How to Make Students Better Thinkers

James Yang for The Chronicle

“Critical thinking” is one of the most prevalent buzzwords in the academy, but what does it mean? We all want our students to be critical thinkers, but we are collectively unable to say with any degree of precision what that actually entails.

Given this confusion, it is a common assumption that all professors teach critical thinking, and that no one discipline has any special claim to expertise in this area. Physicists argue that students absorb this skill while investigating the results of high-speed electron collisions; engineers point to the intrinsic problem-solving nature of engineering as evidence that the discipline teaches critical thinking. A member of our psychology department once told us, “Anyone can teach critical thinking.”

The word “critical” comes from the classical Greek words krinein or kritikos, which refer to judging, discerning, or estimating the value of something. A critical thinker, then, is a critic of thought in much the way that a film critic is a critic of film. A good film critic must have appropriate criteria to use in evaluating film, which are then applied to a given work, ideally in conjunction with honesty and fair-mindedness. In the same way, critical thinking involves thinking about thinking itself. Let’s take the following definition: Critical thinking is the conscious, deliberate, rational evaluation of claims according to clearly identified standards of proof.

The natural disciplinary home for this type of work is, of course, philosophy — a discipline that has been thinking about thinking since its inception. Most critical-thinking textbooks flesh out definitions of “critical thinking” as the study of arguments, which is further evidence of philosophy’s authoritative role. Philosophers have spent centuries formulating logical principles that distinguish good reasoning from bad reasoning. Knowing the difference between premises and conclusions, factual claims and inferential claims, deductive and inductive arguments, and good from fallacious reasoning is vital for thinking seriously about thinking. But you won’t learn any of that in “Intro to Organic Chemistry.”

Not that nonphilosophers are incapable of demonstrating critical thinking. In order to attain an advanced degree in any field, one has to stake out an original claim and support it with evidence. But these narrow, discipline-specific skills come with an unfortunate consequence: Professors tend to think they teach critical thinking as a general skill, but most of them don’t.

Many colleagues have told us that critical thinking is discipline-specific — that there are no universal critical-thinking skills that apply to all disciplines — in a tone suggesting that this claim is self-evidently true. Good nurses are good critical thinkers, we are told, as are good engineers, history majors, and political science majors. Being a good critical thinker simply means mastering the problem-solving skills in a particular major. But if the skills can’t be learned in organic chemistry, neither can they be learned in nursing, engineering, history, or political science.

The teaching of critical thinking as a life skill requires teaching students the underlying grammar of rational thought, which is operative across disciplines. When students enter college, we are inviting them to participate in a culture of evidence. Courses in critical thinking (or “Reasoning,” “Practical Reasoning,” “Informal Logic,” or “Introduction to Logic”), when they exist in a course catalog, demonstrate the importance of providing evidence for any claim to knowledge. Such claims are, of course, the putative conclusions of arguments, and the evidence for these claims are the premises. The specific content of the premises varies. This is the part of critical thinking that is discipline-specific. Determining whether or not a set of premises is true requires prior knowledge of the subject matter. Does an interpretation of a historical event rely on a discredited source? Ask a historian.

But, from a logical perspective, all the true premises in the world are not enough to establish a conclusion if the inference is flawed. To offer a pedestrian example: All Democrats are members of a political party; Barack Obama is a member of a political party. Therefore, Obama is a Democrat. Good arguments must not only have true (or at least plausible) premises; they must also have a good inferential structure. This argument is invalid because it lacks a good inference, and it is in the evaluation of the strength of inferential claims that philosophy makes its unique contribution. There is no other discipline that has identified and described both the kinds of inferential claims an argument can make and the principles for evaluating such claims.

Again, professors of literature, history, economics, nursing, and business are all presumably competent critical thinkers in their own disciplines. But if students are to learn what it means to be a critical thinker in all areas of their life, then they must be taught what constitutes good critical thinking in general — and that means taking a philosophy course. Consider fallacies, or mistakes in reasoning: Fallacies occur across the entire spectrum of claims to knowledge, but their essential characteristics are the same regardless of the subject matter. Professors who cannot recognize fallacious arguments in any context — even if they can identify them in their own disciplines — cannot truly teach critical thinking.

The distinction between assigning something and teaching something is important. A former colleague of ours who directed the writing program at our university makes a good point: Although all or at least most professors assign writing, that does not mean that they all teach writing. Teaching it requires a broad understanding of what constitutes good writing, and a generalized understanding of audience, revising, editing, and proofreading. That requires prolonged study of writing qua writing, such as that done by those rhetoric-and-composition scholars who have specialized in WAC/WID programs (writing across the curriculum / writing in the disciplines).

Expertise in logic is to critical thinking as WAC/WID is to teaching writing. In an ideal world, a course in critical thinking or informal logic would be considered just as essential to a university education as are courses in algebra and composition, and would be taught in the freshman year. Since most graduate programs in philosophy have a logic requirement, this undergraduate course would be mainly taught by philosophy faculty members, though qualified instructors in rhet-comp or communication studies might also teach it. The course would point out the various psychological barriers to good reasoning and could include units on scientific, statistical, moral, and legal reasoning. But its main focus would be on providing students with the fundamentals of argumentation, especially as those pertain to everyday life.

Such a course could be taught with a robust writing element but need not be, because learning the fundamentals of logic is much like learning math or a foreign language: There is a lot of drilling both in class and out, and a lot of collaborative working through of exercises. In such an iteration, this class would act as a complement to the freshman-comp course, but more to the point, it would ground students in the basics of good reasoning, making them better thinkers.

These courses would be easy to justify. Good critical thinkers navigate the world with a kind of intellectual body armor, making them less likely to be deceived by improbable claims, more likely to make reasonable requests for evidence, and more aware of rhetorical ploys that appeal only to our emotions, biases, or prejudices. Good critical thinkers recognize human finitude and fallibility, and are always conscious of the roles those characteristics play in the formation of belief. Critical thinking might, in fact, be the paradigm of a liberal art, for it both broadens and frees the minds of our students. And the study of logic is an essential key to this liberation.

Sadly, however, because of the predominant view that critical thinking is strictly discipline-specific, philosophers are surrounded by colleagues who have no formal knowledge of logic and are ignorant of its origin and refinement within philosophy. As a result, there is little recognition that philosophers have any special claim in this area, despite the historical fact that it is philosophy that has and continues to have the deepest and most sustained engagement with the science of inference. At best, in our experience, philosophers are considered only one voice among many; at worst, when philosophers make claims such as the ones we are making in this essay, we are regarded, in Plato’s words from the Republic, as useless “star-gazing babblers.”

Plato goes on to say that philosophers being regarded as useless is not the fault of philosophers, but rather of those who decline their services. The refusal to recognize philosophy’s centrality for teaching the art of critical thinking is damaging not only for the philosophers who are eager to provide this service, but also for colleagues across our campuses who have to endure the poor reasoning of their students. But it is incalculably harmful for our students, who will leave college without the intellectual tools necessary to navigate their lives in a rational way, or to protect themselves from unsupported opinions and everyday nonsense in an age when the spread of irrationality has become a crisis. Amid such a crisis, we wish people would step aside and let philosophers do their job.

Elizabeth Oljar and D.R. Koukal teach philosophy at the University of Detroit Mercy.