Original air date: December 13,
2009, 5 p.m. central.
[Music playing 00:19 –
00:24]
Jack: What is critical
thinking? Does a critical view point lead to skepticism? Is questioning simply
a skill or is it a matter of character or way of inhabiting the world? Join me
Jack Russell Weinstein and my guest Harvey Siegel for what is critical thinking
here on WHY - Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life broadcast
live on Prairie Public, right after the news.
[Music playing 00:45 – 01:06]
Jack:
Hello everybody welcome to WHY, Philosophical Discussions about Everyday
Life. I’m your host Jack Russell Weinstein. Thank you for joining us. Today
we’re talking about critical thinking with Harvey Siegel, Professor and Chair of
the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami. If you’d like to join the
conversation, we’ll take your calls later at 888-7556377 or if you prefer, email
us at
askwhy@UND.edu, that’s
askwhy@UND.edu.
A couple of
weeks ago, my 4-year-old daughter asked me if we were rich. Lacking on
age‑appropriate answer, I decided to tell the truth that it depended on what she
meant by being rich. This is a kind of answer that is you can imagine she hears
from me a lot, so much in Philosophy depends on how you define your terms.
“There are a lot of people in the world who don’t have food or houses,” I
explained to her as I have many times before. “And compared to them, in fact
compared to most people in the world and most who have ever lived, we are rich,
tremendously rich. But compared to our friends, to the people who live around
us, I told her to many Americans, we aren’t rich at all, we’re just kind of
normal.” Adina accepted the answer. She doesn’t know about the detour or the
whirlpool that suggests we are rich compared to Americans as well. But I could
see her thinking about what I said, processing it and trying to make sense of
the complex explanation her daddy had just given her. I don’t know how much she
got. She’s a smart girl. But the answer I gave her requires so much contextual
and comparative knowledge and understanding of value and exchange, and most
importantly, the intuitive understanding that a person’s life could be very
different from hers. These are things that adult struggle with, not just 4 year
olds. Obviously, the conversation made me think about our personal
circumstances, but more than that and in connection with today’s episode, it got
me thinking about thinking itself and what it means to be able to compare one
situation with others. Studies suggest the baby shows empathy as young as a few
months old and other recent developments in cytology argue that despite
generations of skeptical philosophers, human beings may actually be born without
[inaudible 03:15] desires to help
others. But being able to understand comparatives that truth depends on context
and that we may both be rich and not rich at the same time, that’s advance
knowledge. I don’t know what the world looks like from the perspective of a
4-year-old, but I do have a sense of what it means to be touched by new
information.
Last week I
attended a human rights symposium with the North Dakota Museum of Art and spent
some time with Ishmael Beah, the author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy
Soldier and Emmanuel Jal, a musician and author of the memoir War Child, also
the name of his new CD and documentary. Both were child soldiers fighting in
Civil Wars in Africa. Both told of lives of immeasurable horror, but both got
out and shared their histories with grace and heroism. As Ishmael explained on
the Daily Show, he like to point out that “human beings, regardless of where you
are, are all capable of true evil and equally capable of regaining our
humanity.” There’s that duality again, that comparative and contextual
knowledge and I always knew about war children.
Prior to
the symposium, there was something about these specific presentations that made
me feel like I had been a 4 year old before I heard them in capable of
understanding that someone’s life could be so different from my own. Part of
this is simply the added power of harsh stories involving children now that I’m
a parent, but part of it is the specific messenger, the moment of connection
with facts and people combined with how I live now. So, in understanding, in
addition to understanding capabilities and comparisons and contacts, the thinker
also has to be ready for understanding is about character and time of life.
Reasoning is a process that must be cultivated, attended to, studied and crafted
the way one does ice skating, reading to creative arts. So, it is with critical
thinking and so it is with these specific critical thinking that is required to
understand what it means to be so lucky to live where we live while knowing that
we are all profoundly unlucky to inhabit a world with such injustice and
fragility. How long do I keep Adina in her state of ignorance? How long before
she learn these things on her own? She has seen fighting in movies and she has
given away with much prodding unused toys to charity, but she doesn’t get any of
it really, just like she didn’t really get my answer. My wife and I worked so
hard to get her to understand that the movies we watched are pretend that we’ve
largely neglected the fact that they’re not. The fighting and shooting and war
are real even when what she’s watching isn’t accurate portrayal of how it
happens. Her stories are both true and untrue duality yet again.
Today on
why we explore critical thinking and we were repeatedly asked the question of
the relationship between knowledge or facts and ability to reflect on them.
Need we be an expert in science to make a decision about climate change? Must
we understand money to get that someone is both rich and not rich at the same
time? Was my answer to Adina unfair because it might compromise her innocence
or was it the only moral response in a largely immoral world? Or is requiring
moral agency of the innocent both inherently unfair and my absolute duty as a
parent? I don’t have an answer to any of these questions, but I do know that my
daughter is smarter than me already. And what she doesn’t grasp now, she will
soon enough. Thinking is a process that develops overtime and she will help me
find the way out of these puzzles eventually even if in the end the answers we
come up with together will arrive much later than when I needed them and with
that, we turn to today’s guest.
Harvey
Siegel is a Professor in Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at
the University of Miami. He spent much of his career writing about the nature
of critical thinking and its connection to education. Harvey, thanks for
joining us here on WHY.
Harvey:
I’m happy to be here.
