Many of the epistemic missteps we make stem from a blunt tools for reasoning. That's where traditional critical thinking education comes in. But many more of our epistemic missteps stem from the misapplication of our tools for reasoning. We use our reason to engage in argumentative combat, blindly defending what we already believe. It is this motivated use of reason, more so than our blunt tools, that is driving social and political polarization.
What can we do about the motivated use of reason? Jakob Hohwy, Craig Hassed, and I are writing a book on it. In which we rethink the basic structure of what critical thinking is, and how to teach it.
A brief synopsis is below...
The first section of the book introduces readers to the ways in which the default intuitions and patterns of thought that social evolution has endowed us with can get in the way of good reasoning and how cultivating mindfulness can help.
Maintaining an open mind is central to being mindfully rational. When we are open-minded, we take new evidence seriously, irrespective of whether it conforms with our existing beliefs. This might seem quite straightforward, but in practice it is far from it. In Chapter 1 we explain why maintaining an open-mind is so important and why it is much harder than we typically think and introduce a few off-the-shelf tricks that can help notice when we are being irrationally closed-minded.
There is a growing body of evidence that practicing mindfulness can lead to significant improvements in a host of metacognitive abilities that are key to successfully navigating our own biases—attention, self-awareness, emotional regulation, attitude. In Chapter 2 we review some of this literature, propose mindfulness as a long-term metacognitive training program, and explain how to go about safely introducing mindfulness practices into your daily routine.
How we think of ourselves as individuals and the social groups we identify with have a profound influence on how we reason—and not always for the better. Although it can unite people within identity groups, it also divides and biases thinking in response to out-groups. This chapter introduces the concept of ‘identity gardening’ and the technique of ‘decentering’ and explains how to harness identity so that it aids rather than impedes reasoning.
In the second section of the book, we introduce the core tools for good reasoning. This includes: how to construct arguments, how to think about evidence and update your beliefs, how to evaluate generalizations and with them, and think clearly about causation. As the varied case studies we examine demonstrate, mindfulness is absolutely crucial to the effective deployment of these tools for reasoning. Scientists’ belief in a non-existent planet, the introduction of cane toads into Australia, and recent claims that one in five young Americans deny the holocaust, all suffered from a shortage of the mindful use of tools for reasoning.
A cornerstone of the critical thinking toolkit is the logical argument. In logic, the word 'argument' means something quite different from its everyday sense. A logical argument isn’t a fight—it’s simply a set of reasons leading to a point or decision. In Chapter 4, we explain why arguments in this sense are best understood as tools for communication rather than as tools for persuasion and explore how mindfulness can help us construct better arguments in daily life.
Good arguments need true premises, but truth can be tricky to obtain. For the most part, we must make do with beliefs supported to varying degrees by evidence. Chapter 5 explains how philosophers of science approach evidence and how to update our beliefs in light of new information. A surprising implication of this framework is that it can be perfectly rational for people with different starting beliefs to disagree about the evidence. We explore how mindfulness can help us navigate these disagreements and update our beliefs more effectively.
To bring about the changes we want in the world, we need to understand what causes what and how those causes interact. Reasoning about causes is more complicated than we tend to think. Evolution has endowed us with instincts about causation that can misfire spectacularly—particularly when considering complex networks of causes. Cane toads eat cane beetles, so introducing them into cane fields will control beetle populations and boost the harvest, right? Wrong! In Chapter 6, we explain how to think clearly about causation in a complex world and how mindfulness can help ensure our attempts to make the world better don’t backfire.
Stereotypes get a bad rap, but generalisations are unavoidable. The challenge is distinguishing more reliable generalisations from bogus stereotypes. What are we basing our generalisations on, and how do they affect the way we see others and the world? In Chapter 7, we identify common mistakes we often make when generalising from a sample and explain why it’s probably not true that 1 in 5 young Americans are Holocaust deniers.
Many of the most important decisions we make aren’t ones we make on our own. They are decisions we make together, with other people. For example, at home, decisions about where to live or where to send the kids to school are made with our partners. At work, the board of directors works together to assess options for direction, strategy, or priorities. And in government, decisions about fiscal policy, budgetary spending, and how to respond to a national threat are not in the hands of any single individual; they are group decisions. But group decision-making is not easy. If there is insufficient disagreement within the group, we end up with groupthink—we pat each other on the back and become more deeply entrenched in our biased view of the world. But too much disagreement leads to conflict. The third section of the book explains how mindful rationality can help us disagree without being disagreeable and foster more effective group decision-making.
Critical thinking has traditionally been taught as an individual pursuit—something we do on our own. From this perspective, to the extent that others figure into the picture at all, they are seen as foes to be cajoled, persuaded, or overridden. Chapter 8 advocates for a more collaborative approach to reasoning and decision-making. In short, we reason better when we reason together.
One of the things that makes group decision-making so powerful is that it allows us to harness the hard-won expertise of others. Want to know what’s causing the pain in your neck? You could spend weeks or years studying human physiology, or you could just ask an expert. But how do we know who the experts are? In some cases, we have clear signals (such as medical degrees), but most of the time, we rely on what psychologists call the confidence heuristic. We assume that the more confident someone is in their belief, the more likely they are to be right. But people can be confident and profoundly wrong at the same time. Chapter 9 explores how to more mindfully calibrate our confidence and the implications this has for effective group decision-making.
A major obstacle to more effective group decision-making is the attitude we bring to the table. We often aim first for persuasion, giving little thought to trying to understand others' views and why they hold them. This is doubly ironic, because, on the one hand, persuasion is most effective when built on a solid foundation of understanding and mutual respect. On the other hand, the whole point of reasoning together is to harness the diverse perspectives and expertise of others—not to persuade them. Chapter 10 explains how the tools we've introduced throughout this book can help maintain an understanding-first attitude.
In the epilogue we express our hopes for the future and the prospects for building mindfully rational communities through education and training.