Cohen, M. (2015). Critical Thinking Skills for Dummies. (pp. 178-197). John Wiley & Son.
In some contexts, being an uncritical reader is sufficient: in fact most education encourages this approach. The main skill that schools develop is the ability to summarise rather than select; while challenging or disputing sources – be they other books or teachers – is actively discouraged. Colleges are no better.
This may be because education operates in a bit of a sealed bubble. The exam board tells the teacher what to teach; the teacher tells school students what to learn; and the exam board checks only ‘how much’ the children remember. Critical Thinking doesn’t come into it! Put another way, a college course can be badly designed, out-of-date and irrelevant, but if the people who teach and mark it are happy with it, that’s the course you have to succeed in.
This focus may lead you to think that Critical Reading isn’t a necessity. But don’t make this mistake! Instead, look on it as an investment for later life.
Take healthcare, for example. Professionals of all kinds are responsible directly to their clients and reading that a particular new approach is effective isn’t enough if people using it find that it makes the situation worse. Doctors are deluged with medical studies that argue persuasively for new treatments, which some years later turn out to be ineffectual or even harmful. A careful, Critical Reading of the claims made for the treatment may reveal early on that the evidence advanced for them is weak. So, having Critical Reading skills can be a matter of life or death!
Wouldn’t life be much easier if you could assume that what you read is a straightforward account and that – by and large – authors are truthful. Yet people can be wrong and texts can be misleading – and for many more reasons than authors simply being mendacious (I swear it’s true, honest!). They may be misinformed, out-of-date or simply incompetent; or mixed up, muddled or just lazy. Or all of them!
So you need to be a sceptical reader. In this section I describe a number of mental checks to run on any piece of writing that you’re reading critically, to help assess the soundness of its content. You may be surprised just how much information you can glean from a few fairly basic quality controls.
Checking the Publisher’s Standing
If an article or book is from an academic journal or an academic publishing house, you can assume that several people with relevant knowledge of the themes and topics it covers have checked it. They should have knocked out sloppy writing full of basic errors. Plus, you can be sure that if it’s from a respectable source, you can quote safely from it without risking looking silly.
But, despite what even some Critical Thinking experts say(!), all topics in scholarly life contain a range of diametrically opposed opinions. Therefore, this academic type of check is far from a guarantee that the text isn’t making more sophisticated and significant mistakes, that it isn’t partisan, or indeed that the work’s whole approach isn’t wrong.
Academics tend to hunt in packs, and so authors and reviewers can easily find experts to back up – or rubbish! – adopted positions. Real life features plenty of examples of mainstream views being wrong and minority views being right, and (last time I looked) academics are part of this real world.
Cross-Examining the Author
Ask yourself whether what you’re reading is an academic study, a news report, an expert’s opinion or an anonymous website. If one or more authors are named, what’s their background, their area of expertise and experience? In other words, consider what qualifications they have to write on the subject.
Perhaps you’ve asked yourself what qualifications I have to write on Critical Thinking. You should have! Well, to put your mind at rest, I do have relevant degrees and I researched and co-authored a report on the subject for the UK government. For Dummies guides also require a popular touch, and so it’s relevant that I’ve written many books for general readers too.
Authors having first-hand, relevant experience makes their books more credible. But look out for authors whose experience may indicate that they have a bias – it’s an easy mistake to make. For a possible example, see the nearby sidebar ‘Being aware of potential author bias’.
Being Aware of Potential Author Bias
Critical Thinking professor, Richard Northedge, when writing advice for students on sources, praises an article by an academic called Richard Layard on social inequality. He counts in favour of the article the fact that Professor Layard is an advisor to the UK government and had been, as it were, ‘commended, for his services by being made a Lord.’
To me though, this fact indicates that Professor Layard’s views could be (I’m not saying they are, just that they could be) influenced by what’s politically desirable or useful to say, as well as by what’s academically important to say. Richard Layard is at the top of the social pyramid in the UK, very much part of the ‘establishment’, and his perspective on the British government’s efforts to help disadvantaged folk might seem to be a little bit too cozy.
Considering Why the Text was Written
Ask yourself whether the writing is supposed to serve a particular purpose, perhaps to record an event, or whether it’s intended to find a large paying audience (and make the author money), or maybe to obtain a qualification. (The nearby sidebar ‘Being aware of potential author bias’ may indicate a text with a hidden function.)
