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CriticalThinking
- 2. www.mollydwyer.com Molly has a Masters degree in English, and PhD in Philosophy & Religion. She has taught Freshman Composition in community college for over 15 years and is an award-winning novelist.
- 3. Critical Thinking English 205, Mendocino College, Ukiah, CA Instructor: Molly Dwyer, PhD. http://criticalthinking-mc205.wikispaces.com
- 4. http://criticalthinking-mc205.wikispaces.com The course uses one paperback, A Rulebook for Arguments. 104 pages Publisher: Hackett Pub Co 4th Edition (11/ 14/08) Price: $7.95
- 5. http://criticalthinking-mc205.wikispaces.com The main text for the course is a website. Everything for the course can be found at http://criticalthinking-mc205.wikispaces.com
- 6. Thinking Thinking is not a natural process of human consciousness. You may say, “Sure it is. Everybody thinks.” I have news for you: very few people think. Most people react, and then pass that off as thinking. Thinking is the cause of things. Reaction is the effect. —John-Roger, The Power Within You
- 7. How often are you actually thinking, and how often are you reacting? You are probably reacting about 90% of the time. For the most part, you are reacting either to your previous reactions or to someone else's reactions. It's a long chain of effect and effect and effect. It's like dominos: you hit one and they all go.— John-Roger, The Power Within You
- 8. What is Critical Thinking?
- 9. Critical Thinking involves two distinct activities: Analysis: Coming to understand an argument. Criticism: Evaluating the truth of an argument.
- 10. What is an argument? A good argument marshals reasons and organizes them in a clear and fair way.
- 11. An argument is built on one or more premise and arrives at its conclusion, based on those premises.
- 12. What is a premise?
- 13. An idea that points you toward a conclusion
- 14. Sherlock Holmes: “dogs bark at strangers…”
- 16. “I am an optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else.” —Winston Churchill This simple argument contains a premise and a conclusion. The premise is the reason for Churchill’s conclusion that being an optimist is justifiable.
- 17. “I am an optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else.” —Winston Churchill
- 18. How do we decide what to think? World View, Belief Systems, & Paradigms
- 19. World View, Belief System & Paradigm We use these words to talk about the intellectual structures that define the way we think about reality. They help us describe and understand how we view existence and the world we live in. They are the patterns of thought that underlie our collective intelligence, and they determine how we make meaning. These structures can change individually and/or collectively.
- 20. World View A World View is a framework of ideas and beliefs through which we interpret the world and interact with it.
- 21. Until sometime near the close of the 15th century (Columbus sailed in 1492), the vast majority of commoners believed the earth was flat. This idea formed the common world view.
- 22. World View
- 23. Soviet Union & Communism A World View often has hidden implications.
- 24. Paris architecture is quite different from what’s commonly found in the US. And a simple thing like architecture can influence our world view, that is, what we take for granted.
- 25. Belief Systems A belief system answers questions about life and death and about consciousness and the existence of higher or more evolved forms of power.
- 26. Paradigms
- 27. Paradigms shift as our understanding of reality shifts. We move, for example, from an earth-centered universe to a sun-centered solar system, to a universe full of galaxies.
- 28. An optical illusion can be a visual cue for understanding the implications of a paradigm shift. The same information looks different. Is it a Duck or a Rabbit? There are three ways to see it: Rabbit, Duck, both. Those who see it only one way find it difficult to agree about the truth, about what the information means or represents.
- 29. Our perceptions can be fooled.
- 30. How do we see the world?
- 31. Do we know what the world looks like? We know approximately what it looks like.
- 32. Perception is a matter of relationship.
- 35. There is something “out there,” but it is not what we see (or experience with our senses). What we see bears some relationship to what is “out there,” to be sure, but what we see is selective. We attend to what’s important to our survival.
- 36. What is Perception? The electromagnetic spectrum extends from low frequencies used for radio communication to radioactive gamma rays. Radiation is energy that travels and spreads out as it goes—visible light and the radio waves that come from a radio station are both electromagnetic radiation. So are x-rays. The electromagnetic spectrum is infinite and continuous.
- 37. Calling Forth the World
- 38. The Biology of Mind neurons — nerve cells
- 39. Understanding the Brain The human brain is not like a computer, it’s more like a lush rain forest, an organic living system, a living jungle of dense neuron arbors.
- 41. Information flows from one neuron to another across a small gap called a synapse. Communication of information between neurons is accomplished by the movement of chemicals called neurotransmitters.
- 42. How does the human mind work? The mind is mostly intra-connected, mostly focused inward on itself. It is a process, not a thing.
- 43. We are a symbolic species. We engage in thought in ways no other species appear to, and we use symbolic, written languages. We live in a world no other species can access. Ours is a shared “virtual world” of thought-designed stories— stories of “real” experience, invented stories, stories that imply hidden or esoteric meaning, stories we use to explain and organize our understanding of the world, stories about the way things are.
