, a respected physicist at the University of Nancy and a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences, announced a new kind of radiation, which he named N-rays after his city. The rays were detected by eye, as tiny changes in the brightness of a spark or a glowing strip in a darkened room. Within months many scientists, mostly French, reported seeing them; laboratories in Britain and Germany saw nothing. In September 1904 the American physicist Robert W. Wood visited Nancy and, in the dark, secretly removed the prism the key experiment depended on. Blondlot went on reading the same results. Supporters suggested that sceptics' eyes were not sensitive enough. After Wood's report in Nature, the rays were soon abandoned outside Nancy, but Blondlot was reportedly still convinced in 1926.

Open questions

Task Choose three or four questions. Spend most of your time on the one your group disagrees about.

1. Can critical thinking be taught, or only caught from teachers and parents who show it?

2. Can you be too critical? Where does healthy doubt turn into cynicism?

3. Who needs critical thinking most: a scientist, a voter or a parent?

4. Is "questioning authority" a universal virtue or a cultural value? Is it encouraged where you live?

5. Does intelligence protect you from false beliefs, or just give you better arguments for them?

6. Should schools grade critical thinking? What might grading do to it?

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Think of a belief you once held strongly and later changed. What changed your mind: evidence, a person, an experience, or simply time?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Think of a time you were fooled: a trick, a rumour, an advert, an April Fool. What made it so convincing?

Before Lesson 2

This week, collect one argument you meet: an advert, a headline or a post.

conclusion

Copy it down or take a screenshot, and note where you found it. We will take it apart in Lesson 2.

Next lesson: The Anatomy of an Argument. What every argument is made of, and how to find the parts it would rather you didn't see.

premise

premise

?

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (1)

THREE QUICK QUESTIONS answers also given on "The answers"

1 5 cents. Intuitive wrong answer: 10 cents. Ball 5 cents + bat $1.05 = $1.10.

2 5 minutes. Intuitive wrong answer: 100 minutes. One machine makes one widget in 5 minutes.

3 47 days. Intuitive wrong answer: 24 days. The patch doubles daily, so half coverage is one day before full coverage.

SMART BUT WRONG suggested diagnoses; every card can be argued more than one way

• Pauling: not a missing skill; he was one of the century's greatest analysts. Missing dispositions: willingness to reconsider and honesty about one's own biases, once the randomised trials came in. The phrase that failed: self-regulatory. A fair counter-argument: some of his objections to the trials' design (oral rather than intravenous doses) were reasonable, and the intravenous question is still open; what failed was his response to the evidence on what he had actually claimed.

• Conan Doyle: a failure of evaluation (judging the credibility of a source: he relied on Gardner and read Kodak's careful "no signs of faking" as support) and of inference (not considering the simplest alternative: two children with paper and a camera). Underneath, a disposition: fair-mindedness, because he very much wanted the photographs to be real. The phrase that failed: the part about explaining the evidence and methods a judgment rests on.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (2)

• Blondlot: a failure of method that is also a failure of self-regulation: observations made by eye, by people who knew what they expected to see, with no blind checks. Dismissing sceptics' "insensitive eyes" is a failure of open-mindedness. Note that the error spread to many other researchers: critical thinking can fail in a group, not only in an individual (a link to Lesson 10).

• The larger point: all three had the skills. What failed was the disposition to turn the skills on their own favourite beliefs, which is why the panel treated dispositions as essential.