Deanne Kuhn, a psychologist at Columbia, believes that the most important thing in the way we think is not what beliefs we have about the world. What really matters is why we have these beliefs (a belief that can be any theory: being left-wing, thinking it's going to rain tomorrow, believing in aliens...).
Critical thinking is the ability to:
- identify and develop your beliefs about the world.
- Gauge our confidence in our beliefs.
- update one's beliefs.
Skills that lead to critical thinking
The education system does not allow young people to develop their critical thinking skills properly, as it mostly transmits knowledge rather than teaching the skills of knowledge.
This is not the fault of the national education system. Leon Bostein reminds us rather well of this irony: adults want better schools for their children, while they themselves generally do not respect education and knowledge.
For Deanne Kuhn, there are two skills of knowledge : inquiry (and argumentation. These are the two pillars of critical thinking.
Epistemological inquiry
When I was in high school I was taught the history of man in biology: the different species that have existed, their propagation, the dates of their existence... If I had been more proficient in investigation, I would have listened patiently to the lecture and then searched for data to confirm or deny what I had just heard.
I would have learned that the researchers themselves have many theories about the history of the human species, with a lot of uncertainty: how did man come to Australia? How many species were there?.... Bill Bryson in his great book explains that it would take only one pickup truck to contain all the bones (non homo sapiens) found on Earth. That's very little evidence, so I would have taken what my professor told me with a grain of salt.
Epistemological investigation allows one to ask the right questions to refine one's beliefs about the world and to seek the answers to these questions. It is not sufficiently formalized and taught in school. When a teacher transmits knowledge, students must swallow it and return it as it is, without questioning it. And this often happens even after the baccalaureate!
I am fascinated by epistemological investigation. My great passion in life is discovering new fields. This happens in several phases:
- First I spend several weeks/months reading introductory texts to the field (Wikipedia, YouTube tutorials, light books...).
At that time, I have a cloud of colorful (but unstructured) information and images about the domain in my mind.
It is important for me have fun during this phase. - Then I refine my knowledge by discovering the pillar books and geniuses of the domain. These geniuses/books are easy to find as they are usually found in most of the top 10 on the Internet, forum/blog/reddit users mention them a lot, and with admiration.
This is where I force myself to structure my domain model. I say to myself: "if I were to make a presentation on the subject, what would be its structure? The information starts to look like a network of dots, which brings together the theories and data of the field.
At this point, I tolerate a little more boredom because it's inevitable. - Finally, I find out what the disagreements disagreements are within the domain. It allows me to be more humble, because the debates really bring out the weaknesses of the theories I had in my mind, and I take them a little more in perspective.
I think that skill would help individuals enormously in their lives. Indeed, it helps to find the answers to the complex questions that one asks oneself. The ones for which a google search is not enough.
How can you be happy? What kind of life and direction should I choose? How can you learn to play the guitar effectively?...
Many people have already scientifically answered these questions. And it's much faster to learn how to find their answers than to redo scientific research on the subject.
Argumentation
In the 1990s Deanne Kuhn conducted interviews with several hundred individuals and asked them questions like, "What do you think is the main reason why people drop out of school?"
To her great surprise, most of the participants gave false answers to this question ("their parents are not authoritarian enough", "young people work less"...), with great confidence, even though they had no data to support their answer.
Of course we can't know everything, but we must know that we do not know. The participants should have acknowledged their ignorance and possibly hypothesized that they are not sure at all. That they could verify their hypothesis by looking for such and such data, etc...
Argumentation is a complex skill. I have talked about it before, but I am always dismayed when I am told that there is too much unemployment because the unemployed are too protected, without even knowing 3 or 4 figures on unemployment. In that case, we have to be careful.
Because knowing data is only the first step in the argument. We must then be able to evaluate a data and its impact on a theory, which requires to make inferences, not to fall into the various cognitive biases, etc... Argumentation also includes the ability to structure and restitute the theories we have about the world, our confidence in these theories and the data associated with them.
Argumentation is crucial, as it allows us to have an accurate vision of the world and to transmit it. It helps us in our daily life, but not only. A democracy works best with citizens who have a sharp critical mind.
Developing these skills
At school
The psychologist Andres Ericsson is the world's leading expert in skills development. He developed the "deliberate practice theory“.
According to him, in order to develop a skill you need to:
- Be fully focused on it during training;
- Do increasingly hard exercises, and increase the difficulty through repetition;
- Work precisely on certain sub-skills;
- Be coached to get personalized feedback.
It is obvious that developing argumentation and investigation skills according to Ericsson's theories requires courses that focus only on these two skills. One cannot develop one's critical thinking skills as a side effect of a high school history course.
Deanne Kuhn offers courses in which the students take responsibility for researching the data and theories themselves while being closely supervised by their teacher. I also think this is the best way for students to actively develop their critical thinking skills. In my opinion, these investigation/argumentation courses should be the majority of classes in a week, at least from adolescence onwards. Maybe even earlier.
And what about us, the adults?
We'll never get a chance to go to high school and take critical thinking classes. According to Dr. Kuhn, the relationship between a man and his beliefs goes through four stages in his development:
- The "realist" stage: Before he's four years old, the child doesn't know that he knows. That he builds up theories about the world and that several people may have several theories.
- The "absolutist" phase: any difference between two people is considered to be the result of a misunderstanding. One of the two is right.
- The "multiplicist" phase: differences are questions of point of view, which are subjective. Every point of view is right (It's only a matter of perspective).
- The "evaluative" phase: the adult understands that theories are linked to data, and that therefore they can be gauged. Some points of view are strictly better than others.
According to Kuhn, not all adults reach the evaluative or multiplicist phase. That is, many adults think that any disagreement is based on a misunderstanding or that two people who disagree are each right in their own way.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there is a correlation between the number of adults who are not evaluators and the number of adults who remain victims moralism throughout their lives (according to Blanton).
For in both cases, we are talking about people who never ask themselves why they think what they think.
The first step in developing a critical mind is to constantly question oneself. When you have beliefs about the world (political orientation, philosophy of life...) ask yourself: why do I think that? Very often, we realize that these beliefs have in fact been transmitted to us. In fact, the best indicator of a person's political opinion is their parents' (personally, I was pro-Sarkozist until 2012 because of that).
Then, when you hear arguments, dissect them later when emotions have subsided. If someone contradicted you and you didn't have an answer, that's good news: what information were you missing? How should the new information be taken into account in your belief network? Do you need to change your mind?
Jérôme Grondeux believes that the three values necessary for critical thinking are curiosity, lucidity and humility. According to Deanne Kuhn, a teenager spends four times as much time in a debate presenting his or her arguments as he or she does reacting to the other person's arguments. Critical thinking in a debate begins by absorbing what the other person is saying so that it can be taken into account, without judgment.
Don't try to save your face or change the subject (I see this all the time), because you have to be face to face with the limits of your knowledge in order to be able to push them forward.