What’s Reasoning?
The behavioral and emotional problems that people wrestle with in their daily lives are almost invariably due, to some extent, to bad decisions. Whenever a person makes a decision, he or she draws a conclusion from a set of premises. This process of drawing an inference is known as reasoning. You make an inference when you try to justify one statement in terms of another. The set of statements you give as reasons for a further statement is known as your premises. In all reasoning, there must be at least one premise. As you will see, there is usually more than one. The further statement that you justify with your premises is known as your conclusion. All reasoning has one conclusion. If you have more than one conclusion, then you have made more than one inference. If I tell you that I hate Jane because she is stuck up, I am attempting to justify my dislike for her in terms of my contention that she is stuck up. My premise is that she is stuck up; and the conclusion I draw from this is that I dislike her. If I tell you that she caused me to dislike her because she is stuck up, I have succeeded in concealing my decision to dislike her in the language of causes. I have in the same breath denied responsibility for my feeling, which I attribute to her. “If she wasn’t so stuck up, then I wouldn’t dislike her,” you may declare in an attempt to deny the reality of your decision.
Unfortunately, it is usually easier to deny one’s self-destructive decisions than to
admit them. The former does not require any work, while the latter does.
What’s Logic?
Logic is, by definition, the science of reasoning. It studies the justification of inferences and develops methods and techniques for distinguishing good reasoning from bad reasoning. The utility of logic lies in its ability to help people distinguish between sound reasoning and that which only masquerades as such. The rules and reports that typically under gird irrational behavior and emotion are ones that only masquerade as sound reasoning. A clear, accessible, non-technical science is needed that systematically helps to distinguish rational rules and reports from irrational ones. It is sometimes said that logic is based on common sense, and indeed it is. Unfortunately, what seems to be commonsensical is often not really so. For many, common sense says to get someone back if they do something wrong to you; to do whatever others are doing so as not to be odd man out; and to call anyone who screws up a screw up. Such “rules of life” often pass as “common sense” even though they are anything but commonsensical. What is needed, therefore, are methods and techniques for sifting through the litany of premises that drive human decisions and to provide a manner of distinguishing the rational from the irrational. What is needed is a process of critical thinking.
What’s Critical Thinking?
The distinguishing mark of critical thinking is that it is a kind of thinking about thinking. Unlike most of the thinking people do, critical thinking has as its object the thinking itself. A popular bumper sticker often found on business vehicles states, “How’s my driving?” Such a question invites you to think about the external world, not about your thinking or anybody else’s. The question, “How’s my thinking?” which is not ordinarily affixed to a bumper, invites reflection that does not refer to the external world but rather to the internal operations of your mind.
This so called “meta-thinking” or thinking about thinking is also characterized by the kind of thinking it examines. Critical thinking examines reasoning, that is, the inferences you draw from premises. It is thinking about reasoning. More precisely, it is reasoning about reasoning. If I decide to tailgate the car in front of me because I believe he has deliberately cut me off on the highway, I am not thinking critically. However, if I decide not to go through with this decision because I decide that I have based my decision on flawed premises—an irrational, self-destructive rule of getting even and a report engendering a concocted explanation of the driver’s sudden jump into my lane—then I am in the critical thinking mode. I am drawing inferences about the fallacious character of my inferences, and it is these inferences that qualify as critical thinking.
But critical thinking needs also to be distinguished from other forms of meta-thinking that are neither critical nor helpful. If I am obsessing about my thoughts or inferences, and if I am telling myself that I must keep these thoughts up or be damned, I am not thinking critically, even though my thinking is about thinking. This is because critical thinking is rational thinking about thinking; it isn’t just any form of reasoning about reasoning. It is reasoning that avoids and corrects the pitfalls of fallacious reasoning.
