Critical Thinking Study Question Collaboration Page

Chapter 1: Thinking about Thinking

What are some of the opportunities and obstacles of trying to become a better critical thinking in the information age?

The information age is overwhelming precisely because the growth of research knowledge gives us both more good reliable knowledge and more apparent or questionable findings and theories. The information age gives thinkers today more information and more knowledge at their fingertips. However, having everything technological takes away the face-to-face conversations that are credible ways to become a better critical thinker.

How has the progress of research and "knowledge work" contributed to and complicated the pursuit of truth?

The progress of research and "knowledge work" contributes to the pursuit of truth by creating more answers and basis of knowledge. There are also more ways to look at the question with more knowledge available. It complicates the pursuit of truth by creating more information but not necessarily reliable and credible information.

What is epistemology? What are some of the values and limitations of logic in becoming a better thinker?

Epistemology is the study of the origins and grounds for knowledge. One of the values of logic is questioning the truth and therefore continually seeking knowledge. A limitation of logic would be it causes an inability to fully comprehend the emotional and moral aspects of the argument.

What does it mean to make your thought an object of thought?

An object of thought could be an issue, topic, or problem in your life. You are thinking about a topic, focused on that topic, until there is a resolution or something that that distracts you from that topic.

How can we describe thinking in ways that seem compatible with what we are learning from research on cognition and social conflict?

Cognition is linked to your personal interpretation of how you understand a concept. It deals with how an individual understands the material. Social conflict deals with assessing the situation correctly and approachs the situation from different critical viewpoints.

What is a persona and how does your persona affect the quality of your deliberations?

The persona is essentially the facade or character one tends to adopt within reflective discussions. As noted in the text one could be a "gadfly," which would entail "listening carefully for much of the discussion but then interjecting a particularly insightful or disarming question or series of questions." In short, one's persona is the general personality one develops within the context of the discussion, which would pertain to one's behavior towards others, the matter at hand, and other aspects of the conversation. Other examples provided include someone that "holds forth," one that "holds the fort," or someone that is a "synthesizer." Depending on one's persona, the quality of the deliberation will vary. The individual personas allow for different levels of quality based on what one takes out of the discussion, in addition to other variables.

What are the three main critical thinking virtues?

The three mail critical thinking virtues are sympathetic understanding, seeking knowledge, and inviting appraisal. Sympathetic Understanding is to be able to enter into a sypathetic unsderstanding of the views being offered. This requires you to understand the meaning of what has been said and the perspective from which it makes sense. Seeking Knowledge involves the following three questions about any view or argument: What is known? What is knowable? Who knows it? Inviting Appraisal is your openness to appraisal, both to giving ctitical appraisals and to receiving them.

Chapter 2: Making Reflective Moves

Understand and explicate terms and phrases such as: presumption, conversational implicature, burden of proof, rationales, claims, and logic chopping

Presumptions: Claims that are generally taken to be true or implied to be true within the context (not from the actual content) of the deliberation. All communication must take certain truths (presumptions) for granted. We presume what we do not question. Presumptions are the claims/ideas that are not "in play" in the discussion. Presumptions are good things to question, but not too early. They are partly determined by the interests of parties to the conversation, but also by the social and historical context of the discussion. They are one of the "structures" underlying spoken/written communication that help organize our thinking and exchanges. Specific presumptions that are made depend on the speaker's personalities, cultural values, and historical context. They are "non-logical" and pragmatic aspects of communication

Conversational implicature: A nonlogical inference constituting part of what is conveyed by a speaker in making an utterance in a context, without being part of what is actually said in the utterance.

Burden of proof: An obligation that is normally attributed to a speaker/writer to provide credible/plausible reasons for his/her major claims. This shifts as more compelling reasons are offered for different claims. In a discussion, it depends upon what is already presumed. One way to shift this is to undermine/question a presumption.

Rationales: Any set of premises or reasons which imply a conclusion when the truth of those premises is somehow a basis for accepting or understanding the conclusion (when on thing is said for the basis of another)

Claim: A statement about the world that is either true or false. They become conclusions of a thought process when we think we have support for them.

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VICTORIA MANKILLER

Formatting changes: Erik Boisen

Explain and be prepared to distinguish arguments from explanations.

Arguments are reasons for believing a conclusion is true. If you are justifying a belief, the rationale is an argument.

