(Ep. 7) Information in Relationship with Intellectual Standards and the Other Elements of Reasoning

hello I'm Linda Elder I'm the president of the foundation for critical thinking I'm here with you today with my colleague Dr Gerald nosich hello Gerald hi Linda good to be with you and to be talking about the elements of reasoning today information yeah yes it's always a delight uh the foundation for critical thinking is a 501c3 nonprofit organization in California and in this series we are focused on the analysis of reasoning going deeper so if you are new to our work you'll need to study some of the foundations first and when you do you'll be

introduced to the elements of reasoning and we are going deeper in the elements of reasoning in this series and in this particular session we're focusing on information and so why don't we Gerald first just talk about the relationship between information and the other elements of reasoning and would you like to just start there um um I was actually think you said we were gonna start with information related to standards and I did say that I was formulating what it is I was going to say and then you asked me this different question well I think

since we're focusing on the elements of reasoning as a whole as an introduction um we could just talk a little bit about information in relationship to the elements so let me just do that and then we'll come back to the elements and burrow a bit deeper so the elements of reasoning um as you know has eight parts those of you who are viewing this because you've been studying the work for some time and information is one of the elements of reasoning so very briefly then we could say that information is important in the following way

in reasoning whenever we reason we use information we can't reason without information and information is related to the other seven ele reasoning so we don't just have information in a vacuum information is related to our question and issue and our purpose and we B and we make inferences uh based on the information but we also are using assumptions in that process when we make inferences and all of this is set within our point of view within which we are we are often confined even though we may think of ourselves as having all of this freedom

of thought we really are confined within narrow ways of looking at the world based on our history and where we are in history and what we've been taught to believe and our gender and how we've been taught based on our gender and so forth and so on so we have a point of view within which we are locked and this point of view is informed by our Concepts and all of these of course again into relate and lead to implications or Consequences so information is one of these elements of reasoning and so now we can

move to intellectual standards as we suggested earlier before the meeting and then we'll come back uh to the elements so Gerald how does how do how do how does how do the standards help us with information yeah so let me just let me say something well about information information is neutral with respect to the standards that is as an element of reasoning it's just information whether it's accurate or inaccurate whether it's important or unimportant and exactly the same thing holds in as a matter of fact for all of the elements that is the elements of

reasoning they're not the elements of good reasoning they're the elements of any old reasoning if you reason very badly really badly you still have a purpose you're still addressing some question or problem you're still making assumptions you're still using information all eight of the elements of reasoning come in even if your purpose is misguided the question and issue is unclear your assumptions are not accurate your information is actually misinformation so notice the standards come in the standards don't don't enter into the elements and um there are a couple of places though where the standards in

our ordinary parland the standards kind of work their way in in that information is one of those um another one is an aside is assumptions so often when people think of assumptions they think you're you're you're if there's something wrong with assumptions and there isn't anything wrong with assumptions there's something wrong with making inaccurate assumptions but making accurate assumptions is fine making a important assumptions is fine something similar is true with information um that is people when we talk about misinformation we we're hesitant to call it information so it's just important to distinguish uh factual

Matters from whether something is true or false accurate or inaccurate important unimportant so if I say just an obvious example if I say Los Angeles is the capital of California that's a piece of information it's false information it's inaccurate right um but still I would call it a piece of information so um uh one of the things about information I you talked about it in relation to the other elements and let me say that for me Linda um information is almost the least exciting of the eight elements I don't want to say it too strongly

because I think they're going to be straightforward counter examples to it um but I find that very few issues are ever settled by information um they're almost always settled by what you do with the information or the inferences you make so um couple of pieces of information that I I I heard recently one is um that there are more more Americans have been killed in the last 30 years murdered in the last 30 years than the number of Americans who died in World War I World War II Vietnam Korea Iraq the Gulf War um Afghanistan

all combined and that was on just 30 years now that's a piece of information and it was startling to me but notice that doesn't tell me where to go with that information it doesn't tell me how to address this problem or even how to understand it well so I have another example though too so here's one that's brought up by Congressional leaders sometimes and often by people in business and it's that Amtrak you know it's that's the rail service in public rail service in the United States has lost money every year of its existence it's

lost In Sum billions of dollars and people often say why would we as taxpayers support an institution that loses money every year so it's information that that's lost in that it's lost money every year I looked it up from MJ and indeed it's true so it's accurate but what follows from that is not that we should not support an institution that doesn't make money I mean the business of government is to provide services very few of the services government provides make money do the police make money does Congress make money does I mean the only