Jack: If you would like to participate in the conversation, we’ll take
your calls later on in the show. Call us at 888-7556377 or if you prefer email
us at
askwhy@UND.edu. So Harvey, we hear the phrase critical thinking all the
time, teachers especially are inundated with textbooks and curricular
requirements, what does the phrase critical thinking mean?
Harvey:
Yeah, hello Jack. It’s good to be here. Yeah, well like so much in
philosophy as you just said, what critical thinking is itself a matter of
philosophical controversy at least to some degree. I think broadly speaking,
it’s a stand in good thinking, but that’s too simple so it needs to be
complicated up a little bit. So in the literature on critical thinking, there
are pretty wide range of definitions. A famous one, maybe the most widely used
one, is Robert Ennis who talks about critical thinking as reasonable reflective
thinking aimed at deciding what to believe or do. My own view is that the
critical thinker is one who is appropriately moved by reasons, but there are
hosts of other definitions or quasi definition in the literature.
Jack: One of the questions that faces someone, they start thinking
about this is a motto of critical thinking that often gets taught both in
schools and university here is a newspaper article. What is the argument?
What’s good about the argument? What’s bad about the argument? Is that what you
have in mind when you talk about critical thinking, argument analysis and
identification of evidence and assumptions and things like that?
Harvey: Well, that’s certainly a big part of it. You wouldn’t be much of a
critical thinker if you couldn’t read the newspaper editorial and figure out
what the argument is and whether it is a good one or a bad one. So that’s
certainly part of it. My own view is that the critical thinking also involves
well what can be called dispositions or habits of minds or even character traits
and they would be things like being critical, not being overly credulous and not
being overly skeptical either, but being sort of being willing to take evidence
that’s offered and working with it to determine whether or not it’s good or
bad. You also want to, a critical thinker ought to be someone or is someone who
cares about the truth of the matter and wants to get it through the evidence.
So, those are some things that go along with argument analysis.
Jack: So, there’s…
Harvey: Part of a package so to speak.
Jack: So, there’s a personality, a critical thinking personality.
Harvey: Well, I don’t know if its personality in the sense that
psychologist would talk about it, but I think that especially and so far as we
think critical thinking is important educationally than it has to be understood
as connected with the matters of character, the kind of people that we are. I
mean it’s easy to imagine somebody who’s good at argument analysis, who either
doesn’t engage in it even though he or she could, that would be somebody who is
skilled in argument analysis, but not a critical thinker in his or her life. We
can also easily imagine people who are good at it, but used it to further ends
that aren’t themselves capable of surviving critical scrutiny as they used their
critical skills to advance ends that they shouldn’t if only they thought about
whether or not they should try to advance those in. So, those things are also
part of the picture, I think.
Jack: So, someone who engages in propaganda or manipulations in
magazines conceivably could be skilled in critical thinking even though they are
used in those ends to manipulate rather than to reveal the truth.
Harvey: Well, as I’ve said I think that they could be skilled whether or
not they should count as a critical thinker as a separate question. I think
it’s clear that many people are skilled and yet don’t satisfy sort of minimal
requirements of critical thinking. If you understand critical thinking the way
I just played it out in terms of disposition and character traits and not just
abilities to reason.
Jack: You used the phrase and you work the critical spirit. What is
the critical spirit?
Harvey: Well, it’s just a catch phrase for that stuff that I just
mentioned. If for a student or a person that have the critical spirit, they are
interested in evaluating say the newspaper editorial or the most recent
presidential address not to further their own political ends, not to criticize
it for the sake of criticizing it but because they really want to know what the
truth of the matter is and they want to arrive at judgment about the truth of
the matter on the basis of the relevant reasons, evidence that either have been
presented or could be presented.
Jack: In the philosophical tradition, the ideal philosopher, the patron
saint of philosophy has always been Socrates. He always modeled the virtues of
philosophy as well as the activities in philosophy. Is Socrates the ideal
critical thinker or is the vision we have now of critical thinking different
than this classical model?
Harvey: It’s probably as good a model is as I don’t have a better model to
put before you, so I guess Socrates is as good as anyone else, whether or not
he’ll be the ideal critical thinker, I don’t know. We have to get into more
in-depth discussion of Socrates’ views. I mean Socrates has also been accused
of manipulating his dialogical partners and in being interested in things other
than pure search for the truth. So, whether or not he’s an ideal critical
thinker, he certainly model some of the attitude that we, I think at least we’ve
should encouraged our student to embrace.
Jack: I’m always amaze at the
difference between what philosophers think Socratic method is and what law
students and lawyers think the Socratic method is. When we get back from the
break, I want to talk a little bit about education and about the way that
critical thinking has been a challenge to traditional education. Critical
thinking has been seen in the past as representative of a movement and so I’ll
ask you, Harvey, a little bit about that but before that if you’d like to give
us a call, our numbers 888-7556377 or write us at
askwhy@UND.edu, and we’ll be back with WHY – Philosophical
Discussions after this.
[Music Playing 14:31 – 14: 53]
You’re listening to Prairie Public,
a news information and music service, in partnership with the University of
North Dakota and North Dakota State University.
[Music Playing 15:02 –
15:19]
Jack:
Welcome back, you’re listening to WHY – Philosophical Discussions about
Everyday Life. I’m you host Jack Russell Weinstein and we’re here with Harvey
Siegel talking about critical thinking. Harvey, in your book Educating Reason
in particular, you are writing in a time where the critical thinking folks
self-identified as a movement. What is the movement and what were they’re
reacting against?
