ON DEFINING “CRITICAL THINKER”
AND JUSTIFYING CRITICAL THINKING

Harvey Siegel
University of Miami

I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on these two fine papers. I cannot address the many challenging points raised by Christine McCarthy and Stephen P. Norris in the brief space available to me. Instead, I shall concentrate on two fundamental questions raised by their discussions.

I. How Should “Critical Thinking” be Defined?

After explaining the differences between nominal kind, strict natural kind, and non-strict natural kind terms, Norris asks which sort of term “critical thinker” might be. His answer is that “critical thinker” should be taken to be a non-strict natural kind term, one “whose extension…[is] determined by the presence or absence of underlying traits,” but which is “constrained by… educational values.” This is lucky for me, since I regard “critical thinker” as just such a term: the skills of reason assessment and the attitudes, dispositions and character traits constitutive of the “critical spirit” are the real, underlying traits whose presence or absence determine the extension of the term; they also reflect fundamental educational values, some of which (namely those connected with “reason,” “reasonableness” and “rationality”) are semantically related to the definiendum.¹

But I am not completely persuaded by Norris’ argument for this position. The argument is that taking “critical thinker” to be any other sort of term will hamper both educational research and the educational effort to foster the development of critical thinking in students. He insists that an adequate definition of “critical thinker” must be capable of informing empirical research, and that philosophical theories of critical thinking should form “the basis of empirical critical thinking research” by providing hypotheses to test and explanations of the results of such tests. Indeed, he suggests “that for definitions of ‘critical thinker’ to be significant they must be capable of serving as the basis of empirical research on the nature and fostering of critical thinkers.” I see four problems here.

First, Norris’ necessary condition is too strong. A definition of “critical thinker” can be significant even if it is incapable of serving as the basis of empirical research. Such a definition can serve a variety of philosophical purposes — articulating an ideal, clarifying an underlying concept, relating “critical thinker” to other relevant notions, providing a basis for justificatory arguments, etc. — and in this sense be perfectly “significant” — without having the connection to empirical research which Norris wants. (Compare the definitions of other philosophical terms, such as “knowledge” or “justice”, on this score.) I am not suggesting that that connection is a bad thing, but only that failing to have it does not force us to regard a proposed definition of “critical thinker” as insignificant.

Second, Norris slides between two claims: that definitions of “critical thinker” must meet his necessary condition, and that philosophical theories of critical thinking must do so. If the relevant issue is not what sort of term “critical thinker” is, but rather what properties a conception or theory of critical thinking must attribute to such a thinker, then Norris’ concentration on definition and the philosophy of language might profitably be replaced by more epistemological or meta-theoretical concerns. The theorists Norris discusses are more concerned with the latter than the former; he himself writes that it is “philosophers’ theorizing” (rather than their definitions) which should form the basis of critical thinking research. If so, then what sort of term “critical thinker” is is rather less important than he suggests.

Third, “critical thinker” is not an ordinary noun; unlike most nouns, it refers to an educational ideal. Consequently, it may be that no one falls within its extension. Further, realizing the ideal, and so falling within the term’s extension, is (unlike most nouns) a matter of degree. That “critical thinker” fails to denote (if it does), or denotes only to some degree, is not necessarily a defect. It is quite legitimate to regard a conception of “critical thinker” as a conception of an ideal, which no one fully meets — in which case the term does not denote, or denotes only to some degree — but which is nevertheless capable of guiding educational affairs in so far as they are intended to bring about a fuller realization of the ideal. If so, then Norris has not established that it is necessary that “critical thinker” in fact denote “if we want any theory that employs the term as a central concept to have anything to do with educating people.”

Fourth: none of this suggests that the sort of empirical research Norris is calling for is misconceived or unimportant. He is right that it would be a good thing, given our desire to foster critical thinking, for philosophers to think about the empirical implications of their theories of critical thinking. But, contra Norris, it is not necessary for them to do so. It would be so only if the only aim of philosophy of education is the guiding or informing of educational research, and the concomitant improvement of educational practice. But this is not the only aim of philosophy of education or of critical thinking theorizing. Other aims include the further articulation of educational ideals like “critical thinker,” the development of philosophically more adequate theories of critical thinking, and the achievement of a more refined understanding of the nature of educational aims and the philosophical constraints on them. For these aims, it is not clear that Norris’ call to “go empirical” is correct.