the ones they Levy this against is the post office and Amtrak because they provide services so notice you make an inference to what we should do about it based on information but information seems to me very seldom to settle an issue so that's partly its relation to standards one other P one other standard I want to mention by the standards of critical thinking I'm meaning the one the ones we ordinarily list um clear accurate relevant precise important or significant deep Broad and um I just want to say important as as one um that is it's

important always to have in mind the difference between significant information and information that's not important and by important here I mean important with respect to what you're trying to do achieving your purpose and I say that partly because of my strong background in education in that I think Educators tend to emphasize information far more than they emphasize the other seven right and so what we want to look for or what we want what we want to learn or what we want to teach students to learn is information that's important for achieving worthwhile purposes that standard

significance comes in very strongly so it's a little bit about information and its relation to the standards yes well of course as we know there are many angles from which we can approach this these questions that we're asking so let me just let me follow up a bit because there you you talked a little bit about the relationship between information and the other elements right and and in terms of its importance and then you talked about you you you introduced us to the relationship between information and the intellectual standards so let me first um focus

on well either one let me let me focus on the intellectual standards uh a bit because I think the others is a little more complicated and it's interesting that you said that that information was one of the least interesting ones of the elements and I can see why you say that because um it's really how you're looking at the information that is often the problem and yet if we if we have confidence in reason which is one of the intellectual virtues if we learn what that means which means follow the facts wherever they take you

whether you like it or not whether you want to go there or not just keep following at least what appear to be the facts sometimes you're off but you've got to follow the truth that's going to come into play here as an important standard wherever it lead you well if you are trying to embody that then by implication you're embodying the tools of criticality and one of those sets is this intellectual standards and so if we truly are adhering to intellectual standards and I'm going to go over them a bit again if we're doing that

then we should be using information we should be understanding all information in a reasonable way within context yeah so you mentioned the some of the intellectual standards that we focus on let me just say at one point we named these essential intellectual standards for all human thought but there are other essential essential intellectual standards and as a reminder these come from hundreds exent in all uh ordinary languages but this is a starting place and when we take these serious ly then we begin to understand the role of intellectual standards and we begin to see how

other standards play a role okay so uh just very briefly then Clarity so let's relate that information we have to be clear about the information that we are gathering and first of all we don't and this this is very important we don't think of information in any kind of vacuum that's part of what you were saying as well information is always related to the question and issue why because the question determines the information that you have to gather and consider in good faith to answer that question the question determines that not the human being thinking

so the question guides the intellectual tasks required of us and a primary intellectual task is to gather the relevant significant information to answering that now notice that it's sort of the way that I was described this it sort of feels like just you know follow the dotted line you know just do this and then do that and everything will be fine and and and you that's what confidence and reason actually I think does mean it doesn't mean that it's going to always be easy but it means that that's the path okay so we have to

be so so we've got this information that we have to gather so we need to be clear about what that is we need make sure that the information is accurate in a way this is so it's like simple like how how could that be hard well it's hard sometimes to to figure out whether something is accurate right but it shouldn't be difficult to figure out whether you know whether it's accurate that's you see what I mean so you should be able to say wait a minute I don't know whether what you're saying is true it

may be true but we're going to have to run this down now that part may take some time but just figuring out whether I this information is something that I should question is something that we should be able to learn to do and again it's not always easy if for example if people around you are manipulating you or lying to you and telling you see somebody that's very good at that may be giving you information that's inaccurate so you it's not always I don't mean it to be that I don't mean it not gets that

easy I'm just saying that we we are faced with some information we say is that is that accurate so we can now how do we check to see if it's accurate there should be paths to those processes and so we learn to follow that you know those paths and then Precision sometimes we need a lot of detail in the information that we're Gathering relevance of course the information has to be relevant to the question so sometimes people will give their their reasoning and then they'll give information is not relevant to it then you have say

wait a minute how is that relevant to right so um we we have to make sure that the information is relevant we have to make sure that it is deep where we have complexities and here is one of the ways in which humans fail very frequently because we're not learning how to reason through the complex problems that we face and we're not learning to interconnect with one another well enough to answer these so um a critical thinker will say what are the difficulties in the problem and that relates then that drives us to the information

that we need to gather and sometimes we need clusters of information so now it gets to be more complicated and then bread uh this means we need to consider more than one point of view so often we are we are giving information that is relevant accurate precise clear deep but only within one point of view only arguing for abortion or for whatever you know whatever the case may be you're arguing only for or against for abortion against abortion whatever your argument is you're only giving that side of the argument which is typically done let's say

