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Getting there from here: Critical thinking and debiasing

March 5, 2015March 5, 2015 Cate Hundleby

A primary lesson from the first day was that biases pose different problems in different contexts and need specific techniques to be negotiated. Ways to engage the social and emotional variables occupied a central role on the second day. In that afternoon, and today, the third and final day, we get more specific, considering how reasoning operates in particular contexts and the difficulties faced by critical thinking pedagogy in addressing those contexts and improving people’s practice.

Scientific reasoning concerns Ulrike Hahn, who directs us toward the advantages of Bayesian approaches to fallacies and argumentation. Hahn’s point of departure comes from Douglas Walton‘s analysis of argumentation schemes, including taking the appeal to ignorance as a central case. Accounting for how we gain and incorporate information into belief is the key benefit of Bayesian probablistic analysis, and Hahn makes quite a convincing case, at least if we take arguments to be monological. She takes the dialogical approaches of Walton and pragma-dialectics to become unnecessary in the wake of the Bayesian appraoch. Burden of proof and its dialogical shifts are a messy business, to be sure, but I don’t think we can dispense with analyzing them so easily. We need tools to reason with others, and judging by the social approaches to debiasing that prevailed on the second day, the social dimensions may be key to debiasing argumentation.

Mariusz Urbanski presented research completed with Katarzyna Paluszkiewicz and Joanna Urbanska showing that while untutored skill has a lasting effect on performance in deductive reasoning, training can improve performance on difficult deductive problems.

Debiasing was studied in legal contexts by Frank Zenker, Christian Dahlmann and Farhan Sarwar, because it’s an environment that demands judgements be made; judges can’t suspend their evaluation of a case. People, and so perhaps judges, who score high on agreeableness seem especially influenced by anchoring.

This day gave us little room for optimism about debiasing, or the future of critical thinking as an ideal and an educational practice. An account of frustration with facilitating critical thinking at an institutional level provided the final talk, from Chip Sheffield, recounting his experience as the inaugural Eugene H. Fram Chair in Applied Critical Thinking at Rochester Institute of Technology. Sheffield described how institutional pressure to develop or adopt a new assessment instrument flew in the face of a lack of other institutional and faculty support, student resistance to the integration of critical thinking in courses, and only superficial resources in the larger critical thinking movement. Yet he found some progress in student panels and discussions, and community outreach.

The result of Sheffield’s experience is his recommendation of more critical thinking courses, and more at advanced levels. So it might seem that the problem is not how to teach critical thinking but how much to teach it. That could seem to be the only room for improvement given the disjunct between the experimental research on cognition and biases and the philosophical pedagogy of critical thinking. I was struck to hear the experimental psychologists express concern over the philosophers use of “bias” losely, just as the philosophers were discouraged by the inattention to the pressures to find practical strategie for students.

However, as much as this conference demonstrated an absence of the practical evidence we want to guide critical thinking education, it also paves the way for more engagements between the psychological evidence and the pedagogical and philosophical ideals. I take particular inspiration from the work of Kenyon & Beaulac, and Howes, as philosophers attempting to explore the implications of the psychological research, but also Weinstock, Schendel, Cooke, plus Urbanski, Paluszkiewicz & Urbanska, and Zenker, Dahlmann & Sarwar in assessing the impact of specific techniques on the development of critical thinking. We have barely begun to chart the possibilities and potentials for critical thinking education, and we need more research of the sort gathered at this conference to develop and explore options. Ideally, this should be like the work from Paglieri, Mercier & Boudry, directly engaging both the philosophical and the psychological. To start with, we should explore whether they or Goodwin are correct about the effects of classroom debate.

Talk data to me!

February 25, 2015March 4, 2015 Cate Hundleby

Today’s papers were quite exciting for argumentation theorists, such as myself, hungry for empirical knowledge — ’empiricism envy’ is how Jean Goodwin described it. “Talk data to me!” she exclaimed. It can be a relief and a refreshing change to move from the “might”s and “should”s and “possibly”s of normative theory to facts and findings.

Plus, as teachers, we want good reason to believe our efforts are effective. There has been reason to consider recently that teaching critical thinking is not very effective and that the skills students learn in class do not translate to other environments. For philosophy departments whose budgets often depend critically on the expected utility of these courses, more information about what works and what doesn’t may be increasingly urgent.

Today, from Michael Weinstock we learned about how argumentation skills connect to folk epistemologies: absolutist, multiplist, and evaluativist –drawn from Deanna Kuhn. His review of the research indicated a need for work specifically exploring the effect of education in one on development of the other. Kuhn’s view of folk epistemologies also formed the basis of Rebecca Schendel‘s discussion, and both of them complicated the picture with questions about the cultural specificity of epistemologies. Weinstock looked at contrasts between Bedouin and Jewish lay evaluations of argumentative reasoning.

Schendel, drawing on her experience as an educator in Rwanda, asked us to consider how the educational ideal of critical thinking connects with other social values, such as the creation of job skills or an empowered electorate. Moreover the values encouraged by critical thinking may vary from one cultural context to another in a way that demands further study… more data!

A deeper look into the culture that generated the educational ideal of critical thinking came from Patty Cooke, who discussed her research on how a “fun with philosophy” class for middle school children helped them develop skills in argument analysis and construction. The grade 6 students were encouraged to scrutinize their beliefs and have open-ended discussion in the pursuit of good reasoning. In addition to gaining skills in argumentation, they showed some improvement in meta-cognition.

Discussion became more theoretical with Fabio Paglieri, who presented his joint research with Hugo Mercier and Maarten Boudry.

While Paglieri does not adhere to the evolutionary psychology behind the Sperber and Mercier approach, together Paglieri, Mercier, and Boudry employ the related Argumentative Theory of Reasoning, the view that reasoning functions to serve argumentation, and provide for better communication. The implication of ATR — and the empirical studies behind it — for critical thinking instruction is that we need interventions based on social environment.

In the abstract the authors take that the fallacies approach to argument evaluation is unlikely to yield good results. Paglieri did not explain that, and I’ll have to ask him about it tomorrow — I disagree at that point, as I think fallacies are good tools for identifying different contexts of reasoning. Instead, Paglieri stressed the problem with adversarial debate as a means for teaching critical thinking, especially when it involves the role-playing of taking up a perspective one does not believe. That encourages, he suggested, a disconnect between the tools of argumentation and its operation in specific contexts .

ATR also provided background for Goodwin’s paper, and she elaborated problems with the critical thinking pedagogy that exposes individuals to artefacts for analysis. She too stressed the influence of social settings, but she introduced the consideration that personal accountability is crucial to the value of communication, which argument and reasoning serve. So CT pedagogy should attend to the motivation for reasoning provided by personal accountability, which suggests the value of debate as a learning exercise, contra Paglieri, Mercier and Boudy.

RACT watch this space

February 24, 2015March 4, 2015 Cate Hundleby

Tomorrow begins the conference on Reasoning, Argumentation and Critical Thinking Instruction at Lund University in Sweden. Dr. Frank Zenker, a researcher at Lund, has hosted several conferences in recent years on social epistemology that I would have loved to attend, but I’m especially happy to attend this one as it deals with an intersection of academic topics of special importance. It’s an open question whether argumentation fosters critical thinking and how it affects reasoning, and the recent decades of psychological research on reasoning suggest that people’s thought is much less critical than we might tend to otherwise recognize. All sorts of bias — from perceptual to social — colour our interaction with and reasoning about the world.

The picture at the top is of a lovely brass band playing in the pub this evening, and here are a few speakers who’ve convened so far.

I will post summaries and commentary on the talks as we proceed over the next few days.

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