A great deal of energy is spent evaluating evidence in critical thinking  classes.

The evidence we possess has special salience in our thinking because it is visible, right in front of us. Nassim Taleb, however, reminds us that some of the most important evidence is the evidence we do not have because it is not only unavailable, but also will remain unavailable.

When, as part of critical thinking, we make a habit of inquiring about missing information that would affect the quality of an argument, we do so in major part because we believe the request is a genuine one, in the sense that we fully expect the requested information to be revealed so that we can make a more reflective decision. But suppose there is evidence we will never obtain despite its importance for a thoughtful evaluation of an argument.

While uncertainty pains our humanistic urges to control our world, the discomfort associated with the impenetrability of silent evidence makes nary a dent in its enormous significance. Critical thinking requires humility, and few things teach us as effectively about the need for that attitude as does our interaction with silent evidence.

Despite the efforts of many authors with a dream of a best seller firmly embedded in their consciousness, no one has been able to convince us that he or she can describe the experience of being dead. Yet, the details of that experience, if one dare call it an experience, might have substantial effects on the way we live our lives. Similarly, no one will ever be able to capture what we have lost because prospective female poets and scientists were never freed from a patriarchal history.  We can guess, but the evidence is forever silent.

Why, I wonder, do we speak and write as if words have a single meaning? While it would doubtlessly be tiresome to clarify each of our words.  What reader or listener would have the tolerance to endure such slow-moving discourse?  But we surely need to clarify and seek clarification for key words in our reasoning. Linguists, cognitive psychologists, and our own introspection should have convinced us by now that a word is but a chord struck on the imagination.

And how do we identify key words? What are they key to? To answer that question we should consider why we use words in the first place. There are multiple accurate answers to the question.  We may be simply enjoying the thrill of utterance or desiring to create a vivid description of something that has captured our attention. But critical thinkers are always alert to the possibility that words are used to present an argument, i.e., to move us toward a belief or projected decision.

When words are a component of an argument, the multiple meanings of certain words are crucial to an accurate understanding of what we are being asked to believe.  For example, were I to urge you to read a certain book and provide as a reason that the book will enhance your happiness, you could certainly amuse yourself by asking me what I meant by “read” or “enhance.”  And if you did so, I would need to grant that you may be asking a relevant question. But regardless of what I mean by those words, the key to the argument is a shared understanding of “happiness.” 

Play with alternative meanings of happiness (And a comparison of the meaning in Bhutan and the U.S. is a good place to start.), and your eagerness to turn even the first page in the recommmended book will vary dramatically.  The very force of my argument depends on your desire to pursue the kind of happiness that I see attached to the experience of reading the book.  Even were we to have common definitions of happiness, there would still be multiple reasons why you might not read the book. (Perhaps, the last 4 I suggested were all duds.) But unless you are just curious about conflicting forms of happiness, you are much more likely to read the recommended book after I have defined happiness in a way that meshs comfortably with your own definition.

It is so tempting to think those with whom we communicate share our definitions. A more realistic assumption would be that they do not.

*Thanks to Jesse Griggs for the cartoon.

Most rapists are male.  Therefore, most males are rapists.

When you look at a fallacy after it has been so-labelled, the sloppiness is apparent. Yet, think of the injustice done to citizens of arabic appearance simply because most members of Al Quaeda have that appearance, and are consequently deemed “especially suspect.” An Indian business person going through airline screening might as well get mentally prepared for the strong possibility that he or she will be searched.

With this fallacy, the problem is not so much the qualifier itself, but with the relationship between the qualifier and the entity it is modifying. The ease with which this fallacy is committed should alarm us anew about the need to be especially alert when we see numerical qualifiers.

President Carter recently announced to what he surely knew would be an impending firestorm of public outrage that  ”I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

Yikes. How in the world would one get the numbers to make a claim like that one?

If only he had not said “overwhelming portion” his claim, it seems to me would have been defensible. The magnitude of qualifiers matters big time in terms of the quality of an argument. His reasoning that he had lived in the South and seen the ugliness of racism gives him no special vantage point for making a numerical assessment of that degree. On the other hand, had he said “some not insignificant portion”, I , at least would have found it impossible to gainsay his conclusion.

Most journalists who responded, in my hearing anyway, engaged in blindness to frequency modifiers that was even more egregious.  Again and again they derided President Carter for having said what he never said, viz., “He should know that many people just do not like the policies of the President.”

I somehow believe that President Carter is well aware of that piece of  ”wisdom” that journalist after journalist sanctimoniously repeated as if President Carter were a naughty schoolboy. Notice the license here with respect to numerical qualifiers.  Apparently, they had no awareness that there is nothing logically improbable about “overwhelming portion” and “many people” sharing this argumentative bed. They were vigorously pushing the argument that may never have needed to exist. And, oh, the smugness of the delivery!

Garrett Hardin warns us against what he calls cognitive innumeracy. He doesn’t mean so much that our arithmetic and statistical tools are decrepit.  Rather, he warns us against not including numbers when numbers are absolutely required to make sense out of an argument.  In other words, some arguments imply magnitude, proportion, and size relationships, but the person making the argument or processing it does not seem to appreciate the need for the numbers.

In simple instances of innumeracy there is a claim that X is greater than Y with no reference to whether the difference is tiny or gargantuan.  Either through inability or guile, the author of the argument and the recipient form a partnership of innumeracy, one rife with manipulative potential.

Critical thinking requires constant vigilance for instances where numbers are almost everything in terms of the quality of the argument, but the person making the argument either withholds or does not realize the significance of the numbers.

My experience with those who teach and write about critical thinking suggests an awkwardness around CT talk that moves away, even a little, from logic and empirical proofs. That awkwardness is as understandable as it is troubling. Yes, the use of concepts like emotion, values, attitudes, faith, hunches, and intuition to justify conclusions is a huge problem. However, logic and empirical proofs are frequently abused to justify outlandish conclusions. We know they are, but we have the good sense not to push back from their usefulness simply because as tools they can be misused.

In this blog I wanted to focus on the importance of careful thought about particular attitudes–ones that are primary in the sense that when they are not present, all the critical thinking training in the world will not encourage greater magnitudes of critical thinking. Anyone who has taught critical thinking knows that a subset of students are quite proficient in learning the critical thinking game for classroom purposes.

Such students earn A’s. Then you have the opportunity to see them in action after the class is included, and, gasp, you are shocked. How could my phenomenal teaching have been so ineffective? The same students might be able to demonstrate on command a satisfying array of critical thinking skills.

What happened?

The learner played the teacher’s game, but the learner saw no more need or efficacy for critical thinking skills than he probably saw for the algebra class in which he was the star pupil.

While what I am saying is impractical, a pre-CT course or experience in which the learner came to feel the depths of the problems caused by a lack of critical thinking would seem to provide the attitudinal framework such that CT is internalized and enjoyed as it is being learned. Providing learners with disaster scenarios resulting from the absence of CT was a major objective of the “Medical Mistakes” course that at one time was taught at the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona as a CT course. For some students, reading an outstanding book like Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph Hallinan might so flood them with the dangers of sloppy thinking that they would be eager to acquire mental antidotes.

Later blog entries will focus on specific attitudes that are prerequisites for regularized CT. My single point here is—don’t overlook the mental frame the learner has toward CT in the rush to teach them a series of valuable CT skills.