Thinking in Stereo

Return to Main Page for Critical Thinking Wiki

When you are thinking about a topic, issue, or problem in your life, whether alone or with others, you are usually focused on that problem, and you think about it until you come to some resolution or, what is more likely, until some other practical concern interrupts your train of thought. If we were to picture this basic situation, it might look like this:

Some questions that concern a thinker at this level are: What is the truth about this object? How should I feel about it? How does it work? What caused it? When we are “thinking about thinking,” however, the picture is a little more complicated. Instead of just two objects – a thinking mind and an object of thought, our picture has at least three: the mind thinking, the object being thought about, and my thoughts about “how I’m thinking about the object.”

Let’s call our thinker “Albert.” The first relationship, between Albert and the object of thought, is just normal thinking about the object. I could be thinking about a tree, world hunger, a date I have coming up, or anything else. But suppose I start wondering how I’m thinking about these topics or whether I’m thinking about them in the best way possible? I may ask myself one or more of the following questions:

• Do I have good information about the topic (trees, world hunger, my date)?
• Am I reasoning clearly about the topic?
• Am I focusing on the right aspects or issues?
• Is the way I am thinking about the object a useful way to think about’ the topic?
• Are there better ways to think about it?
• What are the best ways to explain or account for this object of thought?
• What is the relationship between the way I’m thinking about this topic and the way others do?
• How is my thinking on this issue affected by my class, ethnicity, nation of origin, region, etc.?

These are the kinds of questions that arise in the relationship between the two thought bubbles in the diagram. Critical thinkers are first and foremost people who worry about and try to improve the quality of their thinking and who believe that by thinking about their thinking they can find truths and insights about the various things they think about.

To say that you are thinking about your thoughts means that you are getting some distance on your own thought by making it an object of thought. Philosophers sometimes distinguish between “content” and “meta” levels of thinking. On the content level, you are thinking about the object of thought. And on the meta-level, you are thinking about the way in which you are thinking about the object. You are representing your thought to yourself and asking questions about it along with the questions you ask about the original problem. Your thought could be expressed as an argument, an explanation, a description, or a general reaction. But the big difference now is that you are thinking “in stereo” on the content and meta-level.

As soon as you become self-conscious about the way you are thinking about something, you start asking questions about the value of your way of thinking and how your way of thinking about something might compare with other ways of thinking about it. That is because when you represent your thought to yourself (typically in language) it becomes another object of thought. Philosophers are people who, among other things, make their thoughts (especially their presuppositions) an object of thought. Historically, they have asked important questions about thought such as:

• When does a way of thinking provide a good reason for behaving something?
• When does an account of something constitute knowledge of it?
• Are there special methods for investigating some kinds of questions?
• When am I justified in expressing absolute certainty about something?
• When should I recognize that a truth is only probable or possible?