Vol. 73 No. 3 — May/June 1992 —
Knowing How to Think
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Given that people are thinking all the time,
is there a right way and a wrong way to go about it? Here
we examine some guides to more logical thinking. It can deliver
us from manipulation, and lead to a happier and healthier
life ...
Next to breathing, thinking is arguably the most common
of all human activities. We eat and sleep only at intervals;
we walk or talk only part of the time. But as long as we are
conscious, we think constantly. The ability to do so in the
abstract - to have ideas - is what sets homo sapiens
apart from the rest of creation. Descartes spoke for
an entire species when he wrote, "I think, therefore I am."
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, our very lives consist
of what we are thinking all day long. Yet, considering how
vital the mental processes are to human existence, it is remarkable
how little is done to ensure that they are effectively exercised.
We are told a great deal about what to think, but
very little about how to think. This may be because
most people regard thinking as something that comes naturally.
They would no more seek instruction on how to use their minds
than on how to use their veins.
But talking is a natural function too; and just as people
can learn to express themselves more clearly, they can learn
to think more clearly. The first recorded attempt to teach
reasoning skills was among the philosophers of ancient Greece.
Aristotle, for one, propounded certain formal laws of logic.
These have since been widely disputed, but they formed an
indispensable starting-point for the study of how to think.
Aristotle's work was carried on by scholars in the Middle
Ages who developed a list of approaches to reasoning to be
avoided. They called these fallacies - errors which have the
deceptive appearance of making sense. They gave them Latin
names which make them sound forbiddingly "intellectual." In
fact, fallacies are common in everyday life. We are liable
to slip into fallacious reasoning, or have our own thinking
affected by it, at any time.
Take the fallacy the medieval scholars called secudum
quid , which is nothing more than what we today would
call jumping to conclusions. We visit a strange town and see
two men reeling about on the streets; from these two instances
we conclude that the town is full of drunkards. "People in
this town are very rude, too," we think after being treated
brusquely by the only local sales clerk we meet.
Gross over-generalizations like this may seem harmless,
but they can lead to serious damage socially and politically.
When applied to groups, they create misleading stereotypes.
Two members of such- and-such a group are lazy and unreliable,
therefore they are all lazy and unreliable; three members
of another group are charged with stealing, therefore they
are all criminals. There is a murder in an ethnic neighbourhood;
we are frightened ever to go there, because everybody there
is a potential murderer. It is from such crude labelling that
vicious racial and sectarian prejudices arise.
A related over-generalization is the assumption that a localized
and temporary opinion or sentiment represents a universal
principle - that what we deem to be true here and now is going
to be true everywhere and forever. This is often accompanied
by the belief that what one deems to be good for oneself is
good for the whole society.
Over-generalizations are the lazy man's substitute for rigorous
thought, and mental sloth may be the only explanation for
how widely some of them are accepted. In the 1950s, the press
critic A.J . Liebling summarized the American newspapers'
approach to foreign news this way: "Man go church, good man,
no lie. Man not go church, man bad, lie. Communists bad, whatever
they say lie." Scores of millions of people went along unquestioningly
with that mindless line.
Many American lives were then being ruined by the over-
generalization which guided Senator Joseph McCarthy's fanatical
hunt for Communists: "If it waddles like a duck and it quacks
like a duck, it must be a duck." The Senator and his henchmen
raised to a high art the fallacious theory of guilt by association.
Smith had lunch with Jones, who once attended a meeting of
a Communist front group. Therefore both Jones and Smith are
Communists.
Making cock-eyed connections, and the fallacy of 'you're a fine one to talk'
Guilt by association incorporates erroneous correspondence,
the assumption that a thing that has certain attributes in
common with another will resemble it in all respects. If you
were to believe that, you might also believe that whales,
being mammals, can walk. It leads to the kind of thinking
that ascribes a uniformity of opinion to every single member
of a race, a religion, a sect, or a nation. Demagogues on
personal power trips are only too happy to take advantage
of this error to pretend that they speak for their entire
group, which is of one monolithic mind.
