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Article for “The Skeptic Express”

David Yates, July 2006

 

Critical Thinking for Sceptics

When I was approached to write an article for “The Skeptic Express,” I began by wondering if its readers would be receptive to a consideration of the difference between “scepticism” and critical thinking.  After all, one of the stated aims of this publication is to “encourage a logical and rational approach to fringe claims and magical thinking” but fringe claims are not necessarily illogical and critical reasoning is not necessarily an antidote to magical thinking.

For example, the story of Noah’s Ark is often brought up when religion is debated.  Attempting to prove the Biblical claims, a series of expeditions to Mount Ararat have taken place (1).  Many “ark-ologists” have claimed to have found evidence of large boats encased in ice and snow on the Turkish mountain, with some offering photographs and timber as evidence.  “Sceptics”, by contrast, have attempted to show that the flood was “impossible” because, for such a flood to take place, there would have to be an enormous volume of water present on earth and there is no such quantity, even if we count that which is frozen in ice at the poles.  Therefore, it is reasoned, no such flood occurred.  In “Problems with a Global Flood” (2), Mark Isaak goes on to explain, in extraordinary detail, that it would be impossible to gather all species of animals and contain them on the Ark for the duration of the flood and then to release them in such a way that the earth could be repopulated.

It could be argued, that both lines of argument are equally futile.  If a massive wooden boat, thousands of years old, is discovered on Mount Ararat, it cannot be held as proof that God flooded the world.  Nor can the claims of the Old Testament be disproved by the simple claim that the flood was “impossible” in scientific terms, since the event is claimed to be an act of a God that is not supposed to be constrained by any branch of science.

Working in a Catholic school, I also enjoy using a passage from Anne Thompson’s “Critical Reasoning” textbook (3) about the “Weeping Madonna” of Siracusa.  Dr Luigi Garlaschelli, a Chemistry researcher at the University of Pavia, made his own weeping Madonna that could shed tears without any mechanical or electronic aid and without the use of water-absorbing chemicals.  “The secret, he revealed, is to use a hollow statue made of thin plaster.  If it is coated with an impermeable glazing and water poured into the hollow centre from a tiny hole in the head, the statue behaves quite normally.  The plaster absorbs the liquid but the glazing prevents it from pouring out.  But if barely perceptible scratches are made in the glazing over the eyes, droplets of water appear as if by divine intervention.”  Some sceptics may claim that Dr Garlaschelli has exposed the weeping Madonna as a fraud because he has provided a logical explanation for a supernatural claim.  However, there is an alternative explanation, which is that the statue is weeping and that this is a miracle.  A critical thinker should at least be open to this possibility.

The Skeptic Express urges its readers to be “Skeptical not Cynical” (4) and to see scepticism not as a position but as a method of enquiry.  It has a stated aim to promote the teaching and application of critical thinking skills and I was invited to write this article because I am involved in the teaching of a critical thinking qualification in the UK that was taken, last summer, by over 15,000 seventeen and eighteen year olds (5).  This is part of a trend towards testing the critical thinking skills of students in this age group as they prepare to apply for university entry. 

 

Teaching Critical Thinking

“Grade Inflation” is a problem in the UK, with top universities frequently complaining that there are far more “Straight A” applicants than they have places available.  Increasingly, the oversubscribed universities prefer to set their own tests of critical thinking to differentiate between such applicants.  An example is the LNAT (presumably inspired by the American LSAT), which tests the critical reasoning skills of those applying to study Law (6).  One advantage of these tests is that, although performance may be improved, to a certain extent, by working through sample tests, it is said to be impossible to revise or “cram” for the tests because there is no subject content.  As the UK has a particularly sharp divide between independent and state schools, this argument has an egalitarian appeal because genuinely talented students from “deprived backgrounds” may shine in these tests, even though their other results may be mediocre.

The A Level in Critical Thinking, offered by the OCR exam board, is the qualification with which I have been directly involved.  In contrast to the LNAT, the A Level is not linked with an application to any particular university course.  At the age of 18, most British students take “A Levels” in three or four subjects, one of which can be Critical Thinking.  As with the LNAT, there is no subject content, nor is there any “coursework”, with 100% of the assessment being in the form of a timed examination, in which candidates must comprehend and evaluate the arguments of others and compose coherent and logical arguments of their own.

