Critically critical

A very nice article criticising critical thinking. Or rather, criticising the idea that we can and should teach it as its own course.

Those who tend to buy into the view that critical thinking is a general skill can fall into two main traps. The first is to view the contexts for thinking critically as interchangeable. This is what we see when science lessons become projects involving cardboard boxes and LEDs. The precise science covered is not considered important because students are developing their skills of creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and so on.

I'm not sure what these kinds of projects are - I never heard of such things before. However, I agree with the general sentiment :

If you view these skills as being highly domain specific, then these students have merely developed the ability to think critically, creatively and so on in the domain of cardboard boxes and LEDs. The value of this to the student then becomes debatable, especially when contrasted with actually learning some science.

I would suggest that wherever and however critical thinking is taught, it should be explicit. If it's explicit, it can become habitual and reflective : you can think about whether you're applying the lessons learned and whether they are indeed correct. If you make things too implicit, there's a risk of this domain specificity business : poetry becomes a bunch of random words with no greater meaning; Shakespeare fares little better; science becomes a bunch of nuts and bolts that are only useful in highly limited ways. So make it explicit in order to make it habitual and general. That doesn't necessarily mean it needs its own dedicated lesson though.

The second trap is to think that, because these skills are general, you can teach a discrete critical thinking course or bolt a critical thinking module onto the curriculum that deals with these strategies in the abstract or in model contexts.When we start to consider the kinds of strategies that may be more generally applicable, we often alight on maxims such as ‘look at the problem from different perspectives’ or the kinds of rules-of-thumb embedded in logical fallacies.

I'm in two minds about this. I found the "Calling Bullshit" course to be excellent. But is assessing the truth of a statement, or whether it's misleading or not (as the course teaches) really critical thinking or just a peculiar variety of analytic thinking ? I don't know. I do further agree with the idea that a small set of rules is nowhere near enough :

Let’s imagine you wade into a discussion between two public health officials about the health impacts of smoking with your pithy observation that ‘correlation is not causation’. You are likely to get short shrift. Why? Because they have a lot more contextual, domain-relevant knowledge. Now consider someone making claims that school exclusions cause knife crime based upon statistics showing rising levels of both. Here, the maxim that ‘correlation is not causation’ may point you in the right direction. It is plausible, for instance, that the same thing that causes students to be excluded from school is causing the knife crime. Armed only with your maxim, how will you know when to apply it and when not to apply it? The only way you can figure that out is by learning lots about the evidence behind smoking or knife crime. In other words, the way you ultimately establish a reasoned position is by learning about the domain in question. The maxim alone could lead you as often into error as to the truth.

Likewise, those lists of "fallacies" that repeatedly go viral are always fraught with difficulties : ad hominem isn't a fallacy if character is the relevant factor; arguments from authority aren't automatically wrong; slippery slopes are only sometimes slippery. But just because these maxims are tricky, does that mean we cannot teach how to assess the truth in a more general way ? Are there fundamental rules for deciding what's true ? Or am I again confusing this special sort of analytical thinking - let's call it critical appraisal - with genuinely critical thinking ?

Again, I don't know. I would say at the very least we should teach critical thinking explicitly in philosophy classes, which can examine different kinds of knowledge. I would also say that if there is a dedicated course which is sorely missing, it's statistics. I don't mean the kind you learn about in maths lessons where they teach you about the binomial and Gaussian distributions, but a more general look at how to interpret data. That's pretty close to the idea of a critical thinking course, but not quite the same - not everything revolves around numbers, after all.

If critical thinking just represent the highest levels of performance within a traditional subject discipline, then we do not need critical thinking courses or a special focus on critical thinking. We just need to teach our subjects really well. 

Seems reasonable. I remain on the fence about it - surely, sheer knowledge is not enough. But regardless of whether critical thinking is something we can disect to find the true basis of rational analysis that we could apply to all domains, we surely should teach classes explicitly dealing with the kinds of situations where we suspect critical thinking is in trouble. Don't expect someone who can deconstruct a sonnet to be able to apply the same things to political speeches. Teach them about politics instead : how elections work, how candidates are selected, what happens outside of public debates. Don't expect someone who can correctly install electrical cabling in the walls of your house to be proficient about deconstructing opinion pieces in newspapers, or be adept at spotting clickbait. Teach them about it instead. (By "instead", I of course mean "separately".) That would seem to avoid the issue altogether.

Teaching children how to think etc.

Another decade, another article in The Conversation illustrating the irony that advocates of critical thinking seldom think critically about it. There are two interlinked but distinct concepts that we have to consider about critical thinking. Firstly, how general are these skills and, secondly, how transferable are they?