A Different Reading Reflection
I’d planned on a different piece for yesterday, but it just didn’t feel right to send out when there were other things more worthy of attention. And I honestly didn’t have anything to say or offer you as reading, at least not with a broad-enough brushstroke to cover my entire readership.
I will say this much in response to 2020 and yesterday, as the thing I'm commenting on is something I’ve researched for over a decade and at a greater depth than even the one person who wrote his PhD on the term: when you hear or read people claiming that all would be well if we just had more critical thinking, you may well laugh in their faces.
That term has been interwoven in American education since the 1980s. It admittedly has vastly different definitions, but that only serves to make it all the more laughable. Even philosophers can’t agree on whether formal logic is sufficient for critical thinking education—many do claim so without any evidence beyond their gut feels, which makes for a truly odd version of positivist-influenced reasoning—and beyond philosophers, the humanities, the neuro nerds, and K-12 educators all have their own independent definitions.
There’s a cruel joke that the majority of critical thinking courses—the ones specifically designated as such—will include instruction on certain informal fallacies, among them words and phrases known as polysemy (sometimes called the fallacy of ambiguity or equivocation). And you see, critical thinking itself is an equivocation. For some, the term is equivalent to virtue ethics and prudence (probably best if they used those terms instead). For others, it’s about sociopathic success (I do not exaggerate). For still others, the height of critical thinking is the scientific method, which would be a lot handier if they designated which scientific methodology they meant (physicists and paleontologists do not operate the same way, and let us not forget the working of physicians). For yet others more, critical thinking means “question everything”; and directly opposite them—though sometimes uttered, without any reflective pause, by the self-same people—critical thinking means listening to and obeying the right authorities without question. There are progressive bootcamps in critical thinking; there are conservative bootcamps in critical thinking. And no, they do not teach the same things.
These are among the delightful tensions you uncover if you study the term beyond the simple “Critical Thinking for Dummies” guides, college brochures, and generic cultural handwaves. Of course, you can simply read books like The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education or Studies in Critical Thinking (ed. J. Anthony Blair) or older papers in a similar vein (the 1990 Delphi Report on Critical Thinking is a classic, including that it was decided that morals are not a part of critical thinking. Thirty years on, that remains as the only largely-agreed-upon document on critical thinking, so keep the exclusion of ethics and morality in mind when you read people touting critical thinking as the answer to our culture’s depraved state…). And in reading them, especially the Palgrave handbook, you will find a delightful assortment of inconsistencies within and expansions of critical thinking. Spend a moment with academics or business leaders or K-12 educators, and a remarkable variety of definitions and implications emerge. And they can’t all exist together.
But the cruel joke of its equivocal, fallacious nature aside, critical thinking has been taught ad nauseum for decades. Books that used to have the simple title of “Exercises” at the end of chapters now possess “Critical Thinking Exercises,” for exercises that are no more interesting or challenging than those without the lofty ornamentation of critical thinking. Critical thinking wasn’t coined in the 1980s (among its claimed progenitors is early twentieth-century progressive John Dewey, the most commonly invoked godfather); that’s when it blossomed. Don’t believe me? Try this graph from Google about usage in published materials. Note the hockey graph spike.
(Yes, I do have a question about the diminished popularity of “right reason,” as that term’s had popular usage back several centuries. I do wonder if we’ve partly replaced that term with “critical thinking.” Not as a one-to-one swap, but that critical thinking has subsumed it in certain ways. Whether I pursue that historical question more is another matter.)
That graph spike barely touches on the increased usage of that term on social media and in classroom instruction. And yet, in both my own research and published research from others, students repeatedly can’t define critical thinking, some after taking multiple courses on it. We’ve hammered generations (1980s’ classrooms, remember) with this term. What does our public discourse have to show for it?
So while I realize the above is a truncated argument, if you read someone touting critical thinking as the solution to all our problems (especially with ahistorical cries about back-in-the-good-old-days when it literally wasn’t taught) feel free to apply the “original” critical thinking as its 1970s and 1980s hawkers would have had it. That is to say that the only "critical thinking" that need be applied to such intellectuals is assuming that the sales person is indeed trying to dupe us into an unnecessary purchase of their wares...