What's so critical about critical thinking?

Thinking, but good

Every time I taught a class on critical thinking, I quickly moved to defining the concept. Being precise is one of those critical thinking virtues, after all.

There are quite a few formulations to choose from, with Ennis' 'reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do'^[1] being the relatively straightforward one. For cognitive scientists, I always liked to pull out Scriven & Paul^[2], who define critical thinking as:

"the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

I did this because students of cognitive science tend to balk at definitions like this. Here, we can see basically all known cognitive processes in list, with the addition that they should be disciplined, active and skilled. Why not just say thinking, but good and be done with it? What is the purpose of the word "critical?"

That question often led to exactly the discussion I wanted to have in the first place. What do students mean if they talk about critical thinking? Which parts of it do they find hard? What do they want to learn? We usually agree that critical thinking is truth-oriented thinking and that its challenges vary case by case.

However, definitions should not (just) be conversation pieces. Higher education often prides itself on developing critical thinking skills (although empirically, results are mixed ^[3], ^[4]), researchers have constructed all sorts of measures of critical thinking skills and the advent of GenAI led to a widespread worry that exactly these skills are eroding. A clear idea of what critical thinking means would be helpful.

Suspending judgment

Enter Matthew Landers, who published a paper that addresses exactly this issue^[5]. Building on Johnson & Hamby, who found that no existing definition holds up^[6], Landers doesn't offer yet another one. He goes a step back: what does the word critical actually add?

To do so, he revisited the work of John Dewey, the educational reformer from the early 20th century. There are several branches in the critical thinking literature, yet all find Dewey as their trunk, rooted in a more fine-grained cultural and intellectual history.

In Landers' reading of Dewey, critical thinking is essentially a mode switch. There is natural thinking, which works quite well in daily life, and then there is thinking that happens during the suspension of judgment. This, to Landers, makes the latter form of thinking critical. It is when our cognition crosses a critical boundary in which it distances itself from definitive conclusions. Pending judgment, with no definitive beliefs in place, a thinker can then analytically choose which information to attend and which to ignore, which possible conclusions could be drawn and what would be needed to prefer one conclusion over another.

An example of this would be an experienced clinician, who could certainly follow her expertise and intuition to diagnose patients using nothing but natural thinking. Yet she could also decide to withhold judgment and rather seek out information more carefully, to formulate hypotheses and to check these against more clinical observations. Landers says that this state of mind corresponds to critical thinking.

I like this emphasis on the suspension of judgment. It is a good description of the state I try to create when using the WHR approach to critical conversation. I also suspect that the fact that dialogical approaches pop up as effective critical thinking pedagogies^[7] can be partially explained by conversations providing a space that acknowledges that judgment is still pending, while simultaneously providing the diversity of perspectives that is needed to make the most of that space.

Quantifying criticality

Landers goes a bit further, however. Still following Dewey, he describes the many processes that take place during suspended judgment and sneaks in another version of "thinking, but good". Among other things, a critical thinker should select what information to attend, decide to "critically ignore" irrelevant or low-quality information, draw inferences and recombine inferences with general knowledge in a deductive movement. The better someone does this, the stronger their criticality is.

Here I get a bit more reluctant. There are standards for reasoning, of course, which a good critical thinker can meet. Yet there are also elements in critical thinking which do not lend themselves to standardisation. In line with Willingham's view^[8], I think critical thinking depends on open-ended and self-directed thinking, which are more difficult to capture in explicit norms.

To use the example of the clinician again, let's assume that she chooses to suspend judgment and then makes use of a diagnostic flowchart. The chart guides her through specific questions and directs her attention towards clinically relevant observations. It offers directions for additional tests and relates the outcomes of these tests to a diagnosis. It codifies clear and rational thinking about interpreting the patient's case and it indeed does a good job of identifying illness.

Contrast this with a six-year-old, who is having doubts about the existence of Santa Claus. He considers that perhaps, Santa Claus is not a real person and suspends judgment. His reasoning is a bit messy, but he makes an honest effort to look at the matter from multiple directions. His thinking is truth-oriented and fully his own.

Who is doing more critical thinking, the clinician or the six-year-old? My answer: both are engaging in critical thought by suspending judgment, but as the clinician is following instructions, she falls short of the self-directed criterion. The clinician's critical moment was her decision to hold back her diagnosis. After that, the quality comes largely from the flowchart. The child holds the question open himself, directs his own thinking and his faulty logic is a matter of knowledge and practice, not of criticality.

Not following protocol

This difference matters, because we can easily replace the clinician's flowchart with a chatbot and see the situation that many students now find themselves in. Although chatbots are not perfect reasoners, they can certainly structure text in such a way that it looks like "thinking, but good". Still, a student who just goes along with that is not a critical thinker, although one who asks the chatbot follow-up questions, compares notes, maps out her understanding and makes predictions might very well be.

So what's so critical about critical thinking? Not the quality of our reasoning per se, important as that is, but the moment we decide not to conclude yet, and the degree to which we ourselves explore, in a truth-oriented way, the space we create by suspending judgment. We can do this alone, we can do it with others, but as soon as we follow protocol to get to answers, it is the protocol doing the work, not our critical thinking.

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