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by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.
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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

Critical Thinking: Tips for Getting Better At It

Tuesday February 13, 2001

Carl Sagan's masterwork, The Demon-Haunted World, contained a great many suggestions for those of us committed to a healthy and satisfying lifestyle. The usefulness of such skills extend well beyond avoiding Y2K-inspired lunacy as described in my essays during the last two days. They apply daily, in everyday transactions.

One of the first principles of critical thinking is this: To construct and understand a reasoned argument or defend against unreasoned, irrational arguments, insist that the conclusion logically follows the premise. To help you make that judgment in varied cases, follow these guides or tips:

Seek independent confirmation of alleged "facts."
Promote a polite but substantive debate by knowledgeable advocates for all points of view.
Look at a variety of hypotheses to explain what has happened or to assess what someone claims will happen.
Insist upon specificity and quantification, whenever possible.
Only entertain propositions that lend themselves to being falsified, otherwise there is not much use in getting worked up about an issue. In other words, can someone follow your reasoning, duplicate your experiments, and NOT get the same result?
Build in controls that hold variables constant.
Take other steps to separate influences that could affect the validity of the experiment.
Eliminate tactics that blur and distort the issues, such as ad hominem arguments, appeals to ignorance, special pleadings, begging the question, observational selection, suppressed evidence, statistics of small numbers, and confusion of correlation with causation.

Needless to note but I will anyway, these latter characteristics are commonplace in political debates.

More critical thinking tips will be offered tomorrow. Comments are welcomed, as always. Best wishes.

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