The Myth of Critical Thinking

[Magical Realist]

For some time now I have suspected that the much lauded skill called "critical thinking" that is promoted by the online skeptic community is something of a myth, much like the equally hyped and much recommended "scientific method" that no real scientist ever actually uses. Even the most determined efforts to nail down what this term means usually turn up with such generic vagaries and empty generalizations that one is left wondering why it was even invented in the first place. Wasn't just "thinking" good enough? Imagine my surprise upon coming across someone of the same opinion as I on this matter, and with the proper writing skills to express it far better than I ever could:
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"Pundits, skeptics, and the educators of America are largely convinced that belief in strange phenomena, illogical political choices, and all manner of social ills are the result of a generalized poverty in an elusive and ambiguously defined faculty called “critical thinking”, a phrase which has come to mean pretty much whatever we want it to mean, as long as you agree with me.  Apparently there is a mysterious meta-discipline out there reputed to arm the unwary with the tools to think properly, to deftly discern fact from fiction, and cut to the chase that is reality, allowing its acolytes to not just gather the appropriate facts, but also to analyze them without being handicapped by nebulous and pernicious influences such as culture, bias, and indeterminacy.

Woe is us, the great unwashed who never learned to fire our neurons in the right order, and thus are prisoners of our own stupidity, fantasy, or madness.  Science is of course held to be the great equalizer, providing an epistemology that actively promotes critical thinking.  Sadly, not everyone can be a scientist, including many scientists.  Enter the professionalized skeptic, who convinced of the mental inferiority of most of the human race recognizes we cannot train every Tom, Dick, and Harriet in scientific method for application in daily life when we mostly just want to get our bagels toasted and get on with our business, and despairingly promise that much of our uncertainty, the ambiguity of human existence, the vertigo-inducing ebb and flow of cultural norms and values, the mismatch between our dreams and our reality can be swept aside if we simply promote this white rabbit called critical thinking.

When directed towards anomalies, strange phenomena, psychic powers, ghoulies and ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night, you’ll be pleased to hear that the application of critical thinking to the matter has abundantly elucidated their ontological status to the satisfaction of the skeptic.  They just don’t exist, no doubt a great comfort to those who have perceived, encountered, or otherwise interacted with the weirdness of the universe.  Were they only more rigorous in their application of critical thinking, they could have saved themselves a lot of heartache, psychiatrist’s bills, and time spent watching reality television.

There are a minority of pedagogical scholars out there that have temperamentally raised the question of what the hell critical thinking actually is and why we are so convinced that it will solve all our problems?  This is quite understandable as “a close reading of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects, Grades K–12, reveals that nowhere in the sixty-six page document do the literacy standards define or address what “critical thinking” is (Anderson, 2015, p83).  This has certainly not prevented skeptics from pursuing it as the Holy Grail of their agenda, that is, a population armored with acceptable facts, steeped in critical thinking skills, hell bent on dismissing anything unnatural as misperception of the natural or wishful thinking.  Oh, what paradise on Earth it would be.

The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, which one would assume has a pretty good grasp on what the proclivities we wish to instill are, defines critical thinking as the “intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”  Nice and broad.  In fact, the rest of us just call it “thinking”, skillfully or otherwise.

As each generation looks around at the mess we’ve made of the world, they inevitably come to the conclusion that the real problem is the youngsters of the age are lacking in some fundamental faculty that guided their wiser elders.  Critical Thinking is just the latest popular label for this intellectual will-o-wisp, a content-free, imaginary standard of rationality that allows one to identify an organic cause for why someone doesn’t agree with me.  Marshalling one’s forces behind the cause of “critical thinking” is a desperate plea for certainty in an uncertain universe.  The Information Age, once heralded as a means for every individual to access data needed to make informed decisions, thereby decreasing ambiguity and uncertainty in our assessment of the world around us, has simply increased uncertainty, as multitudinous voices compete for our mind-space, lauding their own brand of analysis as the true bastion of “critical thinking” while the rest of us are mired in the Dark Ages of Fake News, Media Bubbles, Belief Systems, and an inability to realize and appreciate the genius of the skeptic in piercing through all these ideologies to the underlying reality.  Critical Thinking, rather than an exhortation to expand and entertain a thought or idea without necessarily accepting it, is yet another attempt to establish the boundaries of the discussion or as philosopher Henri Bergson said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”--------------https://esoterx.com/2017/01/13/where-the...-thinking/

[Ben the Donkey]

"much like the equally hyped and much recommended "scientific method" that no real scientist ever actually uses".
Well, there is one problem, right there. 
Why don't you read what you said there, and then apply your "critical thinking" skills to your explanation of what you just said, why you said it, and perhaps even apply some of the answers to a critical appraisal of why you're subject to short shrift at times. There are so many other logically unrelated extrapolations in that article I simply can't be bothered addressing them. Dat's de truf. 