Explanations are reasons for understanding how something came about. If you are trying to understand a fact, the rationale you offer is an explanation.

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Victoria Mankiller

Review the key features of basic reconstructions and be prepared to give a basic reconstruction of a short argument.

Reconstructions are how we represent rationales in a piece of speech/writing.

PAGE 68 The key to good reconstructions is to follow these steps:

1. Map or highlight the rationales so that you can distinguish arguments from explanations and premises from conclusions explicitly.

2. Identify, distinguish, and separately reconstruct independent and dependent reasons for the main conclusion.

3. Fill in missing pieces of the argument and edit out unnecessary details.

4. Write out a summary of the rationales using good, clear, natural prose in a paragraph format. Be sure that your reconstruction makes it clear to the reader how various sub-arguments and explanations are organized in relationshiip to the overall point of the reasoning

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Victoria Mankiller

Review the principles of fair interpretation.

===1) The principles of clarity- A charitable interpretation is one in which the interpretor has tried to reconstruct the argument in it's best light by assuming that it's author was intelligent, well-intentioned, and in posession of at least some insight. It is more important to get the best representation of the argument rather than try to determine what the author is trying to say. ===2) The principle of fidelity - Being "faithful" to the text requires that you scruptuously avoid making inferences about the author's meaning without good textual and contextual evidence. The best textual evidence is the author's own words and contextual evidence is often invaluable. ===3) The principle of inclusion - Summarizing and putting together the reconstruction of the core of an argument and incorporating as much relevant information as possible into the argument. (OTHERS ADD TO THIS)

Understand the difference between Conversational Interpretive Strategies and Rationale Engagement Strategies and be prepared to apply them in particular cases.

The differences: 1. Conversational/Interpretive Strategies (CIS) = are based on an assesment we make about how to get involved based our judgment about the immediate context of the discussion. 2. Rationale Engagement Strategies (RES) = are more narrowly focused on techniques for questioning, criticizing, or affirming an argument or explanation.

Chapter 3: Sherlock’s Logic – Deductive and Inductive Inferences in Everyday Reflection

Within categorical logic, understand and apply terms such as: contradictories, contraries, subcontraries, subalterns.

CONTRADICTORIES-Contradictories have opposite truth values. If one is, the other must be false. CONTRARIES-Contraries cannot both be true, but can both be false. SUBCONTRARIES-Subcontraries cannot both be false, but can both be true. SUBALTERNS-From true A or E proposition, you can infer a true I or O proposition.

Chapter 4: Tell me Why . . .Or How . . . Explanation and Causation in Reflective Practice

Give examples of the wide range of types of explanatory questions.

Why is Mars red? Why do I feel the way I do? Why do $2000 dollar bicycles weigh so little? Why does toast seem to land butter side down when you drop it? Why does the AIDS virus resist drug treatments? Why are humans so aggressive? Why did my friend treat me rudely the other day? Why do humans laugh? Why are some forms of poverty difficult to alleviate?

Sam Burke

What are the main features of good explanations?

Good explanations offer the most probable account of how something works, comes about, or fits together. While we sometimes talk as though explanations begin with the search for truth and end with discovery, it is more precise to say that explanations begin with doubt and end with the cessation of doubt

Sam Burke

What are the competing explanatory accounts of the redness of Mars?

Why is Mars red? The truth of the matter is that Mars is red because it is covered in iron oxide, but this isn't very explanatory since we will immediately wonder, "Why is Mars covered in iron oxide?" One explanation is that iron oxide comes from water interacting with iron in the planet's rocks. This explanation points to clues such as long empty channels that may have formed from an abundance of water. Water suffused with iron deposits might have gotten into the hydro cycle, dispersing iron oxides in raindrops all over the planet. Another theory points to the fact that the very soil of Mars is made up of iron, suggesting that impacts from meteorites could be responsible for the amount of iron on the planet. The interesting thing about this theory is that it does not require the presence of water. Doing an experiment it was found that super oxide irons could be formed simply from the presence of the planet's atmosphere and UV radiation. Neither of these explanations are sufficiently strong to resolve doubt about the process that produced the iron oxides that make Mars red. Each has their own strength in explanation though, the first points to obvious physical clues while the second used the scientific method and conducted an experiment

Sam Burke

What’s the difference between a “why” question and a “how” question?

