Critical thinking is not such a useful skill
Our attitudes matter more than our reasoning skills
Critical thinking is often seen as the solution to many problems. It is thought to be the antidote to mis- and dis-information, the key to improving education, and even the solution to capability gaps in public services or businesses. There is a growing demand for critical thinking training and yet, as I know from personal experience, it often doesn’t work as well as we hope.
I was chatting to a young lady recently who had an interesting reaction when I said I run courses in critical thinking. She was initially highly negative, as she’d had a bad experience in a critical thinking class at university. From her perspective, the class just tried to teach her what to think, not how to think.
While I’d like to think this is unusual, I have my doubts. Critical thinking is often taught as a set of reasoning skills, that are assumed to lead people to the right conclusions. However, what that ‘right’ conclusion might be varies and seems to get more rigid as people learn more sophisticated thinking skills: in various countries, there is a positive correlation between education and polarisation. That is, the more educated people are, the more polarised they become. The reason for this appears to be that stronger thinking skills allow people to find better reasons for what they believe already.
You can see this dynamic in any of our deeply polarised societal debates, such as around climate change. All sides of the debate tend to bemoan the critical thinking skills of the other side, and often believe that teaching critical thinking will inevitably lead everyone to agree with them.
The lesson I think we can draw from this is that critical thinking skills are not sufficient for addressing many of the problems we would like solved. In my view, there are at least two factors that need to be in place to get real value out of our critical thinking skills. To start with, we need sufficient subject matter knowledge about the topic in question. And secondly, if you do not think there is a genuine chance that you might be wrong, then critical thinking skills will most often only be used to build more sophisticated arguments about why you are right.
Subject knowledge is necessary
It is often assumed that critical thinking skills are more important and foundational to good reasoning than subject knowledge. Instead of learning or memorising vast amounts of information, the idea goes, we are better off learning how to think as this is a skill that can be applied in any context. The problem is that these two factors, knowing about a subject and thinking critically about it, are not separable.
Any number of examples can illustrate this, but we’ll touch on two. The first is the relatively common case of a colleague who takes their car to a mechanic but doesn’t know anything about how cars work. The second is far less common, but imagine you’ve been asked by a friend to help read through their PhD thesis on quantum physics.
No matter how good your colleague’s thinking skills are, they are not going to help figure out check the mechanic’s explanation that the car won’t start because of a problem with the electronic fuel injection. And I doubt many of my readers would have any chance helping out a friend with that PhD, regardless of your critical thinking skills. Most of us will struggle to know even whether many of the sentences make sense.
Subject knowledge matters in both cases if you want to be able to test whether the claims make sense or might be true. But they also matter for the types of reasoning involved. The practical engineering logic needed to fix a car is not the same as the abstract, mathematical reasoning involved in physics research. The overlaps between the thinking skills needed in both cases are limited as the skills we need are often tied to the subject matter area.
Humility is foundational
Subject knowledge might be necessary for critical thinking but it is clearly not enough. There are many people with deep knowledge of any subject but who are rigid, rusted on to their views and unable to see clear flaws in their arguments. Such people are invariably highly confident in what they already think and are unwilling to consider that there is any real chance they might be wrong. In short, intellectual certainty, or arrogance, is incompatible with genuine critical thinking. Intellectual, or epistemic, humility, on the other hand, is vital for genuine critical thinking. If you are open to being wrong, it is far easier to see strengths in other views and flaws in your own thinking.
In fact, I’d argue that epistemic humility is the foundation for genuine critical thinking, and is more important than a command of logic, the ability to research or skills in synthesising information. Consider a case where we have two people with deep subject knowledge on a subject. The first is a brilliant rational thinker, with highly sophisticated logic and reasoning skills, but is utterly convinced they are right. The second is less sophisticated and often slower at reading or writing strong arguments, but is well aware they might have things wrong.
The first will invariably be able to spot all the flaws in any arguments or cases they don’t agree with, but is unlikely to notice any issues with things they believe and is unlikely to fix any problems with their beliefs over time. The second may not be so good at arguments, but will take new information on board, genuinely consider alternatives and, I would argue, be a much more reliable guide to truth or what we need to know.
In other words, our attitudes towards knowledge and our own abilities matter more than the specific skills we have. This is often implicitly acknowledged in the ways that critical thinking is explained and taught. While there are many different approaches, most emphasise conceptual frameworks and lists of principles, rules or norms. Ideas like ‘consider alternative viewpoints’, ‘check your sources are reliable’, and ‘provide reasons for your conclusions’ are all common components but if you pay attention, they are things to remember to do rather than skills to learn. That is, they capture principles or norms. Importantly, all of these principles reflect a broader commitment to intellectual humility - recognising that I could be wrong.
Improving critical thinking
There is good and bad news in this analysis for how we try to improve critical thinking. The good news is that the important aspects to learn are not technical skills like understanding formal logic, advanced research techniques or statistical analyses - which are often hard to teach. The bad news is that critical thinking depends much more on values, norms, expectations and mindsets. These are all things that are simple to articulate but very difficult to change in practice, both at individual and organisational levels. All our actions are based on our default biases and respond to incentives, few of which encourage genuine epistemic humility.
I have been teaching critical thinking with this in mind, where we always start with a tangible expression of epistemic humility. It is an approach resonates with people and they can see the benefits. Moreover, the value of various thinking tools and techniques then becomes more obvious and people get genuine value out of the training. However, the challenge is that a short period of training for individuals rarely changes the broader norms, expectations and incentives that tend to work against genuine intellectual humility. These are, however, what matters most.