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Excerpts from ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS a guide to critical thinking 8th ed.* M. Niel Browne *Stuart M. Keeley - Critical Thinking Dawson College Course
Transliterated for Gaia Online Extended Discussion forum application by Tuggerfub Drum




When a movie is about to be released into theaters and you're introduced to it through advertisement, your mind becomes suddenly immersed in the process of critical thought. "Should I go see it in theaters? Should I wait for it to be at my local Rent-It? Should I avoid it altogether?" This is when, through common discourse, you begin to actively seek information from friends or review articles. This is now where we realize that opinions are cheap and plentiful, your friend Sam thought it was a crapfest but Judd Jackson of the Daily Mirror's entertainment section thought it was the masterpiece of the decade. Now you begin deductive reasoning. wink

This experience is a metaphor for much of life. Doctors, legislators, plumbers, architects and all disagree amongst themselves about the proper course of action in particular circumstances. How are we as consumers of opinion and Extended Discussion participants to respond?
You need to build skills to and attitudes that will enable you to decide for yourself which opinions to make your own.

One approach to thinking is similar to the way in which a sponge reacts to water; by absorbing. This commonly used approach has some clear advantages.
First, the more information you absorb about the world, the more capable you are of understanding its complexities. Knowledge you have acquired provides a foundation for more complicated thinking later.
A second advantage to the sponge approach is that it is relatively passive. Rather than required strenuous mental effort, it tends to be rather quick and easy, especially when the material is presented in a clear and interesting fashion. The primary mental effort involves concentration and memory.
While absorbing information provides a productive start toward becoming a thoughtful person, the sponge approach has a serious disadvantage'
it provides no method for deciding which information and opinions to believe and which to reject. If a reader relied on the sponge approach all the time, he would believe whatever he read last. The idea of being the mental puppet of whomever one happens to encounter is horrible imagery for a person and a community. Decisions become accidents of association, instead of reflective judgments.
We think you would rather choose for yourself what to absorb and what to ignore. To make this choice, you must read with a special attitude--an asking attitude. Such a thinking style requires active participation. The writer is trying to speak to you, and you should try to talk back to them!
(even in examples when they are not present, like books.)
We call this interactive approach the panning-for-gold style of thinking. The process of panning for gold provides a model for active readers and listeners as they try to determine the worth of what they read and hear. The task is challenging and often tedious, but the reward can be tremendous. To distinguish the gold from gravel in a conversation requires you to ask frequent questions and to reflect on the answers.

The sponge approach emphasized knowledge acquisition; the panning-for-gold approach stresses active interaction with knowledge as it id being acquired. This, the two approaches complement each other. To pan for intellectual gold, there must be something in your pan to evaluate. In addition to evaluate arguments, we must posses knowledge, dependable opinions.

Let us examine more closely how the two approaches lead to different behavior. What does the individual who takes the sponge approach do when he reads material? He reads sentences carefully, trying to remember as much as he can. He may underline or highlight key words and sentences. He may take notes summarizing the major topics and major points. He checks his underlining or notes to be sure that he is not forgetting anything important. His mission is to find and understand what the author has to say. He memorizes the reasoning, but doesn't evaluate it.

What does the reader who takes the panning-for-gold approach do? Like the person using the sponge approach ,he approaches his reading with the hope that he will acquire new knowledge. There the similarity ends. The panning-for-gold approach requires that the reader asks himself a number of questions designed to uncover the best available decisions or beliefs.

If you would enjoy asking these kinds of questions, this is especially for you!
The primary purpose of this is to help you know when and how to ask questions that will enable you to decide what to believe.
The most important characteristic of the panning-for-gold approach is interactive involvement--a dialogue between the writer and the reader, or the speaker and the listener.
Clearly, there are times when the sponge approach is appropriate. Most of you have used it regularly and have acquired some level of success with it. It is much less likely that you are in the habit of employing the panning-for-gold approach-- in part, simply because you have not had the appropriate training and practice. This will not only help you asked the right questions, but will also provide frequent opportunities for practicing their use.


Panning for Gold: Asking Critical Questions

It would be relaxing if what other people were really saying were always obvious, if all their essential thoughts were clearly labeled for us, if the writer or speaker never made an error in her reasoning, and if all knowledgeable people agreed about answers to important questions. If this were the case, we could read and listen passively and let others do our thinking for us.

However, the true state of affairs is quite the opposite. A person's reasoning is not always obvious. Important elements are often missing. Many of the elements that are present are unclear. Consequently, you need critical reading and listening skills to help you determine what makes sense and distinguish this clear thinking from the sloppy thinking that characterizes much of what you will encounter.
The inadequacies in what someone says will not always leap out at you. You must be an active reader and listener. You can do this by asking questions. The best search strategy is a critical-questioning strategy. A powerful advantage of these questions is that they permit you to ask searching questions even when you know very little about the topic being discussed. For example, you do not need to be an expert on childcare to ask critical questions about the adequacy of day-care centers.

