1. © Critical Thinking Skills BV
Critical Thinking: The Art of Reasoning
Lecture 21: Knowledge
© Critical Thinking Skills BV

2. Overview Six major Critical Thinking skills
Ordered cumulative to help skill development

3. Deliberating Lectures: Knowledge (21) Cognitive Biases (22)
Belief Preservation and Rational Inquiry (23)
Experts and Expertise (24)
Hypothesis Testing (25)
Decision Making (26)

4. What is Critical Thinking?
‘For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. So I thought my nature had a kind of familiarity and relationship with Truth.’
- from The Advancement of Learning
Francis Bacon
1605

5. Kinds of Critical Thinking
Making Statistical and Causal Inferences
Estimating Probabilities
Testing of Hypothesis
Reasoning, Argument & Deliberation
Reflecting on your own (critical) thinking (“Metacognition”)
Solving Problems
Making Decisions

6. Critical Thinking is the skilful deployment of simple, general methods which enhance the reliability and accuracy of judgment.

7. More generally… Logic Cognitive Psychology Research Methods
Statistics and Probability

8. Rational Inquiry
Rational inquiry is determining whether a claim is true or false by considering the total case, i.e., the full range of arguments bearing upon it, directly or indirectly.

9. Which map structure would best represent an inquiry task?

10. Rational Advocacy
The function of rational advocacy is to persuade an audience to accept a certain conclusion by argumentation (as opposed to emotive, fallacious reasoning which may be persuasive though not solid reasoning, nor convincing to the critical thinker).

11. Which map structure would best represent an advocacy task?

12. Knowledge How do you know that you know the truth of the matter?
What do we mean by knowledge?
What do we mean by truth?
What sorts of things can we know?
Who knows?

13. Knowledge: Epistemology
What are the ingredients of Knowledge?
= justified true belief
See in Rationale Reasoning for Knowledge Exercises

14. What is knowledge?
Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy

15. Some challenges to knowing
S knows that p
s= subject
that p = the proposition

16. Who is S?
S treated as a “featureless abstraction” Lorraine Code

17. Feminist epistemology
Lorraine Code & Genevieve Lloyd

18. Lloyd:
Reason has been traditionally considered as gender free. As Augustine said “reason has no sex.” Duality of mind and body.
“Reason has figured in western culture not only in the assessment of beliefs, but also in the assessment of character…”
“no superficial linguistic bias”
(The Man of Reason, p. ix)

19. Challenges to the nature of “scientific” knowledge
Evelyn Fox Keller’s research on Barbara McClintock: sympathetic understanding

20. One should have “the time to look, the patience to ‘hear what the material has to say to you,’ the openness to ‘let it come to you.’ Above all, one must have a ‘feeling for the organism’.”
(Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism, p. 199)

21. The subject
The inquirer should “be placed in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter, thereby recovering the entire research process for scrutiny in the results of research. That is, the class, race, culture, and gender assumptions, beliefs, and behaviours of the researcher her/himself must be placed within the frame of the picture that she/he attempts to paint.”
(Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, p. 9).

22. Confirmation Bias A “pro-attitude” towards a claim leads us to:
Seek supporting evidence
Ignore conflicting evidence
Overweigh supporting evidence
Underweigh conflicting evidence
Be reinforced by conflicting evidence
Maintain belief when no supporting evidence remains
See Lecture 22 and 23

23. Other ways of knowing

24. Lung-gom-pa
Legendary lamas who by means of psychic training could rush nonstop across vast distances of rugged landscape, running without end. Description of meeting a lung-gom-pa (by the French mystic-scholar Alexandra David-Neel who, disguised as a beggar woman, gained rare insight into common Tibetan life) in a wilderness where, for ten days, no fellow human being had been sighted: "By that time he had nearly reached up; I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far-distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground. His steps had the regularity of a pendulum. He wore the usual monastic robe and toga, both rather ragged. His left hand gripped a fold of the toga and was half hidden under the cloth. The right held a phurba (magic dagger). His right arm moved slightly at each step as if leaning on a stick, just as though the phurba, whose pointed extremity was far above the ground, had touched it and were actually a support. My servants dismounted and bowed their heads to the ground as the lama passed before us, but he went his way apparently unaware of our presence.“

25. gTummo the yoga of inner heat
Herbert Benson gives an account of his experiences and the scientific findings from studying the physiological effects of meditation, starting in 1967 with practitioners of transcendental meditation and then eventually working with Tibetan monks with an expertise in the practice of "inner heat" (gtum mo). He specifically discusses how these types of meditative practices can significantly increase or decrease metabolism. Dr. Benson describes the nature of the studies performed with Tibetan monks, including the specific physiological changes he measured such as skin temperature and oxygen consumption. He also gives a general overview of the medical understanding of temperature regulation, looking specifically at the how warm-blooded animals regulate temperature through (1) heat production and (2) heat conservation.
Heat production can result through muscle activity and through chemical changes, such as chemical changes effected by the hormones epinephrine and thyroxin. Heat conservation is achieved in a variety of ways such as reducing the amount of skin exposure to the cold, piloerection (raising of hair, humans replace this by wearing clothing), and reducing blood flow to the extremities (where it will cool more rapidly). When put in a cold environment, the body naturally reduces blood flow to the extremities. However, practitioners of inner heat do the opposite: they increase the surface temperature of the skin. They also increase their metabolism.
MindScience : an east-west dialogue

26. Thinking time… meta cognition..
What do these challenges mean to you?
How may they effect our task as critical thinkers?
So what is knowledge?
What sort of beliefs do you preserve?
Could there be hidden assumptions that no one sees?