In the face of other people's suggestions, how to judge whether it is suitable for you? What should we believe and what should we not believe in the face of other people's opinions and articles? Why do they have such an idea? What is the reason?
Learning to Ask Questions was written by American writers Danny Brown and Stuart Keeley. The above questions will be revealed for you in this book.
Before we begin, let's understand what critical thinking is. The meaning of critical thinking includes the following three dimensions:
Sponge thinking: Absorb as much external information as possible to lay a solid foundation for your complex thinking in the future. But relatively passive, it is easy to fall into the dilemma of what others say. The focus is on the results of knowledge acquisition.
Thinking of gold rush: take the initiative, choose what to absorb and ignore, be ready to refute the author when reading, and attach importance to interaction with him in the process of acquiring knowledge. Its most important feature is interactive participation. These two ways of thinking can complement each other.
Because only when you have absorbed enough external information can you pick out what is worth keeping and what needs to be discarded.
According to the different uses of critical thinking, we can divide critical thinking into weak critical thinking and strong critical thinking.
Weak critical thinking is to use critical thinking to defend your current beliefs. Its purpose is to resolutely resist and refute those different views and arguments. When you use weak critical thinking, it shows that you don't care whether you are close to truth and virtue, but just want to refute each other.
Strong critical thinking is to use critical thinking to evaluate all opinions and beliefs, especially to evaluate your own opinions and beliefs.
The values in the book refer to the ideas that people think are more valuable but not clearly stated. They have set certain codes of conduct by which we can measure the quality of human behavior. Simply put, values are the code of conduct that we recognize ourselves, and we hope that other people's words and deeds can be consistent with it.
The communication between people is mostly the pursuit of knowledge. What are your values as a critical thinker?
(1) Independent decision. We should make our own decision from many opinions, not just one.
(2) curiosity. Listen and watch more at ordinary times, and keep asking questions when you meet anything.
(3) politeness. Respect others and be good at using their strength.
(4) Sincerely respect rigorous argumentation. Not all opinions and conclusions are valuable, so we should choose the best from them. But once you meet someone with thorough reasoning and rigorous argument, you must believe his point of view impartially until a more thorough and rigorous argument appears.
Some people don't like being asked questions, and they don't like the feeling of being questioned, because it will make them feel that they are being interrogated in court. We should fully understand our interviewees and adjust our questioning strategies according to different people.
If we make a hasty judgment only based on some existing information at hand without any in-depth and comprehensive thinking, then the probability of our making mistakes will greatly increase. Therefore, you must "slow down" when you think about important things.
For example, we think that girls will be worse at math than boys, and Shandong people are very bold and unrestrained. These are stereotypes.
1, halo effect. It means that we usually recognize a person's positive or negative characteristics first, and then relate these characteristics to everything else about the person.
2. Faith is fixed. In other words, we will think according to the beliefs formed by past experiences. We are often overconfident in our abilities. To resist the tendency of fixed beliefs, as long as we remember, strong critical thinking requires us to realize that all judgments are temporary or related to the situation.
3. Usability inspiration. It refers to the psychological shortcut that we use repeatedly, that is, we only form conclusions based on the most easily available information at hand. Another harmful thinking habit closely related to it is recency effect. As the basis of our thinking, the information we can easily get is often the information we have seen recently. For example, after an air crash, people will be afraid to fly.
4. Answer irrelevant questions. For example, in celebrity interviews, we often meet the question of whether there are contradictions between two artists.
5. egocentric. It means that compared with other people's experiences and opinions, we give ourselves a position as the center of the world. When we argue, we often forget the object we are facing and immerse ourselves in our own knowledge world. The curse of knowledge is one of the typical manifestations. The curse of knowledge means that if we don't have the knowledge we know now, then we can't tell what it is at all. Experts often use technical terms that outsiders cannot understand, which is also the curse of knowledge.
6. wishful thinking. In other words, what we want is true, and we simply declare it to be true. In this way, facts must conform to our beliefs, not to prove our beliefs with facts.
There is a wishful thinking mode called miracle thinking, and miraculous cause and effect will bring people hope, as many advertisements show: as long as you buy XX things, you will become XX people.