Harvey: It’s a
little bit of a tricky question and it’s also a little bit historically dated, I
mean that book was published in the late 80’s, so 20 years ago. But to answer
the question, the people, the early philosophers who identified themselves with
the critical thinking movements also sometimes called the informal logic
movement isn’t exactly the same thing, but they’re closely related. They were
interested in, well let me mention a couple of things that they were reacting
against, one thing that they were reacting against was educational. They were
reacting against the apparent overwhelming focus in contemporary education on
road memorization, the training for very sort of simple straightforward skills
like arithmetic, arithmetical skills, diagrammatic sentence skills that kind of
thing. So, and people thought at least these philosophers taught that’s too
simple of you of what we want students to do by way of their thinking. So, one
kind, one part of the movement was aimed at making education a deeper kind of
thing, a more ambitious kind of thing for intellectual life of the students. I
mentioned a minute ago, informal logic which is also thought as it self as a
movement in those days, that was a different thing, that was eventual ignitions
were reacting against the hegemony of informal logical methods in logic. And
they thought, look if we’re going to teach our students, we don’t want to just
teach them how to manipulate symbols and prove theorems, we want to teach them
how to think logically about real world questions and real world issues. So,
are two different or distinct but allied movements and in the 80’s or late 80’s,
early 90’s that period of time, there was a kind of movements there and it had a
fair amount of political traction. So, for example, in the State of California
in the early 90’s, every single student in the California State System that’s
not the UC System and not the community colleges, but the one in the middle that
level of California education, every single student had to take a course in
critical thinking, so something like a half a million students a year and the
State of New York had a similar for their students. So, it did have a fairly
substantial impact on actual educational practice.
Jack: What
is the relationship, you talked about the movement stemming at least in part
from informal ignitions, what’s the relationship between critical thinking and
logic? Is logic just a subset within critical thinking or is there a more
complex relationship?
Harvey: Well,
yeah its complex but I think it’s fair to say that the subset in the sense that
critical thinking incorporates logic, but goes beyond it. So, I think that for
me the best way to think about it is critical thinking is fundamentally not
logical but epistemological that is it has to do with believing in accordance
with reasons and evidence and that is closely linked to what epistemologists
talk about when they worry about justification and when are beliefs justified.
So in that sense, I think when we say we want our students to think well or we
want them to be critical and by that we mean we want them to believe and judge
and act on the basis of good reasons that they have considered appropriately,
then we’re really suggesting something along the lines of we want them to be
people with justified beliefs and we want them to care about whether or not
their beliefs are justified. So in that sense, I think critical thinking is
better thought of as epistemological rather than logical.
Jack: Now,
the concept of epistemology for those who have studied some philosophy, is the
theory of knowledge and ask about the nature and the limits thereof, but you
just used the term belief all the time. So, what’s the relationship between
knowledge and belief if critical thinking is epistemological or about knowledge,
why be concerned with the justification of beliefs instead of simply asking what
is it we can know?
Harvey: Well, we
can ask what it if we can know and as an epistemologist that’s one of the things
I asked as a matter of profession. But when we’re talking about students, it’s
not always appropriate to worry about whether or not they know. At least, that
sense of very high bar, if for example we’re teaching elementary school science
student about some aspects of the natural world, it’s not entirely clear to me
that the fundamental aim is to get them to know stuff. I mean imagine that we
have knowledge pills, I could just give to each student the pill and they would
know whatever it is I wanted them to know, say the number of planets or the
distance to the sun or something like that. They could do that and yet not be
able to think well about that matter. Not be able to reason with it and so I
think knowledge in some ways not quite the right notion at least if you think of
knowledge in terms of true belief. What we want is students who are able to
think well about this stuff. After all, a lot of stuffs that we think is
important, we don’t know or if we think we know, we often find out we were
mistaken and we didn’t really know after all. So, I think from the educational
point of view, the job is not to cram students full of knowledge, the job is to
help them to become capable of judging for themselves how good their
justification is as a component of what they know.
Jack: You’ve
used this phrase several times we want our students to think well and
intuitively, I wouldn’t disagree with that but I don’t think I know what mean.
Our listeners, we hope they think well and do call us up with some questions and
help us think well,
888-7556377. But one of the questions they may ask is what is that phrase
mean? What is thinking well mean?
Harvey: Well, I think that’s a good question when we are earlier talking
about what the definition of critical thinking. One aspect of the definition
that comes in for debate is exactly that, what counts as thinking well? Do you
have to search for evidence or is it okay to just go with the evidence you
have? Once you have that evidence, what do you have to do with it and how do
you evaluate it? Those are things that students need to learn how to do and we
need to learn. We, that is people in general, need to learn how to do it even
as we do it. Well, there are areas of the scholarly world philosophy in
particular and epistemology even more particularly, but also logic which is
really a branch of mathematics as much as it is a branch of philosophy,
probability theory. All of these things are offered as tools to improve our
listening or at least to reason better and they offer us criteria by which to
tell whether or not a given bit of reasoning is good or not. So, when I talk
about think well, what I mean is roughly thinking that meets the criteria
available in the relevant fields like epistemology, logic, probability and so
on. So, thinking well is thinking in accordance with criteria.
Jack: Now when you say relevant fields, do you also mea physics,
biology, art or is this a meta category of thinking well.