Perceptions of the subject vary considerably.  Some schools have reported that the thinking skills of their A Level students have noticeably improved, that students have enjoyed the subject and that the additional qualification has improved the overall A Level points score of their university applicants.  In other cases, students have regarded the subject with disdain, either because of the lack of specified content or because their school has made the subject compulsory!

The notion that Critical Thinking is a “soft option” is not borne out by the evidence.  In 2005, 8.4% of candidates were awarded an A grade for the “AS Level”, compared to an average for all subjects of 17.7% (7).  Although these figures do not prove that Critical Thinking is harder than other subjects, they do show that, for whatever reason, the subject was severely graded.  One explanation might be that, in some centres that make the subject compulsory for all students, the candidates are not engaging properly with the subject or there could be a lack of curriculum time or specialist teaching.  Like most teachers, I greatly prefer to teach students who have actively chosen and are genuinely interested in the subject.  With such students, Critical Thinking can be a joy to teach.

 

Critical Thinking is not Debating!

Critical Thinking involves the study of arguments but since when did teenagers need any help learning how to argue?  We all know that teenagers can be contentious and quarrelsome but a quarrel or a row is not necessarily an argument.  We teach that an argument must include a conclusion and at least one reason to support that conclusion.  Students then have to learn to identify other components of arguments such as intermediate conclusions, analogies and assumptions.

Having learnt to identify the structure of arguments, students can start to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of arguments and this is where the real fun begins!  Students must try to understand that there is a difference between critical thinking and debating and strongly held opinions may have to be set aside when evaluating arguments, since it is the reasoning that is being studied, rather than the merits of the conclusion.  Authors can, and frequently do, come to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.

Fallacies are usually best explained through examples . . .

Spot the Fallacy!

 When considering the following rhetoric, students should be able to identify precisely what is going wrong with the reasoning.  Some of the fallacies have Latin names, which students do not have to learn but they are expected to be able to explain why a fallacy is being committed:

 1.  It’s rich that the Pope calls gays unnatural; could there be a more unnatural irrational lifestyle than his? (8)

2.  Arguing that tobacco advertising encourages people to smoke is the equivalent of arguing that pet food advertising encourages people to buy pets.

3.  Chelmsford is not worth visiting.  Charles Dickens despised Chelmsford, describing it as “the dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the Earth.” (9)

4.  My teacher said that I had to read the textbook if I wanted to pass the exam.  I have read the textbook, so I will definitely pass the exam.

5.  Which would you rather have?  One million babies aborted and never brought into this world or one million children found dead in dumpsters, addicted to drugs, beaten, neglected, and/or mentally abused by parents who didn't want them? (8)

6.  Allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns reduces violent crime. In the 31 states that have passed right-to-carry laws since the mid-1980s, the number of multiple-victim public shootings and other violent crimes has dropped dramatically. Murders fell by 7.65%, rapes by 5.2%, aggravated assaults by 7%, and robberies by 3%.

7.  The percentage of pupils gaining A grades in their A Levels is increasing.  According to the government, this is evidence that their education policies are working.

8.  Why Adolf Hitler relied on ID cards: With IBM's help, he used them to organise the Holocaust. Today's politicians, argues this historian, must heed this terrible lesson. (10)

9.  We should have conscription. People don't want to enter the military because they find it an inconvenience. But they should realise that there are more important things than convenience. (11)

10.  If we legalise marijuana, then we would have to legalise crack and heroin and we'll have a nation full of drug-addicts on welfare. Therefore we cannot legalise marijuana.

Spot the Fallacy – The Answers

These are all very bad arguments, with fairly straightforward fallacies being committed.  Having explained the fallacies, an interesting homework exercise is to ask students to find examples of the fallacies being used in the media or even by parents and teachers!

1.  The point is mere tu quoque (“you too”).  The suggestion is that the only reason why the Pope's assertion should not be taken seriously is that he himself leads an unnatural lifestyle.  The author doesn’t say what, if anything, is wrong with leading an unnatural lifestyle, nor does he address the view that a homosexual lifestyle might not be unnatural at all.

2.  There are strengths in the analogy, in that tobacco advertisers have long argued that they are encouraging existing smokers to switch brands rather than encouraging non-smokers to start smoking.  The problem with this analogy is that few would really care if pet food advertisers encourage pet ownership or not, since pet ownership is not thought to be a socially unacceptable health hazard.

3.  This is an example of an “irrelevant appeal to authority”.  As a great nineteenth century novelist, Dickens may be cited as an authority on certain literary matters but not on 21st Century tourism.

