Critical Thinking

A very brief guide; or, a sketch of the door to philosophy

So, you want your children to become critical thinkers. Or perhaps you want to become a critical thinker yourself.¹ Unsurprising: people say they want to hire critical thinkers, educational institutions claim they will form their students into critical thinkers, and one finds adults all around extolling the values of critical thinking made manifest in the lives and actions of those taken to be critical thinkers. All well and good. But what is critical thinking? Or, what would it be to be someone who is a critical thinker and, thus, to be distinguished from those who are not? Unless one can acquire an answer to this question that is true, complete, and to the point, and unless he has in fact acquired such an answer, he is not in a position to determine whether, for instance, an educational institution that claims it will form one’s children or oneself into critical thinkers can and will actually do so. Thus, any parent who wishes to form his children into critical thinkers, or anyone who wants to become a critical thinker himself, and who wishes to entrust his children or himself to those who can and will help so form them, will want to determine what critical thinking actually is, for otherwise he can guide neither himself nor his children toward developing it; the current piece is a humble, initial attempt to help one do so.²

Before we attempt to get at what critical thinking is, we have to see if we can remember, imagine, or think of those we would call “critical thinkers,” and this by means of discerning instances in which people explicitly and clearly engaged in what we would call “critical thinking.” Before we can think about anything well, we have to attend to the things we want to think about, to be alive and present to them as they are made manifest. So, what are examples of what we call “critical thinking”? Perhaps:

(1) attending calmly and carefully to a set of givens before trying to interpret and analyze them, as one who wishes to study and understand frogs well might do out in a forest, or as one who wishes to better organize and develop a fighting force might do before trying to organize and develop things further;

(2) being open to and actually recognizing connections among things, relations among things, as the scientist who studies frogs will calmly and carefully note the various relationships that obtain between the frogs he studies and the larger environment and the things of the environment in which they live before theorizing about them, or how a commander will notice real or apparent, possible or actual, relations or connections among the men in the company he needs to reform and the various relations or connections that actually or possibly obtain among those men and the equipment available to them, as well as between the company in need of reform and its equipment and the environments in which they will need to operate and be deployed;

(3) asking questions about the things one wants to understand, which will involve asking whether how they seem to appear to one is really the way they are, as well as whether the connections or relations one thinks he has noticed between the things he wants to understand and their larger context are real or apparent, truly actual or merely possible, important or unimportant, and he will ask whether these connections or relations are relevant or not—as the biologist studying frogs will ask whether the connections he thinks he has noticed between the frogs he is studying and the forest in which they dwell are real and significant, or as a company commander will ask whether the real or potential relationships he notices or expects to obtain between company personnel and their equipment, and the whole of the company and future domains of engagement, are significant, and how;

(4) reflecting on what one has done in (1), (2), and (3) so as to determine whether he has attended to things carefully and calmly and widely and thoroughly enough, whether he has noticed everything he ought to notice about the thing or things he wants to understand and the relevant and real relations between it and its larger context, and whether he asking the right questions about not only (1) and (2) but whether he is even asking the right questions in the first place—as will the herpetologist before commencing a planned systematic study of a particular kind of frog or a commander will about the armor company that it is his job to reform;

(5) going about seeking to methodically and systematically answer questions that are determined to be well-honed and well-directed about the thing or things one wants to understand within their relevant contexts, which one will do by gathering what further data one might need, ensuring that one properly understands that data, and seeking out and weighing the evidence one needs to make a judgment that will serve as an adequate and true answer to the question, or answers to the questions, that one is pursuing—as a batrachologist would in order to determine how and why a particular frog secretes the poison it does, or as an armor company commander might gather the information he can from relevant sources (which he must be able to determine as relevant!) in order to determine why in fact his company has performed poorly in European-theater war games and what has to be done to make it ready for real-world combat in the same theater;

(6) and finally, determining that one indeed recognizes all of the relevant conditions for at last making a judgment that will serve as an answer to the question driving one’s inquiry and that these conditions have been met—as our batrachologist will as he wraps up his study of the organ systems in a newly-discovered rainforest frog that produce a particular kind of poison and what exactly triggers the production thereof, as well as how an army armor company commander would as he prepares to write up a report on, say, lack of group cohesiveness around newly integrated technologies due to prior training deficits and intra-company cross-group tensions.

All of that may seem like an awful lot to consider, and it may seem may seem as if it is an awful lot more that would go into generating actions and effects that we would take as marks of critical thinking and habits of critical thinking. But in order to determine whether it is true that that is more than would ever go into a true and complete act of critical thinking over anything whatever, one would have to: (A) determine the conditions for making a judgment about the matter and that those conditions have been met, which would require (B) gathering the relevant data, making sure you’ve interpreted it properly, gathering and weighing the evidence out of that data, and determining which methods you will then use to come to a judgment in light of that data the conditions of which have been met, which will mean (C) asking the right questions and determining that you are in fact asking the right questions, which will in turn require (D) that you have noticed the relevant connections or relations between (i) an act of critical thinking and the cognitive processes of the one whose act it is and (ii) the relevant relationships, personal and otherwise, that obtain among a true critical thinker and the context in which he is able to perform an act of critical thinking, which will, finally, require (E) that you have attended carefully and fully enough to a wide-enough instances of what is called critical thinking and the contexts in which they have occurred in the first place. Thus, in thinking critically about whether the steps outlined above are actually involved in critical thinking, you, the reader, would have moved through those steps yourself!

