Simply put, critical thinking teaches you how to form beliefs correctly , how to argue well, how to distinguish good arguments from bad arguments, and how to generally conduct yourself well in the realm of debate and intellectual activity.
What critical thinking is not about – and is sometimes mistakenly thought to be about – is how to be a critical person (that is, a person who habitually criticises things or other people). Of course a critical person might benefit from learning about critical thinking, and become more effective in their criticisms! But there is no necessary connection between learning about critical thinking, and becoming a critical person. In fact, some of the best critical thinkers are highly sympathetic and agreeable people, who only rarely criticise others.
Another common confusion is that critical thinking teaches you how to be a skeptical person, or a “skeptic”. Again, the tools you will pick up in these critical thinking lessons might help you to exercise skepticism more effectively. But being skeptical about everything is not a requirement, nor even a likely consequence, of learning about critical thinking. As we’ll see in the lessons that follow, there are some circumstances where a highly skeptical disposition is justified. But it is not always the case.
Critical thinking is also not primarily about how to critique things (e.g. critiquing a play or a film). Again, perhaps there will be some critical thinking tools that help professional critics – art critics or film critics – to more effectively and fairly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a particular work or project. But again, this would be incidental, and is not the main purpose of critical thinking.
The main purpose of critical thinking is, in a nutshell, to teach people how to think clearly and fairly. If you’re curious about what exactly that involves, then I recommend you complete this course!
Why is it important?
I’d like to think that if you were able to understand the first sentence in this article, then you already understand perfectly well why critical thinking is so important. In fact, of fundamental importance. But just in case you’re still not that bothered – or if you simply want to know how you might convince others who are not that bothered – let’s make the case more explicitly.
Firstly, critical thinking teaches you how to avoid common errors in belief formation. Why is this important? Because if you don’t have a good approach to forming beliefs, it increases the probability that you will end up with incorrect beliefs about the world. And if you end up with incorrect beliefs about the world, you are more likely to act incorrectly in the world. And if you act incorrectly in the world, the world is likely to “punish” you for having incorrect beliefs. Simply put, you ignore reality at your peril. And one way of ignoring reality, is to pay little or no attention to how you form and evaluate your beliefs about reality. The flipside of this is that if you have a generally good approach to belief formation and evaluation, you are more likely to end up with accurate beliefs about the world. And this in turn will help you to pursue sustainable courses of action in the world, to solve problems more effectively, to navigate personal relationships more successfully, and to have a less frustrating existence.
Secondly, critical thinking teaches you how to argue well. Why is this important? Presumably, if you are a normal human, you would prefer to avoid making bad arguments! If you habitually make bad arguments, you are – other things equal – less likely to be able to convince other people to believe certain things, or change their minds about certain things. You are also more likely to be perceived as unreliable in the area of decision-making, problem-solving and general intellectual exchanges. This can have negative impacts on your work life, public life, and even on your personal life.
One qualification here: as you’ll learn in the Fallacies and Cognitive Biases modules, there are certain kinds of bad arguments (or fallacies) that might be quite effective in convincing people to accept a particular conclusion. Because of people’s biases and/or lack of familiarity with certain fallacies, bad arguments do sometimes succeed in fooling people. But again, succeeding in convincing someone isn’t, and shouldn’t be, our ultimate goal (again, see the lessons below). Being good at fooling people by using certain fallacies or exploiting certain biases, may pay off in the short term. But over time, as people discover that you have caused them to form bad beliefs, it’s likely to backfire.
In any case, if it’s a choice between using bad arguments to convince people and using good arguments, why not choose the latter? Good arguments have the benefit of being more robust in the long-term, in the sense that they don’t run the risk of being exposed and refuted later on. And even if you are happy to use bad arguments to persuade people, you would still need to study which bad arguments are more likely to work and why (not all bad arguments are created equal!). Simply being bad at arguing is no guarantee that you will happen to use that small subset of bad arguments that are more likely to persuade people. And so, learning about critical thinking is a requirement even if, for some perverse reason, you want to learn about how to argue “effectively” only by exploiting people’s intellectual blindspots. (More on why you have an obligation not to do that below).
