Following the publication of my first book, Critical Thinking: Conceptual Perspectives & Practical Guidelines (Cambridge University Press, 2017), I was invited by Psychology Today to write an ongoing blog regarding all things critical thinking, with opportunities to extend beyond that as appropriate. I took up the offer and started ‘Thoughts on Thinking’. Let me be clear by saying that I never thought I would write a blog. I recall even making fun of some bloggers before having been presented the opportunity. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe.
Another way of looking at it is as being consistent with one of the core fundaments of critical thinking (CT) – exhibiting the willingness and ability to change one’s mind. That’s what I did. I changed my mind, because a specific purpose for the blog became clear to me – I had the opportunity to reach a larger, wider audience than ever before with respect to informing people about CT, its importance and how we can improve it. Indeed, that has always been the goal of my research. Does the format of how I share my message really matter? As an educator, I saw this blog as a tool for education.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not so self-important as to think that I could change the world with a blog. Honestly, for as cliché as it might sound, I genuinely felt that if the blog could meaningfully impact just a handful of people beyond the reach of my book, then it’d be worth it. Besides, it’s not like I’d have to regularly produce pages upon pages; blog posts are relatively short – you need to get your point across quick and strong. If anything, it might help my writing.
So, I started the blog and one of the first things I noticed confirmed this notion: people won’t read it if your entries are too long – TL; DR (too long; didn’t read), as they say online. If I wanted to have meaningful impact on anyone – especially those not from an academic tradition – I’d need to maintain their attention. I had to be as succinct and concise as possible, while still maintaining clarity. However, academics often have this implicit desire to be as accurate as possible with their wording so as to not be misconstrued. If you’re familiar with academic papers, they’re generally a good bit longer than a typical blog post, regardless of how ‘succinct and concise’ they can be. That was one pitfall of communicating with the public through the blog – I couldn’t be as thorough and, subsequently, as accurate as I would like to have been with my language. Thus, pretty early on, I found myself writing the blog in an almost serialised way – constantly referring back to previous posts where complex concepts were ‘fleshed out’, so as to save me from reiterating the same things over and over.
On the other hand, one thing that ended up being quite a strength of the blog format was the informal nature of the communication. I found myself telling stories and getting my point across to readers through examples and analogies. As research suggests, examples and personalised anecdotes are very powerful means of communicating messages, even though they’re not the most credible way of arguing for one’s perspective (see Chapter 5 for more on that). Nevertheless, I figured ‘fight fire with fire’; and so, I looked at the narrative structure and colloquial nature of blog writing as a potentially more entertaining means of achieving my goal of conveying educational material to readers and, also, a welcome break from the stylistically limited nature of typical academic writing.
I’ve taken pride in the fact that I’ve received positive feedback on the blog over the past eight years that it has been on the go. The most useful pieces of feedback have pertained to indicating topics of interest, different avenues to explore, new research to read and, of course, disagreement in perspective (be it from academic or non-academic readers), which inevitably leads to re-evaluation of my own thinking – a true example of CT. Simply, it has been a learning process for me just as much as I hope it has been for readers.
Over the course of writing the blog, my mind has changed on topics, new ideas have arisen and my excitement for the field of CT research has further grown. The fun I’ve had writing the blog and engaging readers, along with the feeling that I am, in many ways, achieving the aforementioned purpose and goal of my blog, has led me to write this book – while taking into consideration both the strengths and weaknesses of the blog medium.
The goal of my first book was to engage academics, students and anyone who wanted to learn about CT and get better at it. While I do imagine (and hope) that many readers of this book will be academics and students interested in CT, its target audience – much like my blog – is truly anyone, regardless of academic background, who wants to learn about CT and get better at it. This book is for everyone. Thus, I’m going to take a page out of my blog-writing experience in my approach to Knowledge Doesn’t Exist; I’m going to adopt a conversational approach – following the more informal tone and narrative structure of my blog – in discussing the various topics and concepts within this book. But, given that it is a book, I’m allowed more room to play with in terms of being accurate in my wording and meaning – and ensuring you, the reader, are provided a sufficient amount of information to take in and consider for yourself in your own CT. Sure, one goal of this book is to similarly tell you about what CT is and how it can be improved, just as it was in its predecessor (in light of more recent research and further consideration since my first book’s publication). However, another important goal is to address the complexities surrounding what CT really means, in a conversational way, with respect to applying it in our modern world.
