Critical Thinking/Writing

HOW NOT TO THINK

As far as this class is concerned, there are three kinds of thinking. There is passive thinking, which is basically going up along with whatever other people say, or whatever feels good, or whatever's easiest to believe. Passive thinkers don't put any effort into thinking, so they can't really be said to be thinking at all. The next kind of thinking is self-deception, which is basically a habit of avoiding negative information about the self. A self-deceptive thinker puts a lot of effort into finding excuses, finding different ways to look at things, and finding ways to ignore or discount negative information. Finally, there is Critical thinking, which is set of ways of dealing with information that is aimed at finding out the truth, whatever the truth may turn out to be.

The passive thinker really doesn't have any standard information handling practices, so I'll ignore passive thinkers from now on. The self-deceptive thinker, on the other hand, has some very definite standard information handling practices. They are:

1. Whatever the information is, find some way to make it look like it supports the idea that I've done something good for other people.

2. Whatever the information is, find some way to make it look like it supports the idea that I'm good at what I do.

3. Whatever the information is, find some way to make it look like it supports the idea that I'm important.

4. Whatever the information is, find some way to make it look like it supports the idea that I was right all along.

(See Greenwald, Anthony G. "The Totalitarian Ego; Fabrication and Revision of Personal History." American Psychologist (1980) 35:7 603-618)

Obviously, the self-deceptive thinker does not believe that he is deceiving himself. The whole point of self-deception is to sincerely believe the things that make him feel good. So he does not consciously seek out beliefs that make him feel good. Instead, he avoids things that make him uncomfortable. (As one of my friends said once, "if I thought about that, I'd go crazy.") Nevertheless, self-deception is done deliberately. The self deceiver takes the effort to hide the fact of his own self-deception from himself, just as he takes the effort to avoid information he does not like. The self deceiver is not "lying" in the sense of consciously believing one thing while saying something different. Rather he is lying in the sense of saying to himself things that he has good reason to believe are not true. The most accomplished liars are those that manage to deceive themselves before they go on to deceive others.

Any thinker is morally responsible for any harm that comes to himself, or to others, as a result of any false belief that he acquires through passive or self-deceptive thinking. An honest person may be excused for causing harm when she acted upon false beliefs that she could not have avoided having. A sincere mistake is not culpable because the person who made it has also made every reasonable effort to find out the truth, but the "mistakes" of the passive or self-deceptive thinker are culpable because that thinker could have tried to find out the truth, but didn't. This means that people have a moral duty to think Critically. People who don't think Critically are putting themselves and others at risk when they act upon their "sincerely held" but false beliefs. (Self deceivers who don't act upon false beliefs are therefore not morally culpable. If they deceive themselves, but only act on beliefs developed by Critical thinking, then any mistakes they make will be sincere ones.)

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