Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines

As a learning tool, argument and decision maps enable students to hone their interpretive and analytical skills. This paper illustrates one effective approach to teaching the diagrammat­ic conventions used in a powerful decision and argument mapping methodology. The twenty example maps included begin with a configuration illustrating one reason offered in support of a conclusion, and build to highly complex maps illustrating the analyses of real world decisions as recorded in interviews and official documents. Using their interpretive and analytical skills, and the simple conventions taught and illustrated here, students and researchers are able to build and to refine maps that show simple arguments, lines of reasoning, unspoken but implicit as­sumptions, pro and con argumentation, individual and group decision making, the influences of reactive cognitive heuristics on decision making, the use of various familiar valid and fallacious inference patterns, and the bolstering phenomenon associated with the use of multiple arguments in support of a given option.

This review essay discusses three articles from the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education (eds. Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett) concerned with outlining the connection between cognitive science and critical thinking. All of the authors explain how recent findings in cognitive science, such as research on heuristics and cognitive biases (e.g. framing effects, the availability heuristic) might be incorporated into the critical thinking curriculum. The authors also elaborate on how recent findings in metacognition can reshape critical thinking pedagogy. For instance, the essays articulate how critical thinking instructors would be wise to broaden the scope of traditional critical thinking content by instructing students in the metacognitive strategies of self-regulation, cognitive monitoring, and evaluation in order to encourage better decision making both inside and outside the classroom.

Stephen Brookfield offers a distinctive conceptualization of and approach to teaching critical thinking. In this review I highlight some major aspects of his approach, and critique his baseline conception. I conclude that, while evaluating assumptions is an important aspect of critical thinking, it is not as important as Brookfield maintains. Instructors of critical thinking should read his book, but they should remain skeptical of its major substantive theoretical commitments.

This essay discusses some developments in informal logic and argumentation theory since 1980, commenting briefly on positive aspects and areas of disappointment.

The dialectical approach to teaching critical thinking is centred on a comparative evaluation of contending arguments, so that generally the strength of an argument for a position can only be assessed in the context of this dialectic. The identification of fallacies, though important, plays only a preliminary role in the evaluation to individual arguments. Our approach to fallacy identification and analysis sees fallacies as argument patterns whose persuasive power is disproportionate to their probative value.

Students often struggle with writing thesis statements. But without a narrow, focused thesis, the essay is often too general and scattered, resulting in an unconvincing and confusing product. This article offers a formula that not only helps writers devise a sharply focused thesis and controlling idea but also gives them a touchstone to help provide relevant, convincing support, as well as create topic sentences and transitions that anchor readers. The formula fosters students’ critical thinking because it helps them proceed dialectically between thesis formulation and the devel­opment of the essay to write with logic, relevance, depth, precision, and clarity, five of the nine standards for critical thinking outlined by Paul and Elder (2012).

This study determined the historical relationship between critical thinking and performance on multiple-choice exams in a large entry-level educational psychology course. The correlations be­tween critical thinking as assessed by scores on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal-S and exam scores ranged from .29 to.44 over a 12-year period (N of 4933). The critical thinking distribution was heavily skewed toward the lower end of the percentile range when compared to normative data for college graduates. The relationship between critical thinking and exam performance approximated a linear relationship, with periodic plateaus in exam scores. Com­parison of exam performance for students scoring at the 1st versus the 99th percentile revealed a letter-grade difference. Additionally, students scoring at the 75th percentile on critical thinking achieved exam scores that did not differ significantly from those of students scoring at the 95th and 99th percentile on critical thinking. Critical thinking predicted exam scores better at higher than lower levels of Grade Point Average.

The California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory (CCTDI) is a commonly used tool for measuring critical thinking dispositions. However, research on the efficacy of the CCTDI in predicting good thinking about students’ own deeply held beliefs is scant. In this paper we report on our study that was designed to gauge the usefulness of the CCTDI in this context, and take some first steps towards designing a better method for measuring strong sense critical thinking.

This article argues that the goal of an undergraduate liberal education should be to educate a competent layperson rather than a disciplinary specialist preparing for graduate school or employment. A competent layperson is someone who has a broad understanding and appreciation of the intellectual landscape, someone who has strong generic intellectual abilities such as critical thinking and research skills which enable them to make inquiries into any area of specialization with efficiency and appropriate confidence. The goal is to develop the skills and understanding necessary for thoughtful citizenship and an intellectually empowered life.

