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Archive for the ‘Critical Thinking’ Category

Epistemologist, know thyself.

Posted in Critical Thinking, Uncategorized on March 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

An unprecedented apology for excluding women has been offered by the organizers of the Extended Cognition and Epistemology conference at TU Endhoven.

“The organizers of the conference sincerely regret the gender imbalance in the list of contributors. They admit that they should have, before the list of contributions became final, taken more proactive measures to guarantee a better gender balance in the special issue/conference line-up.”

“Gender imbalance” is an understatement regarding the all-male lineup, and respecting the recommendation of pretty much the same lineup at the Episteme conference on privacy and secrecy. There are plenty of women doing work in these fields, and not just (to use Sandra Harding’s terminology about scientists) the “women worthies,” such as Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Lackey.  The apology goes a good way toward indicating a desire to do differently (at least I think it is mistaken to be sceptical), but treating gender as an afterthought, the remedy that they suggest, won’t suffice.

What needs to be addressed is why women are being overlooked, and similar biases have been clear in job applications, promotions, and so on for decades (as Steve keeps reminding me).  We can blame this on implicit bias, but that may seem to limit prospects for a deep or lasting solution. It suggests that the problem has unconscious and permanent roots in individual cognition, which may discourage those who want to make equitable choices.  It doesn’t provide constructive direction to those who would like to do differently, such as the organizers of the TU conference.  Also, the problem is not isolated: it is a problem of reasoning, a problem for epistemology, and suggests a lack of appropriate critical thinking tools.

We need skills for addressing implicit bias, for negotiating the ways in which our thinking is undermined by gender and racial bias, and other “status quo bias.”  We need to develop procedures that encourage the recognition of socially marginalized contributors, experts and otherwise weakly recognized testifiers.  These considerations need to be built into decision-making at all levels.  Evidence of the problem for invited speakers, insofar as those decisions are made at great length, only indicates that the problem has great epistemological depth.

A step in the right direction would be to orient conferences to this problem from the outset: include race and gender analysis in the conference topic; have a regular conference to address that topic; consider how epistemologists are educating philosophers in ways that reinforce social bias; think first of which women (and people of colour) can be featured.  Make analysis of social privilege part of the critical thinking practice in philosophy and the critical thinking curriculum, not just an afterthought.

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The joke’s on the proliferation of discourse

Posted in Argumentation, Critical Thinking, News on March 2, 2012| 2 Comments »

I had thought that the increasing strategy of reductio ad absurdum in US politics was because so much of US politics is verging on the absurd.  However, the picture may be more complicated than that, and it’s nice to think there is some source for the problem we might address systematically.

A series of “joke amendments” provide reductios to abortion bills that have recently surged.  These “jokes”, such as the suggestion that vasectomies be illegal, are a serious move, argues Jessica Ogilvie in The Gloss.  They reveal inattention to the medical nature of abortion procedures.

“Legislating against it is just as fucked up as, say, legislating against heart surgery. Or prostate cancer surgery. Or…vasectomies.”

How does this happen?  She suggests it’s political inflation:

“When we talk about abortion, we get so caught up in the politics of it, as well as the philosophical questions it brings up (questions that would be better addressed in a house of worship or a college class than on a Senate floor, for the record), that we tend to lose sight of one important fact: abortion is a medical procedure.”

But what is the source of this inflation?  Everyone likes to think he or she is a moral expert and may caught up in the headiness of the debate.  How many philosophers avoid teaching the abortion debate because it is just so very heady?  Too many, I’d say.  I concur with Ogilvie that that’s a proper venue, and I’d add underused.

What allows us to lose sight of the medical nature of abortion, and the fact that it is a rare law that prohibits people from choosing what to do with their bodies, right or wrong, is the proliferation of discourse.  Politics has become self-sustaining and spun off from the concrete contexts that give it significance; likewise medical decisions can be assigned to physicians (as abortion used to be in Canada) instead of patients.  Such divergent discourses are harder to avoid in a classroom, or in the personal decision (as this joke card makes clear).

