00:00: I have a few words and phrases of my own to help us in thinking about what critical thinking is and what it is not. Critical thinking is active, curious, questioning, open, flexible, systematic, and deliberative. Now, these are all words that, in different ways, echo some of the students’ responses that I highlighted above.
00:33: But perhaps what I want to emphasise here is the idea that critical thinking is not just a skill that can, and should, be learned. It is also an attitude, a bent, or a state of mind. Adopting the attitude is what helps you or what drives you to develop the skill as much as possible. Then, understanding what critical thinking is not is at least as important as understanding what it is. Critical thinking is not condescending and it is not emotive in the sense that you are critiquing based on what you feel or what you think.
01:10: If you are critiquing a certain position, you should be coming at it with your own evidence base or at least your own well-informed questions. It’s not enough to just say, like in this cartoon here, you’ve got it all wrong, I don’t like your side, you don’t like my side. As I pointed out before, critical thinking is not about criticism.
01:33: Even when you do detect some criticism or condescension, as sometimes happens with written feedback from peer reviewers in academia, it is usually helpful for you as a researcher to look beyond the unkind attitude to pointers that they may have provided that can really help you improve your work. Now, I can categorically say that every paper that I have ever published has been improved by comments that I got from anonymous reviewers.
02:07: A good critique usually opens up the vista, makes you think of perspectives that maybe you had not thought about before that might help you hone your argument and make it more convincing to readers. So, how do the general principles of critical thinking apply specifically to the conduct and interpretation of science?
02:33: And what are the underlying tenets there? The first is recognising that science in all its genres and all its branches is potentially value-laden in the sense that it comes with a set of assumptions. For example, as a sociologist who has worked with economists, I know that econometric models are typically built on any number of assumptions.
02:59: The basic idea of the invisible hand established in the pioneering work of Adam Smith, for example, still informs the work of many neoclassical economists today: this idea that market forces rule everything and that people are always rational beings who will always make rational choices, all things being equal, etc.
03:25: However, later strands of economics, for example, behavioral economics, have succeeded in showing that humans are not only not rational beings; rather, we are complicated entities who sometimes make decisions that cannot be explained by classical economic theories. And so, assumptions like these give rise to scientific theories that inform practice to a greater or lesser extent. And the issue you have to contend with as a critical thinker is that many of these assumptions are tacit as they are dominant.
04:05: The definition of critical thinking as “thinking about thinking” that I highlighted earlier speaks to the mark of a critical writer and thinker, which is to constantly question the often implicit assumptions in other people’s work, but also – and perhaps especially – in our own work. We all come at issues with different assumptions, and it is important to be explicit about those and uncover the assumptions as much as we can.
04:38: This is what the peer review system in academia excels at. When you submit a manuscript to an academic journal, the editor sends it to two or three reviewers to do the job of critically analysing it. To a very large extent, the more you practice this idea of questioning your own assumptions before you send in your manuscript, the fewer the holes a reviewer is going to be able to poke in your overall logic or argument.
05:09: Now, they may not necessarily agree with your findings, or your conclusions may not necessarily align with their own scholarly position, but they cannot fault the reasoning behind the analysis that led to those conclusions. So, before somebody raises a question about something, you have raised a question – that question – in your own mind, and you have answered it in the text.
05:35: You may not answer it conclusively, but even just acknowledging a question, a limitation or an assumption makes the reader understand that you are aware of these potential caveats to your conclusions. And often, in science, that’s enough for your arguments to pass scrutiny – another good word proferred by a student.
06:03: This word – scrutiny – really captures the essence of good critiquing. The idea of scrutinising or critiquing a piece of research does not equate to criticising it – or worse, criticising the researcher who produced it. Although, sadly, the tendency for people to mistake critique for criticism is very great.
06:31: Scrutiny asks, “why should we believe what you are telling us?” It’s a bit like taking a microscope to an idea and saying, “I’m taking it apart.” What are the merits of this argument? How valid are the assumptions and how reliable are the findings? So, “scrutiny” is a really good word to use here.