Introduction
Andrew Gurevich
Critical Thinking: An Introduction
“Never trust a brain. Especially your own” – Jesse Richardson
Arguing is as old as communicating. As long as people have been thinking, they have been disagreeing with the thinking of other people. We “make sense” of the world in different ways: the relational and the rational, the traditional and the innovative, the scientific and the intuitive, the individual and the communal, etc. Often these ways of seeing, believing, and acting come into direct conflict with one another. The root causes of these disagreements are the study of history, philosophy, political science, anthropology, sociology, and psychology (among others). People argue about resources. They argue about values, morals, and cultural/religious customs. They argue about the interpretation and application of law. They argue about access, opportunity, identity, and community. They argue about important things and petty things. They argue to win. They argue to avoid losing. They argue out of ego, fear, privilege, and desperation.
People argue for many different reasons. But one underlying thread is that we usually argue over things about which we are passionate. We spend the time, energy, and resources necessary to engage in this difficult practice because we are usually invested in the outcomes. This is a good and bad thing, as we shall see going forward. For now, let us just say that passion is a mighty wind that is as likely to push us off course as it is to sustain us in turbulent seas. But we must remember that in academic argument, passion, alone, cannot get us to the destination. As the poet Alexander Pope reminds us, “On life’s great ocean, diversely we sail. Reason is the card (map), but passion is the gale (wind).”
For our purposes, in the study of rhetoric (the art and science of persuasion), often the causes of disagreement are a lack of credible information on one or more sides of the argument. Once the relevant, authoritative information is provided, the argument is settled and the sides are reconciled. At least that’s the way it used to work. Or the way it should have always worked. But today we have a different problem.
We live in an age of instant access to endless streams of information. According to a recent study, social media is used by 85% of the world’s 5.27 billion mobile phone users. China, with 1,021 million users, is the country with the most social media users as of 2023. India ranks second with 755 million, and the United States comes in third with 302 million users. Since 2012, the Internet has doubled in size roughly every two years. And it is not slowing down anytime soon. If you stored all of that information on old school data DVDs, and then stacked them on top of one another, the stack would reach to the moon and back nearly seventeen times (or wrap around the earth 300 times).
We now have more immediate access to more terabytes of information, across more fields of interest and study, than any other time in human history. As of 2022, there are over 2 Billion individual websites on the Internet. And that is just the individual, active websites themselves. When we look at the actual content on those websites, the numbers jump astronomically higher. The New York Times Article Archive alone, for instance, now contains over 13 million articles total. And that’s just the content living in one of the above mentioned 2 Billion websites. And remember, this number will double over the next two years. That’s roughly 25 million new websites a day between when this OER text was written and when you are reading it. One study has the total number of books ever published in the world to be somewhere around a paltry 210 million in comparison.
This is all happening at lighting speed, in comparison to the longer, slower historical arc of human knowledge, deliberation, and reflective wisdom. In the last 30 years, there has been a greater transfer of information across the planet than in any other time in human history combined. You now have more access to more knowledge in the palm of your hands than Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Dorothy Vaughan, Carl Sagan, Maya Angelou, or Jane Goodall could ever image having the ability to engage all at once.
Have a look at this video clip from the Today Show from 1994 that shows how unfamiliar the coming digital revolution was to most of us just a few decades ago.
Or this clip from 1995 where television host David Letterman clearly struggles to understand what it is that Bill Gates does for a living and how individuals would ever need or want to spend any of their time on a computer.
The point, here, is not to make fun of these television hosts or to suggest they were personally ignorant or unaware of the coming digital revolution. The point is to show how much we ALL were unaware of what was coming. And the current AI revolution will likely be as disruptive and transformative over the next thirty years as this transition was before it. Perhaps even more so. The point of education is to prepare people to meaningfully and productively engage their futures. But these video clips demonstrate that just a few decades ago, most of us had no real idea what the future would look like. Think about it. People entering the education system today will be retiring around the year 2083. Nobody has any idea what the world will look like at that point. Most of us can barely comprehend what the world will look like in five years, or ten. So how are we supposed to educate people to inhabit a future we cannot, ourselves, comprehend?
The way forward may require us to first go backwards: to some fundamental principles of philosophy, ethics, and human psychology. The future will likely be a mix of the very old and the very new. The best of what our ancestors could discover about the world and the mind, combined with meaningful, emergent innovation and collaborative problem solving. As much as the world has changed, some things will forever be the same. We are still human. We are still a strange mixture of rationality, emotion, experience, and memory. We still need community to survive and thrive. We are still driven by wonder, curiosity, and awe. So that means we still need to learn how to better listen, think, argue, and compromise with one another. We have the tools. But we also have many potential pitfalls.
