Unreflective thinker definition

CRITICAL THINKING

T O O L S FOR T A K I N G C H A R G E OF y 0 l l R L E A R N I N G AND Y O U R L IFE

T H I R D e d i t i o n

Richard Paul Foundation for Critical Thinking

Linda Elder Foundat ion for Critical Thinking

PEARSON Boston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco Upper Saddle River

Amsterdam Cape Town Dubai London Madrid Milan Munich Paris Montreal Toronto Delhi Mexico City Sao Paulo Sydney Hong Kong Seoul Singapore Taipei Tokyo

C H A P T E H 2

EXHIBIT 2.1 Most people have lived their entire lives as unreflective thinkers. To develop as thinkers requires commitment to daily practice.

STAGES OF CRITICAL THINKING DEVELOPMENT

/ Accomplished Thinker

(Intellectual skills and virtues have become second

nature in our lives)

/ Advanced Thinker

(We are committed to lifelong practice and are beginning to internalize intellectual virtues)

/ Practicing Thinker

(We regularly practice and advance accordingly)

/ Beginning Thinker

(We try to improve but without regular practice)

/ Challenged Thinker

(We are faced with significant problems in our thinking)

Unreflective Thinker (We are unaware of significant

problems in our thinking)

If we aspire to develop as thinkers, the stages all of us go through are:

Stage 1 The Unreflective Thinker (we are unaware of significant problems in our thinking)

Stage 2 The Challenged Thinker (we become aware of problems in our thinking)

Stage 3 The Beginning Thinker (we try to improve but without regular practice)

Stage 4 The Practicing Thinker (we recognize the necessity of regular practice) Stage 5 The Advanced Thinker (we advance in accordance with our practice) Stage 6 The Accomplished Thinker (skilled and insightful thinking become

second nature to us)

STAGE 1: THE UNREFLECTIVE THINKER Are you an unreflective thinker? We all are born—and most of us die—as largely unreflective thinkers, fundamentally unaware of the role that thinking is playing in our lives. At this Unreflective Thinker stage, we have no useful conception of what thinking entails. For example, as unreflective thinkers, we don't notice that we are continually making assumptions, forming concepts, drawing inferences, and thinking within points of view. At this stage, we don't know how to analyze and assess our thinking. We don't know how to determine whether our purposes are clearly formulated, our assumptions justified, our conclusions logically drawn. We are unaware of intellectual traits and so are not striving to embody them.

At this stage, many problems in our lives are caused by poor thinking, but we are unaware of this. We don't question our beliefs or our decisions. We lack intellectual standards and have no idea what such standards might be. We lack the intellectual traits but are not aware that we lack them. We unconsciously deceive ourselves in many ways. We create and maintain pleasant illusions. Because our beliefs seem reasonable to us, we believe them with confidence. We walk about the world with confidence that things really are the way they appear to us. We judge some people to be "good" and some to be "bad." We approve of some actions and disapprove of others. We make decisions, react to people, go our way in life, and do not seriously question our thinking or its implications.

Although we don't realize it, our egocentric tendencies at this stage play a dominant role in our thinking. We lack the skills and the motivation to notice how self-centered and prejudiced we are, how often we stereotype others, how fre- quently we dismiss ideas irrationally simply because we don't want to change our behavior or our comfortable way of looking at things.

2.1 Think for Yours ̂ REFLECTING O N YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF T H I N K I N G

M ight you be at the Unreflective Thinker stage of development? Test yourself by writing your answers to the following: I. Describe the role that thinking is playing in your life. (Be as clear and as detailed as

you can.)

2 What was a recent assumption you made that you should not have made? 3 What is a concept you recently formed that you previously lacked? 4 List five inferences you made in the past hour. 5 Name and explain a point of view you sometimes use to guide your thinking. 6, Briefly describe how you analyze and assess thinking.

Name some intellectual standards you use. Explain how you apply them. 8. Explain the role of egocentric thinking in your life. 9. Explain what you are doing to try to embody one or two of the intellectual traits.