4.  This author is confusing necessary and sufficient conditions.  Reading the textbook may be a necessary condition of passing the exam (anyone who fails to read the book will fail the exam) but it is unlikely to be a sufficient condition because the teacher has not said that reading the book will automatically mean that a student will pass.

5.  This is a “false dilemma” in that the author supposes that every baby that is currently aborted would otherwise be addicted to drugs, beaten, neglected, mentally abused or killed. It is extremely unlikely that this would be the case.

6.  This is a fallacy of causation.  One thing has happened (the passing of a “right to carry” law) and then another thing happened (the crime rate fell).  The author leaps to the conclusion that the first thing caused the second thing to happen.  There could be many other reasons why the crime rate fell but the author has not considered any of these other explanations.

7.  Again, the government is claiming that because exam results have improved since they came to office, the increased results must have been caused by their policies.  There are many plausible reasons why exam results have increased that are almost too numerous to list but two popular suggestions are that the exams have been deliberately made easier and that the grade boundaries have been fixed.

8.  This is an example of the “Reduction to Hitler” fallacy, which is frequently committed by those who want us to believe that simply mentioning Adolf Hitler in any debate is sufficient to win the argument.  Yet Hitler enjoyed painting (like Churchill) and he was a vegetarian (like Mahatma Gandhi), so sharing an interest with Hitler does not necessarily make a person evil.

9.  This is a famous fallacy known as the “straw man”.  It is the fallacy of distorting the argument of an opponent and then attacking the distorted argument (the straw man) rather than the real argument.  In this case, those who are against conscription would probably be able to come up with a stronger argument than the inconvenience of national service.

10.  Another famous fallacy called the “slippery slope”.  If one small step is taken, a sequence of events will be set in motion and we will rush to disaster.  The fallacy can be exposed if it can be shown that one thing will not necessarily lead to another thing happening.

 

Assessing Credibility and CRAVEN

A large part of the AS Level examination is concerned with assessing the credibility of evidence in disputes.  In the early papers, this was always a dispute such as judging which driver was to blame for a car accident, deciding whether or not a football player broke his leg as a result of a foul tackle or establishing what caused a plane to crash.  There were always five main participants in the dispute and candidates had to come to a reasoned judgement based on the credibility of the evidence given by these individuals.

In the more recent papers, this section has been extended and candidates are now given a reading booklet with conflicting passages and a range of sources about some well known controversies, such as what really happened in the “Battle of Samarra” and whether or not the moon landings were faked.

In both papers, CRAVEN (Corroboration, Reputation, Ability to observe, Vested Interest, Expertise, Neutrality) can be a useful system for students to use when assessing the credibility of the evidence.  To illustrate the use of this system, here is a fictional example of a dispute:

  

An eleven year old boy called Ricky was expelled from his Primary (elementary) school after being involved in a playground altercation with another eleven year old called Simon.  A fight occurred during a lunch break and the school “permanently excluded” Ricky, on the grounds that this was the latest in a series of incidents involving violence, bullying and disruptive classroom behaviour.

Ricky claimed that Simon had provoked the fight by pushing him, calling him a name and saying something unpleasant about his mother.  Ricky’s claim that he merely retaliated was supported by Nathan (Ricky’s best friend). 

The “Midday Assistant” (adult playground supervisor) who broke up the fight says that she did not see how it started.  However, she said that Simon was a sensitive child who was sometimes “picked on” by the rougher boys.

Ricky’s social worker says that Ricky comes from a deprived and unstable background, with his father recently having been sent to prison for armed robbery.  She claims that the school is “entirely to blame” for the incident because they have not properly recognised his “emotional and behavioural difficulties”.  She feels that the school has been negligent in not providing Ricky with one-to-one help from an LSA (Learning Support Assistant) to help him deal with his anger-management issues.

Simon’s mother claims that her son had been bullied by Ricky over a significant period of time and that lessons at the school have frequently been disrupted by Ricky’s poor behaviour.  She claims that he was sometimes so intimidated that he was scared to go to school.  However, she feels that her husband may have precipitated this particular incident because, fed up with his son being a victim, he had told him to “stick up for himself and fight back”.

 

Ricky’s Exclusion – Assessing Credibility

The exclusion of Ricky, although far less complex a dispute than those on the AS Level exam paper, is sufficient to begin to illustrate the major “credibility criteria” that candidates are required to consider.

