First-Year Seminar Faculty Workshop
Teaching Critical Thinking
Daryl Close
Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy
May 18, 2005
Presentation Summary
I. What is Critical Thinking?
II. Logic and Truth in Critical Thinking.
III. Incorporating Critical Thinking into NDI 100.
IV. Critical Thinking in the General Education Curriculum.
V. Conclusion.
VI. Selected Bibliography.
Introduction.
Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum: Preliminary FAQs:
Q: Why can’t
the philosophy department handle all the critical thinking instruction?
A: We’re
generous-hearted folk.
Q: How can I
teach critical thinking in my departmental courses when I can’t even cover the
necessary subject-matter content?
A: Embedding
critical thinking in subject-matter instruction is very doable. Seriously.[1]
I. What is
Critical Thinking?
1.
If we were to
confine ourselves to the study of validity, we should be shirking the task of
the “criticism of thought.” For in real
life we want our conclusions to be true as well as valid: irreproachable reasoning can be no substitute
for well-grounded premises.
Max Black, Critical
Thinking: An Introduction to Logic and
Scientific Method (New York:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1946), 227.
2.
[W]e need to
think because the world we live in, however well we learn to cope with it, is
constantly forcing us to choose. When
experience surprises or disturbs us, we have to “make up our minds,” and, as
the phrase suggests, when we do that, not only are we deciding what to do with
the world about us; we are deciding what we are or want to be.
3.
[There are] two
distinctly different kinds of thinking, creative
thinking and critical thinking. Creative thinking may be defined as the
formulation of possible solutions to a problem or explanations of a phenomenon,
and critical thinking as the testing and evaluation of these solutions or
explanations.
W. Edgar Moore, Creative
and Critical Thinking (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967) 2, 3.
4.
The art of making
sense involves an understanding of semantics and scientific methods of
thinking, in addition to the analysis of reasoning, or logic. The “good thinker,” in other words, must make
a threefold analysis of a discussion. He
will interest himself in the meanings of words, he will look for the “argument”
in what he reads or hears, and he will ask himself whether what he hears is
true or false.
Lionel Ruby, The
Art of Making Sense: A Guide to Logical
Thinking, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1968), 10.
5.
In addition to
the critical tasks already mentioned—namely, figuring out what language means
in various contexts, determining when evidence is required to support
assertions, and marshaling evidence when it is required—critical thinking also
involves other abilities: thinking
coherently, comprehending instructions and advice, formulating problems and
solving them, judging whether bits of information are relevant to an issue,
surveying possible outcomes of decisions and plans, and deciding how to make
the best choices from those available.
Merrilee Salmon, Introduction
to Logic and Critical Thinking, 4th ed.
(
6.
I am uneasy to
think I approve of one object, and disapprove of another; call one thing
beautiful, and another deformed; decide concerning truth and falsehood, reason
and folly, without knowing upon what principles I proceed.
David Hume, A
Treatise of Human Nature, Sect. VII.
7.
Critical thinking
is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully
conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating
information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience,
reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
Michael Scriven and Richard Paul, “Defining Critical
Thinking: A Statement for the National
Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking Instruction.” http://www.criticalthinking.org/aboutCT/definingCT.shtml (16 May 2005).
8.
“Critical
thinking,” as I think the term is generally used, roughly means reasonable reflective thinking that is
focused on deciding what to believe or do.
Robert H. Ennis, “Critical Thinking: A Streamlined Conception,” Teaching Philosophy 14 (March 1991):
6.
Some Background Basics:
A. Logic
Deductive—inductive distinction
What is an argument?
·
Identification
o Look for inference indicators
o Arguments and explanations
·
Analysis
o Logically compound statements
o Class statements
o Beardsley-type arrow diagrams
o Implicit/hidden assumptions
·
Evaluation
o Deductive validity: If all the premises are true, then it is impossible for the conclusion to be false.
o Inductive strength: If all the premises are true, then it is highly unlikely that the conclusion is false.