If you had trouble with your responses in the Think for Yourself exercise you may well be at the Unreflective Thinker stage. If so, you do not need to 'apologize or feel badly about it; most people are at this stage and don't know it. Traditional schooling and the way children typically are reared do not help people to become skilled thinkers. Often, parents and teachers themselves are unreflective thinkers. This is the product of a vicious circle. Unreflective per- sons raise unreflective persons. Once you explicitly recognize that you are at this stage, however, you are ready to move to the next stage. And when you move to the next stage, you may be close to breaking out of the vicious cycle of unreflectiveness. To do so requires that we become honestly reflective—that we begin to notice some problems in our thinking, that we begin to recognize that our thinking is often egocentric and irrational, that changes in our own thinking are essential.

Honest reflectiveness leads to healthy motivation to change. It is functional and productive. You must not only see problems in your thinking but also have some sense of how you might address those problems. You must become rea- sonably articulate about what you have to do to improve. Motivation is crucial. Without a drive to change, nothing much of significance will happen.

STAGE 2: THE CHALLENGED THINKER Are you ready to accept the challenge? We cannot solve a problem we do not own or deal with a condition we deny. Without knowledge of our ignorance, we cannot seek the knowledge we lack. Without knowledge of the skills we need to develop, we will not develop them.

As we become aware that "normal" thinkers often think poorly, we move into the second stage of critical thinking development, the Challenged Thinker. We begin to notice that we often

• make questionable assumptions; m use false, incomplete, or misleading information; • make inferences that do not follow from the evidence we have; • fail to recognize important implications in our thought; • fail to recognize problems we have; • form faulty concepts; • reason within prejudiced points of view; and • think egocentrically and irrationally.

We move to the Challenged Thinker stage when we become aware of the way our thinking is shaping our lives, including the recognition that p rob lems in our thinking are causing problems in our lives. We begin to recognize that p o o r thinking can be life-threatening, that it can lead literally to death or p e r m a n e n t

T H E F I R S T FOUR S T A K E S o r DEVELOPMENT

injury, that it can hurt others as well as ourselves. For example, we might reflect upon the thinking of

• the teenager who thinks that smoking is sexy; • the woman who thinks that Pap smears are not important; • the motorcyclist who reasons that helmets obstruct vision and, therefore,

riding without one is safer; • the person who thinks he can drive safely while drunk; • the person who decides to marry a self-centered person with the thought that

he or she will "change" after marriage.

We also recognize the difficulty involved in "improving" our thinking. If you are at this stage in your own thinking, you recognize that the problem of changing your habits of thought is an important challenge requiring extensive and difficult changes in your normal routines.

Some signs of emerging reflectiveness are that

• you find yourself striving to analyze and assess your.thinking; • you find yourself working with the structures of mind that create, or make

possible, thinking (for example: concepts, assumptions, inferences, implications, points of view);

• you find yourself thinking about the qualities that make thinking sound— clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, logicalness—even though you may have only an initial grasp of how to achieve these qualities;

• you find yourself becoming interested in the role of self-deception in thinking, even though your understanding is relatively "abstract," and you may not be able to offer many examples from your own life.

At this point in your development self-deception is a distinct danger. Many resist accepting the true nature of the challenge: that their own thinking is a real and sig- nificant problem in their life. If you do as many do, you will revert to the Unreflective Thinker stage. Your experience of thinking about your thinking will fade, and your usual habits of thought will remain as they are. For example, you may find yourself rationalizing in the following way: " My thinking is not that bad. Actually, I've been thinking well for quite a while. I question a lot of things. I'm not prejudiced. Besides that, I'm very critical. And I'm not nearly as self-deceived as lots of people I know."

If you reason in this way, you are not alone; you're in the majority. This view—"If everyone were to think like me, this would be a fine world"—is the dominant one. Those who share this view range from the poorly schooled to the highly schooled. There is no evidence to suggest that schooling correlates with self- reflectiveness. Indeed, many college graduates are intellectually arrogant because of their schooling. Unreflective people are found in all socioeconomic classes and in- clude psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, mathematicians, doctors, senators, judges, governors, district attorneys, lawyers, and. indeed, people of all professions.