Guilt by association also has elements of the fallacy in
which ideas and things are mixed up with personalities. You
may think, " That charity can't be a good cause because the
man who runs it is an egotistical publicity hound." In fact,
his lust for fame has nothing to do with his ability to run
a charity, or with its worthiness. An awareness of this fallacy
is handy in making judgments in politics, in which personalities
are often confused with issues. You don't like that politician's
appearance or his way of speaking. Therefore you reject his
policies out of hand.
Personalities also come into play in what might be called
the " you're a fine one to talk" fallacy. Under its spell
people may absolve themselves of their faults on the specious
grounds that others are just as bad as they are, or worse.
A wife says she wishes her husband would not leave his socks
on the bedroom floor. He retorts: "Yeah? And what about the
dent you put in the car?" which is irrelevant to the question.
Such cock-eyed connections are often made in political debates,
deliberately or otherwise. They can be fatal in business,
in which the management that concludes " we're no worse than
anybody else" is courting bankruptcy.
Among the other fallacies that rest on irrelevancies is
circulus in probando - arguing in circles. You
can think in circles, too, without stating an argument aloud.
Circular reasoning conveniently supplies its own authority.
Someone might declare that Thackeray was a greater novelist
than Dickens. Why? Because the most discerning critics say
so. And who are the most discerning critics? Those discerning
enough to discern that Thackeray was a greater novelist than
Dickens, that's who!
Thinking in circles often entails joining an intellectual
herd charging round and round. Everybody thinks such and such;
it must be so for the simple reason that everybody thinks
that it is so. A variation of this is basing a conclusion
on an unprovable assumption . Fowler's Modern English
Usage gives a grisly and ridiculous example: that fox
hunting is not cruel because the fox enjoys the fun.
Baseless conclusions are sometimes palmed off as "self-evident
truths." The phrase is a contradiction in terms since the
word " evident" implies the presence of signs that point unmistakably
to a conclusion. The less verifiable the "self-evident truth,"
the more fiercely those who subscribe to it will attack anyone
who dares question it.
One tactic for defending a flawed piece of reasoning is
to cite the endorsement of some prominent person or book.
Of course, the validity of opinions does not necessarily depend
on the fame or eminence of those who hold them. The principle
applies equally to self-appointed gurus and impressive-sounding
statistics, which can always be misinterpreted or deliberately
skewed to support a certain cause. In his Guides to Straight
Thinking , Stuart Chase quotes a sign in a British school
that got to the heart of the matter: "The teacher could be
wrong. Think for yourselves."
'It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so'
In our attempts to think for ourselves, we should refuse
to be included in declarations that "everybody knows" something
or other. Everybody else might indeed know it, but a critical
thinker will withhold acknowledgement of a fact until it has
been demonstrated satisfactorily. Similarly, if a speaker
says that "most experts agree" on something, we have the right
to ask: What experts? What precisely have they agreed on?
Such challenges can be important because, as Bertrand Russell
once observed, "Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted
on man have come through people feeling quite certain about
something which, in fact, was false."
"It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so,"
Josh Billings wrote. But how are we to distinguish between
what is so and what "ain't?" Since people are always citing
"the facts" to support their points of view, it helps to know
what separates a fact from a mere notion. A few years back
the California Department of Education defined a fact as "an
understanding based on confirmed observations and inferences,
and ... subject to test or rejection." No one can unilaterally
create a fact to fit their opinions, feelings or prejudices,
as people frequently try to do.