Thinking and Feeling

When you first encounter a conclusion, you do so with a history. You have learned to care about certain things, to support particular interests, and to discount claims of a particular type. So you always start to think critically in the midst of existing opinions. You have emotional commitments to these existing opinions. They are your opinions, and you quite understandably feel protective of them.
This point deserves special emphasis. We bring lots of personal baggage to every decision we make--experiences, dreams, values, training, and cultural habits.
However, if you are able to grow, you need to recognize these feelings, and, as much as you are able, put them on a shelf for a bit. Only that effort will enable you to listen carefully when others offer arguments that threaten or violate your current beliefs. This openness is important because many our own positions on issues are not especially reasonable ones; they are opinions given to us by others, and over many years we develop emotional attachments to them. Indeed, we frequently believe that we are being personally attacked when someone presents a conclusion contrast to our own. The danger of being emotionally involved in an issue is that you may fail to consider potential good reasons for other positions--reasons that might be sufficient to change your mind on the issue if only you would listen to them.
Remember: Emotional involvement should not be the primary basis for accepting or rejecting a position. Ideally, emotional involvement should be most intense after reasoning has occurred. Thus, when you read, try to avoid letting emotional involvement cut you off from the reasoning of those with whom you initially disagree. A successful active learner is one who is willing to change his mind. If you are ever to change your mind, you must be as open as possibel to ideas that strike you as weird or dangerous when you first encounter them.
Critical thinkers, however, are not machines. They care greatly about many issues. The depth of that concern can be seen in their willingness to do all the hard mental work associated with critical thinking. But any passion felt by critical thinkers is moderated by the recognition that their current beliefs are open to revision.

Previous sections mentioned that you already have opinions about many personal and social issues. You are willing right now to take a position on such questions as: Should prostitution be legalized? Is alcoholism a disease or willful misconduct? Was George Bush a successful president? You bring these initial opinions to what you hear and read.
Critical thinking can be used to either (1) defend or (2) evaluate and revise your initial beliefs. Professor Richard Paul's distinction between weak-sense and strong-sense critical thinking helps us appreciate these two antagonistic uses of critical thinking.

(Note: Weak-sense critical thinking is the use of critical thinking to defend your current beliefs. Strong-sense critical thinking is the use of the same skills to evaluate all claims and beliefs, especially your own.)

If you approach critical thinking as a method for defending your initial beliefs or those you are paid to have, you are engaged in weak-sense critical thinking. Why is it weak? To use critical-thinking skills in this manner is to be unconcerned with moving toward truth or virtue. The purpose of weak-sense critical thinking is to resist and annihilate opinions and reasoning different from yours. To see domination and victory over those who disagree with you as the objective of critical thinking is to ruin the potentially humane and progressive aspects of critical thinking.

In contrast, strong-sense critical thinking requires us to apply the critical questions to all claims, including our own. By forcing ourselves to look critically at our initial beliefs, we help protect against self-deception and conformity. It is easy to just stick with current beliefs, particularly when many people share them. But when we take this easy road, we run the strong risk of making mistakes we could otherwise avoid.
Strong-sense critical thinking does not necessarily force is to give up our initial beliefs. It can provide basis for strengthening them because critical examination of those beliefs will sometimes reinforce our original commitment to them. A long time ago, John Stuart Mill warned us of th emptiness of a set of opinions accumulated without the help of strong-sense critical thinking:


To feel proud of a particular opinion, it should be one we have selected--selected from alternative opinions that we have understood and evaluated.

Trying out New Answers.

Although there is often no absolutely right answer, this book tries to encourage your search for better answers. Certainly, some answers are more accurate, appropriate, useful, or moral than are others. For you to want to do the hard work necessary to find better answers, you need substantial curiosity and even courage.
Courage is required because to keep looking for better answers we have to be willing to give up our current beliefs or positions. When we encounter a question, we probably already have an answer. Suppose someone says something to us about the appropriateness of behavior by abortion activists. In probability, we already have an opinion about the matter. It often takes incredible courage to give up on an opinion we have held for some time after listening to someone else. As critical thinkers, we have to struggle to force ourselves to try out new answers. The interplay between our old answers and new ones provides a basis for our growth.

The Importance of Practice

Learning new critical-thinking skills is a lot like learning new physical skills. You cannot learn simply by being told what to do or by watching others. You have to practice, and frequently the practice will be both rewarding and hard work. The goal is to make your learning as simple as possible. However, acquiring the habit of critical thinking will initially take a lot of practice.

It will be helpful at this point to identify two types of issues you will typically encounter. The following questions illustrate one of these.

Do families who own pets have fewer arguments with one another?
What causes high blood pressure?
Who made the decision to increase our sales taxes?
How much will college cost in the year 2010?

All these questions have one thing in common. They demand answers attempting to describe the way the world is, was, or is going to be. For example, answers to the first two questions might be, "In general, families with pets have fewer arguments with one another" and "Poor dietary habits cause high blood pressure."
Such issues are descriptive issues. They are commonly found in textbooks, magazines, the Internet, and television. Such issues reflect our curiosity about patterns or order in the world. Note the boldfaced words that begin each question above; when questions begin with these words, they will probably be descriptive questions.

Attn: Descriptive issues are those that raise questions about the accuracy of descriptions of the past, present, or future.




Now let's look at examples of a second kind of question:

Should capital punishment be abolished?
What ought to be done about social security?
Must we outlaw SUVs or face increasing rates of asthma?

All of these questions demand answers suggesting the way the world ought to be. For example, answers to the first two questions might be, "Capital punishment should be abolished," and "We ought to increase social security benefits."
These issues are ethical, or moral, issues; they raise questions about what is right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, good or bad. They demand prescriptive answers. Thus, we will refer to these issues as prescriptive issues. Social controversies are often prescriptive issues.
We have somewhat oversimplified. Sometimes it will be difficult to decide what kind of issue is being discussed. It will be useful to keep these distinctions in mind, however, because the kinds of critical evaluations you eventually make will differ depending on the kind of issue to which you are responding.

Attn: Prescriptive issues are those that raise questions about what we should do or what is right or wrong, good or bad.