in a traditional debate you're only giving one side of the argument you're giving that as well as you can but you're not considering this other side because your goal is not to consider the other side your goal is to defeat the other side right right so then that's antithetical to critical thinking so there obviously we would need if we if the question is Broad we would need information in all of the relevant viewpoints all the significant information within the relevant viewpoints to answer the question then we need to think logically about the information and we

need to see how it fits together we need to be able to ask how how does information fit together though how do we let's say we want to actually sustain the Earth's resources but how are we going we've got this information we've that this information about the the oceans we have this information about the air quality we have this information about in every part of the Earth's surface and pro you know it's like the life itself so the question is how do we fit these together all of these this information and this this accurate information

how do we make it work together so that we actually sustain the Earth not just you have the information over there and you're using it over here um so then uh significant you already mentioned that importance so we have to make sure that we have we're looking at all the significant information and we have to make sure that we're thinking fairly about the information and we have to make sure that we have sufficient information to answer the question so the reason why this feels in a way it sort of feels Elementary is because if you

just follow if you just carry this around with you and this page with these questions on it and that focus on the the intellectual standards it's in multiple pages that we have so we've got these questions and we've got these standards so if we just follow follow this then we would understand better how to use information right so that is something that is maybe the easiest way into information in terms of getting immediate U power in the the idea yeah so now let me pause let me just uh address one thing that you said um

and that is that information is you Again by saying information is always always related to a question and issue and related to a purpose and I'm going to say that's true when you're reasoning about something if you're not reasoning about something the information can just sit there um right yes yes my background in education right I mean not the field of education but in teaching in that much teaching gives students information without any questioned issue just a questioned issue that the teacher thinks of is important and the students don't care about what maybe one one

way or the other so it's when when when reasoning when you're trying to figure something out that's when the information fits together with all the other elements otherwise it can just float off and be unimportant just something you've put down on on an exam um yeah so and they're yes yes and like so they they're also there's also this kind of information let's say I don't know if this even counts as information but maybe if you're if you're just wandering in your mind from one thought to another some of that will be information right you're

just maybe you're falling asleep or maybe you're you taking a walk and you're just letting your mind float and this information comes up and you know just there sometimes you grab hold of it and you do something with it but yeah right so we're thinking about information in relationship to reasoning when we're in when we're talking about critical reasoning critical thinking so I was yes making that assumption now we can now I think go back if we could to the elements of reasoning again and talk a little bit about information in relationship with data facts

evidence observations experiences and reasons which we also place in that element right right and um I think one of the moves that we have to make that early on which I think you you've already made but circling back to it is the relationship between information and knowledge and in other words information as you said is neutral in and of itself if I have information it could be accurate it could be inaccurate accurate it can be significant or can be trivial right so I have this information and a critical thinker understands that you need information that's

accurate and relevant to the question at issue right if you're reasoning and so there that means that we have to be able to distinguish between information that is either just sitting there as in in nerd information or it is information that is and maybe it's accurate uh but we may be using information in our thinking that's inaccurate right and this is where misinformation comes into play because since people don't have these skills of criticality that we're talking about they're using information in their thinking that's inaccurate and um it's not based therefore in facts so if

we just take the we're going to come back to iner information in a few minutes but let's just take data let's take each one of these and just relate it to information so information is neutral you got to apply intellectual standards to it to to decide whether it's it's uh worthy of your consideration data is the same way data is like information it's a it's a certain type of information uh facts imply truth right right so and then evidence also also right and this I have to just say this reminds me of Richard Paul's favorite

definition of evidence evidence is something that makes something else evident that's like and even though you're he's reusing the word and the that's not supposed to be allowed um so it's the fact that it is evident is means that it's that's really it entails the intellectual standard of Truth truthfulness or being factual and then observations are neutral are neutral right experiences that's a big one right because we think of our exper we don't think of our experiences as neutral we think of our experiences as facts right these things happened to me and we don't realize

that we have often Twisted that right as experiences now they appear as facts right yeah yeah and uh also it's just kind of a a a standard thing that many people do and that is to make generalizations based on their own experiences right and there's a way in which um at heart that's always a flaw I mean you can correct for the flaw in it by checking it out T testing testing other people's experiences and whether their experiences are the same and paying very close attention to the nuances of how they interpret the in the

experience and so forth but but I think it's a very natural human thing to do to base my view of the world on my own experiences so I think it's a very natural human thing to do leads us fundamentally astray a good deal of the time yeah that's why I think in experiences are that category is is something that we need to take seriously yeah in our own minds because we're using a lot of we're also let's say even if the information is accurate I mean I'm sorry even if your your memory is accurate of

