Ch.2 Flashcards
Obstacles to critical thinking:
Self-centred thinking
Accepting a claim solely on the grounds that it advances your interests or helps you save face.
•Can never establish the truth of a claim
•Creates vulnerability to propaganda, manipulation, and self deception.
•Can hinder personal growth, and maturity, and self awareness.
Ex: “This university should not raise tuition because I am a student and I don’t want to pay more tuition.” 
Detecting and overcoming self interested thinking
1.Watch out when things get very personal.
2.Be alert to ways critical thinking can be underminded.
3.Ensure that nothing has been left out.
Group pressure
Pressure to fit into groups and adopt their ideas, attitudes, and goals.
Peer pressure: When the pressure to conform comes from your peers.
Appeal to popularity: When the pressure comes from the mere popularity of a belief.
Appeal to tradition: When the pressure comes from what groups of people do or how they behave.
Group pressure continued
Your pressure also comes from presuming our own group is better than others.
Prejudice: A negative or adverse belief about others without sufficient reasons.
Stereotyping: Classifying individuals into groups according to oversimplified or prejudiced attitudes or opinions.
Racism: The belief that some races are inferior to others in important respects and deserved distain, hatred, or hostility.
Ex: “Everyone does drugs, so you should do drugs too.”
The toughest mental obstacles
Resisting Contrary evidence: Resisting evidence that flies in the face of cherished beliefs.
Confirmation bias: Seeking out and using only confirming evidence.
Motivated reasoning: Reasoning for the purpose of supporting a predetermined conclusion not to uncover the truth.
Availability error: Relying on evidence because it’s memorable or striking not because it’s trustworthy. 
Your brain on social media
Mere exposure effect: the way repeated exposure towards images can induce a favourable feeling towards them even in the absence of reasons or evidence.
Illusion-of-truth effect: believing a false claim is true simply because it’s familiar.
False consensus affect: overestimating the degree to which other people share our opinions attitude and preferences. 
Dunning-Kruger effect: Being ignorant of how ignorant we are. 
Worldview
Set a fundamental ideas that helps us to make sense of a wide range of important issues in life.
•Can contain philosophical ideas that threaten critical thinking such as subjective relativism, social relativism, and philosophical scepticism
Objective and Subjective
+
Absolute and Relative
Objective: independent of human attitude.
- 2 + 2 = 4
Subjective dependent on human attitudes.
-“Vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate ice cream”
Absolute: doesn’t depend on anything else.
- 2 + 2 = 4
Relative: depends on some thing else.
-What side of the road you should drive on depends on your society. 
Subjective relativism
The view that truth depend solely on what someone believes.
-If I believe the earth is flat, then it’s flat for me.
-If you believe the earth is roughly spherical, then it’s roughly spherical for you.
A central criticism to subject relativism is that it is self-defeating.
Social relativism
The view that truth is relative to societies.
-It’s a society believes the earth is flat, then it is flat.
-If a society believes the earth is roughly spherical, then it is roughly circle for them.
Problems for relativism
•Employers infallibility: Neither persons or society can ever be mistaken.
•Self-refuting: Their truth implies their falsity.
-“There is no absolute truth”
-Is this an absolute truth? If so, then there is absolute truth.
-If it’s just a relative truth, then it’s not true for everyone. So there is absolute truth.
Mix and match
•You can hold different views of different domains.
•Could be in objectivist and absolutist about mathematical claims. But a subjective relativist about morality. (“Hurting animals is bad”) And a social relativist the artistic or aesthetic claims. (“Dante is better than Shakespeare”).
•It’s probably harder to be a relativist about claims about the physical world or mathematics and easier about aesthetic claims. 
Room for subjective feelings
•Even if you don’t deny that there are objective truth, you could still think that often they aren’t very important or that our subjective feelings matter more. 
-how many blades of grass are in front of the building right now?
-Our feelings for our loved ones can’t be measured, but surely they matter more than how many blades of grass are in front of the building.
•Even as objective facts exists, maybe our subjective feelings are more important to us.
-Romanticism, sentimentalism.
Philosophical scepticism
The view that we know much less than we think or nothing at all.
•sextus empiricism: “We should suspend judgement about everything because equally strong argument can be made on each side of every question. We should believe only that things appear to be the case not that they are that way.”

Skepticism
•If knowledge requires certainty, then there’s little we can know because almost every claim can be doubted. 
•To be knowledge, however a claim needs to be beyond all reasonable doubt not all possible doubt. 
•Can we be certain that the earth is not flat? What if we are being deceived by a powerful alien who has hooked into a computer that stimulates our reality?
•No good reason to believe alien simulation scenario out of the countless different possibilities. We can say we know we aren’t in an alien simulation until presented with good reasons to think that we are
Homophily
The tendency for people to seek out or be attracted to those who are similar to themselves. They will move towards each other and act in a similar manner.
Ex: The tendency to give more credence to a statement if it comes from a friend is called homophily. 