Specifically, this book starts with a thorough discussion of what CT actually is in Chapter 1, before moving on to the ‘why’ and ‘when’ of its application in Chapter 2, where the conversational tone really ‘kicks in’. Chapter 3 introduces the nature of the information we think about and how that affects what we might conceptualise as ‘knowledge’, thus addressing the book’s titular perspective. Chapter 4 discusses how we might store, retrieve and apply whatever it is we refer to as ‘knowledge’, before addressing the issue of such information’s credibility – and how to evaluate that – in Chapter 5. Assuming we have appropriately evaluated such information, Chapter 6 presents a discussion of how one might go about changing the minds of others (and even our own) who hold misinformed views as true. Chapter 7 begins the move of our focus to a more applied look at CT, specifically through a discussion of the nature of problem-solving. Chapter 8 presents ways one might enhance their CT, particularly through training methods. Chapter 9 discusses how other people and the world around us can affect our application of CT, with respect to various examples of real-world events from recent years. Finally, Chapter 10 concludes the book and discusses the various ways one might express CT in real-world scenarios; the possibility of separating the ideal from the practical (in terms of how we might really go about application); as well as the implications of our considerations throughout the book, and where such associated efforts to enhance CT might focus on in the future.
The information we ‘think about’ in real-world settings, how we do it and the very nature of both information and thinking are fundamentally important issues for consideration. When we think critically, the process must be applied to some information. In a very basic way, we can consider that information to be knowledge, regardless of whether it’s true, false or even somewhere in between – a half-truth if you will. But, what is knowledge really? Isn’t it just the information that someone stores in their head? If that’s the case, then knowledge isn’t necessarily ‘true’; rather, it’s just the way in which someone understands something. If we look at it in a collective sense, knowledge might refer to all the existing information out there, over the course of history. Regardless, once we start collating it, we start seeing discrepancies and contradictions.
Did humans evolve over millions of years to become what we are today, or were we intelligently designed by some omnipotent force to serve some purpose in the world? These rather ‘foundational’ perspectives represent two different ‘knowledges’ that often seem to be in direct contrast. So, which one is right? Or can they co-exist? For the purpose of this example, it doesn’t matter because without a definitive answer (and means to check it), can we really say that one is ‘knowledge’?
Isn’t knowledge supposed to be correct? Sure, you might argue that this is an issue of semantics regarding how one defines knowledge – or even ‘right’ for that matter; but in a colloquial sense, we must question whether or not knowledge actually exists or if everything is just a series of stand-alone or integrated concepts that are considered with varying degrees of likelihood. Thus, if you care enough about an idea or concept, you will think critically about it – regardless of label – because without it, how can you know? Perhaps such consideration has never been so important as now, in light of the exponential increase in the amount of information created over the past twenty-five years and the ‘age of misinformation’ that many have argued we find ourselves living in (e.g. with respect to ‘fake news’, gaps between political views in the general population, various social movements and the COVID-19 pandemic). Indeed, never in human history has there been such an abundance of health information and misinformation from sources so wide-ranging in levels of trustworthiness (Abel & McQueen, Reference Abel and McQueen2020), noted in the recent literature as an ‘infodemic’ (Rubinelli et al., Reference Rubinelli, Ort, Zanini, Fiordelli and Diviani2021) – and this was based on research data from before the COVID-19 pandemic!
So, when it comes down to it, this book is about CT – as a process. But it’s also about the nature of thinking, as well as the nature of the information we think about. Happy reading and critical thinking.