Harvey: Well, certainly those - if you’re thinking about, for example,
global warming. It’s not enough to know epistemology or logical probability
theory, you also have to know some physics and some chemistry and so on,
atmospheric science. So, right, you need to know, let me back up one half of
sentence. In the literature on critical thinking, people have argued a lot
about the following questions; is critical thinking subject specific or is it
general? And there are a bunch of, well, several scholars anyway, really a
family of scholars who think that the idea of critical thinking in general is
sort of unworkable and crazy. And it makes more sense to think about critical
thinking in particular areas like in physics. So a student might be a good
critical thinker in physics, but not a good critical thinker in literature or
aesthetics or history or something like that. And I think that it’s not that
there is not a point there. I think there is a point there, but it can be
confused with another point which is that in order to think well about some
problems, it’s important for me to have subject specific knowledge about
problems. So, if you’re going to think well about an argument in physics say,
you know, pick up the latest physics review letters journal, read the article
and then now your teacher says, “Okay, analyze the argument. Tell me what’s
good about the argument, what’s bad about the argument.” You’re not going to be
able to understand the argument if you don’t know some of the physics. So,
there is no question that the subject matter knowledge is relevant to at least
many questions that we want to think quickly about. And I’m as a generalized
critical thinker that is to say somebody who thinks critical thinking is a
general thing and not just the subject specific thing. I totally can see that
subject specific knowledge is often necessary and certainly helpful if not
necessary for thinking critically. That said, I think there is something
general about it, for example, there are standard mistakes people make in
reasoning. Psychologists study those mistakes and logic teachers and informal
logic teachers and critical thinking teachers teach students how to avoid those
mistakes. Those I think are general, so you can beg the question in pretty much
any field. You can reach a hasty conclusion in pretty much any field and there
are a host of these reasoning mistakes or fallacies that sometimes called that
we can make and we do make. We thinkers make them regularly. And so far as we
make them in all different fields, I think it does makes sense to talk about
critical thinking as something general.
Jack: This list of mistakes that you’ve outlined make a case for
critical thinking as a subject area in itself and when we get back, I want to
revisit this question and I want to revisit what I know is a controversial
question in the field which is can you test in general minimum critical thinking
competency? We will have that conversation, Harvey Siegel, Chair of the
Philosophy
Department
at the University of Miami right after this.
[Music Playing 27:56 –
28:05]
Next month join WHY
as we talked about self-deception with philosopher Amelie Rorty. As always, we
broadcasted 5 PM central on the second Sunday of the month. Tune in on January
10th for discussion on self-knowledge and the lies we tell ourselves.
Visit the WHY
radio store to purchase mugs, t-shirts and show your support for WHY. Click on
the store link at
www.whyradioshow.org and while you’re there, check out the schedule for the
coming year, our archives and subscribe to our podcast, that’s whyradioshow.org.
[Music Playing 28:40 – 28:55]
Jack: You’re
listening to WHY – Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life, I’m
your host Jack Russell Weinstein and we are here with Harvey Siegel from the
University of Miami talking about critical thinking asking what is this and the
various different controversies involved. Harvey, you and I are actually both
members of the group called the association for informal logic and critical
thinking…
Harvey: That’s right.
Jack: …and it’s
this group of people who have been involved both when it was a movement and just
as subject specific area and there’s a Listserv and the Listserv will be quiet
for a long time and then someone will post something about minimum competency
testing and by that I mean some form of standardized tests like the GRE or the
LSAT or the test that now American students have to take throughout their entire
educational career and things will explode. What is the controversy about
testing? Is it possible to test someone’s critical thinking skills and to
follow up on that given the role of the spirit of the critical thinking spirit,
how do you test for character traits?
Harvey: Yeah, these
are obviously very good and very difficult questions and so I think my most
direct answer to your question has to be I don’t really know. There are tests,
there are tests, existing tests which test for critical thinking or at least
claim to test for critical thinking. Some of them are more successful than
others. There are some very smart people who devote all good chunks of their
careers to developing and improving such tests. So, I’m not myself prepared to
say it can’t be tested for, but I think it’s very difficult because it would
have to be – to be a good test of critical thinking would have to be the kind of
test that not only asks students to give the right answer, but it would have to
ask them to not only give their reasons for that answer but to sort to give an
account of the goodness of those reasons. Why does that conclusion follow from
those reasons and what objections to that conclusion might be raised that would
require additional reasons to defeat or overcome or undermine or something. So,
I don’t want to say the testing is impossible, but I think it’s pretty hard and
so probably the best kind of test in general, if you had the time and the money
to run this kind of test, would be the kind of open-ended test where students
could give their reasons and give a train of thought. A train of reasoning and
consider objections and so on and that’s obviously not the kind that could be
machine tested or at least not easily machine tested. And so it would be very
expensive and so I think most students don’t ever see tests like that.
Jack: When you
talk about critical thinking in your work and you’ve mentioned this before, a
critical thinker is appropriate moved by reasons. What do you mean by moved and
how could you test movement because as I understand, what you mean by move is
not only disposition, but a cognitive change, a sense of belief. How do you
investigate someone’s will, someone’s desire or someone’s proclivity to act?
Harvey: Yeah, well, as
I say these are hard questions and I’m not sure I have an easy answer to them.