Thank goodness feminist lawyers are trained in critical thinking and strategic argumentation that aids the revelation of assumptions, such as the assumption that abortion is not a medical procedure.

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Philopolis at Guelph

Posted in Announcements, Critical Thinking, Discussion, News, Seminar/Workshop/Program Announcements, Uncategorized, Workshops on February 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

University of Guelph graduate students (it’s my understanding) have been organizing in a serious fashion to take philosophy out of the ivory tower.  A two-day series of events, with six concurrent sessions addresses issues from Einstein to zombies, heuristics, and feminism. 

Philopolis Guelph, inspired by Philopolis Montreal aims to “[do] a better job [than academic philosophers have been doing] of engaging in dialogue with the public: this requires finding a common language, as well as being explicit about the relevance of the ideas at issue. Both academic philosophers and the broader public stand to benefit one another greatly through this kind of exchange—free of jargon, of minced words, and of exclusionary assumptions. ”

Philopolis’ resistance to academic jargon and presumption promises to make philosophy accountable as well as show non-philosophers how valuable philosophy can be.  The development of a common language is a creative endeavour that requires public engagement, and making assumptions explicit is an important principle of critical thinking to put into practice.

Philosophers sometimes think we own “critical thinking,” which is an extremely dangerous assumption in itself.  Sociologists, neurologists and physicists engage in critical thinking too, and are more aware of the limitations to their methods.

I know at Guelph they’ve been talking about this sort of event for years, and I spoke at one such around 2004.  Unfortunately, that lacked the upswell and publicity that supports this event.  Such savvy is to the credit of the graduate students, I expect.

As a faculty brat, I have a long-abiding affection for graduate students from the old days when there were more personal relationships between faculty and graduate students.  While that intimacy could and often did involve a number of problems regarding sexual morality and nepotism, some of us benefited in the most benign ways.  As the numbers of graduate students swell — at least in Canada where governments are putting money into that sector of education (mostly to the exclusion of others), many freshly-minted doctors will be disappointed by their job prospects.  The benefit however (and this is the reason the government puts the money there) is for society in general.  Graduate students have insight, passion, networking skills, and drive that can drive social and intellectual progress.  That power is well-demonstrated by Philopolis Guelph.

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The art of subversion

Posted in About RAIL, Critical Thinking, News on February 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Steve and I have had an extended discussion about the subversive potential of art since the (latest) Hendricks scandal broke.  The case of the public library in Troy, Michigan is a good case in point, I think, of how hiding the artistic quality of a communication can aid in critical thinking, foster political dialogue, and be constitutive to the art itself.

When the library was in danger of closing, supporters enacted a reductio ad absurdum on those pushing for the closure to save on taxes.  The supporters posted false publicity of a book burning party, a campaign that enraged so many people that the nature of the discourse shifted away from taxes and back to books; eventually the library was saved.

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Women in logic

Posted in Connections, Critical Thinking, Discussion, Humor, Logic, tagged , , , , , , on February 22, 2012| 17 Comments »

This [a disconnected link to a logic course webpage] is no way to get women into logic.  The “naughty schoolgirls” Vince Hendricks, an editor of Synthese, probably the most prestigious epistemology journal, anticipates in his logic class will surprise the rest of us.  The kinderwhore fashion is ten years out of date and provides too little clothing for Copenhagen.  In all seriousness, it’s such a throwback (except for the iPod) that I thought it was The Onion.

Hendricks gradually removed the images, beginning with these, which I caught with screen shots.  The page was changed to indicate they come from a magazine spread, which does not mitigate Hendricks’ choice to use cheesecake to advertise logic.  Perhaps mooning is a new transformation rule that he’s taught his students?

A similar arrogance, though not specifically sexist, was noted on the part of Hendricks by the Leiter Report, when he shut down criticisms of creationism.  Leiter  credits the  feminist philosophers blog for breaking the cheesecake story, (I thank them for my first joke,) and you can find more discussion there.  But here on RAIL are the screen shots everyone has asked for as a record of what logic looks like without feminism, even now.