§ Generalizations (enumerative induction)
§ Analogies
§ Probability and statistical inference
§ Casual reasoning
§ Evaluating scientific hypotheses
o Soundness: deductively valid, plus all premises are actually true
o Fallacies
B. Truth
· Meaning
o Definition types
o Fact/opinion distinction
· Reasons and causes of belief
· Relativism
o Cultural relativism
o Philosophical relativism
· Testimony and credibility of sources
· Experience and experimentation
· Self-evidence
· Causation and explanation
· Evaluation of hypotheses
· Inference to the best explanation
II. Critical
Thinking Exercises for the First-Year Seminar.
I recommend that critical thinking
instruction in the First-Year Seminar be very focused. Specifically, I recommend instruction be
limited to (1) inference indicators and argument identification, (2) a few
prominent informal fallacies (see below), and (3) assessing the truth of
premises, with particular attention to the reliability of testimony. This recommendation is based on the
assumption that approximately 13 50-minute meetings will be available for
critical thinking instruction.
A. Field
Studies in Reasoning.
Exercise title: Descriptions, arguments, and explanations.
Time required: Varies. First time requires >= 50 min., two or more sessions. Subsequent exercises may be much shorter, e.g., three or four sample cases at the beginning of each meeting.
Purpose: Being able to identify the reasoning of others, as opposed to description, is arguably the most basic task in improving critical thinking. Students will examine a short passage, determine whether there is reasoning in the passage (argument or explanation), and if so, what premises and conclusion(s) the author advances.
Special critical thinking tools needed for exercise: (1) definitions of “argument” and “explanation,” and (2) list of inference indicators. Skill level need not be great, but this exercise assumes that students have done simple homework regarding these two skills. Can be used in small or large sections (upper limit: 40-50). Appropriate to many different types of courses.
Procedure: Introduce a list
of short passages (need not be relevant to the course content) and ask students
(individually, or in small groups) to identify the reasoning, if any, in the
passage. The passage may be descriptive,
argumentative, explanatory, or a combination.
Remind students that inference indicators are the most reliable method
by which we can determine the author’s intentions, and that intermediate
conclusions serve as premises for subsequent conclusions. Students should write out each statement in
the passage on a separate line, prefaced with its logical function.
Critical thinking texts have hundreds of examples like those shown
below. After students learn to
distinguish among descriptions, arguments, and explanations, I suggest
providing only passages that contain some argumentation, and then introducing
passages that are primarily or exclusively explanatory.
Sample passages:
·
A
senior government source leaked a report of “Koran abuse” to Newsweek, and then
the Pentagon denied the accuracy of the report.
·
The
Pentagon denied the accuracy of Newsweek’s “Koran abuse” story because the
denial was reported in the New York Times.
·
The
Pentagon denied the accuracy of Newsweek’s “Koran abuse” story because it is
not in the national interest that such a story be true.
·
I went to the woods because I wished
to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I
could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover
that I had not lived. (Henry David
Thoreau, Walden)
·
.
. . we know that there is no greatest prime number. But of all the prime numbers that we shall
have ever thought of, there certainly is a greatest. Hence there are prime numbers greater than
any we shall have ever thought of.
(Bertrand Russell, “On the Nature of Acquaintance”)
·
The
deliciously creamy taste of Sealtest cottage cheese stands out no matter what you
make with it. Because we make Sealtest
cottage cheese with pure Sealtest sweet cream dressing for an outstandingly
fresh natural flavor. That’s why
Sealtest cottage cheese is so good just be itself, or as a delicious
ingredient. (Sealtest cottage cheese ad,
Redbook, July 1980, as quoted in Nolt
1984, 74)
·
An
object offers as much resistance to the air as the air does to the object. You may see that the beating of its wings
against the air supports a heavy eagle in the highest and rarest atmosphere, close
to the sphere of elemental fire. Again
you may see the air in motion over the sea, fill the swelling sails and drive
heavily laden ships. From these
instances, and the reasons given, a man with wings large enough and duly
connected might learn to over the resistance of air, and by conquering it,
succeed in subjugating it and rising above it.
(Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks)
B. Questioning.
Exercise 1 Title: Single-meeting questions.
Time required: >= 30 minutes.
Purpose: Questioning is fundamental to teaching critical thinking. It serves to promote (in both the questioner and responder) active thought, insight, challenging of assumptions, consideration of alternative hypotheses, seeing an issue from the perspective of another person, investigating the reliability of sources, and the stimulation of reasoning.
Special critical thinking tools needed for exercise: None. Can be used in small or large sections (upper limit: 40-50). Appropriate to many different types of courses.
Procedure: Introduce lecture topic and ask students (groups of 3-6) to prepare a brief written statement concerning the topic with respect to reading and homework. Groups are then questioned by instructor. The statement can be descriptive or argumentative. Example: “Briefly describe channel gating during an neuron action potential.”
Sample initiating questions: Depends on subject matter and student responses. Example: “If all neural impulses are basically the same voltage cascade, then how can touching a warm surface with a finger feel different than pricking a finger on a thorn?” Example: “How can an increase in Federal spending reduce unemployment?”
Sample quick-response questions:
· What do you mean by the word such-and-such?
· Would you say some more about that?
· How do you respond to the statement that such-and-such?
· Would you restate your point again?
· What assumption behind your statement/claim is the most important?
· Why should we trust/distrust the source you cite as evidence for your claim?
Exercise 2 Title: Long-term questions (e.g., 2-3 per semester-long course).
Purpose: Provides a basis for extended critical analysis of a question including research and evaluation of sources, consideration of alternative hypotheses, development of evidence, use of deductive techniques, etc.
Special critical thinking concepts needed for exercise: argument, explanation, premise, conclusion, reliability of testimony, explanatory adequacy. Also needed: open-ended set of concepts determined by course objectives, instructor preparation, etc. Can be the basis for a course focused on critical thinking, e.g., first-year seminar, upper division special topics course in the major, etc.
Procedure: Introduce question and guide students through structured analysis of the question over several days or weeks using various critical thinking tools.
Sample questions:
·
Was dropping the bomb necessary to end the war
with
· Give your own reasons for believing that the earth is round (Black 1946, 245).
· Is Polonius a silly old fool (Ennis 1996, 233)?
· Can the earth be protected from catastrophic asteroid impact?
· Is alcoholism a disease?
·
Did the first Polynesians come from
·
Were the violent acts of
C. Fallacies.
Fallacies are fairly easy for
students to learn, but can be more difficult to identify in context. Nonetheless, students comment that they especially
enjoy this part of the critical thinking curriculum. Some fallacies are so common that a single issue
of a newspaper or news magazine is virtually guaranteed to contain examples. Other fallacies of reasoning are especially
common in everyday speech and conduct.
Exercise title: Fallacy hunting.
Time required: >= 15 minutes per fallacy.
Purpose: Expose students to
patterns of bad thinking that are so common that over the centuries they have
been given names. I recommend that NDI
100 instructors identify a small set of prominent fallacies to be covered in
the course, e.g., equivocation, ad hominem, fallacious appeal to
authority, hasty generalization, false dilemma, slippery slope, appeal to
popularity, and argument from ignorance.
Certain formal fallacies such as conversion, affirming the consequent, and denying the antecedent are very common in ordinary speech, no doubt because of widespread misunderstanding of the conditional and its many variant forms. However, I do not recommend that conditional reasoning be included in the NDI 100 critical thinking curriculum in any great detail. If students can simply identify the conditional grammatical form and its most common (and not equivalent!) variants, e.g., “A if B,” “A only if B,” “A is necessary for B” and “A is sufficient for B,” much will be gained.