- 44. Here’s a story about sea squirts. Infant sea squirts are a little like tadpoles. They have a notochord, the simplest manifestation of brain tissue. It’s a rod-like structure that stiffens their tail and allows them to move.
- 45. As the sea squirts mature, however, they began to feel a vague sense of desire to find others of their kind and settle down in one place and become part of a colony.
- 46. The Sea Squirt’s last decision is undoubtedly its most dramatic. One might even call it sacrificial. Once these little squirts are safely situated, they seem to recognize, however vaguely, that there are no decisions left to be made...
- 47. And having no use for their metabolically demanding brains, they eat them—and, one hopes, enter into sea squirt nirvana.
- 48. There are two morals to the sea squirt story. The first is that your brain is metabolically expensive, the most demanding organ in your body. Use it or lose it.
- 49. The other moral of the story is that there is a moral. Which is to say that we humans are symbolic creatures. We constantly engage in representations of reality, living essentially in a virtual reality defined and created by symbols.
- 50. How we learn Accommodation There are two complementary processes of adaptation and learning described by child psychologist Jean Piaget. Existing mental constructs are changed to accommodate new concepts and external realities.
- 51. Assimilation New ideas and concepts are simplified to fit pre-existing mental constructs and cognitive structures. Information is interpreted in terms of existing ideas. Adults tend to stick to this kind of thinking.
- 52. So, what is Critical Thinking? It teaches us how to become aware of our mind, and its inner workings.
- 53. Critical Thinking teaches us how to respond to the world we live in… to the political and moral choices that face us, to the events of the world that confuse and frighten us. It helps us explore aspects of life we may tend to ignore because they are difficult, even painful to address.
- 54. Critical Thinking teaches us to think consciously, deliberately, and skillfully; to live well and to make meaningful, powerful choices.
- 55. It helps us develop our minds in the same way physical exercise helps us develop our bodies.
- 56. So we can choreograph our own unique dance, think for ourselves, follow the beat of our own inner drum.
- 57. Critical Thinking is not about settling for being one of the crowd.
- 58. We are here to learn how to think better, to discover the strings that control our minds, and learn how to resist their tug. We are here to discover how to take more control of our own thinking processes.
- 59. We are not here to argue, not here to convince others they must think like we do. Our concern in this class is not with the claim itself. Our concern is with the argument behind the claim, the thinking that is used to construct the claim. Our task is to develop reasoning that either proves or disproves that claim—reasonably, rationally, skillfully, intelligently, successfully, and most important—to the best of our ability, truthfully.
Editor's Notes
- Since the dogs didn’t bark the night of the murderer broke into the barn where Silver Blaze was stabled, Holmes concludes the dogs knew the murderer. His premise leads to an accurate conclusion.
- Churchill was the Prime Minister of Britain during World War II, (1940-45). During that time London was under siege. It was being bombed by Hitler’s Germany and Hitler seemed to be winning. It was a frightening time for the British and the world in general. People were discouraged. Still, Churchill’s premise is that there’s no advantage in not being an optimist even in the worst of times. His conclusion, arrived at from his premise, is therefore “I am an optimist.”
- The retina collects light and sends signals to a network of neurons that then generate electrical impulses in the brain. The brain processes the impulses and determines what we are seeing. Understanding what we see mostly happens in the brain. This is why we are susceptible to optical illusions. Do we know what the world looks like? We know approximately what it looks like.
- What a hawk perceives when it tracks a mouse scampering across a field, is the result of the evolutionary relationship, the predator-prey dynamic that has long existed between them. Were you in your hang-glider to pace the hawk and watch the ground below, what you would see would be different. Your ocular system is not equipped to catch a mouse hundreds of feet below, nor is your brain. We assume what the human sees is the “what” of what is out there, and what the hawk sees is a deviation from that standard. In fact, what the human sees is no more standard than what the hawk sees. Both are the result of the dynamics between the brain and the environment being negotiated. We interpret more than we perceive the world.
- There is something “out there,” but it is not what we see (or experience with our senses). What we see bears some relationship to what is “out there,” to be sure, but what we see is selective. We attend to what’s important to our survival.
- We are a symbolic species. We engage in thought in ways no other species appear to, and we use symbolic, written languages. We live in a world no other species can access. Ours is a shared “virtual world” of thought-designed stories—stories of “real” experience, invented stories, stories that imply hidden or esoteric meaning, stories we use to explain and organize our understanding of the world, stories about the way things are.
- There are two morals to the sea squirt story. The first is that your brain is metabolically expensive, the most demanding organ in your body. Use it or lose it. The brain is the most metabolically active organ in the body. It consumes up to ten times more energy than the average of the whole human body, can burn only pure glucose, and has little capacity to store reserves.