Critical thinking is disobedient, not correct
Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas
Critical thinking should disobey before being reasonable. The freedom of questioning everything - reason included - and the defying of received opinion and of face value must be unfettered.
Those who profess that critical thinking is nothing but inspecting beliefs and arguments to be realistic and disciplined, put a yoke on their own neck and then preach freedom.
True critical thinking tests the world, and itself, with no holds barred. The first instinctive move of critical sense is to resist complacency and sway, not to conform, nor be self-satisfied or disciplined. Realism and method come as a necessary second move, born from the initial intuitive drive, to check and to justify the need to criticise.
*
I claim that what is called and taught today under the name "critical thinking" is incomplete, only one face of the coin. We are presented with a critique of thinking but the other face of this Janus, critical spirit, the gadfly, is ignored, swept under the carpet. Critique of thinking waters down critical thinking.
The manuals of “critical thinking”, while teaching what is good and bad argument, also prescribe what exists, what truth is, what must happen in our head, what criteria to use, as if those criteria were sacred axioms above suspicion; but they are not. Such manuals are rich with procedures, skills, logical rules and examples of fallacies, vital knowledge, but incomplete; if you just follow the rules, your thinking will be utterly uncritical. I dare you that this much is not critical thinking.
*
You can experience critical thinking with or without method, even against Method.
Critical thinking is a grain of rebellion against authority and conformity. The critical thinker respects authority only on merit and accepts received knowledge only after understanding it.
The root of our critical thinking is our critical sense - an attitude, a disposition, an instinct. Critical sense roams as orderly as storm. It takes liberty to approve or reject, and proceeds to undo or to support, rationally or irrationally, often because so we please or itch. It may rise against justified belief, repeal what everybody admires or defend that which everyone around us disapproves. We have a right to differ. It is reasonable to agree to disagree. We own the right to select out as we select in, to shun or prefer, to contest and to dream away.
We have the mental right to depart from what is; even when the present is faultless. You can dislike something perfect.
Critical thinking may start something new. You can be disapproving without being right or proving that you are right. This defiance is a reaction of life, of the “me”, not a syllogism.
Live critical thinking uses two measures “deux poids, deux mesures” [1], not one: besides testing against reality, standards and other people’s views, it is also testing things against us: our interests, our taste, our understanding and even the most obscure of our feelings.
*
Something else, liberation, our own point of view, fairness, new truth, life – not just copies of copies - comes from discontent, first intuitive or irrational and later, hopefully, justified. Creation is undoing, changing, replacing. It is asking: “Why so?” and “Why not otherwise?” It certainly needs to demolish the given and requires a disorder space to turn; at least here in your mind, where your freedom to swing your fist does not meet someone else’s nose.
Your critical thinking is personal. It follows your interest and intentions and is grounded by your understanding, the image in your mind, not someone else’s. It is a core part of your freedom to consider any choices, to be an autonomous agent, a person. It is not neutral. We have the right to feel and to say no in our mind, long before we ground our opposition by strict argument and justify criticism with valid proofs. That will come later. Any creation, any thought of change says “no!” to what is. Or, it says “yes” to something else which is not. Not yet.
To make this simple, critical thinking is the one by which you have the courage, at any time needed, to draw a line and say: “Now I will think for myself, with as little as I know, and I will decide what is true for me and what not, what is good for me and what is bad, what to refrain from and what to do.”
Your critical thinking is a mixture of intuition and thinking. It happens informally, hidden in your mind, not publicly. This is why it should know no inhibition and no mercy. It has the right to be as wild and iconoclastic as Nietzsche shows it to be. Nothing should be impossible in the mind when there are no rules and material limitations; there is no guilt in harbouring any thought that may arise, without censure, moral or logical. You should not kill your baby-thoughts because they are born wild.