Special critical thinking concepts needed for exercise: argument, premise, conclusion, inference strength (validity, inductive strength)
Procedure: First session should include a review of inference strength, i.e., an argument is valid if, assuming that the premises were true, the conclusion could not possibly be false; and an argument is inductively strong if, assuming that the premises were true, the conclusion is unlikely to be false. Then, define the first target fallacy and provide examples. Finally, distribute a short list of passages, some of which commit the target fallacy, and ask students to identify the passages containing the target fallacy. Students should write the premise and conclusion of each passage so that the fallacy can be more easily identified. Use short passages only to begin with.
Sample passages:
·
Each of
the amendments to the Constitution covers only a very narrow issue, so the Bill
of Rights (the first 10 amendments) is much too narrow to provide Americans
with adequate protection of their rights.
·
Hitler
was a strong supporter of abortion, so it must be wrong.
·
Elective
abortion in the first trimester is the first step to wholesale murder. Today it's limited to the first three months,
which is okay, but next it will be the first six months, then any time during
pregnancy, and before you know it, this country will be practicing infanticide
up through the first six years of life!
·
Why
should I report the few hundred dollars I make mowing lawns? Most people in my church under-report their
income, so it must be okay.
·
If Joan
says that you can get an A in Logic without doing your homework, then you'd
better believe her. After all, she was
chosen as Miss Soybean for 2004 and she's also President of Eta Pumpkin Pi
Sorority.
·
The
reluctance to extend protection [of rape laws] to married women is attributable
partly to the feelings of self-preservation on the part of married American
male legislators. (Margaret T. Gordon
and Stephanie Riger, The Female
Fear: The Social Cost of Rape as
quoted in Irving M. Copi and Keith Burgess-Jackson, Informal Logic, 3d ed.)
·
The
great philosopher Aristotle himself states that a rock falls to the ground
because it desires to return to earth and rest, so how can we possibly think
that gravity really exists?
·
No one
has ever provided any evidence that there are metamorphic rocks on extrasolar
planets, so we may correctly conclude from this fact that there are none.
·
DOBERT: Can you prove that chlorination is useful in
making water safe?
ALGAN: Yes, I can. Devton gets its water from the same place
that we do. Three years ago, Devton had
nine cases of typhoid fever. Two years
ago they started to chlorinate and they had only two cases that year. That’s proof enough. (Robert H. Ennis and Jason Millman, Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z)
·
There is
a very strong statistical correlation between owning a car and having a job, so
if you want to get a job, just buy a car.
·
God
exists because the Bible tells us so, and we know that what the Bible tells us
must be true because it is the revealed word of God. (from
·
We can
safely ignore anything that Osama bin Laden has to say about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The guy is
clearly insane, and as a moral being is down with Hitler, Stalin, and other
mass murderers of the 20th century.
·
I never
use aspirin or acetaminophen. These are
drugs and if I started using them, before long I’d be taking methamphetamine
and Quaaludes, and then I’d be hooked for good.
·
Bush’s
former drug-using behavior just sickens me.
I feel that he lied about his service in the National Guard and I
don’t care what his supporters say. Bush should be impeached.
·
Food
costs are beginning to soar. The price
of hamburger went up 19% in one week.
·
Most
people on welfare are ripping off the taxpayer.
I saw a woman in Kroger’s the other day who bought ten pounds of filet
mignon with food stamps, and then she drove away in a Cadillac!
III. Issues.
Conclusion.
Daryl Close, Ph.D.
Professor of Computer Science
and Philosophy
419-448-2281 --
dclose@heidelberg.edu
Selected Bibliography
Textbooks:
Beardsley, Monroe C.
1950. Practical Logic.
Black, Max. 1950, 1946.
Critical Thinking.
Boyd, Robert. 2003. Critical
Reasoning and Logic.