Facts are elusive at the best of times. The great Canadian
explorer and writer Vilhjalmur Stefansson illustrated the
point by telling of a man coming into a house and saying,
"There is a red cow in the front yard." Stefansson pondered
the possibilities of error: "The observer may have confused
the sex of the animal. Perhaps it was an ox. Or if not the
sex, the age may have been misjudged, and it may have been
a heifer. The man may have been colour-blind, and the cow
... may not have been red. And even if it was a red cow, the
dog may have seen her the instant our observer turned his
back, and by the time he told us she was in the front yard,
she may in reality have been vanishing in a cloud of dust
down the road."
Because information is so fallible, scientists take five
steps in attempting to establish what qualifies as knowledge
and what does not: (1) asking questions; (2) making observations;
(3) reporting results; (4) answering questions arising from
those results; (5) revising assumptions in the light of the
answers. Even then, they do not look for certainties, but
for high probabilities. A scientist will say, "The evidence
supports this hypothesis." He will not say: "This is the truth."
You can use the five-step system in your own efforts to
think more logically, and also to assess the thoughts of others.
Can they stand up to questioning and review? Have the assumptions
implicit in them been revised to take account of the latest
developments?
Some fairly reliable signals exist to indicate when people
are on shaky logical ground. One is that they will refuse
to listen to contrary arguments or evidence that might spoil
their hypotheses. If forced to listen, they are likely to
treat contrary arguments or facts not as challenges to the
validity of their conclusions, but as attacks on their probity
or dignity. In the marginal notes to a speech, an old Member
of Parliament is said to have written: "Weak point. Emote!"
High on the list of fallacious tricks of rhetoric is one
called argumentum ad populum , meaning an argument
appealing to popular passions. It can usually be spotted by
the splashing around of emotive abstractions like honour,
dignity, and pride. You can be reasonably sure that you are
being exposed to this type of propaganda if the message is
couched in simplistic unitary terms: there is one problem,
one solution, one indisputable body of evidence. Either there
is one monstrous enemy, or there are enemies everywhere. In
either case, the enemies all have the same traits.
The ability to detect a fallacious argument is the critical
thinker's primary defence against demagoguery and brain-washing
in advertising, politics and other public affairs. In a plea
for the teaching of reasoning skills in grade schools, Toronto
author and journalist Erna Paris wrote in The Globe and
Mail : "Imagine a society in which children were taught
to distinguish argument from emotion, and to evaluate information
according to the quality of the evidence backing it up! We
would still be faced with prejudice and a stubborn human unwillingness
to see the other person's point of view ... But more of us
would be equipped to resist the opinion manipulators, the
weavers of superstition, and the propagandists with political
or other agendas."
How to avoid mistaking our impressions for the real thing
In the absence of such teaching except in specialized courses
in philosophy, ordinary people must rely largely on horse
sense to assure that they practise logic themselves and detect
the lack of it in public discourse. There are, to be sure,
a few books on the subject, and the larger encyclopedias have
articles on logic describing the various fallacies and other
intellectual tools. In broad terms, however, no one can go
wrong by questioning all generalizations, looking for supporting
evidence for every assertion made, and being on guard against
extremes in thinking, whether in others or oneself.
On the personal side of the question, we would not be human
if we did not occasionally allow our minds to go to extremes,
if only when we are hurt or angry. The surest way to avoid
extremes is to be aware of the danger of thinking in absolute
terms.
Absolutism thrives on words like "is," "are," "be" and "am,"
which lead people to confuse their interior judgments with
exterior reality. "Statements such as 'this picture is beautiful'
or 'the outlook is good' or 'this steak is overcooked' are
not statements about the picture, the outlook or the steak,
but the speaker's reaction to them," S.I. Hayakawa wrote in
his Language in Thought and Action . People are
naturally inclined to mistake their impression of a thing
or event for the thing or event itself - to mistake the map
for the territory. "But, of course, no one can get outside
the limitations of one's nervous system to see reality directly
and absolutely objectively. If we could do this, we would
never be fooled by magicians or optical illusions, and we
would never misinterpret a situation."
