I hear from a lot of commentators who pride themselves on their critical thinking. They care about facts. They care about reality. All the idiots who oppose them are unrealistic and misguided.
I think of them as a corrupt fallacy police. They are quick to bust others for failing to adhere to the strict standards of critical thinking, but they will not tolerate any criticism of their beliefs.
If you point out a fallacy in their thinking, they ignore it or dismiss it—or better yet, cite you for another failure. They will offer you critical thinking but you will never dare force them to apply it to their beliefs. If you try, they will throw the book at you, a bunch of hackneyed talking points memorized.
They will insist on arbitrating every discussion they engage in. They know the crux of the matter. It is whatever they insist on, whatever they believe trumps all other concerns. If you don’t follow them to what they believe is essential, you are screwed because they are critical thinkers after all!
For example, I often hear people say in so many words, “You used a personal fallacy, so you’re wrong about everything,” without realizing that they are engaging in a personal argument.
There is a subpage called Selfawarewolves that collects examples of such blatant, arrogant, and blind hypocrisy. I would call this subpage “Selfawarewolves.”
It’s natural to be wary of self-awareness. Self-awareness breeds self-awareness, guesswork, and doubt. This is great as long as other people are doing it. Your opponents should be doing it, but you shouldn’t be doing it. It’s liberating to ignore your failures in critical thinking, and you can if you focus on the failures of others. Blow the police whistle loudly and you won’t have to hear yourself think.
I love critical thinking. Socrates is generally seen as the founder of it, the master of doubt and questioning. Ironically, he is also seen as the founder of its opposite, the pursuit of absolute truth that is beyond question and doubt. I embrace both goals, but I don’t think they can be achieved. Since Socrates, we have realized that we cannot doubt what we do not know and assume and that there are no absolute truths that are immune to all doubt and questioning.
I support Socrates more than anyone else because of his problems with sophists, people who use critical thinking (logic, or logos) only to rebuke the opinions of others, or in other words, exploit critical thinking as an arsenal of weapons used by hypocrites and deceivers.
The fallacy is a pandemic these days. The world has become overwhelmingly complex. It is not comfortable to be self-aware and skeptical in the current sandstorm of doubt-generating possibilities. So people are naturally drawn to anything that makes them feel confident in themselves and as if they have found the absolute truth without any doubt (here is a short video on that). Declaring yourself a critical thinker is very useful in this way.
You can simply declare yourself a critical thinker without any training in it or thinking about what the term means. Just adorn yourself with the authority badge of critical thinking because that is what the cool guys wear. You are a critical thinker because you say so. A self-proclaimed know-it-all doesn’t need to know much, and a self-proclaimed critical thinker doesn’t need to think much.
To wear this badge with pride, it helps to not think critically about your beliefs. I call this “the contempt exception.” You feel such contempt for uncritical thinkers that you become an expert in uncritical thinking and thus exempt from it. “Me! Uncritical?! Impossible! I hate uncritical thinking!”
This is like playing the perpetual victim of injustice, assuming that you are an expert in injustice and thus exempting yourself from being accused of injustice. “I am fair because I can always tell when someone is treating me unfairly!”
Or you can declare yourself a critical thinker because you follow a leader who declares himself to be one. An example of this is the followers of Ayn Rand, who called her philosophy “Objectivism,” as if she had some privileged access to objective truth. To this day, her popular cartoons of objective heroes make readers and even leaders idolize themselves, sympathize with the heroes, declare themselves objective, and pretend to be the fallacy police.
People are often fooled by leaders who portray themselves simply as critical thinkers, using the rhetorical music of critical thinking, the upright posture, the scolding paternal voice, and the cheerful clothing, without using any real critical thinking other than overcoming all the challenges to their uncritical self-confidence.
Or you can take a course in critical thinking and get excited about it because of the power it gives you to play fallible cop, armed to defend your instinctual assumptions. Declare yourself as a critical-thinking expert and take on the world!
The general pattern goes like this:
First, you notice some leaders who pretend to be the most critical thinkers, the people who honor your intuition.
You feel a romance budding between your intuition and this seemingly rational leader. You fall in love.
You get married. You follow the ideas of this leader and through them, you find other like-minded thinkers who also sing in the voice you aspire to, the ideas you sense, the style you respect.
You study more passionately than ever. You were never a top student, but now your mind is buzzing with all the self-affirming stuff you’re learning. You repeat the patterns of these leaders. You memorize these leaders’ talking points. You notice that there’s a tribe of people who agree with you, so you must be right after all.
What a relief! You are like an undiscovered genius, like a pauper who discovers he was a prince all along or an ugly duckling who proves to be a magnificent swan!
You watch your tribe members battle it out against the idiots out there who lack your critical thinking skills. You watch your opponents fall in these battles. You copy them. You are amazed at how effectively you defeat people with your newfound combination of courage, “critical thinking,” and memorized talking points. You insist on relegating all conversations and discussions to your comfort zone, places where you can defeat people with your talking points.
People walk away frustrated, a sign that your intuition, rationality, and talking points have triumphed. With each victory with your newfound powers, you become more convinced that your opponents are idiots.
You have never felt so engaged in the world; there are more things to consider, too.
Many people learn a great deal about critical thinking without applying it to their beliefs. There are ways to teach critical thinking that don’t have this terrible effect. I’ll show you in this article, but here’s a summary:
Critical thinking is largely the ability to recognize fallacies, and weak arguments to support a claim, or, in other words, the ability to invalidate empty or weak rhetorical arguments to support some claim. Claims can be true or false. Think of fallacies as “non-indicative” indicators that don’t point one way or the other about claims.
Fallacies come in opposite pairs: For example, it’s a fallacy to say that a claim must be true because so many people believe it. It’s also a fallacy to say that your claim must be true because you’re a brave loner who believes it against all odds. Similarly, optimistic thinking is a fallacy, but so is “apocalyptic thinking,” that is, assuming that a claim must be true because people don’t want to hear it.
Every fallacy is also a rhetorical device. In other words, if you know how to invalidate an argument, you also know how to invalidate it. Today, social psychology offers some of the most advanced work on distorting and deconstructing arguments. It narrows down the types of human weaknesses in persuasion. The most fundamental of these is confirmation bias. Distorting what you want to believe, and dismantling what you don’t. Responsible critical thinking can be taught by emphasizing ways to counter confirmation bias and thus neutralize it. In other words, have students deconstruct their claims and those of their opponents. Teach students how to apply critical thinking to their claims and make persuasive rhetorical arguments to support their opponents.