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New Addition to the Resources Page

Posted in Announcements, Critical Thinking, Teaching, tagged , , on January 6, 2012| 2 Comments »

Mark Battersby and Sharon Bailin have created a blog to supplement their excellent textbook, Reason in the Balance.  I have added it to the RAIL Resources page. You can also have a look at it here.

Reason in the Balance presents students with a novel, inquiry-based approach to critical thinking. If you haven’t had a chance to check out their textbook yet, it Battersby and Bailin’s treatment gathers and synthesizes much of the best recent material from across the different approaches in argumentation theory. It’s worth a look.

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Guest Post: Why is the National Association of Scholars Saying Such Awful Things about Critical Thinking?

Posted in Critical Thinking, Discussion, Guest Posts, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2011| 1 Comment »

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest article by longtime critical thinking advocate and researcher Donald Lazere.  Prof. Lazere is Professor Emeritus of English at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

WHY IS THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS SAYING SUCH AWFUL THINGS ABOUT CRITICAL THINKING?

Donald Lazere, Professor Emeritus of English, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

Two of National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood’s recent “Innovations” blogs in the online Chronicle of Higher Education renewed NAS’s long-running attack on the theory and teaching of critical thinking, about which he and I had an e-mail go-round a few years ago. I think there have been several semantic misunderstandings here that have needlessly exacerbated the dispute, and I will try, once again, to overcome these here.

In “The Curriculum of Forgetting“ (Nov. 21), Wood wrote “What we need is a reversal of cultural tides, a restoration of the basic principle that the university is responsible for keeping the past imaginatively alive and available for the present.  The stance of generalized antagonism to the whole of Western civilization and the elevation of “critical thinking” in the sense of facile reductionism (everything at bottom is about race-gender-class hierarchy) makes the university function more and more as our society’s chief source of anti-intellectualism.”

In “Leaf Taking” (Dec. 4), he added, “We have elevated ‘critical thinking’ as the chief and worthiest end of a liberal education.  Perhaps it is time for a reassessment.   The critical thinker who is deaf to culture’s deeper appeals is impoverished in some profound ways.  He is equipped to take everything apart but not to put anything together.  We need more minds capable of moving at ease and grasping the whole.”

I posted the following comment in response to the Dec. 4 piece, but as I should have made clearer, it was directed more to the previous one: (more…)

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Does Teaching Critical Thinking Include Challenging Students’ Beliefs?

Posted in Critical Thinking, Discussion, Teaching, tagged , , , , , , on December 23, 2011| 7 Comments »

This past term I had a rather unpleasant experience in my critical thinking class. I was confronted with a subset of students who walked in the door assured that I had nothing to teach them about critical thinking. I learned this because they vocally resisted absolutely everything with which they did not personally agree. Unfortunately, this wound up being nearly everything in the class–especially when it ran against the notion that everything is a matter of opinion, a matter for an eternal debate in which all views are equally right.

Now, many readers are probably thinking, “cry me a river, that happens to me every term”. I agree. It happens to me almost every term too. What was different this time was how long it lasted (all term, without let-up) and how deep the resistance went. Not even the definition of deductive validity was accepted as offering a legitimate, if technical and limited, usage of the word ‘valid’.  The only validity these students recognized was the sense in which a point of view was “valid to me”, full-stop.  They didn’t bother learning the technical sense of ‘valid’ well enough to offer even cursory reasons for why they wouldn’t accept it. Nor could they articulate what it was, exactly, that made a point of view “valid to me” when asked. This is just one example. On multiple occasions, I got the distinct impression that my refrain that sometimes it takes more than an affirmative “gut feeling” to make it reasonable to hold a position was being taken as a personal affront by some of the students. “How dare I”, their attitude demanded, “try to teach them that things were not as they believed?” (more…)

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Culture and Critical Thinking

Posted in Critical Thinking, Discussion, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 13, 2011| 3 Comments »

In a recent post on the Chronicle of Higher Education website, frequent contributor and NAS president Peter Wood laments:

“We have elevated “critical thinking” as the chief and worthiest end of a liberal education.  Perhaps it is time for a reassessment.   The critical thinker who is deaf to culture’s deeper appeals is impoverished in some profound ways.  He is equipped to take everything apart but not to put anything together.  We need more minds capable of moving at ease and grasping the whole.”

