What is Critical Thinking?

The term “critical thinking” is in danger of becoming a cliche.   In the March 2006 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, Howard Gabennesch worked to put some edges on what type of thinking actually qualifies as “critical thinking.”  I will cite extensively from this article.

For starters, “a critical thinker is disinclined to take things at face value, suspicious of certainties, not easily swayed by conventional (or unconventional) wisdom, and distrustful of the facades and ideologies that serve as the ubiquitous cosmetics of social life. In other words, critical thinkers are necessarily skeptics.”  Referring to Skeptic Magazine, Gabennesch described skeptics as follows:

  1. Skeptics do not believe easily. They have outgrown childlike credulity to a greater extent than most adults ever do.
  2. When skeptics take a position, they do so provisionally. They understand that their knowledge on any subject is fallible, incomplete, and subject to change.
  3. Skeptics defer to no sacred cows. They regard orthodoxies as the mortal enemy of critical thought-all orthodoxies, including those that lie close to home.

True skeptics leave open the possibility that their foundational assumptions will be disturbed.  “Toes will be stepped on, tempers could flare, mortified members of the audience may stagger from the room.”  Gabennesch cites the following examples of the sorts of claims about which true skeptics consciously work to keep an open mind, despite heavy social pressure to do otherwise:

  • From the beginning, AIDS has been exaggerated as a significant threat to heterosexuals in the U.S.
  • It is far from clear
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The magnitude and the music make war AOK

My government’s violent occupation of Iraq has not flustered me nearly as much as the nonchalance of half of America.  Why are so many Americans utterly complacent about the wretched and rampant killing going on in our names?  Is it possible that we have become confused and seduced by the magnitude of the killings and by the music?  Allow me to explain.

First, the magnitude.  Stalin’s well-cited quote comes to mind: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”  Perhaps the immoral nature of Bush’s aggression would be clearer had Bush caused the death of only one man.  Imagine this hypothetical: 

President Bush looks out the window of the oval office and sees a man wearing a backpack walking down the sidewalk.  In a dry-drunkish paranoid moment, Bush tells his security officers that the man walking down the sidewalk has nuclear weapons grade aluminum tubes in his backpack and orders his guards to capture “that terrorist.”  While capturing the man with the backpack (it turns out to be empty), a U.S soldier is accidentally shot by friendly fire of a fellow soldier.

It is later disclosed that, one minute before giving his order to capture the man, a former ambassador had advised Bush the man wearing the backpack had just been searched and that he was not carrying anything dangerous.  Then it came out that Bush and his highest advisers had intentionally blown the cover of a CIA agent to discredit the former

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Sam Harris on problems with religious moderates and agnostics

In the 2004 New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith, Sam Harris wrote that

…120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.

Harris, author of the Atheist manifesto, was interviewed by Truthdig.com.  Despite the above-described unsubstantiated beliefs of many theists, it is somehow the atheists who have become “America’s least trusted minority group, “trusted less than Muslims, recent immigrants and homosexuals.”

Harris lays much of the blame for the success of fundamentalists on religious moderates, whose “political correctness” serves to protect long-overdue criticism of the fundamentalists:

religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism. And as a result, it keeps fundamentalism in play, and fundamentalists make very cynical and artful use of the cover they’re getting by the political correctness in our discourse.

Harris also takes aim at those who call themselves “agnostic,” because they are not “intellectually honest.”  Per Harris, agnostics refuse to disavow claims for which there isn’t a drop of evidence.

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Did Adam have a belly-button?

Until yesterday I didn’t realize that there was a serious debate about whether Adam had a navel.  But, alas, the debate has been a serious one in the minds of some people.

According to both versions of creation in Genesis (there are two substantially conflicting versions in the Bible), neither Adam nor Eve was ever in a woman’s uterus.  So neither Adam nor Eve needed a navel.  This doesn’t answer the question of whether they had navels, though.

We don’t have the remains of Adam and Eve.  We don’t have their photos.  How would one resolve this debate, then?  Many believers are undeterred.   Here is one analysis that Adam and Eve had no navels.  Raptureready.com also weighs in with a “no.”  Ditto for Christiananswers.net.  It’s not always seen as a serious debate.  Here is a tongue in cheek account by posted by a Baptist Church.  The terminology can get a bit daunting.  For instance, there is mention of the “Post-Umbilisists,” those “learned theologians and scholars believe that Adam’s navel was formed after the Fall.”

This issue occurred to me only because a friend (thanks, Deb!) recently mentioned to me that her friend was a “Navelite.”  I’d never heard of this religion.  Well, turns out that there is a small offshoot of Christianity that distinguishes itself by its belief that Adam did not have a navel.  It was a big enough issue at one point to cause a schism.  I have this one word of mouth only; Deb’s friend was …

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Coordinated violence and the frame of “war”

Imagine that it is broad daylight and you are attending a large public festival.  Now imagine that you suddenly realize that you are walking around in your underwear.  Perhaps you are one of the many people who would find it disconcerting to suddenly find that so much of your skin, and most every crevice, curve and imperfection of your body was exposed to public view.

This thought occurred to me while I was at a municipal swimming pool with my children.  I was surrounded by hundreds of people who were wearing swimming suits that covered no mobeach-at-nantucketre skin (and often less) than the underwear that many of these people likely wore.  Yet these people strutted about and proudly spread out on their towels and lawn chairs without any apparent concern that they were flagrantly exposing so much of their “private” areas to total strangers.

What is it, then, that convinces people to expose so much of their bodies to strangers in one case but not in the other?  It would seem that the context of being at a public swimming area constitutes a “frame.”

George Lakoff wrote of the great power of frames in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant!  Know Your Values and Framed the Debate (2004).  Here is how Lakoff describes frames:

Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world.  As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a

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