I think it’s very difficult to that. But in the ordinary case, it’s not hard to
tell what people think or what people live. Most of us are quite willing to
declare our beliefs about many things, anyway. So, if I ask you right now, for
example, do you believe in God or do you think the war in Afghanistan is
something we ought to be engaged in? You could tell me what you believe? So,
it’s not the beliefs are secret or hidden or at least they don’t have to be
hidden, but getting at your reasoning for those beliefs whatever beliefs you
happen to have about those subjects would take a little work. You know, you
have to tell what your reasons are and I would have to press you on them. Are
they any good? Are these really your reasons or these just rationalizations and
so on, so again not impossible but hard.
Jack: We’ve got a
bunch of questions in advance and two folks, Claire Minot and Tony Moorehead
ended up actually rather asking a question writing page long thoughts which I
absolutely encouraged, it was very interesting to read and both of them are
struggling with versions of the same question, not simply can you persuade other
people of things, but why should you persuade other people thinks. Now neither
you or I are psychologists and so I don’t want to talk about the psychological
abilities of people to change their minds whether that’s possible, although I
think this is a question. Does critical thinking presume that you can change
someone’s mind and does it presume that you ought to change someone’s mind if
you can?
Harvey: Yeah, I think
the focus on persuasion is a little bit misplaced. It’s not the case that
critical thinkers try to get students to believe particular things. Of course,
if there is some candidate belief that is very well justified, then in so far as
a person as a critical thinker, that’s what they should believe because it’s the
one that most justified but we don’t – we critical thinking instructors don’t
want – we don’t have a list of beliefs that we’re trying to put in to the heads
of student, so that they’ll end the class with those beliefs. That would be a
terrible critical thinking course, in fact, it would be disqualified as critical
thinking course. Because what’s important is not what they believe, but why
they believe what they believe whether or not the reasons for the belief pass
muster epistemologically. So, persuasion is not really the game at least as I
understand critical thinking as an important educational aim. The question, but
you asked another question about so that should we, well you ask, can we
persuade or should we persuade? So, can I address them?
Jack: Sure,
absolutely.
Harvey: It’s
[inaudible 35:36]. So, can we persuade? Well, certainly sometimes we can. I
mean if you believe something, say I don’t know take a sort of innocuous
example, if you believe that the distance from Fargo to Miami is 2000 miles and
then I tell you, “But gee, Jack, I’m looking on Google map right now and it says
the distance is only 1600 miles.” I’ve given you a reason to change your mind,
then if you believe me that is if you believe I’m telling you the truth about
what Google maps says, then I’ve given you a reason to change your belief. And
probably you will unless you have some other evidence for that belief that you
think overrides the evidence I just gave you and we could talk about that. So,
you can change your mind and I think often we do change our minds when learn new
things that give us new evidence for the beliefs or the potential beliefs that
we’re considering. Should we change people’s mind? Well, I guess my first
answer is it depends on what basis you’re trying to change them. I mean if I’m
trying to change your mind by giving you a truth or correcting a falsehood,
there hasn’t seem to me to be anything obviously wrong about that. If I try to
brainwash you into believing something or get you to believe something
independently of the evidence for it, then I think I am doing something that’s
morally objectionable and I should not do that. But critical thinking shouldn’t
be sort of all or nothing, you know, either I’m doing it only on the basis of
evidence, I’m doing it only not on the basis of evidence. I think the question
about persuasion has to deal with the particular case. If I’m trying to
persuade you for, so to speak, honourable grounds, morally unobjectionable
grounds, I’m not trying to brainwash you. I’m not trying to advance my own
interests, political or economic or military or otherwise by getting you to
believe that thing. I only wanted in trying to get you to believe it because
it’s true and I have very good reason for thinking its true and I’m giving you
that reason that I don’t see that there’s anything objectionable about. If I am
trying to change your mind because of those untoward things that I just
mentioned, that I think that is objectionable and I would agree with your
callers if that’s what they are worried about that we shouldn’t do that,
certainly not in schools.
Jack: The language
that you used, you talked about you used the phrase morally, objectionably. You
used the term brainwashing, when we get back I want to ask you about the
critical thinking world view rather there are certain beliefs or systems or
positions that you have to hold in order to be a critical thinker. Must you be
an empiricist? Must you be secular or liberal democrat? Do you have to hold, I
know you talked about this in your work, an enlightenment perspective? So, when
we get back, we will talk to Harvey Siegel more about the nature of critical
thinking. Give us a call, 888-7556377. You’re listening WHY –
Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life on Prairie Public.
[Music Playing 38:50 –
39:07]
The Institute for
Philosophy and Public Life bridges the gap between academic philosophy and the
general public. Its mission is to translate between academics and
non-academics, cultivating discussions between philosophy professionals and
others who have an interest in the subject regardless of experience or
credentials. The Institute is conceived on the premise that anyone can do
philosophy and that the subject relates to everyone’s daily lives.
Visit us on the web
at philosophyinpubliclife.org.
The Institute for
Philosophy and Public Life – because there is no ivory tower.
[Music Playing 39:44 – 39: 56]
Jack: You’re
listening to WHY – Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life. I’m
your host Jack Russell Weinstein and we’re talking with Harvey Siegel from the
University of Miami about critical thinking. When we last spoke to each other
before the break, I asked you a litany of questions…
Harvey: You did.