an experience right it doesn't follow that you should be using that as information right in other words you can just close the door to that and say I'm not I'm not going to be influenced by that but it comes you know it it decides you decide to use that as information now obviously sometimes it's relevant information and you want to use it as information it's but sometimes you can you can close the door on that those experiences I'm I'm trying to think of an example of what you mean would this be one that um maybe

someone in my place of employment has mistreated me and I'm trying to consider whether to stay at this place of employment and I might just say well the fact that this person mistreated me um supposing it's factual um I that's something I'm not going to pay attention to because this is a bigger decision than that is that the kind of example you're thinking of well that could be an example but it wasn't I was thinking more of Haunting memories right uhuh yeah I I I suspected that that's what you meant staying away from it as

as an example though but yeah you're right now notice that that you that analogy that I use which I just you know thought of Haunting It's haunting you meaning you're trying to get away from it but it keeps haunting that's the way that we think about memories but we don't really have to think about them that way we can actually say I'm not going to think about that anymore that did happen to me in the past but that's over and that doesn't have power over me anymore I mean that's a basic um critical thinking and

psychological move if we can make it yeah so in other words information these experiences can be popping in in ways that are not very useful and not very helpful right and let me go back let me go back to the one before which is observation because observation seems so much more straightforward so much than and so much more in a way reliable than uh experiences um but one of the things about observation is that it's all it's first of all it's selective right what it is I observe in any situation uh is is very very

highly selective and the other one is that observation is also context dependent um meaning um if I'm a high school kid and I'm looking through the microscope what I see is a bunch of colors whereas the the instructor the science person might look through the microscope and what that person sees is a bunch of cells or the the organel inside right so if it dependent your observations are dependent on your on the context in this case by your prior knowledge and and integration of prior knowledge so um so even observations are often not as straightforward

as they they they seem now I'm glad that you went back to that because I sort of I didn't mean to skip it and but I kind of did and then yeah because observations are similar to experiences because you are observing through your point of view and through your assumption base and through your concept maps and therefore your observations can be poor and you can you can observe let me let me just say this I don't know if this is a good analogy but imagine that you're a tennis player and you're observing very high you're

not that great and you're obser not that good you're new you're an amateur and you're serving very highly skilled players and then you can say um that that really looks easy right right and and then and and then you also might maybe you're even saying to yourself yeah I do that I do that I do that and it's similar to being around a very highly skilled theoretician or thinker Within field so why is it that some people would be observing let us say and this highly skilled thinker and they don't even really know can't even

see the moves that this person's making because they they just they they they have no awareness now I was doing a workshop recently with a set of teachers and we've been studying critical thinking and I asked them what they've been learning the first two weeks in this class and one of the teachers which I called on randomly she wasn't raising her hand so it's I was just asking inviting her to say what she had learned and she very honestly said to tell you the truth I really don't understand anything that I'm reading wow and that

was helpful for me because it reminded me of the complexities yeah in critical thinking theory so in other words so she can she can observe me talking about critical thing and maybe in the moment makes sense but then when she goes back to her classroom she says I don't know how but I don't know how to do anything right better now as a result of that so you're You observe your your ability to observe is dependent upon your critical thinking abilities right and your ability to understand your experiences in a reasonable way depends upon your

critical thinking abilities so that's the way in which they're similar yeah there parallel as you were as you were speaking another complexity of observation occurred to me and it's that um well we've seen news footage recently and I could say well I've observed Russians shooting at I've observed the Russians shooting at ukrainians and that's that's an observation and it's an accurate observation in its way but really what I've observed is some Russians shooting at ukrainians there's a way in which I can just just without thinking about it generalize that observation to this group of people

so I see this this individual or this group of individuals and I observe them that as I phrase it in my mind I'm saying a term that applies to a great many other people aside from them in addition to them um and that seems to me to be a very great diff built-in difficulty to observation in that it depends on the categories we've got and that are active in our mind yeah yeah so there is actually you could see uh there is a lot to be explored in each of these categories so we could go

deeper on in data what does that even mean facts what does that even mean evidence give examples of those so each of these has um a lot of depth and then reasons right do you want to talk I say I could say something about it originally uh when when Richard and I formed these into a circle there were nine and uh one of them was reasons as you know and um and uh and I don't I don't want to say this too strongly but maybe we were both influenced by our philosophy backgrounds where reasons are

the primary thing that goes on um I mean Harvey seagull's definition of critical thinking yes yeah it just involves reasons and um and uh I think it's probably Richard but maybe maybe both of us play played a role in this week decided to uh take reasons out as one of the Prime categories not so much because belongs in information but because it moves around in various of the other elements uh my reason for for doing X Y and Z might be an assumption I make my reason for it might be an implication that it has

