Think With Socrates An Introduction To Critical Thinking 1st Edition

[Adam Makin]

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My aim in this post is not to find the holy grail of a perfect definition but to begin to focus on the human side of it and ask, who (or what) exemplifies or characterises critical thinking? After all, there can't be thinking without thinkers. Why? oh why do so many of us try to define it abstracted away from the person?

Another aim is that I try to do critical thinking as I write about it so that you can see how one person does it, (your's truly). Think of this as an implicit, hidden curriculum that is congruent with the explicit curriculum that I am writing about.

Socrates loved asking people difficult questions like what is virtue? What is justice? And when his sparring partner could not give him precise definitions, it appeared that Socrates won the argument. Whether there is such a thing called the Socratic Fallacy or not, I do think we can use words successfully without being able to define them. And this applies to critical thinking.

Or think of the colour green. Pretend to do this: define the colour green to someone who has never seen green before. It is no good to say it has a wavelength of about 540 nanometres. It is much easier to show people the colour.

Think of one of your closest friends. Can you define them? If you have another acquaintance who has never met them but wants to know them, it is much easier just to introduce them to each other. You can know something so well without being able to define it.

On the other hand, those who think they know more about critical thinking: academics, lecturers, philosophers and researchers, tend to use stipulative definitions because they think there is close to one or at least a very narrow range of meanings that defines critical thinking. And that is the meaning of what it should mean. And, boo! down with everything else that does not conform to our definition!

Hence, we have a difference of opinion between those who talk about it a lot in their practise and profession without being able to clearly define what it means; (and so, almost anything can be considered critical thinking);

For example: for the Buddhist, reality is illusory and in constant flux; for the Hindu reality is permanent and never changing. These positions were too one-sided. There is a middle way according to the Jain. It is too simple to think that the truth is either one way or the other. I am not suggesting they compromised and thought truth was in the middle. No, they avoided simplicity by not being dogmatic and one-sided while they synthesised their view of reality by looking at things from multiple perspectives. They thought that in some respects, reality was constantly changing and in other respects, reality doesn't change at all. Jain philosophy makes for fantastic conflict resolution.

By analogy, I hold that critical thinking is complex and it does no good to define it just one way or the other. There is a bit of truth in all definitions though perhaps some definitions are better than others.

When you admire someone for their critical thinking abilities you are actually pointing to them and thereby defining descriptively what a critical thinker is, and also defining stipulatively what a critical thinker should be. This is making an ostensive definition.

A child asks a parent, what is a mandarin? The parent points to one they have handy and replies, this is a mandarin. It is easy to do that. To say it is like an orange except smaller just confuses it with small oranges. Children learn a lot through ostensive definitions.

For inspiration and to get a closer look at what I am talking about, consider the character played by Henry Fonda in the 1957 film Twelve Angry Men - a great movie to watch if you are ever summoned to go on jury duty. After all, the virtuous juror must be a critical thinker.

Juries are experts of the evidence where their role is make judgments about what to believe (is there enough good evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to pronounce the defendant guilty?) and what to do (given what we know, should we determine a verdict of guilty or not-guilty?)

If you have watched this movie ask yourself what is it about the character that was most influential? What is the character's knowledge, or skill, or attitude that made a difference? What makes them exemplary?

Dr Robert Anderson teaches and writes about critical thinking and philosophy. Contact me if you have any questions about critical thinking. When I have more time to write I will make sure my posts are shorter.

Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments in order to form a judgement by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation.[1] The application of critical thinking includes self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of the mind;[2] thus, a critical thinker is a person who practices the skills of critical thinking or has been trained and educated in its disciplines.[3] Philosopher Richard W. Paul said that the mind of a critical thinker engages the person's intellectual abilities and personality traits.[4] Critical thinking presupposes assent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use in effective communication and problem solving, and a commitment to overcome egocentrism and sociocentrism.[5][6]

Socrates established the unreliability of Authority and of authority figures to possess knowledge and consequent insight; that for an individual man or woman to lead a good life that is worth living, that person must ask critical questions and possess an interrogative soul,[8] which seeks evidence and then closely examines the available facts, and then follows the implications of the statement under analysis, thereby tracing the implications of thought and action.[9]

As a form of co-operative argumentation, Socratic questioning requires the comparative judgment of facts, which answers then would reveal the person's irrational thinking and lack of verifiable knowledge. Socrates also demonstrated that Authority does not ensure accurate, verifiable knowledge; thus, Socratic questioning analyses beliefs, assumptions, and presumptions, by relying upon evidence and a sound rationale.[10]

As a type of intellectualism, the development of critical thinking[11] is a means of critical analysis that applies rationality to develop a critique of the subject matter.[12] According to the Foundation for Critical Thinking,[13] in 1987 the U.S. National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defined critical thinking as the "intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action."[14]

In the term critical thinking, the word critical, (Grk. κριτικός = kritikos = "critic") derives from the word critic and implies a critique; it identifies the intellectual capacity and the means "of judging", "of judgement", "for judging", and of being "able to discern".[15] The intellectual roots of critical[16] thinking are as ancient as its etymology, traceable, ultimately, to the critical reasoning of the Presocractic philosophers,[17] as well as the teaching practice and vision of Socrates[18] 2,500 years ago who discovered by a method of probing questioning that people could not rationally justify their confident claims to knowledge.

Contemporary critical thinking scholars have expanded these traditional definitions to include qualities, concepts, and processes such as creativity, imagination, discovery, reflection, empathy, connecting knowing, feminist theory, subjectivity, ambiguity, and inconclusiveness. Some definitions of critical thinking exclude these subjective practices.[30][19]

The study of logical argumentation is relevant to the study of critical thinking. Logic is concerned with the analysis of arguments, including the appraisal of their correctness or incorrectness.[34] In the field of epistemology, critical thinking is considered to be logically correct thinking, which allows for differentiation between logically true and logically false statements.[35]

In "First wave" logical thinking, the thinker is removed from the train of thought, and the analysis of connections between concepts or points in thought is ostensibly free of any bias. In his essay Beyond Logicism in Critical Thinking Kerry S. Walters describes this ideology thus: "A logistic approach to critical thinking conveys the message to students that thinking is legitimate only when it conforms to the procedures of informal (and, to a lesser extent, formal) logic and that the good thinker necessarily aims for styles of examination and appraisal that are analytical, abstract, universal, and objective. This model of thinking has become so entrenched in conventional academic wisdom that many educators accept it as canon".[30] Such principles are concomitant with the increasing dependence on a quantitative understanding of the world.[citation needed]

In the 'second wave' of critical thinking, authors consciously moved away from the logocentric mode of critical thinking characteristic of the 'first wave'. Although many scholars began to take a less exclusive view of what constitutes critical thinking, rationality and logic remain widely accepted as essential bases for critical thinking. Walters argues that exclusive logicism in the first wave sense is based on "the unwarranted assumption that good thinking is reducible to logical thinking".[30]

The list of core critical thinking skills includes observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and metacognition. According to Reynolds (2011), an individual or group engaged in a strong way of critical thinking gives due consideration to establish for instance:[36]

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