1.1: Basic Concepts

In this section, we briefly survey several concepts that will surface repeatedly throughout the textbook. This will give you some idea of what critical reasoning is and what this textbook will involve. The aim here is just to provide some basic orientation, so don’t worry about details now.

1. Intellectual Responsibility
2. Reasons
3. Empirical questions
4. Inference and argument
5. Relevance
6. Going beyond the information given
7. The importance of the situation or context
8. Explanation and understanding
9. Prediction
10. Testing
11. Feedback
12. Emotions and needs
13. Quick fixes
14. Persuasion
15. Biases
16. Fallacies
17. Safeguards

We will consider each of these notions briefly (you may find it useful to come back to this list from time to time as you work through later chapters).

In today’s rapidly changing world, much of what you learn in college will become outdated rather quickly. Many of your grandparents, and perhaps even your parents, had just one or two jobs during their adult life. But the swift pace of globalization and technological innovation make it likely that you will have a succession of jobs, perhaps in quite different fields, once you graduate. Hence it is important for you to learn how to learn, and a key part of this is learning how to think critically and carefully about new things.

Intellectual Responsibility

Adults are responsible for the things they do, and this includes thinking clearly and carefully about things that matter. This is hard work, and no one succeeds at it completely, but it is part of the price of being in charge of your life. In addition to thinking for ourselves, it is important to think well. This means basing our reasoning on how things are, rather than how we wish they were. It means being open to the possibility that we are mistaken, not allowing blind emotion to cloud our thought and putting in that extra bit of energy to try to get to the bottom of things. This doesn’t mean that we should constantly be questioning everything. Life is too short and busy for that. But in many cases, successful action requires planning and thought. It is also desirable to reflect on our most basic beliefs from time to time, and the college years are an ideal time for this. In the end, you may wind up with exactly the same views with which you began. But if you have thought about them carefully, they will be your own views, rather than someone else’s, and you will be able to better support them with reasons.

Reasons

Good reasoning is said to be cogent. Cogent reasoning is based on evidence, rather than on wishful thinking or rash appeals to emotion. When we evaluate a claim, our first question should be: What are the reasons for thinking it is true? If someone tries to convince you to vote for them, or that abortion is immoral, or that God exists, you should ask:Why? What reasons are there for thinking that this claim is true?

Empirical Questions

Empirical questions are questions about the facts. They are not matters of opinion, and they are not best answered by guessing. They can only be answered by checking to see what the facts are. In the sciences, this may involve complex field studies or experiments, but in everyday life the process is often much easier, just looking is enough. As we will see in various places in the following chapters, answers that seem plausible to us often turn out to be wrong.

Inference and Argument

When we arrive at a new belief based on reasons, we are said to draw an inference. For example, if we learn that 80% of the people in a carefully conducted poll are going to vote for the Republican candidate for Congress, we might infer (or conclude) that the Republican will win. The results of the poll provide a reason to draw this conclusion. If we learn that three of the University of Oklahoma’s starting five are out with the flu, we may infer (or conclude) that they will lose to Missouri. Our knowledge about the two teams, including the information about the ill players, gives us a reason to draw this conclusion.

Such reasoning adds up to an argument. Our reasons are the premises of the argument, and the new belief is the conclusion. For example, the inference about the election involves the following argument:

Premise: 80% of the people surveyed plan to vote Republican

Conclusion: The Republican candidate for Congress will win

In a good argument, the premises justify or support the conclusion; they provide good evidence for it.

An argument is a group of sentences; one conclusion and one or more premises. An inference is something we do when we draw a conclusion from premises. We will study arguments in detail in the next chapter.

Relevance

If an argument is to be any good, its premises must be relevant to its conclusion. Relevance involves a relationship between statements. So, a premise can be relevant to one claim while being irrelevant to other claims. It is irrelevant if it simply doesn’t bear on the truth or falsity of the conclusion, if it’s independent of it, or if it doesn’t affect it one way or the other.

The premise that there is video evidence of one of the Tsarnaev brothers placing a package at one of the bomb sites is relevant to the conclusion that they were responsible for the Boston Marathon Bombing. By contrast, the fact that three people were killed and 264 injured in the bombing is not relevant to the claim that they are guilty (though once Dzhokhar was convicted it may have been relevant to questions about the appropriate penalty).

One of the major causes of bad reasoning is the use of arguments whose premises are irrelevant to their conclusions. It is very easy to make mistakes about the relevance of one claim to another. This is especially problematic when the premises “look relevant,” even though a more careful examination shows that they aren’t. Later we will also see that in some cases the acquisition of information of marginal relevance can lead us to dismiss information that is highly relevant to the problem at hand.

