Chapter 2 environment Flashcards
Critical thinking happens in an “environment”
that is often hostile to it.
Your thoughts, feelings, and experiences can:
- Prevent us from being systematic.
- Prevent true and honest evaluation or formulation.
- Make us ignore rational standards.
We can?
Detect errors in our thinking (even
subtle, hard-to-detect ones).
* Restrain any attitudes and feelings
that can distort or warp our reasoning.
* Achieve a level of objectivity that
makes critical thinking possible.
How we think?
Psychological factors
* Fears, motivations,
attitudes, desires, etc
What we think?
Some beliefs or ideas
* Relativism (true)
* Skepticism (doubt)
Self interested examples:
- “The province should lower sales tax; it would
be good for my business!” - “I’m against gun control, because I’m a hunter.”
- “I think the government should freeze tuition,
because I’m a student and I don’t want to pay
more!
Self interested thinking can?
- Limit critical inquiry,
- blind you to the facts and lead to ignore evidence,
- provoke self-deception,
- encourage rationalizations and *motivated
*reasoning, - foster wishful thinking, and
- leave you open to manipulation by others!
Avoiding self interested thinking
-Watch out when things get personal and you become emotionally invested in an issue.
-Beware of the urge to distort your thinking to save face.
-Be alert to ways that critical thinking can be undermined.
-Ensure that nothing has been left out of consideration.
-Avoid selective attention.
-Make a conscious effort to look for *opposing evidence.
The power of the group?
- Pressure can come from assuming that our group is the best, the right one, the chosen one, and that all other groups are not as good.
- The assumption that your group is better
than others is at the heart of prejudice.
How to avoid group pressure?
Group pressure can come in the form of peer pressure, appeals to popularity, and appeals to common practice.
Group-centred thinking can degenerate into narrow-mindedness, resistance to change, and stereotyping.
The best way to defend yourself against group thinking is to always proportion your acceptance of a claim according to the strength of reasons
Power of group examples:
“Moosehead is the best beer in the world. I’ve never tried any of those weird foreign beers, and I don’t intend to.”
“I don’t agree with immigrants’ claims that they are being treated badly at the border. If I endorsed those claims, every friend I’ve got would turn their backs on me.
what is world view?
A ‘worldview’ is a ‘philosophy of life’.
* A set of fundamental ideas that helps you make sense of the world.
o What do I know? Is knowledge possible?
what is subjective relativism?
The view that truth depends solely on what someone
believes; truth is relative to persons.
* ‘What’s true for you might not be true for me.’
* Arguments based on this commit is called ‘the
subjectivist fallacy’
A ‘fallacy’ is a common, flawed form of reasoning
*infallible
ex of subjective fallacy:
Jane: You know, smoking might not be the most healthy habit to start. Terry: Smoking is unhealthy for most people, but not for me.
what is social relativism?
The view that truth is relative to
societies or groups.
* Also known as cultural relativism.
* ‘Different societies believe
different things. Who are we to
say that other societies are
wrong?’
is rooted, historically, in a well-meaning desire to understand and accept other cultures.
What is Philosophical Skepticism?
The view that we know much
less than we think we do or
that we know nothing at all.