While there have been many opportunities and advantages to living in this emerging information economy, there have also been some serious problems. The quality, consistency, and reliability of this bottomless ocean of information, for instance, is almost impossible to calculate. It is also almost impossible to keep up with a news cycle that never sleeps. The rivers of knowledge are often so polluted with “fake news,” conspiracy theories, partisan opinions, and other such rhetorical toxins as to render them unsafe to drink even before their waters reach our thirsty devices. This leads to a drought even in the midst of a hurricane. People feel isolated from one another, even as they are more “connected” than ever before. They spend more and more time online and report feeling less and less satisfied by the experience; leading to a deluge of bitterness, cynicism, and mistrust on the part of the general public and average citizens with regard to how they view these digital spaces, how they view one another, and ultimately even how they view themselves.
And in an age when information, not knowledge, is power, those who control the access, flow, and content of the data stream have a disproportionate amount of power compared to the rest of the us. It was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who said, “All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” In other words, for all of those 2 Billion websites, there are a shockingly few number of perspectives that get the most coverage, funding, attention, and spread. What is not platformed often far outweighs what is. Also, predictably, those on the margins of this new information economy tend to suffer the most from its abuses and misfirings, as they often do in industrial economies, as well.
Even with all of this unprecedented access to information, we seem to be arguing with one another more than ever in an atmosphere of increasing hostility and distrust, with fewer spaces for genuine dialogue, mutual exploration, and collaborative problem-solving. In fact, research shows that the increased access to more volumes of information is actually forcing people to use less and less of that very information to make up their minds on the many complex problems we face. Some data shows that most people take between 7-10 seconds to make a first impression about another person or a topic, and rarely move from that initial impression once it is fully formed.
Many people are exhausted, suffering from information overload, only skimming the headlines and popular memes, instead of digging deeper into the complex layers of a given topic and giving it the time it probably deserves to fully understand before making a judgment. The echo chamber effect, where Internet algorithms are specifically tuned to show us only the ideas and information we already agree with, provides even more opportunities for this unchecked bias to creep in and take over our thinking. It becomes increasingly difficult to think clearly, listen empathetically, and respond authentically when everyone is talking at once and there is no clear way to sort one voice from the next.
Indeed, some interesting questions immediately arise when we consider the ways people now interact with one other within this digital “hall of mirrors” that the Information Age creates and sustains:
How does one clearly, calmly, and confidently navigate these growing storms of data, opinion, and spin to find a stable path to greater knowledge and understanding of a given topic?
What is it to think methodically and critically in a world that seems to demand our immediate emotional response to every clickbait topic under the sun, well before we know enough to make a reasonable judgment?
With such a unending stream of uncritical information hacking away at our fraying attention through every digital device in our possession, when and how do we create the spaces for our curiosity and wonder to bloom and lead us into deeper knowledge and understanding of the world around us?
How can we think critically and creatively in academic contexts to incorporate logical, rational, cultural, and even ecological perspectives into our thinking and arguments?
How does we understand our own subjectivity in relation to the topics and ideas we engage and argue with others about, and use that knowledge to bolster our rhetorical strengths and minimize our blindspots and unwarranted prejudices?
In this Open Educational Resource (OER) text, we will explore these questions (and many others) and examine how our intellectual ancestors have dealt with such issues over the years. We will also explore the ways in which this modern age presents new challenges, and opportunities, to think about our own thinking. We will study the emerging science on where our thoughts come from, and also how rhetorical studies can equip us to discern when to trust our own brains and when to challenge ourselves, ask questions, and seek other alternatives to our own understanding. The world is often an opinionated and messy place. We need to develop the proper tools to help us navigate these increasingly complex, crowded, and confusing spaces. This text is intended to help us do exactly that. The first, and most important, of these tools is the ability to actively listen to one another with openness, patience, curiosity, and respect.
This text is also, at least partially, a writing textbook geared towards enhancing students’ abilities in rhetoric and composition. Writing is a tool for personal, academic, and professional empowerment. The essay form, itself, is a wonderful piece of linguistic technology to use in further educating oneself about a topic, any topic. It is a process by which we first attempt to increase our own understanding of a given topic, through entering into a substantive dialogue with the ideas of others, and then sharing those ideas with the larger world. The process itself is transformative and by entering into it, we all become both students and teachers of the world’s wisdom and knowledge.
In this text, we will be reading, watching, discussing, and writing about a variety of different “arguments.” We often argue about what we care the most about, what we value, what is closest to us. It is important at the very beginning for us to establish a tone of mutual respect and academic focus. We are not here to fight with one another or to attempt to convince each other to be for or against any particular position. I intend to set that tone in my interactions with you as readers, colleagues, students, and fellow critical thinkers. And I ask that you follow suit and do all you can to be decent, respectful, and kind to one another. There will be times when you disagree, and in academia, these are opportunities for all sides to expand in awareness, knowledge, and respect for the other. If ever in this digital text you feel like the tone of the material or discussions are not providing an atmosphere for fair, inclusive, integrative participation, please let me know.
Mostly in this text we will be exploring how to think, not what to think. We are exploring how we, as humans, make or discover meaning and create value in and through our complex cognitive and rhetorical processes. We will also be exploring how arguments are constructed, academically and socially, to evaluate their logic, credibility, emotional appeal, and overall strength.
By the end of this course, students will be able to meet the OWEAC Outcomes for WR 122.