if I do this bad things will happen therefore I'm not going to do this so the implication is actually a reason for not doing it so and information is also a reason but it's a it's a more it's a more flexible in much the way I just occurs to me now in much the way when we do the standards reasonable is not one of the standards we look list though in your book you you talk about reasonable as a standard a great deal but the reason we don't list it uh there may be multiple reasons

one of the reasons we don't list it is that reasonable fits all the other standards right are you being is it reasonable with respect to depth is it reasonable with respect to Precision is it reasonable with respect to accuracy so reasonable can is I don't want I don't want to be committed to what it is I just said I saw you looking up like wondering if that's true no you're just there are so many a angles go ahead no keep going yes back to reasons um um yeah uh there's there seems to be nothing wrong

with including reasons as as information because information often serves as our reason for doing something our reasons for for an inference we're making or conclusion we're draw we're drawing but um in actual but in actual English usage reasons can be uh many of the things can even be a purpose right right and actually the way the way that you can prove this is by saying if I ask you Gerald if I say Gerald what was your reason for doing this you might tell me your purpose right you might tell me your question at issue you

might tell me information you might tell me any of the elements of reasoning right right so reasons permeates it's sort of a nuisance in a way because it's got to be in there as you say because that's the way I mean philosophers sort of want that and need that but it's important to understand that if you understand what I if people can understand what I just said I say what is your reason you're you're not necessarily going to give me information in response you may give me an assumption you may give me any of the

other elements right I don't know that you could do it with question and issue but the other because it's a question um so what well I don't know I thought about that before I said that because you if you if you say I say what was your reason and you say well because I was trying to figure out how to get the car started so that's a problem that's an issue right but when you say it that way I don't want to harp on something this specific but when you say it that way you're actually

embedding the question inside a statement um if well no well if you're ask say because I was asking the question how do I get the car to start right that still could count as a reason right but I don't think you could say what's your reason for doing that and I say How can I the car to start that if I just say the question at issue it just doesn't quite work out yes that's anyway it's it's true that we could make any number of moves and so but we have reasons there because often reason

when we give our reasons we are giving the information right and so it made most sense to place it there yeah right so and and it's very important what this also reveals is it's very important for people to understand the spirit of the elements of reasoning indeed not the law of the elements of reasoning so we when we look at any of the elements we could add other terms that we just couldn't fit into this small circle eventually you you know you can get going with synonyms and so there then you have then a long

list of big network but we should be able to do do this in our minds we should see that this is not just eight elements but it has a lot of complexities there are a lot of complexities within each one and some messiness as well some overlap in certain cases right so let me me just com not comment on that but add something to that and that is that um Richard would often say and I would often say these I'll just speak for myself then these are the eight elements meaning there aren't any others um

within each category within each wedge of the circle there's a lot of flexibility and and terms can move around but there are but these are the eight so I've never heard anyone give me an element of reasoning that's not included on the list at least implicitly so in so I hypothesis is a an element of reasoning but hypothesis is really an either an assumption or a conclusion held tentatively right so yes yes implicit on the list but I have not but I have not heard anyone offer me an element that is not on the list

and if someone did of course it means we'd have to expand the list of elements I mean it's not saying this is this is set in stone it's to say this is uh as far as I can tell completely is this one is complete very unlike the standards because there's no complete list of Standards at all yes I think that and that's because of the research that went into the development of these elements right beginning with Richard's dissertation and moving into the era in which you were working with him and come together in a circle

that's that's 20 years or more probably have that wrong but it's a it's a lot of years of study right and looking to make sure that nothing was missing and yeah and I I I I may make this comment it's not directly about information though but it's about the elements I uh when I I consider Richard's Insight in coming up with the elements as just as as brilliant um in that before anyone had ever before Richard did this and even after but before Richard did this people always thought of elements of what we're calling the

elements as not as Concepts which are flexible in and of themselves but as part of a sentence like identify your assumptions so an important thing to do is to identify your assumptions uh another one is to State your purpose or bring in standards as well be very clear about your read re make sure your reasons are accurate those are the kinds of things that permeate other approaches to critical thinking all right there're they're embedded so that you get an action word like uh evaluate or assess your reasons uh accurately right so it's got an action

an element and uh a standard Al together and what that does is it limits what you do because you don't want to you don't want to just evaluate your reasons you also want to evalate your purposes you want to evaluate your point of view you want to evaluate the question your issue so so what Richard did is extract from these sentences yes individual Elements which are Concepts and the nature of Concepts is that they're very flexible they apply everywhere so as he often emphasized that you don't just identify the information you need you evaluate the

