UNDERLYING TRAITS OF CRITICAL THINKERS:
A RESPONSE TO STEPHEN NORRIS

John McPeck
The University of Western Ontario

I

The comments that I would like to make about Stephen Norris’s paper have less to do with specific conclusions which he draws, and more to do with the kind of empiricism which Norris seems to have in mind. Specifically, Norris’s use of terms such as “natural kind,” “underlying trait,” and “mental powers,” as well as his use of the Russell-Frege theory of meaning, suggests at least a methodological commitment to a reductionist empiricism of a materialist sort. I find this brand of empiricism; (a) unnecessary for helping us understand what critical thinking is, (b) implausible as a view of mental phenomena generally, and (c) methodologically ill-suited for investigating the phenomenon of critical thinking (CT).

Before criticizing Norris’s particular view, however, I would like to make it clear that there are several points which he makes about which there is no disagreement between us. For example, I agree that there is a valid place for empirical research on several of the questions surrounding the teaching of CT.

And certainly I agree with his statement that: “A minimal condition of adequacy for a theory of human learning is that its central terms refer.”¹ [I’ve never met anyone who would (or could!) deny this statement.] The crucial difference between various theorists, however, is over the kinds of things which should be refered to in a theory of learning. Many different kinds of things can satisfy the “denotation” of a term.

I think it perfectly adequate to have our central terms “refer” to human processes, acts and/or behavior. Indeed, most social scientists, educators among them, continually refer to these things as the central terms in their theories. [Recall that even B.F. Skinner was content to understand behavior at a macro-level.] Norris, however, seems to want, or require, that our central terms be “natural kind terms” which refer to “underlying traits,” or even more basic entities than these — possibly brain processes. However, even Paul Churchland, who is cited by Norris, would admit that modern brain science is nowhere near understanding thinking at this level. And even if it did, it is not clear what implications it would have for our teaching of Jack or Jill.

II

The major point that I would like to make here about Norris’s program, however, has to do with his suggestion that critical thinking consists of some kind of yet-to-be-discovered “underlying trait(s),” and that it is the business of science to discover what these are. Norris’s overall position on CT, in fact, might be viewed as a call for empirical research into the discovery and understanding of the “underlying traits” which make CT possible. The basic question that I pose to Norris’s view is: what reasons can be given for thinking that CT has an underlying trait?

The point of this question can, perhaps, be more easily understood if we consider the example of “creativity.” Do creative cooks, engineers, dancers, trumpeters, and scientists have some “trait,” as such, in common? And is this trait an “underling trait” that could be discovered by scientists? To simply assume that there is an underlying trait in all these cases begs the question I am raising here.

In my view there are no good reasons for believing that there is an “underlying trait” for creativity or critical thinking. My argument would have the same form as Wittgenstein’s arguments against essences for common nouns. Recall his asking us to consider what all “games” have in common, and then his suggesting that it is no more than a “family resemblance,” where no single feature is common to all. Similarly, I would suggest, that all creative acts have no more than a family resemblance between them, and the same for critical thinking. At the descriptive level we find nothing in common, no essence, which all creative and/or critical acts possess in common. So we have no reason to surmise, much less to think, that there is some “underlying trait” in common.

Let us, for a moment, set aside critical thinking, which is clearly a mental phenomenon, and consider a similar problem for physical space-occupying properties. I recall, for example, Hilary Putnam arguing that:

The common idea that there is some one molecular structure (or whatever) common to all objects which look red ‘under normal conditions’ has no foundation: consider the difference between the physical structure of a red star, and a red book (and the difference in what we count as ‘normal conditions’ in the two cases).²

I am suggesting that if it is the case (as Putnam argues) that even red, and red objects, have no underlying structure in common, then the chances of critical thinking having an “underlying trait” in common is yet more remote. This is why I find Norris’s research agenda unpromising.

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¹ Stephen P. Norris, “Bachelors, Buckyballs, and Ganders: Seeking Analogues for Definitions of ‘Critical Thinker’,” in Philosophy of Education 1992, ed. H.A. Alexander (Champaign, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1993).

² Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason (Cambridge, England and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 230.