Jack: …that were
about the sort of the net that’s involved in critical thinking including
assumptions, world views that sort of thing. I know that a lot of people are
concerned, well, I mean back up a second. Critical thinking if we presume it to
be good, it’s because we think that individuals have to have a certain kind of
agency or respect for a person and this comes out of 18th century
enlightenment notions that comes out of liberal democratic notions and when I
say liberal democratic notions and when I say liberal democratic, I mean the
American system or individuals are valued, do you have to be immersed in this
perspective in order to value critical thinking?
Harvey: Yeah, I think
that’s a very good question and in so far as critical thinking philosophically
controversial, that certainly one of the main axis of controversy. So, you
mentioned respect for person as part of the kind of liberal side guys and I do
think that the most important reason and most important justification for
thinking that we should accept as a fundamental educational ideal that of
helping our students to become critical thinkers is exactly that we owe our
students respect as person. So, what does that mean? It means a lot of
different things, but from the educational point of view what I want to do for
my students if I respect them is to help them get out from under my influence
and under their own influence as soon as I can, right? So, I don’t want them to
be under my influence as their teacher, although I mean they are my influence as
their teacher, at least, especially when they’re young, right? But the aim, my
aim as a teacher is to give them the ability to reason for themselves so that
they don’t have to take my word for things, so that they can figure things out
for themselves and decide for themselves what’s important, what’s not
important. How they should live? How they shouldn’t live and so on? So, in so
far as the value of critical thinking is fundamentally a matter of respect per
person, then I think you’re right that, at least, if it doesn’t depend upon that
enlightment outlook, at least, is very at home in that enlightment outlook. And
so critics of that outlook may well be critical of this approach to education as
well and that’s something that defenders of critical thinking as an educational
ideal have to deal with, have to defend themselves from.
Jack: Is there a
place for critical thinking or I should say justified critical thinking in
Stalinist Russia? Or is critical thinking, because you say at home in
enlightenment world view, is critical thinking really just a democratic virtue?
Harvey: Well, I would
say it is a democratic virtue for sure but if you’re not already independently
disposed to value of democracy then, of course, that’s not going to mean very
much to you. It’s not going to be a strong reason. I think the most important
thing to see in this whole domain of questions and these are very big question
is that to deal with any of these questions fairly. One has no choice except to
approach them from the perspective of a critical thinker that is if you’re
pro-enlightenment or you’re anti-enlightenment, once the question should we
value the values of enlightenment, should we embrace the values of enlightenment
is raised. The only way to address is it to ask for reasons for and against
it. And as a defender of critical thinking, I can’t presuppose that the
enlightenment view is the correct view. What I have to say is I think the
enlightment view is the view that best withstands critical scrutiny. And here
other reasons for embracing it and let’s talk about your objections if your
objections are any good, I’ll have to change my position. The only thing I
would say in addition that offers friends of critical thinking some comfort is
that if the objector gives me some good reason to give up the ideal of critical
thinking, then I’m giving it up on the basis of good reasons and so far I’m
doing it on the basis of critical thinking, so there’s a kind of self-justifying
dimension to critical thinking which I think is the greatest epistemological
strength.
Jack: The problem
with self-reference has been a problem in philosophy since its inception, but
how about someone who respond this way and says if I ask you should you be a
critical thinker, I don’t want you to be develop reasons, I just want you to
open your heart. I just want you to meditate and find that intuitive reaction
because that will be your soul talking and that is the justification you want.
How do you respond to that?
Harvey: Well, I would
want to know why it is that I should that this intuitive reaction, whatever it
is, is my soul talking. As far as I know, I don’t have one but in any case, if
they say what you should do is not develop a justification along epistemological
lines, but instead formulate some intuitive reaction. It seems to me the right
question to ask is why do you prefer the intuitive reaction to the other, the
one that I was depending, the epistemological one and that’s a question that
demands reasons to answer it, right? So, if my questioner says, “Oh yeah,
forget about reasons. Look into your soul.” I want to know why should I do
that. Why is that the right thing to do here? What reasons favour that rather
than what I’m proposing? And then everything will depend upon the quality of
his or her reasons.
Jack: Does that
should our listeners hear what you say especially and we’re not going to give
you this test professional belief, but especially your side about your soul,
should we presume that critical thinkers tend towards the secular or is there a
role of critical thinking in religious belief and even faith face very
fundamental or orthodox religious beliefs?
Harvey: Yeah, this is
obviously very contentious ground and I don’t want to speak about sort of
religious believers as a whole. I think they defer very widely just as every
group of thinkers and believers differs widely. So, I don’t want to say that
there’s no place for critical thinking. No, I wouldn’t say that. I think even
the most profoundly religious people can think critically about their religious
belief and about everything else. So, I don’t want to set up critical thinking
as some kind of enemy of religion. On the other hand, I think there are many
believers, many religious believers who kind of shy away from reason as if
demanding reason just kind of cheating against God by not taking God’s word on
its face and I think those kinds of believers, believers who say, “Look, it’s
just a matter of faith and reason doesn’t come into it, in fact, you should stay
the hell away from reason and just believe on the basis of faith.” I think they
do themselves this service because there are clearly other views out there that
disagree with their own and if there at all reflective, they should ask
themselves why is my view better than theirs. I think my view is better, but
what are my reasons for thinking so and if they don’t have anything that they
can say, that should give them pause.
Jack: Harvey, we
are out of time, but we do have a whole bunch of questions that have come in.
So, for those people who are able to listen on the podcast after the show, we
will have a little bit more of a conversation with Harvey after the credits.
But for those of you who are listening live, thank you so much for listening and
of course, Harvey, thank you so much for joining us and for finding the time to
talk to us on WHY.
