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Chapter 2 Summary
- We should expect that thinking critically will often be difficult and even unpleasant (as painful truths sometimes are), and indeed it is. But there are ways to (1) detect errors in our thinking (even subtle ones), (2) restrain the attitudes and feelings that can distort our reasoning, and (3) achieve a level of objectivity that makes critical thinking possible.
- We can sort the most common impediments to critical thinking into two main categories: (1) those hindrances that arise because of how we think and (2) those that occur because of what we think. Category 1 obstacles are those that come into play because of psychological factors (our fears, attitudes, motivations, desires, and cognitive dispositions), and category 2 impediments are those that arise because of certain philosophical ideas we have (our beliefs about beliefs). For example, a category 1 hindrance is the tendency to conform our opinions to those of our peers. A common category 2 problem is the belief that objectivity in thinking is impossible or that we really don’t know anything or that we don’t know what we think we know.
Psychological Obstacles
- We are all heir to psychological tendencies and habits that affect our behavior and channel our thinking. They tend to persist or recur, haunting our minds until we have the awareness and the will to break free of them.
- Psychological obstacles include self-centered thinking, group-centered thinking, resisting contrary evidence, looking for confirming evidence, and preferring available evidence. Perhaps the most pernicious are prejudice, bias, and racism.
Philosophical Obstacles
- A worldview is a philosophy of life, a set of fundamental ideas that helps us make sense of a wide range of important issues in life. The ideas are fundamental because they help guide us in the evaluation or acceptance of many other less basic ideas. But there are certain problematic ideas that can undermine critical thinking.
- The notion that truth depends on what someone believes is called subjective relativism, and if you accept this notion or use it to try to support a claim, you’re said to commit the subjectivist fallacy. This view says that truth depends not on the way things are but solely on what someone believes. Truth, in other words, is relative to persons. Truth is a matter of what a person believes—not a matter of how the world is. This view, however, has some implausible implications. Philosophers point out that if we could make a statement true just by believing it to be true, we would be infallible. Subjective relativism (as it applies to morality) also implies an implausible moral equivalence. It says that the sincere moral views of any individual are as good or as true as those of any other. Many critics think that subjective relativism’s biggest problem is that it’s self-defeating. It defeats itself because its truth implies its falsity.
- To escape the difficulties of subjective relativism, some people posit social relativism, the view that truth is relative to societies. The claim is that truth depends not on an individual’s beliefs, but on society’s beliefs. But it has some of the same troubling implications that subjective relativism has. Social relativism also has a difficult time explaining the moral status of social reformers. We tend to believe they are at least sometimes right and society is wrong. But one of the consequences of social relativism is that social reformers could never be morally right.
- There are some who believe that we know much less than we think we do or nothing at all. This view is known as philosophical skepticism, and thinkers who raise doubts about how much we know are known as philosophical skeptic. But it seems that our knowledge does not require certainty. All of us can cite many situations in which we do seem to have knowledge—even though we do not have absolutely conclusive reasons. We know them not because they are beyond all possible doubt, but because they are beyond all reasonable doubt. Doubt is always possible, but it is not always reasonable.