During last week’s podcast, the Critical Thinker Academy’s Kevin deLaplante introduced two new “pillars” of critical thinking: creativity and character. And in the last two blog entries, I added imagination, humility and courage as three more critical thinking skills.
What these all have in common is that they are not, technically, thinking skills but rather reflect emotional states or virtues. Which raises the question of why they should be included in a discussion of critical (or any other form of) thinking? After all, thinking is supposed to be about reason, so why should our emotional states or personal dispositions get dragged into a discussion that should zero in on things such as how to find the most accurate facts and come to a logical conclusion about them?
A hint of why we should be a bit broader in what we include in the category of critical thinking skills came out of a comment that appeared on that Huffington Post story I mentioned last time. In it, the commenter bemoans the fact that people might base their decision over whom to vote for on which candidate wears better suits.
While she makes her point via exaggeration (otherwise known as the rhetorical device of hyperbole), what she is bemoaning is the fact that people make important choices based on something other than rationality. But this should come as no surprise to people who have been listening for the last several weeks to discussion of how emotion (pathos) and personal connection (ethos) play a role in every decision involving argument or persuasion. And while pathos and ethos don’t join logos (logic) in evenly dividing every decision up three ways, I think it’s safe to say that in most (if not all) instances, at least half our decision-making is driven by forces that don’t well up from the intellect.
This is why the cover of this week’s Time Magazine is titled “The Fact Wars,” with a story expressing befuddlement over why we can’t seem to agree with whose facts (Romney’s or Obama’s) should be believed. For our pre-disposition is to believe facts coming from those we already agree with, and discount facts presented by the other side. In other words, even if you fact-checked each candidate’s statements from now until the 2016 election, most people’s opinion of who is telling the truth and who is lying would not be swayed by such logical proofs for the simple reason that most people have already rewarded “their man” with high ethos, no matter what comes out of his mouth.
If reason alone drove our choices, then all we would need to pick a President would be to use one of those many calculators out there that allow you to specify our position on the important issues of the day and then press a button to determine which candidate deserves our vote (based on how closely their positions parallel our preferences).
But what if we don’t trust the candidate these web sites tell us should be our pick to assign those issues we just checked off high priority, or to make the tough decisions needed to implement them? Or what if our historic party affiliation is such a strong driver to our decision-making that it won’t let us vote for someone from the other party, even if, on balance, we agree with him on more issues than we agree with his opponent? Or what if our decision is based on intellectual intangibles such as which candidate seems more comfortable in his own skin, which candidate is a genuine “outsider,” or even which one is a better dresser (or, more specifically, dresses properly for the occasion which is an ethos driver)?
Now we are dealing with non-intellectual matters such as trust, tribalism and subtleties such as food and dress preferences that build the connection between one real person and another. And these are matters that must be attended to (or, at least, recognized and understood) in order to control for the fact that human beings are not robots or Vulcans, and that not every (or even most) decisions are driven by logos alone.
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