By avoiding "is" and other absolute words, you can clarify
your thinking. The distinguished semanticist Dr. Albert Ellis
once gave some examples of how much more precisely and completely
thoughts are constructed if one abstains from the verb form
"to be": "John is lethargic and unhappy." / "John appears
lethargic and unhappy in the office." / "John is bright and
cheerful." / "John appears bright and cheerful at the beach."
/ "Mary is smart." / "Mary scored 160 on her IQ test."
Absolutist thinking seems to be a natural product of western
culture , with its black-and-white view of the universe. Our
legal system decrees that a defendant is guilty or not guilty;
we vote either for one candidate or another; all too often,
we can see only two ways of doing things, a right way and
a wrong way; we are inclined to divide our tastes crudely
into what we like and do not like. In relations with people
who are not of our own kind, we think in terms of "them and
us."
Absolute judgments tend to strengthen 'the power of negative thinking'
Aristotle's system of logic, which for centuries guided
western thought, asserts that everything must be one thing
or another. Like a light switch that is either on or off,
it makes no allowance for degrees. This encourages what semanticists
call "two-valued orientation." A typical two-valued judgment
might be, "He who is not with me is against me." It does not
contemplate the possibility that he could be with you on one
issue and against you on another, or be with you at one time
but against you at another when the circumstances have changed.
This all-or-nothing approach gives rise to childish judgments:
" That is good, this is bad; they are right, the others are
wrong; he is stupid, she is smart." It establishes an intellectual
regime of " allness" in which people falling into certain
categories are all deemed to think, feel or act in the same
stereotypical way.
"Allness" can also affect one's thinking about oneself,
as in, " They are all against me." It is associated with a
lot of other absolute words: " Nothing ever goes
right for me. I'll always be a failure. I
never make any progress. Everything is falling
apart for me. And nobody cares. Everybody
is out for himself these days."
Absolutist thinking tends to reinforce "the power of negative
thinking" because it sets up unrealistic expectations. In
their personal relations, people under its influence expect
others to treat them well or badly all the time, instead of
treating them well some of the time, badly some of the time,
and neither well nor badly some of the time.
Instead of seeing their own lives and those of others as
processes undergoing constant change, they see them as static.
Writing of a theoretical young man who has been going through
a hard time and concludes, "I'll never get over this," Stuart
Chase commented: "He thinks this unfortunate 'time' is all
'times.' Blinded by absolutes , he cannot see other 'times.'
He believes his case is identical with all past and future
cases in his life." He does not realize that "what has happened
can never exactly repeat itself. No two contexts are the same."
The fallacious notion that what has happened before will
happen again generates "pre-emptive thinking" intended to
prevent its recurrence. Thus a young woman who has broken
up with two or three men becomes convinced that, as far as
men are concerned, she is "a failure;" because she believes
this, all her relationships with men do indeed fail.
Being about as happy as we make up our minds to be
Self-defeating thoughts can hold us back from meeting our
full potential, e.g.: "I won't approach the boss with that
idea of mine because I'm sure to make a fool of myself." In
this regard we would be wise to keep in mind Hayakawa's caution
that what we think about anything - including ourselves -
is not the reality of it: "One's self-concept is not oneself.
It omits a great deal about oneself."
What you think of yourself and the world around you can
literally be hazardous to your health. In recent years, experts
on stress have determined that a person's self-concept plays
a key role in how much stress he or she can take. If people
jump to conclusions, take things personally, or fall for other
fallacies, they will act as though everything around them
is dangerous. This triggers the instinctive fight-or-flight
response which causes unhealthy stress.
"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds
to be," Abraham Lincoln said. Despite all the scientific,
technological, and social advances made since Lincoln's time,
his words remain true . External conditions can cause misery,
of course, but the spiritual wellbeing of ordinary individuals
depends more on their state of mind than on their circumstances.
That state of mind can be improved by efforts to think more
clearly, because by doing so we can eliminate baseless self-doubts
and fears.
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