Critical Thinking Isn't a Thing

At least, it's not the thing you want it to be.

Faculty and students milling about in front of the Union College library before commencement 2021

Working where I do, in the elite private liberal arts college world, I hear a lot of talk about “critical thinking” as an essential product of the very expensive education we provide. The term is slightly less common outside academia, but still sees a fair bit of use on Twitter and in thinkpieces, generally by people who passed through elite higher education. In these contexts, “critical thinking” is usually referred to as something that’s sadly in short supply: If more people were capable of thinking critically, or had the necessary skills, the world wouldn’t be such a mess. This is usually followed closely by a pitch for everyone to support (and pay high prices for) our particular brand of higher education.

More and more, though, I think many of these discussions are fundamentally misguided. One major problem is that “critical thinking",” perhaps slightly ironically, is an incredibly nebulous concept. The very general idea— a way of looking at complicated scenarios and evaluating ambiguous evidence— is hard to be against, but any attempt to define what it actually is in concrete terms ends up feeling like trying to bottle a shadow. Every academic discipline engages in something that its practitioners would call “critical thinking",” but they all go about it in different ways. Physicists want there to be differential equations, economists want correlation coefficients, and literary scholars are prone to going on about the unquantifiable nature of human experience.

I have half-jokingly suggested that “critical thinking” is really defined only in the negative— it’s “whatever we do that those people over there don’t do.” Engineers find pure narrative too squishy to count as genuine analysis, historians think that anything that’s been reduced to a number is necessarily oversimplified. These negative definitions are generally followed closely by the suggestion that every student should be required to take a course in the department of whatever faculty member is offering the definition.

The closest you can come to an affirmative definition is more a matter of attitude than a specific set of practices. In this sense “critical thinking” is a process of bringing whatever analytical tools you have at hand— equations if you’re math-y, various theories of the world if you’re not— to bear on ambiguous information about the world, to determine what should be trusted and what rejected.

In principle, applied consistently and universally, this seems like a great way to operate. In practice, that “consistently and universally” is a bear. If you can manage it, the stance of questioning everything should be a good way of avoiding confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. For most people, though, even highly educated professional academics, “critical thinking skills” mostly serve to supercharge their ability to engage in motivated reasoning. You see this even from some of the people who yell the loudest about the importance of “critical thinking”: arguments whose conclusions they like are accepted after fairly cursory examination, arguments whose conclusions they don’t like are subjected to a withering level of scrutiny until some error, however picayune, is exposed, whereupon all the rest can be tossed out.

Operationally, then, “critical thinking” most often seems to mean “Analyze ambiguous information about the world until you agree that I’m right.” And that’s really the main problem with the way the term is posited as a panacea. Advocates for education— particularly liberal arts education, though not exclusively— will lament the lack of “critical thinking” in the electorate in a way that suggests that if more people had that, we would all coalesce around the obvious and correct solution to global climate change, or social justice, or whatever is bugging them at the moment. Which just happens to be the solution that best agrees with their own preferences.

Of course, that’s not a thing that we can— or should— be teaching in college. What we can do is provide students with a set of analytical tools and a kind of aspirational idea about the importance of questioning the world. Those tools and that attitude are infinitely flexible, though, and can be brought to bear in many different ways, not all of which will lead to conclusions a particular member of the faculty will find congenial. Particularly in the sorts of situations where the information we have access to is genuinely ambiguous, in the way that “critical thinking” is supposed to allow us to address.

While it feels cringe-ily obvious to say, I think we’ve seen a lot of this at play in the last year-and-a-bit, in the various debates around the Covid-19 pandemic. The NYT story about Emily Oster from a couple of weeks ago is a nice encapsulation. Oster uses her economics background to analyze a bunch of data about kids and Covid and from that argues that it’s safe to open schools and day care centers, while her critics marshal a different set of data and analysis methods to argue the exact opposite. And then people on each side declare that people on the other are morally reprehensible.

If you are in the mode of thinking of “critical thinking” as a singular path to a consensus answer, you might be inclined to say that one or the other of these sides is Doing It Wrong. And, indeed, the online #Discourse around this is full of such accusations— these people are cherry-picking studies, those people are using unrealistic methodology, etc. With some gratuitous insults thrown in, because Internet.

I don’t think that’s what’s going on, though. To the best I can tell as someone who’s highly educated but very much an outsider to these communities, most of the participants in the argument are, in fact, practicing “critical thinking” within the accepted bounds of their disciplines. They’re looking at reasonably high-quality data, they’re analyzing it with reasonably standard techniques, they’re assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments in ways consistent with the usual standards for such things.

How do they arrive at such diametrically opposite conclusions, then? It’s nothing to do with the methods they’re using, it’s a result of different values. Oster and people on the pro-opening side look at the (limited and ambiguous) data we have available, calculate that the risk of dire consequences from opening schools is a small number, and judge that to be acceptably low. People on the other side look at the (limited and ambiguous) data we have available, end up with risk calculations that aren’t all that much different, but judge that to be unacceptably high. The disagreement isn’t that one side or the other isn’t thinking properly, it’s that they have different priorities and tolerances for risk.

That difference is irreconcilable within the framework of “critical thinking” because it results from standards that weren’t arrived at by any kind of reasoned analysis (or at least not any analysis done from the limited and ambiguous data we have available). It’s a mix of personal beliefs, disciplinary norms, and more of the fuzzy complexity that inevitably accompanies any situation that would require “critical thinking” in the first place.

You see bits of the same dynamic in the “lab leak” argument, and around vaccine safety, distancing requirements, and most other policy responses to Covid-19. (The possible exceptions would be masking and vaccination rates, which seem more purely matters of political polarization and public signaling, with minimal analysis involved.) Pretty much every intractable policy dispute boils down to a question of values and priorities, which lead people on the different sides to see the same level of risk as either acceptably low or unacceptably high based on their individual mix of personal beliefs and professional standards.

These stand-offs aren’t something we can argue our way out of, which is why they almost inevitably devolve into attempts to claim victory through other means— invocations of authority (“Trust the science”), attempts at gatekeeping(“Leave this to the experts”), and unprofessional name-calling. I’m not even sure it’s something we could educate our way out of, but if it is, the path leads not through “critical thinking” and skills development, but something deeper and thornier: genuine engagement with and acceptance of differences in fundamental values and priorities. That, sadly, seems to be even more lacking than the ability to do any of the analysis methods that might fall under the heading of “critical thinking.”

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So, there you go; I said when I started this that I would try to use this for writing stuff that deserves more space and depth than a Twitter thread; I hope this qualifies. This one’s been rolling around the back of my mind for a good while, so I can’t promise that subsequent pieces won’t be less fully baked than this, but if you think it might be worth finding out, here’s a big button:

If you would like to inflict this on others, here’s a slightly different big button:

And at least for a little while, I’ll try leaving comments open, if you’d like to argue with me here (I can’t promise I’ll be good about responding— I’ve got a lot of things going on that limit my writing time…).