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4.9: Review of Major Points

  • Page ID
    36155
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    Most of what we can legitimately claim to know is based on what other people tell us because we have not verified the information for ourselves. Legitimacy is a matter of degree, as is the continuum from mere opinion to solid knowledge. This chapter explored these points. It clarified the principles of charity and fidelity, and it considered the intricacies of assessing unusual claims. Our judgments of improbability depend on our background knowledge and the evidence available to us. When a claim is inconsistent with our background knowledge, we judge the claim to be improbable. Our most reliable source of information is our own observations, but when these are not available, then we turn to other sources of information, preferably the reliable, popular science magazines and the traditional news sources. Usually we accept a claim based on the credibility of the sources who tell us to accept the claim. The reliability and credibility of magazines, newspapers, TV programs, and websites differ radically; with the less credible ones, we should get independent verification, a second opinion from a reliable source, before accepting any of their unusual claims. We always need to be alert for fake news. The more credible media aim to support their controversial information by getting it from two or more independent sources. The more knowledge we have, and thus the closer our body of background knowledge approaches that of the experts, the better will be our own judgments. Anecdotes of people's experiences are not as good evidence as statistical reports. When we don’t have good evidence for a claim, we should suspend belief, or we should continue with our disbelief if we already have some reason to disbelieve it. Getting useful information about whom to vote for is very difficult, but we’ve seen a few examples that tell us what to be on the lookout for, and we've learned that news about candidates early in an election race is usually more useful than news late in the race. The facts—the objective truths—are our goal, and we critical thinkers need to be on the alert against those people who reject objectivity and see it all as a game of pushing opinions on others in an effort to be influential. This alertness demands quite a bit from us critical thinkers because we human beings are not born to be objective creatures. We need self-discipline to overcome our natural instincts to overestimate what's wrong, to attack anyone who criticizes us, and to over-rely on our gut feelings.


    This page titled 4.9: Review of Major Points is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Bradley H. Dowden.

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