information you need you compare my information with your information we synthesize this information with that information so I can do a huge number of things using the concept of information and I can do far more than I could ever enumerate in a list of what you do with information so I I always thought very powerful u in um understanding and thank you for sharing that and so what one of the things that Richard Paul was Master at was looking at a lot of data and from this pulling out the key Concepts and going down to

the most the foundational ideas so our work is fundamentally conceptual right which is one of the reasons why it doesn't fit very well in human society because it's not scientific see it's it's like what is this what are these Concepts these people are doing using over here it's that's the way that I think our work is sometimes if not often viewed so um this and and you're right so but going back to this the elements of reasoning in the wheel this is as you say this was brilliant because what what Richard basically did is took

these lists of we could call them micro skills and macro skills some of them are more complex but this list of abilities skills and abilities so we take this and we say but we don't we can't work within a list as thinkers that's not reasonable we need it we need foundational Concepts that are easier than that right and so we've got the elements of reasoning and that's just so much easier when then we have to now apply the standards to the elements so in a way it's it's it seems harder because then you have to

figure out the lists right you have to figure these skills out but you do it in in a dynamic process that's how it works that's why it works right and I'm I'm thinking you you you know this but um when I first began working with Richard the emphasis he put was on what he called micro skills which which were not the elements but they but the elements were aart as they are in all approaches to critical thinking um but but then the the move that that I I later realized was uh just unique um and

extremely powerful was to step away from the micro skills and identify the elements as part of those micr skills um the the micro skills were things like identify your purpose or identify your assumptions um um yes in fact that's that's how you and he were teaching it whenever I came to the first Workshop in 1992 I mean there was the there was the the circle was there but you were still focusing also on the abilities in in a kind of LZ format to show I think the relationship between the you know these this new way

of thinking about and and the way we traditionally did I guess at that point which was in the list format okay so let's move on then to back to information okay so so we could burrow in further obviously into any any of these other terms within information but the most important or a most important point is for us to understand that like all of the elements of reasoning information in itself is not necessarily adhering to any intellectual standards and therefore we can't count on information you you see something on the internet right so bunch of

people said it was true on Facebook that that's information right and that does not mean that there's truth in it right and people think that if they if a lot of people I often hear people say well a lot of people were watching that so A lot of people are watching it does not mean it's true no h and so then then you can see how [Music] misinformation can easily be spread among people who do not have this ability or these abilities yeah to distinguish good information from as it were bad information in context yeah

and let me just say something about that um and it's that uh I I would say exactly the same sentence you just said that people often don't have the abilities or the skills and that's true but it can make it sound like what you said about watching the great tennis player make a make a move and thinking oh I can do that that is it's not evaluating information or assessing how accurate it is it's not like that's an all or nothing kind of ability uh or that you can just decide to do that it takes

lots of practice over and over again and it takes making mistakes a lot of time getting things wrong and then realizing and owning up to getting it wrong and actively looking for corroboration say or evidence to use the other word um and uh and I think that that takes time it takes time just the way playing tennis takes time um not just hitting the ball over the net but but playing tennis I don't mean like a star but just playing tennis well and I think that's true of very much of critical thinking it's got to

be practiced over and over again and it's particularly true with information where there's this great glut of in of information accurate as well as inaccurate all over the place and it's very hard often to tell to tell what's accurate and inaccurate well I think the way that I think of that is that if we were teaching these foundations in schools colleges and universities then students would begin to get some sense of intellectual standards and how they play a role in indeed you see they would have these tools right now what I'm saying is if we

develop the tools they they provide the Avenues for our reasoning and it's it's not as if you have to be you know it's accessible to everyone that's what I'm trying to say that all of us can have access to this but we have to we have to learn these tools and we need to as you say practice using them and then we have to have confidence in them and not and not be persuaded by other views so in other words we're we're not we're not thinking of the information objectively instead we're thinking it in terms

of the way that other people are viewing it so if they believe it then we believe it right that's that's the yeah what we want to avoid the the skills that would have to be taught would be how among them would be how to evaluate information so you would have students evaluating information assessing it for accuracy say um over and over again as they progress through school instead what we do what teachers tend to do is give them information is give information which is presumed accurate but it doesn't help develop the skills of how do

you tell that something is accurate so you got to focus on that on the how do you tell because once you're outside of school you just get all this information and it's not it's not mediated by this teacher who we hope has your best interests at heart so you you get no skills of assessing the accuracy information now before we leave the one the concepts that you brought up I want to re I want to Circle back on the concept of reasonable as an intellectual standard because you were you were referring to my views on