Wood’s complaint about critical thinking is the punchline to a piece that is largely about how much of intellectual worth is lost when scholars and societies view culture (any culture) through a myopic, modern lens.  To assess this complaint fairly one has to have an idea as to what Wood means by the much vexed term “critical thinking”. Thankfully, he tells us what he means in another posting on the Chronicle website:

“The stance of generalized antagonism to the whole of Western civilization and the elevation of “critical thinking” in the sense of facile reductionism (everything at bottom is about race-gender-class hierarchy) makes the university function more and more as our society’ chief source of anti-intellectualism.”

It is hard to disagree with the substance of Wood’s assertion here. Though it is important to take account of how gender, race, and class might exert distorting effects on one’s thinking, critical thinking certainly does not reduce to such considerations, simpliciter. But why think that it does in the first place? Wood’s assertions here and elsewhere (for example, here) seem to presuppose that everyone in the academy (at least in the US) thinks of critical thinking in this way.

But they don’t. (more…)

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Philosophy matters (for critical thinking)

Posted in Critical Thinking, Informal Logic, News, Teaching, tagged , , , , on December 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

A new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the decline of philosophy in the academy stresses again (see my previous post) the importance of philosophy in providing critical thinking education.  I’m pleased to see the props the author (Lee McIntyre) gives to feminist philosophers for their attention to pressing issues of our time, but I’m not sure his general despair over philosophy is warranted given other reports of the rising popularity of philosophy education.

McIntyre may simply be building a career as an alarmist.  His most recent book “Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior” despairs over losing the emancipatory potential of the social sciences.  (See Berel Dov Lerner’s review here.)  One begins to sense a pattern, and while I haven’t had a chance to investigate “Dark Ages” yet, I’m sceptical that it claims to promote value-free science.

However, his message about the need for a revaluation of the significance of philosophy education, and the central role of critical thinking in that context, may be important.  (He has a book coming out on this too.)  He says “the goal—especially at the undergraduate level—should be to help students recognize that philosophy matters. Not just because it will improve their LSAT scores (which it will), but because philosophy has the potential to change the very fabric of who they are as human beings.”  This requires taking critical thinking to a much higher level than most undergraduate programs will.

McIntyre blames the discipline for hiring sessional instructors, which is absurd since those decisions are made by administrators rather than faculty members.  However, philosophers do tend to view critical thinking, argumentation, and introductory education as less valuable, and so assign it to sessional instructors.  That might be rethought, but only if we begin to have philosophers trained in those methodological issues.

As argumentation theory and informal logic continue to grow (see the introductory editorial in Cogency), giving rise to new journals (such as Cogency) and becoming institutionalized in new research centres and doctoral programs, perhaps we will have the resources for that.   As it stands, critical thinking is much less a part of the philosophy curriculum than one might expect.

Philosophy is not alone in promising (and perhaps failing) to teach “critical thinking,” since that buzzword is so heavily used in education that it is almost meaningless.  Yet philosophers continue to claim a rightful ownership of that terrain.  That claim and the pride that goes with it flies in the face of typical educational and hiring practices that undervalue teaching and research in argumentation and informal logic.

What we need to turn things around may be a radical reconsideration of what is the purpose of a philosophy education.  McIntyre suggests that should be an appreciation of the value of philosophy, and that may require greater focus on the skills of philosophy. That will certainly depend on a broad consciousness-raising among philosophers, not to stem the hiring of sessional instructors but to demand that instructors of courses and authors of textbooks in critical thinking have expertise and training in informal logic.

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