I actually do have a fair amount of respect for Noam Chomsky, in general, but you using that quote as a sig makes me grit my teeth. 
You're making it an excuse, in the same way that I've seen others proudly sport Aristotle's "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it", on other websites, to justify any abject bullshit they care to post by dint of an appeal to "authority" in the form of a generally respected author's contextually-isolated soundbite. That article actually tried to use it. 

We're not all equal, MR. Some people are, flat out, a lot smarter than others. Some people understand things more than others by dint of method.
Some use both. 

And then there's everyone else, who have been told all their lives that their opinions matter, and never hesitate to voice them, loudly and stridently, thereby cluttering up the 'net, which is a marvellous invention which could be used far more efficiently. 
You know what that article is? A fucking self-pitying whine.


Here's something for you to do.
Try to discern the difference between someone saying "I don't believe in ghosts" and "Ghosts don't exist", just by way of example. 
Now I realise it might be difficult, but do try. I'd really like to see what you come up with.

[Magical Realist]

"much like the equally hyped and much recommended "scientific method" that no real scientist ever actually uses".
Well, there is one problem, right there. 
Why don't you read what you said there, and then apply your "critical thinking" skills to your explanation of what you just said, why you said it, and perhaps even apply some of the answers to a critical appraisal of why you're subject to short shrift at times. There are so many other logically unrelated extrapolations in that article I simply can't be bothered addressing them. Dat's de truf. 

I actually do have a fair amount of respect for Noam Chomsky, in general, but you using that quote as a sig makes me grit my teeth. 
You're making it an excuse, in the same way that I've seen others proudly sport Aristotle's "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it", on other websites, to justify any abject bullshit they care to post by dint of an appeal to "authority" in the form of a generally respected author's contextually-isolated soundbite. That article actually tried to use it. 

We're not all equal, MR. Some people are, flat out, a lot smarter than others. Some people understand things more than others by dint of method.
Some use both. 

And then there's everyone else, who have been told all their lives that their opinions matter, and never hesitate to voice them, loudly and stridently, thereby cluttering up the 'net, which is a marvellous invention which could be used far more efficiently. 
You know what that article is? A fucking self-pitying whine.


Here's something for you to do.
Try to discern the difference between someone saying "I don't believe in ghosts" and "Ghosts don't exist", just by way of example. 
Now I realise it might be difficult, but do try. I'd really like to see what you come up with.

LOL! Looks like my post got to ya..

[Syne]

The only vagaries in the scientific method are that each field of study requires different kinds of tests to examine their hypotheses. But all scientific fields, make observations, formulate hypotheses, test the veracity of the hypotheses, rinse and repeat. It's not voodoo magic. And critical thinking is what brought us every advance in human history. Someone looked at a bird, and instead of taking it at face value, hypothesized that there were principles of flight we might be able to emulate. But direct emulation alone, e.g. wing-flapping machines, wouldn't do it. We had to understand the principles of lift, drag, and thrust.

Common Core is a very misguided attempt at instilling critical thinking. Like the scientific method, critical thinking is the ability to objectively test our thinking (a self-examination relatively few seem to do), but you must have a base of knowledge from which to start forming worthwhile questions. Common Core seems to abandon that base of knowledge and dive straight into critical thinking, which just leaves children unmoored, without a structure to hang their quandaries.

[C C]

[...] as philosopher Henri Bergson said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”--------------https://esoterx.com/2017/01/13/where-the...-thinking/

Arbitrary desires and systematic thought orientations can affect / shape apprehension either way: Filtering out what is there or introducing what isn't there, as well as both complementally facilitating each other to achieve an aim of state, institution, authority, or socio-political movement. Tyrannical regimes of the past could sport a culture of "The Emperor Has No Clothes" where (figurative-wise) followers en masse conceptually pretend via conditioning / consequences that a naked monarch is instead wearing lavish apparel. [The kid who broke the cognitive facade would have actually been culinary-prepared and spitted afterwards.]

The IngSoc party of "1984" controlled its inter-subjective reality that way, even regularly doing retcons of history to suit its current needs. But even in that collective solipsism or precursor "hive-mind" the elite members had to cater to dual and multiple interpretations when practicality demanded it. Being stuck in the inflexible rut of one POV / dogma and its growing bureaucracy invites eventually going over the cliff somewhere and missing out on opportunities of progress. Long-enduring ideologues rely upon sloppy air-tight bedrooms to keep them from suffocating. Good little robots who really do keep all the holes patched and adhere religiously to keeping out all intruding, exotic atmospheres are doomed to asphyxiation.

GEORGE ORWELL: 'We are the priests of power,' he [O'Brien] said. 'God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.

'You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone -- free -- the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter -- external reality, as you would call it -- is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.'

For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.

'But how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death --'

O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'

'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'

'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.'

'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'

'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'

'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals -- mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.'

'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'

'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'

'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.'

Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'

Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind -- surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as he looked down at him.

'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.' He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'

Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.

'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

'Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything.

'Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

'There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.

'But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.' --1984

[Magical Realist]

There is a very real example of a powerful 1984-ish regime operating freely in our day and age. The Church of Scientology has evolved into a dogmatic mind control system that squeezes their followers of their every dollar. Promises of some dubious future state are repeatedly dangled before them as they are routinely "audited" and blackmailed for their "crimes" to keep them submissive and unquestioning. All contacts with non-scientologist friends and relatives are forbidden as they are corralled into garish compounds and baroque facilities that protect the fragile hive mindset inculcated within them. Leah Remini is now doing great work with other ex scientologists exposing this massive corporation/cult for all the world to see. The Orwellian utopianism of a disciplined mental methodology coupled with a emotionally self-enforcing panacea to all of life's problems is programmed and enforced under the auspices of their inspired prophet Ron L Hubbard and their infallible pope David Miscavige. And they get away with all of this under the protection of the 1st Amendment's right to freedom of religion. What a travesty..

"Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer."--- O'Brien, "1984"

[Image: scientology-1.jpg]

[Ben the Donkey]

Really, MR? That's your reply? 
Your "LOL" sounds both contrived and nervous. 
Yes, it did make me angry. Stupidity does that, I'm afraid. 
Did you say to yourself "Oooh, I made him angry. I win!"? Do you think that somehow absolves you from a response? 
If you can defend this statement - "much like the equally hyped and much recommended "scientific method" that no real scientist ever actually uses" then please do so. There was a second question in there as well. 

How about you stop pretending to be amused (you're not, and we both know that) and attempt an answer?

[Magical Realist]

Really, MR? That's your reply? 
Your "LOL" sounds both contrived and nervous. 
Yes, it did make me angry. Stupidity does that, I'm afraid. 
Did you say to yourself "Oooh, I made him angry. I win!"? Do you think that somehow absolves you from a response? 
If you can defend this statement - "much like the equally hyped and much recommended "scientific method" that no real scientist ever actually uses" then please do so. There was a second question in there as well. 

"It’s probably best to get the bad news out of the way first. The so-called scientific method is a myth. That is not to say that scientists don’t do things that can be described and are unique to their fields of study. But to squeeze a diverse set of practices that span cultural anthropology, paleobotany, and theoretical physics into a handful of steps is an inevitable distortion and, to be blunt, displays a serious poverty of imagination. Easy to grasp, pocket-guide versions of the scientific method usually reduce to critical thinking, checking facts, or letting “nature speak for itself,” none of which is really all that uniquely scientific. If typical formulations were accurate, the only location true science would be taking place in would be grade-school classrooms.

Scratch the surface of the scientific method and the messiness spills out. Even simplistic versions vary from three steps to eleven. Some start with hypothesis, others with observation. Some include imagination. Others confine themselves to facts. Question a simple linear recipe and the real fun begins. A website called Understanding Science offers an “interactive representation” of the scientific method that at first looks familiar. It includes circles labeled “Exploration and Discovery” and “Testing Ideas.” But there are others named “Benefits and Outcomes” and “Community Analysis and Feedback,” both rare birds in the world of the scientific method. To make matters worse, arrows point every which way. Mouse over each circle and you find another flowchart with multiple categories and a tangle of additional arrows.

It’s also telling where invocations of the scientific method usually appear. A broadly conceived method receives virtually no attention in scientific papers or specialized postsecondary scientific training. The more “internal” a discussion — that is, the more insulated from nonscientists —the more likely it is to involve procedures, protocols, or techniques of interest to close colleagues.

Meanwhile, the notion of a heavily abstracted scientific method has pulled public discussion of science into its orbit, like a rhetorical black hole. Educators, scientists, advertisers, popularizers, and journalists have all appealed to it. Its invocation has become routine in debates about topics that draw lay attention, from global warming to intelligent design. Standard formulations of the scientific method are important only insofar as nonscientists believe in them."----http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2...H-mWhsrLIV

[Syne]

Ben doesn't seem to like the taste of his own medicine.

But that article you quote is BS. I've already outlined the scientific method, that is both applicable in all fields, unique to science, and not common to natural thinking.

[C C]

[...] Meanwhile, the notion of a heavily abstracted scientific method has pulled public discussion of science into its orbit, like a rhetorical black hole. Educators, scientists, advertisers, popularizers, and journalists have all appealed to it. Its invocation has become routine in debates about topics that draw lay attention, from global warming to intelligent design. Standard formulations of the scientific method are important only insofar as nonscientists believe in them."----http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2...H-mWhsrLIV

I almost musingly started to stereotype that it seems to be physicists (like a Percy Bridgman, Steven Weinberg, or this Daniel P Thurs) who dismiss SM as a philosophy of science bauble. But then I remembered biologist Peter Medawar.