*
However, if we are not mad, we become accountable, morally and logically, for the conclusions we make ours and when thoughts come out in words and deeds. The intuitive critical thinking is fast and risky; it needs some slow logic when we communicate it. When we cast our criticism among people we must becoherent, reasonable, moderate and constructive as persistently as we were anarchic inside the crucible of our mind. To paraphrase the common place of the notorious Dr Johnson, We may follow Fancy for our guide but must take Reason as our companion. [2]
*
A critical temper questions everything, ceaselessly: to understand, to help or to fight. It has a habit to test everything from all sides; to judge things sound after it knocks on them. It is taking the freedom to see what is inside things, underneath at their root and behind them, "in the sky and below the earth"; not to submit instead to dominant opinion like mouton. There is nothing wrong in this urge to see things with our own eyes, touch them like Thomas the Unbeliever, and judge them with our intuition or common sense, as modest and fallible as they may be.
The bigoted, try to do away with the critical temper by bad-mouthing it and calling it "critical spirit" - what a sad translation of the French "esprit critique"! Without this perverse interpretation of the words in English, we could call my subject "critical spirit" and see the critical spirit as the precursor and initiator of its complement, the official "critical thinking" that checks validity and argument.
Critical thinking is, as I claim, a method of the person. When I consider my own habits of criticism I observe a constant preference, a style to challenge and test things on all sides, with insistence, to check whether or not they sound empty. This, in all sympathy and even when I have little doubt about the truth or the correctness of the matter at hand. I feel that submitting ideas to showers of contrary arguments and challenges is useful, valuable and constructive. My method is to start by advancing one critique, confronting it with the proposed idea and advancing until the argument or the idea “wins or loses” and convinces me. Then, I signal victory of one critique or concede defeat, with no hard feelings, it is “de bonne guerre”. After this I advance the next objection and follow the same cycle, and so on. I could do this for a long time, undisturbed by the fall of my successive arguments. I am pleased when my arguments fall. The aim is to test and to improve, to strengthen by the vaccine of critique, not to win or to destroy. Interesting to see that such a functioning of the mind appears as unbearable and even dishonest to some people. Too bad for them!
*
Critical thinking is also a key part of good judgment: it is personal understanding.
Before reasoning your critical thinking sets the ground on which you will judge; it finds or even gives meaning, clarifies what things are for you, points at the essential. It chooses your rules. It elaborates your truth, the beliefs based on which you will judge. Ahead of applying properly prescribed criteria your critical sense will choose what criteria to apply.
In my experience, most of the things I understood that did not work, were not detected by formal rules, they were intuitions of what things really meant, what was really important, what rules were adequate, of what felt not right or guessing that the proposed choices were a wrong choice, other choices of choices being possible.
*
If you begin your thinking in submission, even to healthy logical rules, instead of starting divergent, you are doomed to only find in the end what you knew already. You will have to grow old before you earn the right to think. And then, the experts will still explain you that you did not understand.
Imagine a world where you can only dislike or reject something, where you can manifest your taste, follow your preference or vote only after proving that your thinking is scientifically grounded and logically correct. See how absurd it is! Therefore, you should not postpone your critical drive until you master method, even with a risk to be mistaken.
*
The books on “critical thinking”, by explaining what is good and bad argument, also prescribe what must happen in your head. They are full of procedures, skills, logical rules and examples of fallacies, very useful, valuable, true, vital to learn from, but, if you just follow the literal rules, your thinking will be utterly uncritical. Is then critical thinking a mere inspection or arguments and detection of faults? Advancing by the book? Censoring your own thinking as you censor somebody else's arguments? This is misleading. Where is the method to challenge things, the world? Sometimes I wonder if the authors ever questioned what they want critical thinking to achieve: change the world or tame the mind?
*
Good judgment follows, after the anarchic choices of criticism and it is still not by the book; if your judgment is to be good, it embraces complex, contradictory, incomplete knowledge, the one we have in our real life. Its point of view is not objective precision. What counts most for good judgment are preferences, norms and values of the human person not of scientific truth or logic. Certainly, ideas should follow and be consistent but the aim is in the good sense of the content not the perfection of the form.
*
Critical thinking may start in uprising but it should not end in rebellion.
Self examining comes next, to make you master, not slave, of your own critical reaction. Now, to free your deliberation and not to be blinded by passion or wishful thinking you need to rise above yourself, above your critical drive, to understand which is your point of view [3], what moved you to be critical, and if you speak, why you speak and what you want to achieve; otherwise, your criticism is like the buzzing of flies.
