Definition, Key Elements
What is critical thinking? It is "the art of making clear, reasoned judgments based on interpreting, understanding, applying and synthesizing evidence gathered from observation, reading and experimentation." (Burns, Sinfield Essential Study Skills 2016, quoted University of Edinburgh "Critical Thinking" webpage.) Let me break it down into the following essential elements — here, I mostly follow the aforementioned UoE page:
- When reading, try to answer the question of "Who, what, where, when?"— basic factual stuff.
- Who wrote the assigned reading?
- What is its title? What is its genre? (Is it a tragic play? A fictional short story? Something else?)
- What is it about? What is the basic structure of its argument (non-fiction) or plot (fiction)? If fiction, who are the main characters? When and where is the story set?
- What is the historical, geographic, and / or cultural context within which the author wrote? (Classical Athens, 500-300 BCE? Early Imperial Rome, 1st century CE? Twenty-first century America?)
- Identify and evaluate arguments in the target text.
- What is the author or (in dialogues, plays, fiction generally) speaker trying to say — what is the larger point?
- What is convincing about that? What isn't? Why? (For "why?" I'm asking you to explain your reasoning and to cite evidence)
- Be on the lookout for bias. Is the author saying what they say with an ulterior motive, a concealed reason for saying it, one that interferes with the author's objectivity? Bias in your target text, that is, the one that you're discussing, deserves comment. Bias in a secondary source diminishes the usefulness of that source.
- Formulate your own arguments.
- Pull together what you've read, and what you've surmised about what you've read, into a claim of your own. ("In work X we see author Y laying out an expansive, yet flawed, theory of Z. That theory presents itself as inherently valid, yet it betrays the author's ideological commitment to A, B, and C")
- Be prepared to support your claim with reasoned arguments and with evidence: facts, examples, documentation. Avoid extreme, sweeping, or tendentious assertions. Aim for circumspection and nuance.
- Be on the lookout for bias in your own writing, and especially for confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out evidence and arguments that favor one's preferences, prejudices, and preconceptions; more below.
- Anticipate and respond to reasonable objections. Say I want to argue that Socrates in Plato's Gorgias serves as a mouthpiece for a thinker, Plato, who is deeply hostile to rhetoric, period. Well, OK, but, if I'm thinking the matter through critically (employing CT), I cannot make that claim without responding to evidence in Plato's other rhetoric-focused dialogue, the Phaedrus. There, Socrates shows himself to be an extremely capable rhetorician. He even admits, non-ironically, that rhetoric has its place. Indeed, he lays out a basis for theorizing rhetoric and for systematizing its teaching.
I'll admit that numbers 2. and 3. at times merge into the same thing. Still, both rely heavily on a firm grasp of 1.
A Few Commonly Encountered Fallacies
Here are a few ways that a writer/presenter's argumentation can go wrong. Let's be on the lookout for them, whether in our own writing/presenting or in that of others, including our sources:
Sweeping generalization. Avoid unsubstantiated, blanket characterizations, such as, "Euripides never shows a positive outlook on life." But has the writer/speaker read all Euripides' plays, including the lost ones?
Another term for that is categorical claims, things claimed to be true for an entire class (category) of thing: "All humans have two eyes." Do they? "The Greeks always sought to live by the maxim, 'Nothing to excess.' " Did they? Can you prove that? Do you have evidence?
If not, please try to avoid such exaggerations. We often have to generalize; that is, indeed, the point of these papers, at least in part. But we have to do so validly, which requires nuance. What is nuance? Defined as "a subtle or slight variation or difference in meaning, expression, feeling, etc." (OED), for our purposes, "nuance" will refer to the practice of noting fine distinctions, of exploring complexity, of seeking a more precise or sensitive understanding of things, in short, of avoiding oversimplification and sweeping generalization. A nuanced treatment will not ignore those all-important "gray areas." Nuance is one area where our critical thinking skills come into play.
Sometimes, not always, the fix is easy: words like, "often," many," "typically," rather than, "always," "every," "inevitably." Still, be sure you know what you are talking about.
Exaggerated assertion. Exaggerated assertion is overstating a more or less reasonable fact to give it more rhetorical power.
EXAGGERATED: "Since time immemorial, humanity has been struggling with the problem of balancing the need for enlightened leadership with democratic decision-making as a political imperative." (Yes, an often encountered dilemma in democracy. But do democracy and its problematics date back to the beginning of time? I don't think so. . .)
BETTER: "Time and again, the need for enlightened leadership has had to be balanced with democratic decision-making as a political imperative"
Argument by assertion is trying to convince your reader that such-and-such is so simply by stating, often with emphasis, often through repetition, but without any proof, that it is indeed so, as in, "In what follows I shall argue that Pericles, leader of the democracy, ruled as if a tyrant. Let us start by noticing that Pericles most emphatically ruled as if a tyrant. Indeed, Pericles might as well have born the title 'king' or 'tyrant.' End of story."
Yet that is hardly the end of the story, for we are missing all sorts of evidence and argumentation.