that so I want to say What My Views are okay um because the way that I think of the the concept or the standard of reasonable is um that it's a macro what I would call macro intellectual standard right and that means it's multilog and it entails other standards so and it is contextual as well it has to be used in a contextual way I mean in terms of the context so for example if I say you know you're really not being reasonable right now I might mean you're not being logical you're not just looking

at the facts and following where the facts are leading you I might be saying you are not being polite to me right right so it's a it's a stretched a bit and uh but it's and and you might say um you you're requesting if you if you're not being reasonable you're you're you're requiring too much of me right um so if you if if you're reasonable then I guess again it depends on again you'd have to say well what is the context is it reasonable for me to have the lifestyle that I have let's say

that's the question well what is your lifestyle you know what are the variables in your life what you know what is your what is your situation how many people are you taking care of how many kids do you have you how many you see all these things how what are your responsibilities you got then I'd have to say well you you know are you able to maintain all of this is that a reasonable schedule you see can you pull it off so reasonable might mean logical it might be sort of an easy connect connection you

might find an easy connection to intellectual standards or you might be using it in a different broader way and Gerald I just I want to say this is for anyone listening I remember a time when I first started learning critical thinking when I couldn't really I don't think I could Define anything like if somebody told me to give a definition of something I would have had a very difficult time and still I will struggle unless I've really been over the territory a lot right so to be able to make the moves that I just made

about the concept of reasonable as I was thinking of that that is all coming from my critical thinking practice right and I just remember think I can't I just can't even I cannot articulate a definition and I felt the weight of my ignorance and so if anyone is feeling feeling that then that's where you are in the beginning of when you first begin conceptual work because you if you before you've had any practice well how do you H how would you just automatically be able to Define lots of things no you have to practice that

that's right yeah uh yeah yeah it it requires practice and it leads to clear Clarity and Precision in your thinking I mean you can get along in the world even if you're unable to Define many of your Concepts but you my my judgment is you get along better if you're if you have that ability to be clear and precise about about your how you define important words in your life how you define what's a friend how you define what's a loving relationship or any any number of important Concepts right yeah now one of the things

we haven't really tapped into too much is the how people frequently and by this I mean all of us distort information or leave out relevant [Music] information that doesn't serve our selfish interest indeed or our group's selfish interest so there's some sort of easy targets here so take companies that hide information that if this information were to get out into the public would show that they are causing harm to the public so therefore they're you and and but they may be pushing forward the information that they are using that is relevant so that it looks

like they're they're being reasonable so they but they're hiding this from us another example that's easy would be a prosecutor who hides exculpatory evidence yeah right and this is routinely done so you're you're hiding information that's relevant to whether this person is guilty right and you have an obligation legally to put to give that information to the other side uh so these are a couple of examples so but all of us do this so we'd have to ask ourselves any one of us well how do I distort information to fit my viewpoint let's just say

so yeah what do I ignore that I don't want to see sorry go ahead no no um you said hide information you said the there easy cases straightforward cases and those what makes them easy I'm thinking or one factor that makes them easy is that was exp an explicit decision by companies to hide this information and it's an explicit decision by a prosecutor to hide the information the exculpatory information um more Insidious in a way uh is the was the way we hide things without realizing it is uh we just don't uh we just neglect

you know what it might be the word neglect to notice or to think about the information that harms the case that we're making I I I just remember an oldtime movie in which the the guy he's in love with this woman and they meet her father who's a strict upright Old Gentleman and and the the young man says I'm in public relations and the father says and what do you do he said well did I tell people about the the company work for and all the good they're doing and the the the father says and

do you also tell the customers about the bad they're doing and the guy says um uh he's just kind of confused by the question so it's not as if he suppressed saying the bad it's just his job is to say the good and so those are the things he says and those are the things he notices and it's kind of under the surface and we do that I mean that's a fairly explicit case but we do that in our personal relationships all over the place and hard to see hard to think of uh people getting

a divorce without doing that um where they're very selective in the information they're paying attention to about what the other person did right so this is it's it's it permeates this problem permeates our lives but we can see it in other people and we can see it in Paradigm cases and in business I mean part of the concept the very concept of business is about well just making money and whatever that takes then that's we're sorry if you got we sort of ran over a bunch of people and killed them you know we we you

know it's a doge eat dog world and you know we've got to make as much money as we can so obviously we've got to hide things of course we've got to hide things it's understood that you would have to do that right and in the way that they're it's it's at the unconscious level too it's not stated right right I mean sometimes I assume that it is stated we're in people are in a room saying you know we don't want this data to get out that also of course happens right and and as I know