Science does not answer "why" questions, it only answers "how" questions. Science isn't trying to tell us why there are human beings on Earth, only how they might have gotten there. Both "why" and "how" questions are clearly explanatory from a psychological point of view, but scientists who insist on the distinction between scientific and non scientific explanation have a good point when they say that scientific explanations only have to do with "how" something works, came about, or fits together. Their worry is that we will make use of the concept of "telos" or purpose in a way that will prevent us from offering more compelling explanations that can only be offered if we focus on "how."

Sam Burke

Do explanations need to connect to “ultimate purposes”? Be prepared to present both points of view.

Certainly there is no such need within the contemporary paradigm of the physical sciences. But many scientists are like most non scientists in wanting ultimate answers (final causes) to questions about the purpose of existence. They just didn't expect answers to that question to come from science. Explanations begin and end in wonder. We must first feel that something needs explaining to begin looking for the explanation and we continue until, for a variety of reasons, the desire diminishes. Everything from folklore stories about how the leopard got his spots to creation myths show the psychological demand for and power of the explanatory impulse in humans. We have sometimes failed to look for powerful explanations for things like disease and human suffering when explanations were possible. Consider the long standing explanation-stopper for poverty: "The poor you shall always have with you." Other times, we have looked for explanations when none were needed (as in coincidence or astrology). So, in addition to thinking carefully about each explanation that presents itself to us, we have to introspective about what might be motivating our desire for an explanation.

Sam Burke

Can you see “causation”?

We do not see causes in the world; we assign them to events on the basis of the way we believe those events to be related. Our beliefs are informed by experience, but really determined by observation. David Hume pointed out that when we attend closely to our experience, our senses give us evidence of the sequence of events, but not a perception of a "cause." It is only through habit of our experience, in which some perceptions reliably follow one another, that we assign the term "cause" to the connection between them.

Sam Burke

What’s the difference between a necessary and sufficient condition?

Necessary condition is one that has to be present in order for some consequent condition to occur. EX: The presence of acid in a solution is necessary for turning a litmus paper blue. Sufficient condition is one that will help some event to come about. Your hand, the wind, or a tilted table are all sufficient antecedent conditions for the pencil to fall off the table.

Sam Burke

Identify four of Mill’s methods and be prepared to explain each.

"Method of Agreement"- suppose you notice that whenever your friend Jared is around, there is an argument. Through numerous social situations, his presence is the common factor with which the consequent condition, an argument, always agrees. He's not a necessary condition for an argument, but he is a sufficient condition-arguments seem to occur whenever he is involved in a discussion. Used it testing drug effectiveness

"Method of Difference"- If you find two events related as antecedent and consequent, and then you remove a factor and notice a different consequent condition, that factor may be a causal factor. This is a fancy way of saying that the Jareds of the world often get identified as causal factors on the day that they are missing. Used in detecting a food allergy

"Method of Difference and Agreement"-When we test a drug on two groups of patients, selected for their likelihood of becoming or being ill. One group, the test group, receives the drug while the other group, the control group, gets a placebo. If the drug works is all of the test subjects who receive it, it becomes the common factor. If the placebo fails in the control group, it becomes the "difference" that helps prove the rule.

"Method of Residues"- helps us identify the relative weight of causes when there are multiple causes. This method comes into play when you already have a set of antecedent conditions that you believe are causally related to a consequent condition. For example, if groups of people are playing "tug of war" with a rope over a mud puddle, you could remove one of the players from one side and see how long the remaining players could stay out of the mud. That would be a measure of the residue causal effect of the remaining team members. Likewise , if you were taking several medications for a cold, you could stop on ad observe the residual effect of the others.

"Method of Concomitant Variation"- can be the most helpful, but is also most susceptible to misuse. If you increase or decrease the amount or influence of one or more factors (antecedent conditions) in a situation, and you observed a concomitant change in come consequent condition, you should consider the possibility that the antecedent and consequent conditions are related causally and vary together by some common measure. This can result in a direct variation between the conditions-as one or more factors goes up the other one goes up, or inverse variation- as factor or factors increase, some other condition decreases.

Sam Burke

What is “inverse” and “direct” variation?

Direct variation between the conditions-as one or more factors goes up the other one goes up Inverse variation- as factor or factors increase, some other condition decreases.

Sam Burke

Chapter 6 – The Way Up is the Way Down – Thinking Through Complexity.

Intuition, sig. and problems of.

What do researchers on socio-linguistics and conflict tell us about the role of gender in deliberative communication?