Now it is time to accept if on reflection you were mistaken or unfair and if you are still attached to your criticism, to find other, better arguments.
Now, when you formulate arguments and speak, there is usage and canons to respect [4]. Now you censor. It is insane to practice all we imagine and feel and it is boorish to punish people with our freedom to think; politeness and prudence preserve from harm!
My view of critical thinking values and includes as you can observe reality check, logic and good scientific method, all the good advice of the "critical thinking" books, but without being reduced to them. It is much larger in scope.
You may not need to be logical when you start thinking, but you do when you conclude. That is the moment to use what you learned from the many books, some excellent, about “critical thinking” . Critique expressed must be consistent inside and fit outside into the limits of accepted reality and of accepted opinion. That is the stage when the proper flow of logic rules and the awareness of fallacies, formal and informal, preserves you from ridicule and defeat. If you cannot cope with this, better keep your mouth shut.
*
PS: Of course, a flaw weakens my view presented here; it is not foolproof. Critical thinking is dangerous anarchy in the head, not for kindergarten. The fool will understand that anything goes. The fool will confuse the birth of ideas with the growth, the verification and the communication of ideas. The convergent thinker will be indignant. He prefers disciplined ideas reflecting reality, not shots in the dark. Who likes chaos? But we need this dark space to conceive the newness which we later analyse and prove. Where there is no sign of pregnancy even the midwifery of Socrates will help no birth.
17.07.2011
© 2011, 2012 Ioan Tenner & Daniel Tenner
_____________________________________
[1] Deuteronomy. 25:13-14 and Proverbs 20:10
[2] The original said “We may take Fancy for a companion, but must follow Reason as our guide.” —DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON, letter to James Boswell in: Boswell James, The life of Samuel Johnson..., vol. 1, Carter, Hendee and Co, Boston, 1832
[3] Gert J. J. Biesta and Geert Jan J.M. Stams, Critical Thinking and the Question of Critique..., Studies in Philosophy and Education 20: 57–74, 2001, Kluwer Academic Publishers
[4] McInerny, D. Q., Being Logical. A Guide to Good Thinking,
Random House, New York, 2004
Those who profess that critical thinking is nothing but inspecting beliefs and arguments to be realistic and disciplined, put a yoke on their own neck and then preach freedom.
True critical thinking tests the world, and itself, with no holds barred. The first instinctive move of critical sense is to resist complacency and sway, not to conform, nor be self-satisfied or disciplined. Realism and method come as a necessary second move, born from the initial intuitive drive, to check and to justify the need to criticise.
*
I claim that what is called and taught today under the name "critical thinking" is incomplete, only one face of the coin. We are presented with a critique of thinking but the other face of this Janus, critical spirit, the gadfly, is ignored, swept under the carpet. Critique of thinking waters down critical thinking.
The manuals of “critical thinking”, while teaching what is good and bad argument, also prescribe what exists, what truth is, what must happen in our head, what criteria to use, as if those criteria were sacred axioms above suspicion; but they are not. Such manuals are rich with procedures, skills, logical rules and examples of fallacies, vital knowledge, but incomplete; if you just follow the rules, your thinking will be utterly uncritical. I dare you that this much is not critical thinking.
*
You can experience critical thinking with or without method, even against Method.
Critical thinking is a grain of rebellion against authority and conformity. The critical thinker respects authority only on merit and accepts received knowledge only after understanding it.
The root of our critical thinking is our critical sense - an attitude, a disposition, an instinct. Critical sense roams as orderly as storm. It takes liberty to approve or reject, and proceeds to undo or to support, rationally or irrationally, often because so we please or itch. It may rise against justified belief, repeal what everybody admires or defend that which everyone around us disapproves. We have a right to differ. It is reasonable to agree to disagree. We own the right to select out as we select in, to shun or prefer, to contest and to dream away.
We have the mental right to depart from what is; even when the present is faultless. You can dislike something perfect.
Critical thinking may start something new. You can be disapproving without being right or proving that you are right. This defiance is a reaction of life, of the “me”, not a syllogism.