Going Beyond the Information Given

Often our inferences involve leaps from information we are confident about to a conclusion that is less certain. When a pollster conducts a survey to see how the next presidential election is likely to turn out, they ask a few thousand people how they will vote. They then use this information (about the people in the sample) as a premise and draw a conclusion about what all the voters will do. They have a body of information, what the voters polled say they will do, and then move beyond this to a conclusion about what voters in general will do.

Our inferences frequently take us beyond the information we already have. Figure 1.1.1 provides a visual representation of this. For example, we often use premises about how things were in the past to draw conclusions about the future. Your doctor relies on their past experience when diagnosing your current ailment, and they prescribe a treatment based on what worked best in past cases. An experienced cook knows a lot about what goes into a balanced dish and makes choices at the market that they conclude would go well together.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Going Beyond the Information Given

We also go beyond the information at hand in our personal lives. In the past, people we know have behaved in certain ways, and we frequently conclude that they will behave similarly in the future. Sally has always kept her word, so you believe that if you confide in her she probably won’t tell anyone; Hank, on the other hand, is a different story. Again, in the past Wilbur had bad experiences going out with people he met in bars, so he concludes that this isn’t a good way for him to meet people and looks around for alternatives.

When we draw a conclusion that goes beyond the information we have, there is always a risk that we’ll be wrong. But if we use certain strategies, we can increase the likelihood that we will be right. In some cases, we can use numbers to measure just how likely this will be. This means that in the chapters on probability you will have to manipulate just a few fractions, though nothing more than what you did in Algebra I in high school.

Inferences that go beyond the information that we have are pervasive; indeed, in Chapter 3 we will see that even perception and memory often go beyond the information in much the way that many inferences do. When our inference carries us beyond information, we are sure about, we always run the risk of being wrong, but we will discover some strategies that will reduce this risk.

The Importance of Context

Reasoning, inference, and decision making never occur in a vacuum. We will see over and over again that the context or situation in which we think about things can strongly influence the ways in which we think about them. Indeed, it even affects how we perceive and remember things. Furthermore, our reasoning is sometimes faulty because we underestimate the importance of context. We will see that this is especially true when we are trying to understand the behavior of other people.

Explanation and Understanding

We are constantly trying to make sense of things. We need to explain and understand the world around us. Almost every time we ask why something happened or how something works, we are seeking an explanation.

Explanation reflex: We have a strong need to understand and make sense of the world around us.

Learning about things and understanding how they work is often rewarding in and of itself, and it is vital if we are to deal successfully with the world around us. If we understand how things work, we will be able to make more accurate predictions about their behavior, and this will make it easier for us to influence how situations will turn out. If you understand how an automobile engine works, you will be in a much better position to fix it the next time it breaks down. If you understand basic principles of nutrition, you will be in a better position to lose weight and keep it off.

We are constantly seeking explanations in our daily lives. The computer worked yesterday; everything seems the same today, so what explains the fact that it won’t boot up now? We are particularly concerned to understand the behavior of other people. Why did Bret Kavanaugh lie in his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court about his past alcohol consumption? Why did the people in the Heaven’s Gate cult so happily die by suicide? What was Ben Affleck thinking when he got that dragon tattooed on his back? Such questions also arise closer to home. “Why did Sally give Wilbur that look when he said they should go out again; what did she mean by it?” In fact, we often have occasion to wonder why we do some of the things that we do; “Why in the world did I ever say such an idiotic thing?” We are always looking for reasons, regularities and patterns in the phenomena around us. Much reasoning involves attempts to explain things, and sometimes leads us to see patterns that are not really there, or to accept overly simplified explanations, just to have the feeling that we understand what is going on.

For example, some things really do happen by coincidence. But it can be tempting to seek an explanation for them, for example, to adopt some superstition to account for things that just happened by chance. Again, people who like conspiracy theories want simple, pat explanations for why things are going badly for them. When we later learn what really happened in such cases (like the Watergate cover up), we often find less subtle and intricate conspiracy than we imagined, and more bungling and accident. But a conspiracy would offer such a nice simple explanation of things. So, one goal in later chapters will be to devise good explanations while avoiding bad ones.

Prediction

We use reasoning to predict what will happen. If we tighten the bolts, the garden gate will probably last for another year. If you tell Sam what you really think about the ghastly color of his new car, he’ll go ballistic. When we make predictions, we use the information that seems relevant to us (e.g., information about Sam and his short temper) and draw an inference about what will happen. We will see that there are common patterns of errors that can arise in this process.