Thirdly, critical thinking helps you to distinguish between good and bad arguments. Why is that important? Firstly, it helps you with the previous task of arguing well yourself. But it also helps you assess and evaluate the arguments of other people, and to avoid being misled or deceived by other people’s bad arguments. This in turn helps you avoid forming beliefs incorrectly, which leads to all the associated benefits listed above.
Critical thinking teaches you how to conduct yourself well in discussions, debates, and intellectual life in general. Why is this important? This has more to do with behaving in a way that will facilitate productive and sustainable discussions and interactions. One common and mistaken assumption is that the only thing that really matters in critical thinking or intellectual activity in general is how smart a person is, and whether the person’s arguments are sound or not. But this is a short-sighted view. Common sense should tell you that this is not all that matters in debates and discussions. Intellectual honesty is also important. A commitment to seeking the truth, rather than to just making other people look stupid, can make a huge difference to the fruitfulness and sustainability of a discussion. Critical thinking (when done right) teaches these “intellectual virtues”, and not just how to formulate a good argument or identify errors.
Finally, there are good reasons to not only study critical thinking yourself, but to also become a critical thinking “evangelist”. To encourage everyone you know who hasn’t already studied critical thinking, to study it. In other words, there are good reasons for everyone to study critical thinking. If everyone were to study critical thinking, public discourse and belief-formation in general would tend to improve over time. Better decisions would tend to be made at every level of society. Fewer personal conflicts and less interpersonal tension will tend to arise as people will be less likely to resort to personal attacks (see our lesson on “The Ad Hominem Fallacy”). Higher standards of debate and rhetoric would be applied to and expected of our politicians, which may in turn improve the quality of political candidates coming forward for our consideration.
Concluding thoughts
By now you should be convinced that critical thinking is not just important, but vitally important. It can have huge impacts on the quality of your life. It can mean the difference between keeping or losing your job; between breaking up with someone because of a stupid and perfectly avoidable argument, and not; between voting for a politician who will do tremendous damage, and not; between living a healthy and sustainable life, and not. It also sets the intellectual foundations for basically every other discipline and intellectual pursuit, since every discipline and intellectual pursuit benefits from clear thinking, good argumentation, avoidance of fallacies and errors, and good intellectual conduct.
You might well wonder then why “Critical Thinking” as an independent discipline, is not already a core feature of all educational curricula across the world? You might even infer that, given its conspicuous absence, it can’t really be all that important after all!
Well you’d be wrong. It is important, for all the reasons we’ve just discussed. Those reasons are indisputable (I invite you to try and disupte them!). Unfortunately, and ironically very likely because of the absence of Critical Thinking from our educational systems, those who make the decisions about what ought to be taught in our formal education institutions continue to make the error of overlooking (or failing to even recognise the existence of!) Critical Thinking.
To be fair, the idea of Critical Thinking as an independent discipline only arose relatively recently. Before, the components of Critical Thinking were dispersed across and subsumed within different disciplines – although only very inconsistently and haphazardly. So for instance, logic and formal fallacies were traditionally included and studied within Philosophy. The problem is that not all philosophy students are required to study formal logic; and not all students study Philosophy (indeed, very very few do). Likewise, cognitive biases form part of some Psychology courses. But again, not all psychology students study cognitive biases, and few people study Psychology.
You get the point. The components of critical thinking have until now only been incidentally taught, insofar as they are components of, complements to, or accidental accompaniments to other disciplines. Certainly, when children are taught basic arithmetic and languages, at least part of that process involves teaching them how to form beliefs well, how to distinguish correct from incorrect beliefs or statements, how to speak and communicate clearly. But this tends to occur quite haphazardly and unselfconsciously, and often, very sub-optimally. Moreover, most primary and secondary-level educational curricula do not include subjects like Philosophy and Psychology as core disciplines. At best, they are optional “electives”, and still only rarely so. Most of the time, they are only options at third level colleges and universities. As such, most people grow up completely unacquainted with even the basics of Critical Thinking. This has to be one of the most scandalous oversights and failures of formal education globally. Hopefully, courses like this one can begin to go some way to redressing this glaring cultural failure.