Harvey: Thank you,
Jack. It was very much fun.
Jack: As our
listeners know, WHY is built on the possibility that we can think
critically that our goal is to get you to see what is happening in the
philosophical world, what is happening in the intellectual community and how it
relates to day to day life. Our conversation with Harvey Siegel is a mirror, I
think, of all of the different experiences we have everyday, a mirror of the
questions we have about religious belief, a mirror that reveals things about our
democratic society, about our questions of faith. Just the question of whether
or not we are faithful individuals is a question of critical thinking. Is it
simply a feeling or its faith represented by our action? There’s a huge debate
in religious communities. Can you believe in Jesus or in [inaudible
50:03] or in Buddhist principles and only believe without acting, would
that constitute belief? This is a critical thinking question. What are the
ideals of education? How do we teach our students to be independent? Is it
important to be independent? I started out the talk today by reflecting on my
relationship to my daughter and very difficult question that she ask, how the
job of a parent is to create an independent critically thinking child. The
danger of that is that child may grow up to think profoundly different things
than I think, to reject notions that I have and so critical thinking and
education towards critical thinking is itself a scary prospect and that maybe
one of the reasons why it is not always welcome in some political structures in
some educational structures. The more critical thinkers you have, the less
political control you have, the less power in the classroom you have. Critical
thinking is full of possibilities and it’s full of danger. As we continue our
conversation with WHY, we will continue to reflect on the various different
aspects of philosophy and the various different aspects of how we as a community
of inquiry to use a term for critical thinking community can come to conclusion
ourselves and to learn not only what we know, but what we don’t know. You are
listening to Jack Russell Weinstein on Prairie Public. This is WHY –
Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life. As always, thank you for joining
us and I look forward to having a conversation with you in the future.
[Music Playing 51:44 –
51:54]
WHY will return
next month when our guest, Amelie Rorty will talk to us about self‑deception.
Join us on Sunday, January 10th at 5 PM here on Prairie Public or at
our website at
www.whyradioshow.org.
Skip Wood is
our Producer and Chelsea Stone is our intern.
WHY’s music is
written and performed by Mark Weinstein and can be found on his album Lua e
Sol. For more of his music, visit jazzflute@music.weinstein.comor myspace.com\markweinstein. WHY is broadcast on the second
Sunday of every month. It is funded by the Institute for Philosophy and Public
Life Prairie Public Broadcasting, The North Dakota Humanities Council and the
University of North Dakota College of Arts and Sciences.
Philosophy is
every way you make it and we hope we have inspired you with our discussion
today. Remember as we say at the institute, there is no ivory tower.
Jack: Okay, we’re
back with WHY -
Philosophical Discussions the enlightening round. We’re still here with Harvey
Siegel. And Harvey as you know, one of the things we’re going to do right now
is address some of the questions that we didn’t get a chance to talk to address
during the live show. Folks will get to hear this either on their IPod’s and
Zune’s and other such things or on the on demand archive. The first question we
have is from Donald Hatcher, a professor at Baker University who ask a technical
question that I think you’ll have to explain a little bit. He refers to Ralph
Johnson’s work and he wants to know, can one be a critical thinker without
knowing and honestly evaluating alternative positions or objections? And what
he’s referring to is Ralph Johnson’s Dialectical Tier. This actually references
another question we got from Claire from Minot who simply asked, “Is assuming a
position that you don’t hold, arguing for something you disagree, unnecessary
step in homing critical thinking skills? So, what is the Dialectical Tier and
are you supportive of the idea?
Harvey: Well, so Don Hatcher is, as
my wife would say, a fellow wizard that is a fellow philosopher who worries
about these things. Hi Don, if you’re listening and he’s referring to Ralph
Johnson, another fellow wizard who writes. Who has a book called Manifest
Rationality in which he argues that in order to discharge one’s rational duty, I
hope this is a fair rendering of Ralph’s position, one has to not only give
one’s own positive reasons for one’s view, but also address both actual
objections that have been made and imagine the objections that the person
thinking and speaking can imagine to his or her view. So, I guess the question
is – is that a necessary component of critical thinking? And I know Don will
not be happy when I say I think the answer is no, which is not to say it’s not a
very good thing. And it’s not all often exactly what one should do, but it’s
not always what one should do. Because there are some occasions when critical
thinking doesn’t involve that sort of thing, I mean think about it on the model
of justified belief. If I, well, right now I was going to say if I look out the
window and see that the sun is shining or see the brightness and come to believe
that the sun is shining, in order for my belief to be justified. I don’t have
to consider potential objections, at least, in the ordinary course of affairs.
Similarly, right now while I’m sitting in the radio studio and this microphone
is in my face, so I open my eyes, I see the microphone, I don’t have to in order
to be justified in my belief that there is a microphone before me. I don’t have
to consider possible objections. I don’t have to think about well has the evil
demon, you know, placed or created this image of a microphone.
Jack: And just for our
listeners, it’ a reference to Descartes’ meditation.
Harvey: Descartes, right, right.