If we want to ensure that our kids or ourselves become critical thinkers, then, we will place them or ourselves in situations where we can develop: (I) habits of careful and calm attention; (II) habits of noticing what there is to be noticed, as well as of noticing when one fails to notice what there is to be noticed so that one can correct such failures; (III) habits of question-asking and the formulation of questions that are well-formed and well-directed, including habits of noticing when one has been too quick or sloppy in his formulation of questions or in his asking of question; (IV) habits of methodically gathering and putting together relevant data (givens), properly interpreting them, and then determining what givens, properly interpreted, serve as sufficient evidence for arriving at answers to one’s questions; (V) habits of recognizing the conditions for making a judgment that serves as an answer to the relevant question, habits of recognizing when or whether such conditions have been met, and then affirming in a judgment what is in fact true about the matter one has been inquiring into. If we are failing to cultivate all of the above habits in ourselves or in our children, then we are failing to cultivate habits of critical thinking in ourselves or in our children; if those to whom we have entrusted the formation of ourselves or our children as critical thinkers are failing to work to help cultivate the above habits in us or in our children—and especially if they are working to actively undermine such habits—then they are failing us or our children.

There is, however, more to being a critical thinker than mere cognition and developing good cognitive habits. For we are embodied and socially and otherwise contexted beings, beings who think in and out of a language, a set of prejudgments and biases, a whole personal and communal history; and we are beings who desire and who love. One cannot separate off one’s intellectual life from the rest of one’s life, attend to the operations of one’s intellect and neglect the rest, and hope that things will go right; for we are all of a piece, and our lives are one: what effects one part of us, what heals or strengthens one aspect of ourselves (or the opposite) will heal or strengthen the rest of us (or the opposite). A reader of this primer will begin to wonder: How does my background, temperament, mood, set of priors, strengths and weaknesses, and my loves and desires affect what I attend to or not, what I notice or not, what I inquire into or not, what I reflect upon or not (and how!), how I reason or not, and how I go about forming judgments about things or not? One may then notice how he is drawn to some things and not others, and that his attractions and repulsions may make it more difficult to attend to some things rather than others; he may notice that he tends to notice things others don’t, or how he does not notice things that others do, and that differences in where people have come from, what their temperaments are, what their moods are on any given day, and what one’s developed interests or abilities are play a role in what one notices (or not!); he may notice how his loves and his hates lead him to pursue particular questions and not others, or to interpret the relevant data for answering questions carefully and fairly (or not!); and he may notice how everything that goes into making up himself and his life (that he knows of or can recognize) plays its part in what he judges of and how. If, then, it is true that each aspect of oneself, because part of an integral whole, influences and conditions every other, to become a critical thinker it is not enough merely to develop habits of critical thinking; rather, one must work to form and develop well one’s whole person: To be a critical thinker is simply to be fully and actively human wherever and whenever one may find himself.³ ⁴

The question then becomes: How does one become fully and actively human? And with that, one can recognize that he has embarked on the road of philosophy, for he is after wisdom, after how to order his ways well in light of how things actually are, and philosophy just is the love and pursuit of wisdom by those who would be her friends. To seek to become a critical thinker in the truest and fullest sense just is to seek to follow the way of the philosopher; to seek to ensure that one’s children become critical thinkers in the true and full sense just is to want them to walk well and truly the way of philosophy. Who, however, can lead us toward wisdom? Who can form one’s children in the true love and pursuit of wisdom? If one cares, truly cares, about becoming a critical thinker, or if one actually cares that his children become critical thinkers in actuality, then these are questions answers to which he must seek.

1. Header image: Henry Pember Smith, Sailing Ship on the Horizon (1880).

2. As a standard practice, I use the personal pronoun “he” rather than “she” or “they,” or some form thereof. I do so for a number of reasons, even while addressing my piece to mothers as well as fathers: I was taught to do so; it has been common practice in the tradition of letters out of which I have been formed and in which I write; and it also strikes me as most honest, for I am a male and not a female, and thus the personal experiences that inform my writing are those of a male. If I were a female, I would use “she,” both as an act of protest (there is little question that female voices have too often been suppressed in my own Euro-American tradition), and also as an act of honesty; but I am not a female, and my fight is elsewhere than around issues pertaining to equality between the sexes, and so I simply use the traditional “he” and its forms instead of other pronouns. One should absolutely feel free to change out in his head “he” and its forms in this essay to those pronouns that make him feel at ease enough to appreciate the substance of what I am attempting to here articulate: you, the reader, are you, and I am me; we can meet and talk, but we are different, and that is fine.

3. This very brief primer on critical thinking grew out of a study of a variety of thinkers and their work over the years; for those at all interested, I cannot hope to list all of my influences. But there are some I can identify as key: Bernard Lonergan, especially through his Method in Theology and the first part of his book Insight, as well as his essay “Cognitional Structure;” H.-G. Gadamer, especially through the second part of his work Truth and Method; Pierre Rousselot, S.J., especially through his essay “Spiritual Love and Apperceptive Synthesis,” which may be found in Andrew Tallon and Pol Vandevelde eds., Essays on Love and Knowledge (Marquette University Press); Martin Heidegger’s work on moods or attunement in his Being and Time; Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions; Plato’s dialogues Republic, Symposium, and Phaedrus; Ordinary Affects, by Kathleen Stewart; Eugene Gendlin’s Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning; Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty; and Owen Barfield’s book Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry—to name just some.

4. For a further introduction to critical thinking, I would direct the interested reader to this essay by Jonathan Heaps, which I think is really quite good and worth the read.