The authors suggest that “critical thinking” is a term that is much used, extravagantly praised, and little understood. Worse, they contend that teaching critical thinking in a business curriculum is made immeasurably more difficult by the fact that, contrary to all evidence, students believe they already understand critical thinking, and thus have no need to learn more. This article contains some remedies for this dilemma. Using Brookfield’s model of critical thinking in the context of business education, the authors offer a case study, “Ultratec,” with teaching notes, which they have found useful in overcoming obstacles to teaching critical thinking. They close by explaining how they have been able to use the Ultratec case to address what they see as the central challenge to teaching critical thinking: It’s difficult to teach anything to people who think they already know it all.

Less than two decades ago, Halpern (1998) presented a convincing approach for teaching critical thought. However, nowhere in her article did she explain how to “get” faculty to teach to thinking skills to transfer across domains of knowledge using: “(a) dispositional or attitudinal component, (b) instruction in and practice with critical thought, (c) structure–training activities, and (d) a metacognitive component used to direct and assess thinking.” (p. 451) It is an open question as to what type of strategies will faculty need to demonstrate to create productive, knowledgeable, thinking citizenry? In this paper I focus on the faculty’s role in promoting the teaching of critical thought, that is, critical thought processes, with particular reference to dental education. Many students can develop processes of critical thought with frequent practice involving the active use of multiple types of ill-structured problems and situations designed to require the ability (1) to recall useful information, (2) to use pattern recognition, (3) to discern pertinent information, (4) to think ahead, and (5) to anticipate outcomes and problems while (6) remaining composed enough so that their emotions do not hinder decision-making skills.

In this review of Mark Weinstein’s Logic, Truth, and Inquiry, a book in which Weinstein explains his conception of the Method of Emerging Truth (MET), the reviewer, Paul Wagner, appreciates Weinstein’s assertion that “The MET attempts to characterize the process of truth emerging as evidence of the epistemic adequacy of the warrants that support theoretical explanations and govern theory driven inferences.” While he finds several things to question in Weinstein’s explanation of this conception, the reviewer, nonetheless, concludes that “This is a book I heartily recommend to every reader especially those interested in critical thinking but whose academic preparation and home is outside philosophy or logic.”

The legal system – from the jury room to the deliberations of the Supreme Court – offers an abundance of rich resources for the study and teaching of critical thinking.The courts have (often for centuries) struggled with many of the issues central to critical thinking. The courts not only provide fascinating examples and exercises for students to examine, but in many areas – the appropriate use of ad hominem arguments, the distinction between argument and testimony, the proper placing of the burden of proof, the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions, the legitimate (and fallacious) use of appeals to authority, the nature of arguments by analogy – jurists and legal scholars have analyzed these issues carefully, and their insights are of great value to anyone concerned with rigorous critical thinking. Study of those legal resources has also had an impact on my views concerning the moral responsibility system.

It is unfortunate that so much turns on the practices of argument construction and critique in intelligence analysis, for example, because these practices are fraught with difficulty. However, the recently developed technique of argument mapping helps reasoners conduct these practices more thoroughly and insightfully, as can be shown in an extended illustration concerning Iraqi nuclear activities circa 2002. Argument mapping offers other benefits, as well. Its ultimate value, though, will depend on how its advantages compare to those of competitor reasoning methodologies.

The study of the fallacies has changed almost beyond recognition since Charles Hamblin called for a radical reappraisal of this area of logical inquiry in his 1970 book Fallacies. The “witless examples of his forbears” to which Hamblin referred have largely been replaced by more authentic cases of the fallacies in actual use. It is now not unusual for fallacy and argumentation theorists to draw on actual sources for examples of how the fallacies are used in our everyday reasoning. However, an aspect of this move towards greater authenticity in the study of the fallacies, an aspect which has been almost universally neglected, is the attempt to subject the fallacies to empirical testing of the type which is more commonly associated with psychological experiments on reasoning. This paper addresses this omission in research on the fallacies by examining how subjects use two fallacies – circular argument and analogical argument – during a reasoning task in which subjects are required to consider a number of public health scenarios. Results are discussed in relation to a view of the fallacies as cognitive heuristics that facilitate reasoning in a context of uncertainty.

This essay summarizes the research program developed in our new book, Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement (Routledge, 2014). Humans naturally want to know and to take themselves as having reason on their side. Additionally, many people take democracy to be a uniquely proper mode of political arrangement. There is an old tension between reason and democracy, however, and it was first articulated by Plato. Plato’s concern about democracy was that it detached political decision from reason. Epistemic democrats attempt to show how the two can be re-attached. What is necessary is to couple the core democratic liberties with norms of rational exchange. Thus epistemology and argument provides a basis for democratic politics. Why We Argue (And How We Should) makes a case for the connection and develops a toolkit for maintaining it.