Live critical thinking uses two measures “deux poids, deux mesures” [1], not one: besides testing against reality, standards and other people’s views, it is also testing things against us: our interests, our taste, our understanding and even the most obscure of our feelings.
*
Something else, liberation, our own point of view, fairness, new truth, life – not just copies of copies - comes from discontent, first intuitive or irrational and later, hopefully, justified. Creation is undoing, changing, replacing. It is asking: “Why so?” and “Why not otherwise?” It certainly needs to demolish the given and requires a disorder space to turn; at least here in your mind, where your freedom to swing your fist does not meet someone else’s nose.
Your critical thinking is personal. It follows your interest and intentions and is grounded by your understanding, the image in your mind, not someone else’s. It is a core part of your freedom to consider any choices, to be an autonomous agent, a person. It is not neutral. We have the right to feel and to say no in our mind, long before we ground our opposition by strict argument and justify criticism with valid proofs. That will come later. Any creation, any thought of change says “no!” to what is. Or, it says “yes” to something else which is not. Not yet.
To make this simple, critical thinking is the one by which you have the courage, at any time needed, to draw a line and say: “Now I will think for myself, with as little as I know, and I will decide what is true for me and what not, what is good for me and what is bad, what to refrain from and what to do.”
Your critical thinking is a mixture of intuition and thinking. It happens informally, hidden in your mind, not publicly. This is why it should know no inhibition and no mercy. It has the right to be as wild and iconoclastic as Nietzsche shows it to be. Nothing should be impossible in the mind when there are no rules and material limitations; there is no guilt in harbouring any thought that may arise, without censure, moral or logical. You should not kill your baby-thoughts because they are born wild.
*
However, if we are not mad, we become accountable, morally and logically, for the conclusions we make ours and when thoughts come out in words and deeds. The intuitive critical thinking is fast and risky; it needs some slow logic when we communicate it. When we cast our criticism among people we must becoherent, reasonable, moderate and constructive as persistently as we were anarchic inside the crucible of our mind. To paraphrase the common place of the notorious Dr Johnson, We may follow Fancy for our guide but must take Reason as our companion. [2]
*
A critical temper questions everything, ceaselessly: to understand, to help or to fight. It has a habit to test everything from all sides; to judge things sound after it knocks on them. It is taking the freedom to see what is inside things, underneath at their root and behind them, "in the sky and below the earth"; not to submit instead to dominant opinion like mouton. There is nothing wrong in this urge to see things with our own eyes, touch them like Thomas the Unbeliever, and judge them with our intuition or common sense, as modest and fallible as they may be.
The bigoted, try to do away with the critical temper by bad-mouthing it and calling it "critical spirit" - what a sad translation of the French "esprit critique"! Without this perverse interpretation of the words in English, we could call my subject "critical spirit" and see the critical spirit as the precursor and initiator of its complement, the official "critical thinking" that checks validity and argument.
Critical thinking is, as I claim, a method of the person. When I consider my own habits of criticism I observe a constant preference, a style to challenge and test things on all sides, with insistence, to check whether or not they sound empty. This, in all sympathy and even when I have little doubt about the truth or the correctness of the matter at hand. I feel that submitting ideas to showers of contrary arguments and challenges is useful, valuable and constructive. My method is to start by advancing one critique, confronting it with the proposed idea and advancing until the argument or the idea “wins or loses” and convinces me. Then, I signal victory of one critique or concede defeat, with no hard feelings, it is “de bonne guerre”. After this I advance the next objection and follow the same cycle, and so on. I could do this for a long time, undisturbed by the fall of my successive arguments. I am pleased when my arguments fall. The aim is to test and to improve, to strengthen by the vaccine of critique, not to win or to destroy. Interesting to see that such a functioning of the mind appears as unbearable and even dishonest to some people. Too bad for them!
*
Critical thinking is also a key part of good judgment: it is personal understanding.
Before reasoning your critical thinking sets the ground on which you will judge; it finds or even gives meaning, clarifies what things are for you, points at the essential. It chooses your rules. It elaborates your truth, the beliefs based on which you will judge. Ahead of applying properly prescribed criteria your critical sense will choose what criteria to apply.
