Become a Critical Thinker
|Traits
| - Analyzing
| - Conceptualizing
| - Defining
| - examining
| - Inferring
| - listening
| - Questioning
| - Reasoning
| - Synthesizing
| - Interpreting
| - Validating & Verifying
| - explores options & tradeoffs
| - Evaluating Information
| - Seeks to widen perspective
| - Doubts or suspends judgment
| - identifies assumptions
| - Tolerance of ambiguity
| - Assessing criteria and methods
| - Preferring to be aware of ones own ignorance
|
| -- These Traits Help Us
| --- Refine our thought processes
| --- To Think and Assess our own thoughts comprehensively
| --- To help us think about our thinking
| --- while identifying flaws and biases in the processes generating our conclusions
| --- To help us identify & reject false ideas/ideologies
| --- So that if a belief is unfounded, we can appropriately change our position
| --- preferring answers that are evidence based
|
|Traits to Avoid
| - Lack of respect for reason
| - Intellectual Arrogance
| - Unwillingness to listen
| - Intellectual Laziness
| - Lack of respect for Evidence
| - Black and White thinking
| - intolerance of ambiguity (leaping to flawed conclusions because you cant tolerate indefinite answers)
- A Workbook for Arguments, Part 1: Arguments
- A Workbook For Arguments, Part 2: Generalizations and Statistics
- A Workbook For Arguments, Part 3: Analogies, Sources, Causal Claims, and Theoretical Virtues… Oh My!
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 1: Introduction and General Dichotomy
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 2: Circularity
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 3: Science, Lack of Substantiation, and Contradictions
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 4: Defeaters and Definitions
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 5: Fallacies
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 6: Analogies and Kicking the Can
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 7: Expectation, Causation, and Conceptuality
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 8: Variables, Sample Sizes, and Experimentation
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 9: Non-Explanations, Internal Critiques, and the Epistemological-Metaphysical Fallacy
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 10: Hypotheses, Objections, and Category Mistakes
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 11: Counter-Examples and Understated Evidence
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 12: Presupposing What Needs to Be Explained
- Evaluating Arguments, Part 13: The Principle of Relevant Propositions
- Critical Thinking, Part 1: What is Critical Thinking?
- Critical Thinking, Part 2: Intellectual Standards
- Critical Thinking, Part 3: Elements of Reasoning
- Critical Thinking, Part 4: Explanations
- Critical Thinking, Part 5: Logic
- Critical Thinking, Part 6: A Case Study
- Critical Thinking, Part 7: Confirmation Bias and Fallacies
- Critical Thinking, Part 8: Sources Yet Again!
"Originally, fallibilism (from Medieval Latin: fallibilis, "liable to err") is the philosophical principle that propositions can be accepted even though they cannot be conclusively proven or justified, or that neither knowledge nor belief is certain. The term was coined in the late nineteenth century by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, as a response to foundationalism. Theorists, following Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, may also refer to fallibilism as the notion that knowledge might turn out to be false. Furthermore, fallibilism is said to imply corrigibilism, the principle that propositions are open to revision. Fallibilism is often juxtaposed with infallibilism."
Sapere aude is the Latin phrase meaning "Dare to know"; and also is loosely translated as "Have courage to use your own reason", "Dare to know things through reason", or even more loosely as "Dare to be wise". Originally used in the First Book of Letters (20 BC), by the Roman poet Horace, the phrase Sapere aude became associated with the Age of Enlightenment, during the 17th and 18th centuries, after Immanuel Kant used it in the essay "Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (1784). As a philosopher, Kant claimed the phrase Sapere aude as the motto for the entire period of the Enlightenment, and used it to develop his theories of the application of reason in the public sphere of human affairs.
Bertrand Russall's Three Passions:
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
Richard Feynman
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”
“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”
“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
Voltaire
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Denis Diderot
“All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.”
“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”
“Scepticism is the first step towards truth.”
Aristotle (misquoted)
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
" for it is the mark of an educated person to search for the same kind of clarity in each topic to the extent that the nature of the matter accepts it. "
Robert G. Ingersoll
“I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men. I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the world. I attack slavery. I ask for room -- room for the human mind.”
Robert J. Oppenheimer
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.”
John Maynard Keynes
“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”
“A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.”
Carl Sagan
“I don't want to believe. I want to know.”
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
“The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.”
“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.”
“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”
“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.”
David Hume
“In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”
“...no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.”
Jonathan Swift
“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”
Alfred Henrye Lloyd: The Will to Doubt
"We would often hide it from others, not to say from ourselves, but it is there, and we all know it to be there. Though many fear doubt, and try to keep it hidden and locked away, the confession of doubt is in fact the beginning of philosophy.Fear is a chief motivator of dogmatism, and dogmatic people are slaves to their fears. This is not genuine confidence. But doubt is not the road to atheism; in fact, doubt is part of a very difficult road to theism."
Free Thought and Official Propaganda
"What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out."
"None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate."
As an example of the benefits of this kind of actual skepticism, Russell describe's Albert Einstein's overturning of the conventional wisdom of physics at that time. What, Bertrand asks, if instead of overturning physics, Einstein had proposed something equally new in the sphere of religion or politics?: "English people would have found elements of Prussianism in his theory; anti-Semites would have regarded it as a Zionist plot; nationalists in all countries would have found it tainted with lily-livered pacifism, and proclaimed it a mere dodge for escaping military service. All the old-fashioned professors would have approached Scotland Yard to get the importation of his writings prohibited. Teachers favourable to him would have been dismissed. He, meantime, would have captured the Government of some backward country, where it would have become illegal to teach anything except his doctrine, which would have grown into a mysterious dogma not understood by anybody. Ultimately the truth or falsehood of his doctrine would be decided on the battlefield, without the collection of any fresh evidence for or against it. This method is the logical outcome of William James’s will to believe. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite"
Assuming that the need for rational doubt or fallibilism is understood to be important, Russell then goes on to address the question of why irrational certainty is so common. He says this is largely because of three factors.
Education — Instead of public education being used to teach children healthy learning attitudes, they are used for the opposite, to indoctrinate children with dogma, often patently false, even known to be false by the officials imposing the education.
Education should have two objects: first, to give definite knowledge—reading and writing, language and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgments for themselves. The first of these we may call information, the second intelligence.
Propaganda — After being taught to read but not weigh evidence and form original opinions, children become adults who are then subjected to dubious or obviously false claims for the rest of their lives.
Economic pressure — The State and political class will use its control of finances and economy to impose its ideas, by restricting the choices of those who disagree.