RAIL

Puzzle piece, via Wikimedia Commons

Don Lazere’s short but punchy piece in the Chronicle on the beleaguered state of critical thinking education in the American academy is well worth a read.

While I find myself agreeing with much of what he says, I think he misses one of the principal actors in the play: the increasing role of corporate influence in and on the structure and culture of American higher education.  Increasingly, administrators and board members are not professional academics but professional bureaucrats and managers who see their primary task as generating revenue.  This leads to a mentality that sees terms like ‘critical thinking’ as buzzwords, bogus assessment exercises, fodder for mission statements or worse, “branding” campaigns.  The perils therein are familiar enough and rants plentiful enough that I’ll leave it there.

What interests me the most about Lazere’s short piece is how it fits with what has really been an explosion of formal methods in the last thirty or so years.  Indeed, formal logic has changed so much that it is now virtually unrecognizable to those of us who remember the time when advances in modal logic were considered “cutting edge” to most in philosophy. From today’s perspective, the basic course in predicate calculus looks a lot like “baby logic”. ‘Critical thinking’, as Lazere points out, doesn’t seem to have much real purchase at all anymore:

Unfortunately, by now the term “critical thinking” has become a catch-all phrase with no agreed-on definition.  Departments of philosophy, English, and speech-communication have engaged in petty turf wars for required courses, and there is much professional squabbling over whether critical thinking is reducible to a set of “skills” divorced from specific subject matter or should be integrated with disciplinary studies and if so, how. Scholars in nearly every discipline insist that their courses adequately cover the teaching of critical thinking and logical reasoning, but they rarely produce an explicit account of how their courses do so, in ways that are applicable across the disciplines, in the mode of Dumke’s criteria.

Lazere is certainly right about the problem.  It’s the question of whether and how the problem can be solved that makes me wonder.  I’m not sure that the battle to redeem the concept of critical thinking and restore it to its rightful place in the liberal arts education can be won without a fight for the value of the liberal arts education itself.  In defenses of the liberal arts education one often sees references to the cultivation of critical thinking skills as one of its most important benefits–but if “everyone” can teach critical thinking then this argument falls flat on its face. If critical thinking can be taught by anyone teaching anything then there’s nothing special about a liberal arts in this regard. Hence those who wish to defend the liberal arts face a choice when it comes to critical thinking: Either they can abandon the otherwise laudably democratic impulse that moves the assertion that “everyone teaches critical thinking”, and acknowledge it as a special study in its own right that demands scholarly and institutional resources OR they can quit touting critical thinking as reason why the liberal arts are worth preserving.

It seems to me that the former is the way to go, but there’s much work that needs to be done. The problem of rendering a big concept like “critical thinking” tractable is largely a Sellarsian one of articulating how data and insights from multiple disciplines “hang together” to give us both 1) an accurate picture of how human beings reason and 2) teachable tactics for making human beings (at various stages of cognitive development) better at reasoning. Formal logic (both monotonic and nonmonotonic) is part of that picture.  So is informal logic. So is cognitive psychology, rhetoric, communication studies, discourse analysis, and probably evolutionary biology too, among others. What is needed is for those of us who study argumentation and reasoning to get comfortable with crossing the boundaries of our disciplines on a regular basis. If we want to redeem critical thinking then we have to move from saying things like, “Well, the philosophers say this about ad hominem arguments, the rhetoricians say that, normative pragamatics folks point out these things and the AI/computation folks say this other thing.” to really start synthesizing these various intra-disciplinary discussions in the hope of producing something genuinely inter-disciplinary.  There have been and are still collaborations that move in this direction, but these efforts need investment and to be better known outside of the world of argumentation studies.  They also need company.

Now there are lots of reasons why this is a tall order. The biases Lazere mentions certainly count among them, but it’s also the case that the genuinely interdisciplinary activity necessary isn’t always supported with the institutional resources (funding, release time, recognition in tenure committees, etc.) needed to do it. Further, for whatever reason, at least in North America much of the will (and ability, experience, etc.) to do this kind of work lives at smaller regional or private institutions that don’t always have the means to do it–even when they do understand and support the work.  There are exceptions, of course, but largely the exceptions come in the form of highly motivated individuals who have carved out careers at larger research-based institutions through research that includes critical thinking, but isn’t necessarily based on it. All too often interest in critical thinking has to be balanced by research that’s considered “more serious”. (This, I think, is especially the case in philosophy.) There’s also the fact that such collaborations challenge very basic assumptions about how higher education works (subject matters in nice, neat little disciplines that are easy to parcel and sell as majors and minors; scholarly division of labor, and so forth). Lastly, there’s understandable reticence among many regarding the prospect of stepping outside their own area of expertise and entering another. Still, I don’t see another way to save ‘critical thinking’ from the institutional quicksand its currently mired in except to find a way to do this.  If we did, I think we’d also succeed in showing the skeptics that the liberal arts education is worth fighting for.