Unwarranted assumption, insufficiently demonstrated assertion. Virtually the same as argument by assertion, an unwarranted assumption is a statement or assertion presenting as if self-evident something that in fact requires proof. Be especially careful with introductions, where writers/speakers can be tempted to parade "facts" often as doubtful as they are irrelevant.
Closely related are insufficiently demonstrated assertions. They suppose that limited evidence can decisively prove a claim requiring extensive and nuanced argumentation and proof. Consider the following: "Plutarch's Pericles proves that the statesman was a tyrant." While it's true that Plutarch's biography explores perspectives treating Pericles as something other than a committed democrat, its evidence is nowhere near enough to justify the claim that Pericles was a tyrant. It would have been better for the student simply to write a paper exploring the theme of tyranny in Plutarch's Pericles.
More generally, while some facts stand easily on their own, whether because of common knowledge or for other reasons (e.g., "Pericles died in 429 BCE"), there are all sorts of facts that require substantiation. Check, document, cite, SHOW.
Confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out evidence and arguments that favor one's own preferences, prejudices, and preconceptions, and to ingnore all else that doesn't support the argument one wants to make. This is a truly insidious form of bias to which we, as human beings, are all naturally prone. Say I like rhetoric (and I do) and take exception to Socrates' attacks against same in the Gorgias (again, guilty as charged!). If I ignore all the valid points made by Socrates in that dialogue, if I ignore evidence not to my liking, I have fallen into the trap of confirmation bias. In the film, Thank You for Smoking, the scientist, Dr. Ernhardt Von Grupten-Mundt, who can "disprove gravity," does not worry about his own confirmation bias. You don't have that luxury. (Being director of research for the big tobacco lobby, Dr. Von Grupten-Mundt has little inducement to demonstrate anything but the inconclusive nature of evidence for the risks of smoking. Let's not be him.)
Speculative argument, yet another variation on the same theme. Sometimes our ideas can exercise great appeal, but if we're to argue them, we have to ask, Can we prove them? Can we at least show they're plausible? If we can't, yet we persist in pushing the idea, we're speculating, that is, guessing. Example:
"Cleon is presented by our sources as thoroughly contemptible. Indeed, one can easily imagine him as the type of leader who would foam at the mouth when giving a speech. And just such manifestations of physical rage surely explain why writers/speaker despised him so."
However compelling this idea of a Cleon foaming at the mouth is, it is wholly untenable. It's an imaginative flight based on too little evidence.
Speculative argument has, in short, no place in expository writing.
Tendentious assertion. Technically not a fallacy, it nevertheless is to be avoided. "Tendentious" means "marked by a tendency in favor of a particular point of view" (Merriam-Webster), in other words, "biased," but in a manipulative way. For instance, in the film Thank You for Smoking, it is tendentious for Nick Naylor to claim that his anti-smoking opponent "should be ashamed" of exploiting a cancer victim in pursuit of funding. In saying that, Nick illustrates a whole host of logical fallacies in hopes of prejudicing his audience against his opposite number and of shifting attention and blame from himself. His anti- anti-smoking mini-speech is, therefore, tendentious in the extreme. That Nick is also on the whole correct is beside the point. (Beside the point why? Because Nick, though correct, makes no effort to prove his claim.)
Circular argument, tautology, etc., that is, argument premised (whether explicitly or implicitly) on something it sets out to prove — a treacherous fallacy indeed, and one that can sneak up on the best of writers/speaker and thinkers unawares. The Latin term is petitio principii, usually translated as "begging the question": the fallacy "begs" (petit), better, "seeks to establish," one of its principia, its "premises." (Hence the phrase, "to beg the question" is used incorrectly when used to mean, "to raise the question," something very different.) As Aristotle noted, argument must always progress from the more certain to the less. Circular argument or question-begging proceeds from the less certain to the less certain.
Take, for instance: "Snow is white because of its pure and colorless essence." That's like saying "Snow is white because it's white," a circular or tautological statement.
A priori (aprioristic) argument. Arguing a priori is arguing from a premise taken to be self-evidently true. Now, aprioristic reasoning isn't all bad. On the contrary, it is, among other things, the basis of (virtually?) all mathematics, for instance, the geometrical proofs students do in high school. (In Euclidean geometry, it is taken as self-evidently true that two parallel lines never intersect. Those are called axioms.)
Outside of math and abstract logic, however, aprioristic reasoning needs to be handled with special care because it can ignore or overlook evidence. Take, for instance, the statement, "To kill one's children being unthinkable in any society, we are meant to loath Medea for what she has done." That statement takes infanticide (the killing of one's child) as self-evidently evil. Well, OK, but just how unthinkable is it/was it, necessarily, in all human culture? What about the practice, seemingly quite frequent in ancient Greece, of exposing unwanted newborn children — a practice that in many cases must have led to the death of newborns? That's unthinkable for us, maybe, but if it's thinkable for anyone (e.g., ancient Greeks), then it's not unthinkable in the way suggested in the statement above. Better: "It is all but inconceivable to kill one's own child, and we may be forgiven for wondering how Euripides' audience would have reacted to that particular twist in the plot."