Cederblom, Jerry, and David W. Paulsen. 2000. Critical Reasoning. 5th ed.
Chaffee, John. 2003. Thinking
Critically, 7th ed.
Ennis, Robert H.
1996. Critical Thinking.
Giere, Ronald N.
1997. Understanding Scientific Reasoning, 4th ed.
Hughes, William.
2000. Critical Thinking, 3d ed.
Johnson, Ralph H., and J. Anthony Blair. 1994. Logical Self-Defense.
Kelley, David. 1998. The Art
of Reasoning, 3d expanded ed.
Kiersky, James H., and Nicholas J. Caste. 1995. Thinking Critically: Techniques for Logical Reasoning. Minneapolis-St. Paul: West Publishing Co.
Moore, Brooke Noel, and Richard Parker. 2003. Critical Thinking, 7th ed.
Nolt, John Eric.
1984. Informal Logic: Possible Worlds
and Imagination.
Paul, Richard. 1993. Critical
Thinking: What Every Person Needs to
Survive in a Rapidly Changing World, 3d ed.
Dillon Beach, CA: Foundation for
Critical Thinking. [out of print,
available].
Paul, Richard, and Linda Elder. 2001. The Miniature Guide to Critical
Thinking: Concepts and Tools. Dillon Beach, CA: The Foundation for Critical Thinking. [Not really a textbook, but an inexpensive,
useful pamphlet for students.]
Salmon, Merrilee.
2002. Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, 4th ed.
Scriven, Michael.
1976. Reasoning.
Teays, Wanda. 2003. Second
Thoughts: Critical Thinking for a
Diverse Society, 2d ed.
Thomas, Stephen N.
1996. Practical Reasoning in Natural Language, 4th ed.
Weston, Anthony.
2000. A Rulebook for Arguments, 3d ed.
Wright, Larry. 1982. Better
Reasoning: Techniques for Handling
Argument, Evidence, and Abstraction.
Books
and collections of papers on critical thinking:
Bacon, Francis.
[1997], 1605. The Advancement of Learning: With a Brief Memoir of the Author. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing Co. Available online: Krech, Hartmut, ed. 2003. http://www1.uni-bremen.de/~kr538/baconadv.html (16 May 2005).
Cromwell, Lucy S., ed.
1986. Teaching Critical Thinking in the Arts and Humanities.
McPeck, John. 1981. Critical
Thinking and Education.
Norris, Stephen P., ed. 1991. The Generalizability of Critical Thinking.
Siegel, Harvey.
1988. Educating Reason: Rationality,
Critical Thinking and Education.
Talaska, Richard A.
1992. Critical Reasoning in Contemporary Culture.
Toulmin, Stephen.
2003. The Uses of Argument, 2d ed.
Selected
Journals:
Informal
Logic
Inquiry:
Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines
Teaching
Philosophy
Argumentation
Philosophy
and Rhetoric
APA
Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy
[some issues available online at http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/publications/newsletters/
]
Critical
Thinking Assessment:
Robert Ennis, co-author of
the Cornell Critical Thinking Test and
the Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay
Test, has a very thorough list of currently available critical thinking
assessment tools. See Robert H. Ennis,
“An Annotated List Of Critical Thinking Tests.”
June 2002. http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/rhennis/TestListM9Y01.html (16 May 2005).
All rights
reserved
Acknowledgements
First-Year Experience Committee
Faculty Development Committee
Kathryn Venema
Associate Vice President for Academic Support
Laura de Abruña
Vice President for Academic Affairs
NOTES
[1] See Robert H. Ennis, “Incorporating Critical Thinking in the Curriculum: An Introduction to Some Basic Issues,” Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 16 (Spring 1997), 1. Ennis distinguishes between two types of embedding: infusion, where critical thinking concepts are made explicit; and immersion, where subject matter treatment is very deep and involved, but no explicit general principles of critical thinking are presented. There is a spectrum of intermediate course design between these two opposites.