Phil 391, Issues in Critical Thinking
Third Assignment, due 22 July 2004

1. Kerry Walters takes up the question, why is logic taught as critical thinking? He offers four factors in explanation for why teachers would make this mistake, viz.,
   • the academic world rewards facility in logic;
   • the home department for critical thinking courses is usually philosophy, and philosophers generally have undergone a rigorous training in logic;
   • real critical thinking is much more difficult to teach and to master than is logic;
   • finding non-logicistic (his term for taking logic as religion) texts is difficult.
   
   Walters does not offer arguments to support these claims, but the whole is clearly an argument with the following structure: Issue: What could possibly account for such a crazy thing, taking logic for critical thinking? Well, he says, logic is built into higher ed institutions; philosophers, who teach it, are indoctrinated; logic is an easy substitute for honest toil, much easier than doing critical thinking; and there's hardly any textbook support for doing it right. These clearly, he thinks, are a better explanation for why CT teachers would do such a thing than the explanation that critical thinking really is logic.
   An analogy: this argument is like the Freudian argument against the existence of God, namely that there is a better explanation for people's belief than that the belief is true, namely that we all have something like God when we are small, namely parents (who love us, know what we are doing all the time, keep us safe, are all-powerful, are always around no matter where we go, and so on). But our childhood gods in the form of our parents are diminished as we grow up and realize their limitations. Our desire to have an undiminished loving protector does not itself diminish, and the result is that we wish for something larger than our parents to fill that role. The wish generates rationalizations in the form of religious belief and arguments for religious belief, but the true explanation for that belief is to be found in psychological analysis.
   Like Walters, who does not directly attack the issue of whether logic is critical thinking, Freud does not directly attack the issue of whether God exists. Instead, his argument is indirect, offering what he takes as a better explanation for the views of his opponents than that they are true or that they are well-founded.


2. Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Objectives, articulated by Benjamin Bloom in the early 50's, is usually neglected in current discussions of critical thinking theory, even though among schools of education and curriculum writers it remains pervasively influential. Symptoms of this influence often include talk about "higher order thinking skills." Piaget's account of cognitive development as generally a movement from concrete processing toward formal or abstract reasoning is taken as justification for the approach (it sometimes also is taken as justification for regarding formal logic as critical thinking). As such, these approaches leave unaddressed the issue regarding whether abstraction is more crucial to education (or to philosophy) than is storytelling, say, or focusing on examples. This is an issue in which western civilization's convictions might be compared with cultures in which parables and examples are taken to be primary. It is also an issue which perhaps could be approached through investigating Piaget and Bloom's Taxonomy. One problem with Bloom's Taxonomy can be seen in the relation of the lowest level of thinking skills, memory, with those which are allegedly higher. Laying this out requires we review the broad framework of the taxonomy, stressing the relationships among abstractions and examples. I'll give the higher levels at the top.
   • Evaluation is bringing a set of criteria to bear on an example. E.g. Critique the following lesson plan. (Followed by an example of a lesson plan.)
   • Synthesis is putting together a work using elements dictated by a pre-existing framework or structure. E.g. Design a house to take advantage of the resources available, consistent with the desires of the buyers, and in harmony with the site.
   • Analysis is providing an accounting of a whole in terms of its parts, using a set of categories which label the kinds of parts. E.g. Analyze Shakespeare's Hamlet as an Aristotelian tragedy.
   • Application is bringing an abstract theory's claims to bear on a particular example. E.g. Apply Freudian methods to the dream Orestes tells of the eagle and the snake.
   • Interpretation is comparison and contrast of two sets of ideas, telling how they fit or do not fit each other, but using a set of given topics or categories by which the two are to be compared. E.g. Compare and contrast the scene in which Cleopatra first appears on stage in Shakespeare's play with the scene in which Jimmy Dean first appears in Giant.
   • Translation is changing the terms, mode, or language of given information. E.g. Graph the acceleration of the Dodge R/T and the Volkswagen Beetle given the table of distances covered.
   • Memory is retaining and providing back information as given.
   The taxonomy as given above is used in study skills classes to emphasize to students that all the higher level skills test questions can be regarded as having hidden agendas. If one is to evaluate, one has to have the criteria to bring to bear, not make them up on the spot. If one is to synthesize, one has to know the categories of the elements one is expected to put together into a new whole. If one is to analyze, one needs to know the expectations about what kinds of pieces will result from the analysis. If one is to apply a theory, the methods or possible results are unstated parts of the question. If one is to interpret, then one had better use the aspects or dimensions of interpretation which are to be applied in these kinds of cases. And so on.
   But another way to say this is that the higher level thinking skills crucially involve remembering the abstract categories which are to be used, and remembering to use them. The analysis of the categories into higher and lower is thus seen as problematic. One possible explanation for taking memory to be lower is that memory is always specific. Memory is memory of something. But abstract categories do not have this property. An ideal is not necessarily a particular ideal; a flower, as a category, need not be a particular flower; and so on. A prejudice in favor of abstraction will then prejudice one against memory, and perhaps incline one to label it as a lower skill.


3. Nigel Warburton's interview contains the suggestion that philosophers ought to have some relationship with the general public. What is his argument, and how would you modify that argument to make it better?
   
   
4. John McPeck argues against the value of critical thinking by offering as support a categorical claim, that thinking always has to be thinking about something, and thinks that shows critical thinking simpliciter (that is, critical thinking as a discipline itself) is nonsense or absurd. Think about this argument or another of McPeck's arguments, and about the issue of whether critical thinking is valuable.