C H A P T E R 2

In short, absence of intellectual humility is common among all classes of peo- ple in all walks of life at all ages. It follows that active or passive resistance to the challenge of critical thinking is the common rather than the rare case. Whether in the form of a careless shrug or outright hostility, most people reject the challenge of critical thinking. That is why some soul-searching is important at this point in the process.

.3 Think for Yourself THE CHALLENGED THINKER STAGE

Work in groups of three. The person whose first name is earliest in the alphabet will explain the second stage, that of the Challenged Thinker, to the other two. answering any questions they might have. Then the other two in the group will add any features the first student missed and elaborate on the points they think are most important.

TO IDENTIFY PROBLEMS IN YOURTHINK1NG

See whether you can identify any problems in your thinking. The best way to do this is to analyze a behavior of yours that somehow is creating problems, either for you or for others. Look at your personal relationships, your study habits, your interaction patterns. How do you behave when you are upset? How do you act when you don't get your way? Do you expect more of others than you expect of yourself? Consider these questions as start- ing points for challenging yourself as a thinker. If you cannot identify any problems in your thinking, think again.

STAGE 3: THE BEGINNING THINKER Are you willing to begin? When a person actively decides to take up the challenge to grow and develop as a thinker, he or she enters the stage we call the Beginning Thinker. In this stage of thinking, we begin to take thinking seriously. This stage prepares us for the next stages, with the ultimate goal of explicit command of thinking. It is a stage of dawning realizations and of developing will power. It is not a stage of self-condemnation but, rather, of emerging consciousness. It is analogous to the stage in which people who are alcoholics recognize and fully ac- cept the fact that they are alcoholics. Imagine an alcoholic saying, "I am an alco- holic, and onlv I can do something about it." Now imagine yourself saying, "I a m a weak, undisciplined thinker, and only I can do something about it."

Once people recognize that they are "addicted" to poor thinking, they must begin to recognize the depth and nature of the problem. If we are at the Beginning Thinker stage' we should recognize that our thinking is sometimes egocentric. For example, we may notice how little we consider the needs of others and how much we focus on getting what we personally want. We may notice how little we enter the point of view of others and how much we assume the "correctness" of o u r

. thers to S own. W e may e v e n sometimes catch ourselves trying to dominate (,-ortr.c what we wan t or. alternatively, acting out the role of submitting to o t t i e 0 w"ttich gams t h a t s u b m i s s i v e behavior brings). We may begin to notice the extern i we c o n l o r m uncr i t ica l ly to the thinking of others.

As th inkers t h i n k i n g about thinking, we are merely beginning to

• ana lyze the l o g i c of situations and problems; • express clear a n d precise questions; • check i n f o r m a t i o n for accuracy and relevance; ^ • distinguish be tween raw information and someone's interpretation o 1 < • recognize a s sumpt ions guiding inferences: ^

• identify prejudicial and biased beliefs, unjustifiable conclusions, misuse words, and missed implications;

• notice when o u r viewpoint is biased by our selfish interests. _

Thus , as Beginning Thinkers, we are becoming aware of how to dea lAVJ^ structures at work in thought (purposes, questions, information, interp - ^ ^ etc.). We are beginning to appreciate the value of examining our thin king of its clarity, accuracy, relevance, precision, logicalness., justifiability, ^ depth, and fairness, but we are still at a low level of proficiency in these: ^ They feel awkward to us. We have to force ourselves to think in discipnn ^ We are like beginners in ballet. We feel foolish adopting the basic posi e V to don't lee! graceful; we stumble and make mistakes. N o one would pay watch us perform. We ourselves don' t like what we see in the mirror ot o ^ m U S t

To reach this Beginning Thinker stage, ou r values must begin to shitt. h i l l | expl< the foundation of our thinking and discover how we have come ^ and believe as we do. Let us consider this goal in a little more detail. K e ' . on some of the major infiuences that have shaped your thinking (and OU )•

1. You were born into a culture (e.g., European, American, African, Asian). 2. You were born at some point in time (in some century in some year). 3. You were born in some place (in the country, in the city, in the North or

South. East or West). , , t 4. You were raised by parents with particular beliefs (about the family - * ^