Ricky’s excuse of being provoked by Simon is corroborated by Nathan and this corroboration increases the credibility of Ricky’s evidence.  The suggestion that Ricky has bullied Simon in the past is corroborated by Simon’s mother and, to a certain extent, by the Midday Assistant.

Ricky appears to have a reputation for being a disruptive student and a bully.  This reputation will damage Ricky’s credibility.

Ricky, Nathan and Simon are the only participants who had an ability to observe what happened and this increases their credibility.  The Midday Assistant broke up the fight but she did not see how it started.

Ricky and Simon both have a vested interest because both children have something to lose if they get the blame for starting the fight.  The social worker may have a vested interest, since she could be responsible for arranging alternative educational provision for Ricky if he gets excluded.

Adults are expected to have greater expertise than children, so the evidence of adult witnesses is usually thought to have the greater credibility.  Additionally, a social worker might be expected to have greater expertise than a Midday Assistant but maybe such expertise is not relevant to this particular issue.  Although Ricky’s social worker may be familiar with his home circumstances, she is not necessarily qualified to diagnose special educational needs.  Furthermore, although the social worker might be in the better position to explain some of the reasons for Ricky’s behaviour, the Midday Assistant would be more qualified to describe his behaviour in school.

Most of the participants are somewhat biased.  Nathan could be expected to support his friend; Simon’s mother would want to support her son and the social worker to support her client.  The Midday Assistant is probably the most neutral participant.  Whereas bias damages credibility, neutrality strengthens it.

A couple of the sources in this dispute are problematic.  For example, Simon’s mother appears to suggest that her son is at least partly to blame for the incident, although the advice given by Simon’s father was to fight back when attacked rather than to actually provoke fights. 

The social worker’s evidence is problematic because she appears to be objecting to the sanction imposed by the school rather than disputing any of the facts of the case.  If we are merely concerned with who started the fight, the evidence of this participant is of little relevance.  However, if the issue is whether or not exclusion is the reasonable response, the issue of how the school dealt with Ricky’s alleged special educational needs would be highly relevant to a British appeals panel, which might seek further evidence from an educational psychologist.

In all cases of credibility, students are required to consider the weight, the balance and the quality of the evidence offered by the participants and the sources in the dispute.  We cannot prove who started the fight but it should be possible to come to a reasoned judgement that Simon was probably the more innocent party!

 

Conclusion

The purpose of this article has been to give a flavour of the sort of skills that are being promoted by the A Level in Critical Thinking in the UK.  I believe it to be a challenging examination of thinking skills that are highly relevant to the academic courses that students might go on to follow at university.  Furthermore, these are surely important life skills, equipping young people with the faculties of critical reasoning, helping them to make important judgements and reasoned conclusions about the information, claims and evidence that they will encounter throughout their higher education and beyond.

  

The author teaches Critical Thinking at an independent school in England.  He is in not associated with the OCR examination board.  Official information about the A/AS Level in Critical Thinking may be obtained from: http://www.ocr.org.uk

 (c) David Yates 2006

 

Notes:

1.  Has anyone discovered Noah’s Ark? www.christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a001.html

2.  Problems with a global flood: www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html

3.  Anne Thomson, Critical Reasoning: A Practical Introduction (Routledge, 2001)

4.  Skepticism – An approach to life (http://theskepticexpress.com/)

5.  A/AS Level Critical Thinking:  www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/AS_ALevelGCECriticalThinking(new).html  

6.  LNAT – National Admissions Test for Law: www.lnat.ac.uk

7.  OCR GCE AS Level Results, June 2005 (www.ocr.org.uk)

8.  Contribution to Yahoo Answers (http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/): April 2006

9.  Quoted on QI (BBC2) by Stephen Fry, October 2003

10.  Mail on Sunday headline, October 2005

11.  Stephen’s Guide to Logical Fallacies: http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/logicalfallacies.html

 

Further Reading:

Roy van den Brink-Budgen has written three books to support the A/AS Level Critical Thinking course and these cannot be recommended highly enough.  All are published by “How To Books” and are also available from Amazon and other good booksellers:

Critical Thinking for Students (ISBN: 1857036344)

Critical Thinking for AS Level (ISBN: 1845280857)

Critical Thinking for A2 (ISBN: 1845280954)

  

Web Links

Battleground God:  A Test of Logical Consistency: www.philosophersnet.com/games/god.htm

A List of Fallacious Arguments: www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html

 Understanding Statistics: www.robertniles.com/stats