Publishers need to sell books and even academic writing is a product of fashion – authors are more likely to write such texts if they’re part of a live debate going on within the field. A live debate may be one with recent discoveries and developments – or where a lot of money is being spent on new research! In all such cases, try to put the book into a wider social and scientific context.
Appraising How a Text is Written and Presented
Consider whether the text is presented as a factual report or as a logical argument. Or is it part of a campaign, even a piece of propaganda or advertising? If it’s a piece of research, ‘how well’ has it been done?
Judging this last point is by no means straight-forward. Evaluating research is a special process, involving consideration of several factors as I describe in the nearby box ‘Checking the methodology’! Even so, a Critical Reader should at least consider this issue.
Taking into Account when a Text is Written
If a text is presented as a factual report or as research, the date when it was written can be crucial. The ‘when’ is a vital bit of the context.
First of all, facts keep changing – new discoveries are made, old discoveries are revisited and found to have been mistaken. Astronomers only recently discovered that calculations and assumptions about the universe in the twentieth century were way out and that it now seems that 95 per cent of the universe consists of so-called dark matter and dark energy, which is basically invisible. Views in many areas of science and indeed the arts are similarly in constant site of refinement and modification. And then there’s ‘context’. Huge events change perspectives long after. Something written in the politically optimistic years prior to World War I is going to be quite different to something written afterwards. Likewise, the political background of the idealistic (hippy) 1960s, the decade which ended with Man on the Moon, compared to the late 1980s, the decade which ended with the collapse of the communist dreams of the Soviet Union, has a profound and maybe underappreciated influence on books, the pervading artistic climate and culture.
Judging the Evidence
Offering evidence for a position is surprisingly easy – the real question is how you decide what counts as good evidence. For example, is a book with ten pages of sources at the back better than one with no sources offered (like this one)?
Checking the Methodology
When authors write books, conduct studies or investigate a topic, they operate within a research paradigm (a theoretical framework) that affects how they view and investigate the subject. In formal academic studies, authors discuss the research paradigm upfront, and so that’s straightforward. But more often, they leave the nature of the chosen paradigm in the background – as a given. So the Critical Reader has to make a specific effort to work it out – and consider how the choice may skew the information reported.
Here are some useful questions to ask when looking at reports and research findings in the broad area of social science:
- Theoretical or empirical: Is the text primarily concerned with ideas and theories or primarily based on observations and measurements? Most texts mix the two approaches, but Critical Readers need to identify which element should be the primary focus – even if the author seems confused!
- Nomothetic or idiographic: These grand terms originate from Ancient Greek (nomos means law and idios means own or private) and refer to laws or rules that apply in general in contrast to ones that relate to individuals. Most social research is concerned with the nomothetic – the general case – because even when studying individuals researchers usually hope to generalise the findings to everyone else. Always bear in mind the extent to which entirely valid observations about a particular case can safely be generalised.
- Cause or correlation: So many people mix up these terms that the error has its own special name – cum hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for ‘with this, therefore because of this’). In other words, putting things together whose connection is unproven. Take a medical example. […] Be aware that in experimental studies, there is a built-in bias exists to see causation even when, maybe, none exists.
- Statistical answers or ideological hypotheses: A lot of research is based on probabilities. But working them out is something that even experienced researchers get wrong – perhaps applying the wrong statistical procedure to their data and generally overestimating the significance of their findings. Statistics aren’t simple plain-as-a-pikestaff facts; they’re created, misunderstood and manipulated, which is why politicians and businesses sometimes seize on them in order to present a partial picture.
I’ll stick my head out a bit here and say (contrary to much academic practice) that the key thing is the main text. A source looks grand and fine, but the question of ‘who says that and why’ is really just being passed on – it doesn’t go away. Where did the author of the book used as a source get their info from? Authors should give as much evidence as readers need to make an independent assessment of an issue in the main body of the book. As a reader, you shouldn’t be obliged to either take things on trust or to check up yourself on all the footnotes and sources offered in a library!
The important thing is to give enough information to readers at the point they need it. Be suspicious of texts that are long on assertion and short on detail.
A connected issue is the question of whether a book argues just one perspective or several. As I explain in Chapter 10, a good book needs to have the feel of a debate carefully guided by a strong chairperson. For the Critical Reader, even if not for the general public, a book that presents opinions as facts and fails to indicate other views and approaches to the matter reduces its own credibility.
Assessing your Reasons for Reading the Text
It’s amazing how many different responses people can have to the same text. So it’s important for Critical Readers not only to think about the author’s reasons for writing something, but their own reasons for reading it!
