Critical thinking dispositions
Modern argumentation theory is a synthesis of several older research programmes; one of the most important of these is the critical thinking movement. From a trickle at mid century, by the 1980s this had grown into a major programme of educational reform, focused on improving the thinking abilities of schoolchildren, students, and society at large.
For most theorists of critical thinking, such abilities comprise not just a skillset, but also tendencies, propensities, or inclinations people have to think in particular ways in particular contexts... [which] are not the same as, or reducible to, either formal rules of good thinking or specific behaviors or patterns. of behavior.(Siegel, 1999, p. 220)
Such dispositions are seen as essential to the successful internalization of critical thinking techniques: they present a response to the “transfer problem”, that of ensuring that learners go on to use their newly acquired skills outside the classroom (Bereiter, 1995; Bowell and Kingsbury, 2015). Different theorists propose different lists of dispositions, but most such lists include “open- mindedness, fair-mindedness, independent-mindedness, an inquiring attitude, and respect for others in group inquiry and deliberation” (Bailin and Siegel, 2003, p. 183). These dispositions sound more than a little like virtues, an identity some theorists make explicit. Indeed, Sharon Bailin and Mark Battersby argue that intellectual virtues are superior to dispositions in a characterization of critical thinking, since “virtues are not psychological reifications added on to the skills of reasoning, but are inherent to the practice of inquiry and come out of appreciation of the nature of the practice” (Bailin and Battersby, 2007, p. 113).They conclude that virtues are better placed to capture the intrinsic value of reason. However, none of the virtues they propose sounds that much like humility.
Perhaps the most overt invocation of virtue language by a major proponent of critical thinking lies in the work of Richard Paul. Paul draws a distinction between weak- and strong-sense critical thinking.The latter comprises
(a) an ability to question one's own framework of thought, (b) an ability to reconstruct sympathetically and imaginatively the strongest versions of points of view and frameworks of thought opposed to one's own, and (c) an ability to reason dialectically (multilogically) to determine when one's own point of view is weakest and when an opposing point of view is strongest.
(Paul, 1987, p. 377)
As we saw in the previous sections, such abilities can plausibly be seen to depend, amongst other virtues, upon intellectual humility. Indeed, this is a relationship which Paul makes explicit: “To cultivate the kind of intellectual independence implied in the concept of strong sense critical thinking, we must foster intellectual (epistemological) humility, courage, integrity, perseverance, empathy, and fairmindedness” (Paul, 2000, p. 166). Paul defines intellectual humility as “a consciousness of the limits of one's knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one's native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively; sensitivity to bias, prejudice and limitations of one's viewpoint” and a “lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight into the logical foundations, or lack of such foundations, of one's beliefs” (ibid.).
In a helpful comparative survey of several distinct sets of critical thinking dispositions, the educational theorist Ron Ritchhart proposes six groups of dispositions: “the disposition to be open-minded, to be curious, to be metacognitive, to be strategic, and to be investigative and inquiring, and to reason and use evidence” (Ritchhart, 2001, p. 148). Paul is the only theorist in Ritchhart's survey to propose intellectual humility as a critical thinking disposition.
Ritchhart classifies it as borderline between two of his categories: the dispositions to be “metacognitive” and “a truth seeker” (Ritchhart, 2001, p. 149). Paul's conception of strong sense critical thinking certainly stresses metacognitive factors: indeed questioning, or at least reflecting upon, one's own framework of thought is close to a definition of metacognition. Nor is Paul alone in linking metacognition with intellectual humility. Kidd's understanding of intellectual humility requires individuals to reflect upon their own cognition, since they must be “alert to the ways that... complex agential, collective, and deep conditions underlie and shape their intellectual confidence” (Kidd, 2016, p. 396). Some virtue epistemologists have made stronger claims for metacognition. For Jerry Green, it is a virtue in its own right (Green, 2019, p. 120). But for Christopher Lepock metacognition is a necessary component of any intellectual virtue—and specifically of intellectual humility (Lepock, 2014, p. 43). Metacognition also has much in common with Jonathan Adler's account of open-mindedness, as “an appreciation of our fallibility” that takes the form ofa second-order (or “meta”) attitude toward one's beliefs as believed, and not just toward the specific proposition believed, just as fallibilism is a second-order doubt about the perfection of one's believing, not a doubt about the truth of any specific belief.
(Adler, 2004, p. 130)
But James Spiegel argues, I think convincingly, that Adler's account should be understood as defining humility rather than open-mindedness (Spiegel, 2012, p. 34).Without taking a stance on any of these specific claims, it does seem reasonable to conclude that the traditional virtue of intellectual humility is closely allied to metacognition, and thereby to critical thinking.
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