This week’s guest’s decision to include creativity to his list of “pillars” defining critical thinking got me thinking about other elements of our mental makeup that you would not normally think of as critical thinking skills.
Emotion, for example, seems like the opposite of reason. And yet appeals to emotion (pathos) and the emotional and other non-reasoning parts of our personality that determine to whom we award ethos cannot be separated from our approach to rational decision making.
Back during the primaries, I thought a great deal about how imagination (which really falls under Kevin deLaplante’s critical thinking category of creativity) tends to be neglected as a critical thinking skill, despite the role it plays in opening up the number of options we can consider while thinking about something.
During an actual primary race, when multiple candidates are vying for supremacy, it’s easy to see how supporters of one candidate can imagine how they would behave if a candidate they did not support won the nomination. Likely there would be bitterness, followed by a rallying around the final choice. And imagination is what allows partisans to try these various emotional states on for size, as well as imagine during the final Presidential contest how “their choice” might have done had he or she been the nominee.
In a strange way, imagination allows us to think past even our most confirmed biases. For instance, an entrenched Obama or Romney supporter might refuse to consider systemic weaknesses in their candidate (even when confronted with them during political “incidents” like Romney’s 47% video or Obama’s less-than-stellar debate performance).
But if you can ask them to imagine a different scenario (such as one where Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee, or Chris Christie the Republican one), then their mind can open up to comparisons that don’t require as hard a challenge to core personal beliefs (since such scenarios are just flights of fancy).
But even if a specific imaginary scenario might be fanciful, the act of imagining it is not. For if you can imagine something, that means your mind is open enough to think about it. And during an election homestretch that usually involves closing off different avenues of thought, a little imagination might be called for in order to broaden ideas we allow in for further processing.
The post Critical Thinking and Imagination appeared first on Critical Voter.