Advocate Online

Thriving in Academe
Issues To Consider

The Ideal Thinker
There is much resistance to following the rules of good reasoning.

Is teaching critical thinking an impossible mission?
Extensive research on cognitive heuristics and biases seems to show that people—even college students who have successfully completed a logic course—frequently violate rules of good reasoning. For example, experimental psychologists have shown that most people are highly conservative when it comes to belief revision. We often persist in believing something even after all the evidence that formed the initial basis for our belief has been undermined. Does this research show that we are irrational by nature?

It helps to take an aspirational view of critical thinking. According to this view, the rigorous and reflective thinker is an ideal type that we should all strive to approximate, even if there are psychological limits that ultimately prevent us from achieving this ideal. One of my goals as a teacher of critical thinking is simply to get students to endorse this ideal and to commit themselves to trying to live up to it.

How can I teach the informal fallacies without a logic textbook, and without using the op-ed page for target practice?
Try holding a “worst argument pageant.” This can be done in any class. I give students a thesis and instruct them to e-mail me, prior to the next class, the worst argument they can think of for that thesis. I then create a handout with all the contest entries, and we spend the next class period discussing the vices of the arguments that students submitted. At the end of class, we hold a vote to determine which argument is the worst. The student who submitted the winning entry then receives a gag gift. This exercise almost always raises interesting theoretical questions. For example, at what point does really bad reasoning cease to be reasoning at all?

What else can I do in my classes to promote critical thinking?
One easy strategy is to build critical thinking into the grading rubrics that you share with students for particular assignments. For example, I usually distribute a checklist of necessary conditions for receiving an A on a paper. The list might include things like “adherence to the principle of charity,” “contains at least one cogent argument for the thesis of the paper,” and “contains no logical fallacies.” We can provide a powerful incentive by telling students that their grades on any given assignment depend in part on the critical thinking skills they exhibit.

return to "Thriving in Academe"