In my first post I touched on one of the fundamental tenets of critical thinking, which bears repeating:

Be committed, first and foremost, to getting at the truth.

This is not only a fundamental tenet, but is also the purpose of critical thinking. It is why we should want to engage in critical thinking in the first place.

This seems axiomatic. Naturally we would want to get at the truth, wouldn’t we? Well, no, not naturally. Too often we are more interested in defending our opinions. As John Kenneth Galbraith once said, “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” We arrogantly believe that our opinions equate to the truth, or we engage in wishful thinking, subconsciously trying to bend the truth to our opinions rather than the other way around. These behaviors are part of human nature, and that’s why the critical thinker must keep the purpose of getting at the truth in mind at all times. It doesn’t come naturally.

So getting at the truth is why we want to be critical thinkers. But I have not yet explicitly defined what critical thinking is. Today I would like to back up and do just that. Here goes:

Critical thinking is the set of practices and attitudes intended to get us as close as possible to the truth.

That’s it. That’s all there is to critical thinking: practices, attitudes, and the truth. Of course, the devil is in the details.

First, let’s talk about the truth. The truth is unknown and in some cases unknowable; we must go find it, or at least get as close to it as we can. To do so, we must overcome numerous obstacles, including our own incomplete knowledge, a lack of information and uncertainty inherent in the information we do have, and our own human biases and shortcomings. At the end of the day we’d like to be able to say that we’ve arrived at the most objective and justifiable conclusions possible, given the obstacles we’ve had to cope with. This is an important feature of critical thinking: that it allows us to arrive at well-justified conclusions. There’s no guarantee that we will be right, but we will have reason to believe we are as right as we can realistically expect to be.

Another important point: Note that I said critical thinking consists of practices and attitudes. I did not say procedures because there is no cookbook recipe one can follow to “do” critical thinking.

Now let’s look briefly at the practices of critical thinking. These include all the standard cognitive skills such as informal logic, reasoning, inference, interpretation, evaluation, analysis, and synthesis. But more importantly, they also include reflective practices that seek to understand and avoid the various human biases and pitfalls of good thinking. More on this in a future post; for now, suffice it to say that critical thinking demands that we be very reflective about our thinking and try to catch ourselves when we start to let biases and fallacies pollute our thought processes. In short, critical thinking is not so much about our cognitive skills as much as it is about how we apply our cognitive skills to arrive at well-justified positions.

Finally, let’s take a quick look at the attitudes of a critical thinker. The three most important attitudes are intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and skepticism. Intellectual humility is the opposite of arrogance; it requires critical thinkers to not be too proud of themselves, to hold their opinions at arms length, and to admit at all times the possibility that they aren’t as smart or as right as they believe they are. Open mindedness and skepticism form a balancing act; we wish to be open to as many viewpoints as possible and not dismiss ideas that initially may seem untenable, yet at the same time we should remain appropriately skeptical of unjustified claims, claims not well supported by evidence, and evidence of questionable pedigree.

The preceding has been a very broad characterization of critical thinking. I’ll go into much more detail on the practices and attitudes of critical thinking in future posts. I’ll get off the stage today by ending with a quote:

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probably reason why so few engage in it.

- Henry Ford