Why We Need Philosophy Again, Part I: Critical Thinking Skills

Rodin: The Thinker

When I went to college I planned to major in psychology.  I was intrigued by human behavior and the search for psychological health personally, in the family, in communities.  However, at that time there was an emphasis on behaviorism, and I realized I am not really a scientist and did not want to watch mice run through a maze.  Nor did I want to study brain chemistry.

What really interested me was studying the great, classic questions of life throughout the ages:  what is the meaning of life, what is the purpose of human beings, what are the elements of true community, virtue, honesty, compassion.  I had already learned what Christianity had to say about such questions and issues, and I now wanted to know how to think about these questions philosophically, and also what other religions of the world had to say about them.  I thus ended up with a double major in philosophy and world religions.

However, at that time we were seeing the beginning stages of the disintegration of interest in what we call the liberal arts.  I was often ridiculed: how are you going to make a living with a philosophy major?  My wife, Mary, had a similar experience when she earned her first degree in fine arts, with an emphasis on printmaking and painting.  Unless you are a Van Gogh, how are you going to make a living with an art major?

This change in emphasis has continued to the present day.  The focus is on technology and science. Schools facing budget shortages cling to science and mathematics, and even sports, over art, music, poetry, and philosophy.  And now we have come to the point in our culture where the lack of emphasis on the kind of clear thinking philosophy demands has led to our ignoring and casting off the insights of the very science we have worshiped, to our own peril.  From climate change to fracking to the use of pesticides to the pollution of our rivers and oceans, we ignore and “dispute” what science and technology teach us, totally oblivious to the clear thinking, rationality, and logic philosophy insists upon.

Most people who have not studied philosophy don’t have a clear idea of what it is about.  People used to say the philosophers had their “heads in the clouds.”  Now, there are many aspects of philosophy, and one of them is that (metaphysics: that which is beyond material reality), but here is the key, basic definition: “the critical study of the basic principles and concepts of a particular branch of knowledge, especially with a view to improving or reconstituting them.” [dictionary.com] 

The term people may be more familiar with is “critical thinking  skills." The U.S. National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the "intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

When I taught students in Latin America (through Augsburg College) in the late 1980’s, one of the main goals was to help students develop such critical thinking skills.  For instance, we would take students to the US Embassy in Nicaragua where they would hear one view of the Iran-Contra War.  Then we would take them to the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry where they would hear a very different view, often exactly opposite.  In that situation, what is the process you use to try to decide which interpretation you are going to believe, or, more accurately, which parts of each presentation to believe?

The development of such skills continues to be a great need in our society.  It was recently reported that a study of 200 colleges across the US found that at half of them, one third of seniors “were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table.”  [Wall Street Journal, 6/7/17]

Returning to the importance of philosophy, some of the elements considered are causation, logic (correct vs. fallacious reasoning), morality, and, perhaps most importantly today, philosophic dialectics, which is “any formal system of reasoning that arrives at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments.” (think of the Dialogues of Plato in which Socrates searches for the truth by asking question after question, using logical reasoning to get at truth.)  

Now, compare what is happening in our country to the following description of why Plato emphasized this dialectical reasoning:

“Plato considers the sophists to be one of the primary enemies of virtue, and he is merciless in his attacks on them. The sophists, who were relatively new in Plato’s day, were a class of itinerant teachers who instructed young statesmen in the arts of rhetoric and debate for a fee. They taught that values are relative, so that the only measure of who is right is who comes out on top. Their teachings capitalized on a void left by the ancient myths and religion, which were falling out of fashion as Greek civilization moved toward a more rational worldview. The old values were losing their relevance, and there were no new values to replace them. Plato could see the danger this moral relativism posed for the state and for the people who lived in it, and his attacks on the sophists show up their hollow bravado that so many took for wisdom. Plato’s Theory of Forms, and the whole enterprise of the Republic, can be read as an attempt to find a solid grounding for moral values in rational principles.” [Sparknotes: Plato]

The New York Times recently printed an interview with the renown philosopher, Noam Chomsky.  When asked about the tremendous confusion today in a world of fake news, alternative facts, and a general inability to agree on what is scientifically true, Chomsky writes that “if by philosophy we mean reasoned and thoughtful analysis, then it can address the moment, though not by confronting the ‘alternative facts’ but by analyzing and clarifying what is at stake, whatever the issue is. . . . .In that broad sense, philosophy can play a role, indeed an essential role, in changing the world.” [7/5/17]

However, one of the great challenges facing us today is not just the development of critical thinking skills, but doing so in an arena of fake news, ideological media sources intent on presenting falsehoods, and an emotional atmosphere that includes intimidation and bullying.  This is the subject of my next post.