Ask yourself how you first encountered the book or article. Did you just happen to come across it, were you directed or referred to it, or did it appear at the top of a systematic search (say by putting keywords into an Internet search engine)? Is your source for the text anecdotal information, summaries of published works (for example, on Amazon) or a newly minted academic reading list?
The answers to these questions matter because, say, if your source is something you just happened to come across, it may not be representative of the consensus of opinion on the subject. It may be the point of a view of a small, activist minority – or just someone who doesn’t really know their stuff. It’s human nature to seek out views that reinforce ones we already hold, so beware ‘uncritical’ reading of articles and books you chose just because you liked the look of them. On the other hand, suppose that your source is a book that has been recommended to you by someone else, in such cases the recommendation is only as good as their judgement. If they are a professor in the subject, yes, that’s normally a good start because they will surely have a good grasp of the general context (it’s their job to), but equally they may have quite narrow, fixed views. You may be being steered towards a standard view at the expense of other, less conventional but maybe more fruitful ones. The point is to always be aware that you could – and maybe should – be reading something else!
The Internet makes ‘fact checking’ any document incredibly quick and easy – although there are a lot of wonky websites and you may make a worse mistake if you prefer a web page to a carefully researched book. But in any case, you need to look for several kinds of evidence when reading, of which ‘facts’ are only the most superficial layer.
Uncritical readers usually think that evidence is about ‘facts’ – but Critical Readers go a lot further. They don’t read simply to discover facts; like good philosophers, they know that the ‘truth’ is anything but simple and that any number of possible facts exist. So instead they aim to critically evaluate ideas and arguments, aware that the important decisions in writing come in the author’s selection and arrangement of the facts.
Weighing up Primary and Secondary Sources
In this section I describe the detective work that Critical Readers carry out to uncover the hidden premises or chains of reasoning in a text – that is, the implied but not stated assumptions.
- Primary sources: Primary sources are a researcher’s gold dust. They are original materials from the time period involved that have not been filtered through interpretation or evaluation. Primary sources present original thinking, present and report discoveries, or share new ideas or information.
- Secondary sources: A piece of journalism or a book about someone else’s opinions, research or writings. They are interpretations and evaluations written in hindsight, but – don’t let’s be snotty about this – hindsight is pretty powerful too!
Think about the global warming controversy and just how many facts exist on both sides in the debate. If you look at different websites, arguing over exactly the same piece of news (say, that the Greenland ice sheet has been reported as shrinking) you can find two authoritative and equally factual explanations that come to completely opposed conclusions.
In this debate, as in many others, the selection of facts is what’s important. That’s why the Critical Reader doesn’t just examine the evidence but looks ‘behind the facts’ too. Check out the earlier section ‘Reading Between the Lines’ for a more detailed look at this.
When reading a primary source, a short quote provides you with gold-plated evidence for your argument – as well as being more interesting to read. For example, if you are waiting for an author to prove to you that a newspaper called the Daily Wail once warned that polar bears were in danger of dying out, then a quote from the paper itself doing just this is much better than anything else and certainly worth any number of experts recalling or remembering hearing that the Wail did do such things. The Daily Wail would be, in this case, the primary source.
However, to take the same article as proof that researchers believe that polar bears are dying out (let alone that they really are) would be to use the newspaper as a secondary source. The problem with secondary sources is simple: What you read is no longer what someone said or (more subtly) the meaning may be different in the original context. The longer the chain of sources, the more likely distortions are to appear (as in a game of Chinese Whispers).
If you’re reading someone’s views of someone else’s views, which is what almost all writing does come down to, count the author as being the authority instead of trusting him or her to have accurately conveyed anyone else’s words. For that reason, select the text that you use very carefully – very critically. […]
Following Chains of Thought
Another way to be a Critical Reader is to strip texts down to their argumentative skeleton. What do I mean? Well, as I explain in more detail in Chapter 11, non-fiction texts consist of two sorts of arguments:
- Explicit arguments: Signposted clearly in the text by discussing competing views and giving reasons why such-and-such is right or wrong. Explicit arguments often end up with marker terms such as ‘In conclusion’, ‘Therefore’ and ‘Thus it can be seen’.
- Implicit arguments: Just as important and, as the name . . . er . . . implies, a lot harder to spot. There’s many different ways to imply something, so these arguments come in many shapes and forms. For example, an account of the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl might include an implicit argument that nuclear energy is a bad idea. A newspaper story describing how famous pop singers cheat on their boyfriends or girlfriends might constitute an implicit argument that pop singers are all empty-headed people with no morals. Or, on the other hand, it might be written in such a way that the implied argument is that ‘free love’ is fun and normal.