So, I think that if you think of critical thinking along the lines of justified
belief as I was saying earlier, then you don’t have to anticipate and deal with
objections and alternative points of view. So, if I think that this suggestion
of a question is that its unnecessary condition to be properly conducts critical
thinking, you have to. It’s necessary that you consider objections and
alternative points of view. My counter position is that it’s not necessary,
although it is often appropriate and often exactly the right thing to do, so in
a given case and which is appropriate and you fail to do it that is a black mark
of critical thinking, right? That is a demerit for your critical thinking if
it’s a case where you should consider one and you don’t. My point is just that
it’s not necessary always that one do it and so in the philosopher sense of
necessity, it’s not a necessary condition of critical thinking. That said
though, I sort of agree with the spirit of the positions. I agree with Don and
I agree with Ralph that most of the time or at least much of the time that is
indeed the appropriate thing for a critical thinker to do.
Jack: Is this a departure from
Mills’ argument on liberty that in order to feel justified about your position,
you not only have to know why it’s true but you have to know why the opposition
is wrong?
Harvey: Well, I don’t want to
present myself as a Mills’ scholar because I’m not, so I’m not sure how to
relate it to what Mills’ says. And also I should say it’s not a question about
feeling that your belief is justified, it’s about your beliefs to being
justified.
Jack: Right, of course.
Harvey: Okay, so those two points
aside. Yeah, I think if you - for whatever the belief on the table is, so I
gave you a couple of examples before about current Afghanistan policy, I forget
what the other example was so think about Afghanistan policy. If you want to
have a justified belief about that either it’s the right thing to do, it’s the
wrong thing to do, whatever the details of the belief might be. Then, in such a
contentious public battle, of course, it’ll be who’s you as a critical thinker
to be very well versed on your opponent’s views and arguments. So, if you just
ignore them, pretend they are not there, then that is a demerit on your view.
So, yeah I think in general you do have to pay attention to them when they are
relevant. My only hesitation, I’m just repeating myself now, is that it
shouldn’t be promoted into a necessary condition for critical thinking because
there are many cases in which it simply isn’t necessary in order for critical
thinking to move forward.
Jack: Okay, the next question is
Joyce for Milford, Pennsylvania, a long time listener who used to be Joyce in
Washington, D.C. but has moved.
Harvey: Hello, Joyce.
Jack: And she asked, I think a
very interesting question it makes me think of something that Richard Paul said
which are mentioned in a bit. I was a high school teacher for many years and
then she says she’s an art teacher, she said that students would come up to her
and be very uncomfortable about making decisions and creating works of art and
its say is this right or can I do that. And she wants to know is that an
example of critical thinking? How does critical thinking relate a) rule
following and b) rule interpretations?
Harvey: Yeah, that’s a very good
question so compliments to you, Joyce. It certainly needn’t to be critical
thinking if the student is asking you. Because the student thinks, well you
know more about art that he or she does and he or she is looking for guidance
from the teacher, then it could be that the student is looking for a reason to
do it one way or another way. And that then seems at least in the ball park of
critical thinking. But if the student is sort of not wanting to make a mistake
or not wanting to take responsibility for his or her own aesthetic decisions or
something like that, then it needn’t be critical thinking. So, I think whether
or not any given utterance counts as a good move in critical thinking depends a
lot on the context and the motivation and so on. And also I should say that
asking a question is already something we’d been talking about justifying
beliefs and, of course, questions aren’t beliefs, questions aren’t the kinds of
things ordinarily they are justified or unjustified. So, it’s a different kind
of case, I think I’m not sure Joyce is going to be happy with this answer
because I can feel myself squishing around the edges of the question instead of
standing on it firmly. But I think it’s not automatically the case that the
questioner, the questioning student is or is not engaged in critical thinking,
it’s just not clear from what I’ve been given so far whether or not he or she is
engaged in critical thinking and asking that question.
Jack: And it leads to the, you
know, you were talking about questioning and, of course, this is not – is this
right or can I do this or not sophisticated questions but questioning, framing
questions and knowing what is a viable question and what is a deep and hidden
question, these are tremendous issues in critical thinking and how to formulate
question is essential. It makes me think and I’m pretty sure this is Richard
Paul who argued that some of the best critical thinking that’s done in schools
and universities is done on sports team. And that, you know, they play a game
and they’ll come back to the locker and the watch footage of the game and
they’ll sit with the coach and he’ll say what they did right and what they did
wrong. And if I recall correctly, Paul uses that as an example of excellence in
critical thinking. Would you see that as compatible with the kind of picture
that you have of critical thinking?
Harvey: Well, again I think it
depends if you and I wouldn’t want to say – I don’t want to say very much about
the example as such or Richard Paul’s position as such, but just in general, can
a coach and a team of players analyze the film well or badly? Can’t they – I
mean supposed the coach calls in thinking, you know, there‘s one particular unit
of the defense that is screwing everything up and watches the film and analyzes
the film with that prejudice in mind or that prior belief in mind, then it’s not
clear that what the coach says in analyzing the film will be justified and so it
won’t be clear that it will be a good case of critical thinking. Whether or not
it’s a good case of critical thinking depends upon the actual evidence. So, I
don’t think you can say, you know, this kind of thing always is or this kind of
thing always is isn’t critical thinking. You have to get your hands dirty in
the needy greedy of reasons evaluation.
Jack: Excellent. Well, that
wraps it up and Harvey, thank you so much for doing this and our listeners,
thanks for listening to the added and Harvey, it’s really interesting.
Harvey: Thank you, Jack. I
appreciate the opportunity.
Jack: And we will talk soon I
hope and folks, who are listening on the podcast, tune in the second Sunday of
every month and this is available at whyradioshow.org as are all of other
podcasts. Thank you very much.