you know um I mean the one about companies is even is even has legal substance to it in that that's Supreme Court has ruled that companies can't engage in benevolent works if it detracts from the the amount of money they pay to shareholders because those shareholders own the company they're entitled to all the profit they can get that's kind of the legal requirement and so companies can I don't want to say quite hide behind it but can invoke that law that that legal status to justify or seem to try to justify the the uh practices

they engage in it doesn't allow them to practice to engage in illegal the law doesn't allow them to engage in illegal practices but it makes the tension between what's legal and illegal and what you hide and what you don't hide well and it's also what's implicit right what what we don't state that is there that's sort of understood indeed yeah and often there are also like you know ethical standards that we say were adhering to at the same time in these companies so this but there are so many ways to think about how we distort

information or we ignore relevant information so take a person who's living with someone who's highly abusive to that that person and the the person who's being abused is giving all kinds of excuses for the other person yeah as an example right yes but actually she's really a beautiful person she doesn't mean to be saying things to me these things to me or but he's he's good in the following ways you know so the moves that they make to avoid seeing abuse this is the Distortion of the information example it's an example that we're talking about

right to bring it a little closer to home you could say well how am I distorting for example the views of my spouse or my companion or my friends or who whatever the case may be am I seeing their views the way that they are or am I not seeing that so this so information becomes more complex the more we burrow into this so to put a cap on that to the degree that to to the degree that your ego is involved or your egocentricity is involved then you're going to be distorting the information yeah

yeah yeah yeah and uh and I don't know if it's deeper but it's it's different um the socio centricity piece comes in if I think of the kind of self-serving things people say in relation people say and believe in relation to their own country say um uh I know there are innumerable there were innumerable movies in which um people uh Rogue terrorists in another country like I remember one about Libya and they had access to a nuclear weapon or something like that and we sent in we sent in the small band of elite troops who

went in and uh rescued the the released the nuclear weapon and save the world and and I'm thinking what would you think if a band of libyans came into United states to rescue to liberate a a small cell of people who had a nuclear weapon would you say oh thank you Libya for for doing that so the the fact that we're going in I'm not saying that it was wrong to do it it might be a greater good but but it's just taken for granted that going into this other country for a good purpose uh

allows you to invade this other country it's very very strange you wouldn't allow you wouldn't countenance it if it were in the other direction right exactly that so that shows a lack of intellectual Integrity or in other words hypocrisy applying different standards to others than do to yourself yes so there are so many examples here that we can think of and by the way so I was capping that and you added sociocentrism so to I didn't sort of finish so thank you for helping me with that so the idea was this so whenever our egocentricity

or our socio centricity are involved group think so our group is the best you brought the example of nationalism which is a very significant problem internationally so that that's just one of many examples so we where we have this um we're going to have so so whenever we have either of these operating within us group think or thinking within just my own point of view then there's going to be some Distortion of information yeah right and therefore we can always say if if my ego starts to get involved I can say okay how am I

missing the information and by the way egocentricity also includes for example not valuing um your own abilities so if you're not able to accurately see right the information about yourself that is positive and this is going to have serious implications for example your mental well-being right and that's your ego centricity saying you're too dumb you're too stupid you can't do that so whenever that's involved you're going to be distorting information yeah that's a particularly nice move because it it uh it takes away some of the negativity certain kind of the negativity from egocentricity as if

you're just being selfish uh and you're doing things that are going to make you money or or give you power well you could also for egocentric reasons for do things that will result in you're getting less money and less power and doing less of the things that you that are worthwhile for you to do and that's that's a nice broadening of the concept of people's usual concept of egocentrism right and you can also for example give too much of yourself away this also has implications for mental wellbeing so let's just take a a mother who

has a number of children and works and has a husband who's not very helpful well you see there's going to be um that's just that's going to be too much for that person to manage and to say to think that you can manage that and still keep your sanity then you gota then my question will be well how are you going to manage that do you have downtime for yourself do you require two hours a day alone in your room reading with no one entering for example or take you know doing your gymnastics or whatever

you want to do you see how are you taking care of yourself so you might say well he needs that and she needs that and he needs this and they do this and I've got to do this and I've got to do this for them that's all information but there's also information about yourself that you're ignoring right right right yeah well um Gerald I think we should bring this to a close and at in the next session um focus on entered information activated knowledge and activated ignorance and get into the relationship between knowledge and information

good we'll close for today okay it's been and enlightening really VI vital and interesting and it's really nice to talk with you every session we have on this even though we've worked on these elements over and over and over again uh it's still it's still really deep and enlightening to talk about it is and thank you for those that are joining us hopefully this was helpful for you to go a little deeper and to see us working through some of these deeper Concepts so we'll see you next time thank you for joining us good night