All arguments – not just dodgy ones – are based on more assumptions than meet the eye. Check out the nearby sidebar ‘Breaking the argument chain’ for an example.
Breaking the Argument Chain
Euclid’s axioms are rules for geometry saying things such as ‘Parallel lines never meet’ or ‘Things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another’. Euclid believed that his axioms were ‘self-evident’ statements about physical reality, meaning that you can see that they must be true by thinking about it. In fact they can be faulted for containing hidden assumptions. For example, the one about parallel lines assumes that space is flat, as parallel lines certainly do meet if you draw them on a sphere (try drawing two parallel lines on a football!). Behind his rules are assumptions like the one that space is homogeneous (the same everywhere) and unbounded, which are necessary to ensure that any point can be transformed into another point by some mathematical operation, but not in themselves proven.
Einstein (whose theory of relativity significantly modified Euclid’s view) was a great Critical Thinker, and part of the reason why is that he was prepared to throw out so many of the assumptions of his time. And yet his own theory contains lots of hidden assumptions – such as that one about space being homogeneous. (The more powerful telescopes get, the less this seems to be true too – the matter in the universe seems to be distributed unevenly.)
Read Me! Testing Your Critical Reading Skills
Here’s a longish extract for you to use to practise your reading skills. Try to identify the important features and write your own brief notes on it, including a summary of the argument (turn to the later section ‘Summarising with effective notetaking’ for some tips). State whether the argument is persuasive and any other textual features you think need noting, such as dodgy argumentative techniques or hidden premises. Flip to the answers at the end of the chapter for my take on the piece.
Philosophy has long had a dislike of astrology. It is, after all, irrational. And one of the most surprising, some would say alarming, facts about Ronald Reagan is that, as soon as he became the President of the United States, he appointed a personal astrologer to help him take decisions. But then, for thousands of years, all the Kings and Queens had their personal astrologers to do much the same thing. These were experts that they consulted on important state matters, such as when to invade the neighbouring country, when to harvest the crops – or how best to bring up baby.
Reagan had acquired the habit of consulting an expert in the Occult Arts when he was but a humble actor in California, doubtless the process helped him decide which role in which film he should accept – and we know where that ended: Breakfast with Bonzo (1951). But once he took high office, the role of astrology became even more in important.
Reagan consulted his personal astrologer, Joan Quigley, about the personality and inclinations of other world leaders, and used these insights to help him assess the prospects of meetings succeeding. It seems, for example, that the stars looked favourably upon one Mikhail Gorbachev, the then leader of the otherwise Evil Empire, and hence Reagan was encouraged to attempt the rapprochement that in due course led to the end of the Cold War. In fact, the timings of all policy initiatives had to be squared with the movements of the cosmos, and White House staff were instructed to liaise with her in all their plans. She was responsible, in short, for the success of all that Reagan did. And these days, Reagan is counted as a pretty successful President, although that judgement is itself by no means necessarily a very scientific one.
Of course, Ronald Reagan came in for a bit of stick for consulting astrologers. Just as more generally scientists and attached pundits love nothing better that to mock more humble folk who follow their forecasts in the newspapers and magazines. For many educated people, nothing better illustrates the gullibility and foolishness of the masses, and the need for the lead of a scientific elite than the continued activities of ‘unlicensed’ specialists in the influence of the stars and planets on human affairs. They don’t seem to remember, or want to be told, that for a thousand years, Universities taught astrology as one of the core subjects, and that it was part of a sophisticated system of medical knowledge involving the different parts of the body and different herbs.
Even if that founding figure of sensible science, Isaac Newton, was brought up on a diet of esoteric knowledge, in which astrology ranked as one of the great studies of mankind, even if astronomy profited from the mystical approach of Pythagoras, even if the best of modern medicine is borrowed from herbalism and chemistry is a side-shoot of alchemy. Even if, in short, in Paul Feyerabend’s words, everywhere science is enriched and sustained by unscientific methods and unscientific results, today astrology is firmly fallen out of favour with philosophers, let alone scientists. Little remains of the subject other than the superficial popular and psychological forms, yet astrology, like many of the now much derided esoteric studies of the distant past, still has the potential to inform and underpin our understandings of the universe. Because thousands of years of thinking are contained in those ancient astrological myths and legends. Science is just a blip in this long history…
Spotting the Hidden Assumptions
Here’s an argument that I adapt from Sam Harris, writer, commentator, and co-founder and chief executive of Project Reason, which says that it seeks to encourage Critical Thinking. Sam is convinced that science holds the answers to everything – including matters of right and wrong – and what’s more, he thinks that he can prove it. (He was so pleased with this argument he offered a cash prize for anyone who could find a hole in it!)
