Re:More Students Are Turning Away from College and Toward Ap...
by revelio on Saturday March 18, 2023 @06:30PM
(#35213808)
You're right. Academics and graduates are terrible for claiming universities teach critical thinking, yet never stating exactly what they mean or how they think they're doing that. Maybe an obscure philosophy class tries, but the vast majority of students don't take that and the claim is made about a college education in general, not philosophy classes specifically.
Seems to me like it's a self-defeating argument. If they were really teaching critical thinking as a skill, degree holders would immediately start arguing with them about this vague and poorly thought out claim, but in practice people just nod along.
Re:More Students Are Turning Away from College and Toward Ap...
by throw6969away on Sunday March 19, 2023 @12:41AM
(#35216112)
"Critical thinking" is just a fancy word for common sense, with the implication that you are both educated and have common sense.
Common sense is something you can only learn through personal struggle. But if you already have some common sense, going to university and learning about the 15 or so different subtopics of your field is enriching, imo.
There was probably a technical definition of the "critical" at one point, but now basically something like the above is meant by "critical thinking". I don't have a problem with it.
I suppose that is why I'm confused when the term is used, since I don't think I would use the term critical thinking for avoiding logical fallacies. A better term might be "not wrong thinking". Of course this also should take into account that some things we call logical fallacies probably shouldn't be considered logical fallacies at all, like "slippery slope" arguments and so forth, which are considered to be a fallacy since there is no mathematical implication, despite the obviously correct nature of many slippery slope arguments.
The word critical implies some sort of criticism, I'm not sure if identifying a logical fallacy is really what we typically mean by criticism. At the end of the day I guess the word itself isn't important.