Comment on a person's article or argument, you can start from the following aspects:
Themes are divided into descriptive themes and descriptive themes.
Descriptive topics are about the accuracy of various descriptions of the past, present or future. Sentences often contain "what is it?" Or "Really?"
A prescriptive topic is to point out what to do, what not to do, what is right and wrong, what is good and what is bad. Social debate is usually a prescriptive topic. Usually involves value judgment.
And find out the conclusion. The so-called conclusion is the information that the author or speaker wants you to accept. Only by finding a conclusion can we make an objective evaluation. We can find it at the beginning or at the end, or we can use these hints, such as: therefore, show, therefore, prove, tell us that the essence of the problem is ...
The so-called reason is the statement of belief, evidence, metaphor and analogy used to support or prove the conclusion. These statements are the basis for establishing the credibility of the conclusion. Simply put, that is why we should believe the explanation or basis of a conclusion.
Only after you find various reasons to support the conclusion can you criticize the value of this conclusion.
An argument consists of a conclusion and various reasons to support it. The basic structure of the argument is "A is established because of B".
Reason prompt: Because; For this reason; Whereas; Supported by the following materials: because the evidence shows that; Research shows that; First, second and third;
Reasons (evidence) types: facts, research results, life examples, statistical data, expert or authoritative opinions, testimony of parties, and analogy.
Arguments want to convince us of certain beliefs. The more evidence, the higher the quality and credibility of these beliefs. So, what types of evidence are there?
1, intuition. Intuition is private, difficult to falsify and often has personal prejudice. The credibility is relatively low.
2. Personal experience. Personal experience is often not universal, can not represent the views of most people, and will lead to "the fallacy of generalizing."
3. Typical case. Most typical cases will appeal to emotions and attract our attention. Let's not dwell on their value as evidence.
4. Testimony of the parties. People's experiences are different. Many people may show what they want you to see, which may be mixed with personal interests and omit some information appropriately. Just like film promotion, product endorsement, product promotion and so on.
5. Authoritative expert opinions. Facing the opinions of authoritative experts, we might as well ask ourselves three questions:
(1) How much expertise, training or special knowledge does the expert have about the topic under discussion?
(2) Does this expert have first-hand information?
(3) Are there any other better reasons to believe?
6. Personal observation. In many cases, there will be various obstacles to prevent us from seeing what happened in Chu. Seeing is not necessarily true, and the evidence obtained by personal observation is not very reliable.
7. Research report. I believe many people will believe the conclusion of the research report, because scientific research is falsifiable, controllable and accurate. However, the research quality is uneven and the results are often contradictory. In addition, some research findings cannot prove this conclusion. Because of human factors, there will be some prejudices, and the "facts" of research will change with time. What's more, speakers and writers often distort or simplify research conclusions.
Therefore, when we take the research report as evidence, we need to look at the research report itself and ask a few more questions to judge whether it is credible.
8. analogy. Analogy argument is that we use the familiar similarity between two things as the basis to deduce a conclusion about one of the unknown characteristics. In the face of analogical argument, we should be alert to the similarity of two things in one or two aspects, which does not mean that they must be similar in other important aspects.
Next, let's recognize the 13 fallacy that often appears in the argument:
1, personal attack fallacy
2. Landslide fallacy
3. The fallacy of pursuing perfection
4. Appeal to public fallacies
5, resort to suspicious authority fallacy
6, resort to emotional fallacy
7, the scarecrow fallacy
8, false dilemma fallacy
9, disorderly label fallacy
10, planning fallacy
1 1, halo fallacy
12, change the theme fallacy
13, fallacy of circular argument
Sometimes many conclusions are not only black and white, but also multifaceted. We should consider all possible conclusions. We can take the alternative as a conclusion and draw a conclusion with the conditional sentence "If ……"
Critical thinking needs constant practice. After seeing other people's articles or opinions, you might as well ask yourself a few questions:
What does he want to express?
Why would he think that?
What is the reason (evidence)?
Does he make sense?
In this way, when we face some problems and make decisions, we can draw our own opinions and not follow others' advice.