00:00: You might be wondering, why all the fuss about critical thinking and writing? There is this really interesting quote by the French philosopher, René Descartes, which the social science and perhaps humanities scholars among us might be familiar with. It goes, “I think, therefore I am.” Some might critique the quote as being maybe overly deterministic.
00:33: Does that mean that if I don’t think, then I don’t exist? But the core idea here, the core principle, is that the very fact that we are able to think through issues is a core element of who we are as individuals. And many times in our training and in our upbringing, we may have been subconsciously programmed to not think for ourselves. That was certainly my experience early on in my education.
01:04: From a very young age, we may have been taught to absorb and regurgitate information as the accepted wisdom without questioning and thinking critically about whether that information, even if it largely holds true in certain contexts, is applicable in our own situation.
01:27: And that’s the foundation of the whole idea of critical thinking: the ability to question information, and even – maybe especially – authoritative information; questioning, not necessarily from a place of defiance, but really out of a place of intellectual curiosity. This is a really key component of critical thinking and writing.
01:57: If we think of the main goal of science, whatever branch of science we’re in – natural, physical or social – as being to improve the human condition as much as we can, then we will understand that we actually do have a responsibility to keep questioning the accepted wisdom. And the extent to which we do this is reflected in the way that we write and synthesise and represent information as we do our research.
02:29: In many ways, to write is to think, especially if you’re a research student. I encourage students to write as they think because that’s really the only way you can demonstrate to your supervisors, to your audience, to whoever has a stake in your research, that you are thinking in a certain direction. When I deliver this lecture live, I often ask students at this point to tell me what they think critical thinking is, in a word, a phrase, a half sentence – anything.
03:08: Some of the more interesting responses from past lectures include: “thinking differently from the norm,” “thinking with scrutiny,” “thinking about thinking,” and “thinking from a different perspective than what was originally presented.” The last point about looking at issues from a different vantage point than is usual ties in with the idea of questioning what social science scholars have long recognised as dominant narratives in any field.
03:42: There’s a general belief that all science is authoritative and free of bias, but looking at it from a different perspective, we recognise that the way science is conducted and presented – the word “presented” is really key – is often particular and partial.
04:01: As I learned while I was studying for my PhD, when you sit down to write your methodology chapter or section toward the end, you don’t necessarily present your research in a linear manner, in the order that you did your experiments or gained your insights. So, in many ways, your thesis or paper has undergone a curation of sorts, a curation of your undoubtedly rigorous research process – and you are narrating your findings in a particular light, using a particular framing.
04:36: And the ability to recognise this when you’re reading someone else’s research is really important from a critical thinking perspective. What happens if you change the variables? What happens if you change the context? Understanding that this person is presenting their research from a particular point of view or a particular perspective is important.
04:59: I have had other student responses that are not as satisfactory, but which are important to highlight, to better illustrate the essence of the notion of critical thinking. One of those responses defined critical thinking as the ability to think deeper than the average person. This response is not sufficiently critical, as there are many tacit assumptions that underlie the person’s definition of an average person.
05:29: And their definition might differ from yours or mine, depending on your context, my context, and experiences. Now, this might seem like a small detail, but it can make all the difference in scientific interpretation. If someone were to write this in a paper you were reading, and they didn’t define what they meant by an average person, as a critical thinker, then you should be doing the questioning: “if you’re saying that I should think deeper than the average person, I need to know exactly what makes an average person.”
06:05: On its own, the term is so open to interpretation that it could trigger a whole series of back-and-forth exchanges among scholars debating what an average person should look like. And someone else might actually take issue with the term entirely and present evidence that supports discrediting it altogether. Such, my friends, is the way of academia.