Testing

Our beliefs are much more likely to be true if they are based on evidence. It isn’t enough for a scientist to just propose a new theory. The theory must be tested, and it needs to survive stringent tests. We typically test a theory by using it to make a prediction, and we then see if the prediction comes true. If it does, that provides some (though by no means conclusive) support for the theory; if it does not, the theory is in trouble. For example, the germ theory of disease was only accepted once it had been used to make a variety of successful predictions, e.g., once vaccines were shown to be effective.

Science works as well as it does because it is responsive to evidence in this way. And our views in daily life will also be more likely to be true if we test them. We will see, however, that most of us aren’t very good at this.

Feedback

Testing our ideas is one way of getting feedback. Without feedback telling us how accurate our reasoning has been, we won’t be able to learn from our mistakes. Feedback is often painful; we learn that we didn’t do as well as we had thought or hoped—maybe we didn’t do very well at all. But reasoning, like so much else, involves trial and error, and unless you know what the errors are, you won’t do any better the next time around. So, if we want to improve our ability to reason and make judgments, we must seek feedback.

We often overlook the importance of feedback. For example, people who conduct job interviews may have a good deal of experience. Even so, they typically receive limited feedback on their hiring abilities. Why? Because they do get feedback about the quality of the people that they hire, but they rarely get feedback on the quality of the people they reject.

Emotions and Needs

Emotions are a central part of our lives, and they often play a quite legitimate role in our thinking. Intense emotions, however, can lead to poor reasoning. If we are extremely frightened or extremely angry, we aren’t likely to think very clearly. Less obviously, emotions often provide an incentive to think badly. For example, the desire to avoid unpleasant facts about ourselves or the world can lead to wishful thinking and to various self-serving biases in our thoughts. We cannot be effective thinkers if we won’t face obvious facts, or if we seriously distort them. Good thinking involves reasoning, not rationalization; it is based on what we have good reasons to think is true, not on what we would like to be true. Throughout this textbook, we will see how desires, emotions, and moods can impair clear thinking, and we will discuss ways to minimize their effect.

Quick Fixes

We encounter many difficult problems in today’s world. The rise in terrorism, racism and racial tensions, the growing sense that jobs are not secure, and the increasing pollution of the environment all present huge challenges. On a more personal level, the desire to save a marriage, quit smoking, or make more money also present challenges. In such cases, genuine solutions are likely to require a great deal of time, effort, or money (or, often enough, all three), and in some cases, it isn’t even clear where to begin.

The solutions to problems like these often require us to do things we don’t want to do. Most of us don’t want to spend a lot of our own money to solve the problems of the world, or to adopt a new lifestyle, even though it’s healthier. So, it is not surprising that people who promise us an easier solution—a quick fix—will always find an audience. A quick fix is something that is offered as a fast and easy solution to a complex problem. The human tendency toward wishful thinking is one reason why claims by those who offer a quick fix are often accepted, even when there is little evidence in their favor. We will find that hopes for a quick fix are responsible for a good deal of careless reasoning.

Persuasion

We often try to persuade others to accept our view or position. People in the “persuasion professions” (like advertising, politics, and charity work) do this for a living, but we all do it some of the time. You might want to convince someone to go out with you, or to marry you, or to give you a divorce. There are many different (and often subtle) techniques for persuading people. Some involve offering them reasons; others rely on manipulations. We have noted that people prefer having bad reasons to no reasons, and so manipulation often works best if it is disguised to look like an argument. We want to think that reasons and arguments can be given to support our views, even if those arguments aren’t very good. As a result, one very effective way of persuading people is to appeal to their emotions (e.g., their self-interest or their fears) but to dress the appeal up as an argument that doesn’t appear to appeal to their feelings. We will encounter various techniques for persuasion throughout the textbook. Some involve good arguments. Some (called fallacies) masquerade as good arguments (when they really aren’t). We will also examine various non-rational ways of persuading people. If we are aware of these, we will be less likely to be drawn in by them.

Biases

Biases are systematic tendencies to reason badly. We will study several biases in the following chapters. All of us are vulnerable to biases; but understanding how they work and seeing how pervasive they are will help us to minimize their influence in our own thinking and to spot their results in the thinking of others.

Fallacies

Bad reasoning is said to be fallacious. If our reasoning is biased, we are likely to commit fallacies. In Chapter 4 of the textbook we will study several common fallacies.

Safeguards

Throughout the textbook, we will learn various safeguards for counteracting common biases in thought and avoiding fallacies.