I summarise his argument below, with my own clarifications:
- First premise: Notions of right and wrong and human values in general all depend on the existence of conscious minds, because only conscious minds can experience pleasure and pain. (In other words, morality is rooted in awareness of pain and pleasure, which are brain states.)
- Second premise: Conscious minds are natural phenomena, and so they must be fully explained and constrained (limited) by the physical laws of the universe (whatever these turn out to be in the end).
(In other words, consciousness is reducible to physical states, such as electrical signals or chemical changes in brains.) Now Sam draws speedily to his knock-out conclusion. - Therefore: All questions concerning human values must have objectively right and wrong answers, and these answers can be obtained through the techniques of natural science.
Sam adds that he means this ‘in principle’, if not in practice.
Okay, that’s the argument. Now what assumptions do you think are present that ought to be brought out into the light and checked? Answers at the end of this chapter. […]
Here I provide my thoughts on this chapter’s two exercises.
Read me! Testing your Critical Reading Skills
I’m sure that you can find many things to say, but here are my notes.
The piece is an informal argument. The author argues that something useful may reside in astrology and that it’s too often dismissed. To back this assertion up she gives a number of examples. The first one is that of Ronald Reagan, who it seems relied on astrological advice for all his key policy decisions. A specific example is given: Reagan’s decision to work with the Russian president to end the Cold War was based on advice from his astrologer that this would be a good policy.
Another more general defence of astrology is that ‘for a thousand years, Universities taught astrology as one of the core subjects’. The hidden assumption, or implied premise, is that if something is taught at university it must be useful and important. The author adds that astrology was historically part of ‘a sophisticated system of medical knowledge involving the different parts of the body and different herbs’.
The point isn’t made explicit but seems to be that astrology has aided the development of medical knowledge in general and herbalism in particular. But no evidence is offered for ‘how’ astrological notions aided and guided herbalism, and so this seems to be argument by positive association – sometimes called the association fallacy. Similarly, the reference to Isaac Newton seems to be included more to associate a great scientist with astrology rather than to demonstrate anything more substantial about astrology’s scientific usefulness.
Here’s one factual mistake in the piece that I spotted. The film referred to as Breakfast with Bonzo is actually Bedtime for Bonzo. This is a small mistake but does cast doubt on the author’s other factual claims. In summary, the piece presents itself as a factual argument but seems to rest on subjective opinions.
Spotting Hidden Assumptions
I think the argument is basically that morality is reducible to calculations of the total amount of human ‘pleasure’ as opposed to the amount of human ‘pain’, and that these sensations are also reducible to physical states, such as electrical signals or chemical changes in brains. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that scientists can objectively measure and investigate such physical states.
So what are the hidden assumptions or implied premises? For starters:
- [Implied premise] Answers are ‘right or wrong’ in science. This assumption is pretty large, because science is a lot more complicated than this. Scientists, for example, tend to agree on a particular interpretation of data, out of a range of possible interpretations. The agreements do not hold long! As one recent book puts it, surprisingly little of what experts held to be true even 20 years ago is still thought to be true today – and likely much of what’s considered to be settled fact today will be adjusted in the next 20 years. Instead of giving ‘right or wrong’ answers, science provides working hypotheses that are open to rebuttal later.
- [Implied premise] Minds equal brains. An ongoing debate exists about whether minds and thoughts are the same thing as brains and chemical states. Clearly a link is present – but one theory is that thought is a social phenomenon: what people think depends in subtle ways on what other people around them think, and on all the physical sensations that they’re having and have ever had.
- [Implied premise] Morality is simply a matter of maximising pleasure and minimising pain. This assumption barely fits any simple ethical test! Imagine, for example, a nasty neighbour who locks her family in her house and proposes to shoot her children one by one unless you agree to shoot yourself first. Sam would say that not only the scientifically right, but also the morally right, thing is for you to do just that. (One dead person is less bad than two.) I’d say you are under no moral obligation to do so.
No doubt plenty more hidden assumptions exist, so don’t necessarily count yourself wrong if you have a different list!