In my experience, most of the things I understood that did not work, were not detected by formal rules, they were intuitions of what things really meant, what was really important, what rules were adequate, of what felt not right or guessing that the proposed choices were a wrong choice, other choices of choices being possible.
*
If you begin your thinking in submission, even to healthy logical rules, instead of starting divergent, you are doomed to only find in the end what you knew already. You will have to grow old before you earn the right to think. And then, the experts will still explain you that you did not understand.
Imagine a world where you can only dislike or reject something, where you can manifest your taste, follow your preference or vote only after proving that your thinking is scientifically grounded and logically correct. See how absurd it is! Therefore, you should not postpone your critical drive until you master method, even with a risk to be mistaken.
*
The books on “critical thinking”, by explaining what is good and bad argument, also prescribe what must happen in your head. They are full of procedures, skills, logical rules and examples of fallacies, very useful, valuable, true, vital to learn from, but, if you just follow the literal rules, your thinking will be utterly uncritical. Is then critical thinking a mere inspection or arguments and detection of faults? Advancing by the book? Censoring your own thinking as you censor somebody else's arguments? This is misleading. Where is the method to challenge things, the world? Sometimes I wonder if the authors ever questioned what they want critical thinking to achieve: change the world or tame the mind?
*
Good judgment follows, after the anarchic choices of criticism and it is still not by the book; if your judgment is to be good, it embraces complex, contradictory, incomplete knowledge, the one we have in our real life. Its point of view is not objective precision. What counts most for good judgment are preferences, norms and values of the human person not of scientific truth or logic. Certainly, ideas should follow and be consistent but the aim is in the good sense of the content not the perfection of the form.
*
Critical thinking may start in uprising but it should not end in rebellion.
Self examining comes next, to make you master, not slave, of your own critical reaction. Now, to free your deliberation and not to be blinded by passion or wishful thinking you need to rise above yourself, above your critical drive, to understand which is your point of view [3], what moved you to be critical, and if you speak, why you speak and what you want to achieve; otherwise, your criticism is like the buzzing of flies.
Now it is time to accept if on reflection you were mistaken or unfair and if you are still attached to your criticism, to find other, better arguments.
Now, when you formulate arguments and speak, there is usage and canons to respect [4]. Now you censor. It is insane to practice all we imagine and feel and it is boorish to punish people with our freedom to think; politeness and prudence preserve from harm!
My view of critical thinking values and includes as you can observe reality check, logic and good scientific method, all the good advice of the "critical thinking" books, but without being reduced to them. It is much larger in scope.
You may not need to be logical when you start thinking, but you do when you conclude. That is the moment to use what you learned from the many books, some excellent, about “critical thinking” . Critique expressed must be consistent inside and fit outside into the limits of accepted reality and of accepted opinion. That is the stage when the proper flow of logic rules and the awareness of fallacies, formal and informal, preserves you from ridicule and defeat. If you cannot cope with this, better keep your mouth shut.
*
PS: Of course, a flaw weakens my view presented here; it is not foolproof. Critical thinking is dangerous anarchy in the head, not for kindergarten. The fool will understand that anything goes. The fool will confuse the birth of ideas with the growth, the verification and the communication of ideas. The convergent thinker will be indignant. He prefers disciplined ideas reflecting reality, not shots in the dark. Who likes chaos? But we need this dark space to conceive the newness which we later analyse and prove. Where there is no sign of pregnancy even the midwifery of Socrates will help no birth.
17.07.2011
© 2011, 2012 Ioan Tenner & Daniel Tenner
_____________________________________
[1] Deuteronomy. 25:13-14 and Proverbs 20:10
[2] The original said “We may take Fancy for a companion, but must follow Reason as our guide.” —DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON, letter to James Boswell in: Boswell James, The life of Samuel Johnson..., vol. 1, Carter, Hendee and Co, Boston, 1832
[3] Gert J. J. Biesta and Geert Jan J.M. Stams, Critical Thinking and the Question of Critique..., Studies in Philosophy and Education 20: 57–74, 2001, Kluwer Academic Publishers
[4] McInerny, D. Q., Being Logical. A Guide to Good Thinking,
Random House, New York, 2004