McCarthy’s paper introduces an important distinction which promises to shed considerable light on the definitions of “critical thinker” and “critical thinking” and on the nature of critical thinking. She distinguishes between “episodic” and “dispositional” accounts of critical thinking; she criticizes the latter, and argues for the former. She rightly notes that the dispositions I and others associate with critical thinking are “characteristics of the person, the thinker, not features of the thinking itself.” But the aim of an account of critical thinking, she claims, is the specification of the characteristics of “the thinking itself.” Since the thinking itself does not have the relevant dispositions, a dispositional account of critical thinking must, she argues, be mistaken: “While a ‘disposition to act’ in certain ways can be considered a necessary condition of a person’s being a critical thinker, there are several reasons why such a disposition ought not to be taken as a necessary condition for ‘critical thinking’ per se.”

If one assumes, as McCarthy does, that an account of critical thinking must be confined to “the thinking itself,” and so must not be concerned with the characteristics of critical thinkers or with the necessary conditions “of a person’s being a critical thinker,” then McCarthy’s conclusion follows unproblematically, for the dispositions under consideration are indeed dispositions of persons, not of episodes of thinking. But this assumption is contentious, since most theorists of critical thinking do not restrict their accounts to “the thinking itself.” Those accounts include as well treatment of what is involved in a person’s being a critical thinker. The reason they do — at least in my own case — is that an account which so restricts itself will be unable to do justice to critical thinking as an educational ideal. This is because critical thinking is an ideal of persons, not of episodes of thinking. My account, in its emphasis on the reason assessment component of critical thinking, recognizes the episodic nature of critical thinking: an episode of thinking qualifies as critical if it appropriately reflects the evidential force of reasons. But it also recognizes that, from the point of view of philosophy of education, it is important to be clear on what is involved in a person’s being a critical thinker. It is to this issue that dispositions speak. McCarthy agrees that the dispositional account is relevant here. So there is less disagreement between McCarthy and advocates of a dispositional account of critical thinking than she suggests. She claims that I “conflate the dispositional traits of the thinker and the notion of critical thinking per se.” But, as the passages of Educating Reason which she cites makes clear, I do not conflate these; rather, I argue that both are necessary for an account of critical thinking to account fully for its status as an educational ideal. For this, an episodic account of “the thinking itself” is insufficient.

II. How Should Critical Thinking be Justified?

Here I must, regretfully, limit myself to three brief remarks, which fail to do justice to McCarthy’s stimulating discussion.

First, McCarthy argues that critical thinking, conceived episodically, should be justified instrumentally: “one should ‘think critically’ simply because that sort of thinking is efficacious.” She eschews what she regards as “unproductive analytical justificatory traps” aimed at justifying a dispositional account of critical thinking, and criticizes my attempts to lay such traps. My reply has three parts: (a) If my argument above is adequate, then justifying critical thinking conceived episodically is not enough. The ideal has an ineliminable dispositional component, and justifying the ideal as an ideal requires more than the justification of critical thinking conceived episodically. (b) In Educating Reason I make clear that I do not deny the importance of such instrumental justifications as McCarthy articulates. But instrumental considerations do not by themselves constitute a philosophical justification of the ideal. (c) McCarthy claims that my “trap” “begs the question by assuming that some randomly chosen person will necessarily take up the problem” of justifying critical thinking or rationality. This is false; I make no such assumption. I am content to note that a person who does not take up the problem does not engage the relevant philosophical issue.

Second, McCarthy’s distinction between critical thinking and rationality is problematic. On her view, critical thinking is episodic, while rationality is a dispositional trait. But she does not notice that the episodic/dispositional distinction is straightforwardly applied both to critical thinking and to rationality: both can (and should) be understood both episodically and dispositionally. (I argued for this, with respect to critical thinking, above. Those remarks apply, mutatis mutandis, to rationality.) Thus McCarthy’s argument against my view that critical thinking and rationality are coextensive fails.

Third, McCarthy’s remarks about “teaching a disposition” are on target — we shouldn’t strive “to somehow directly teach the disposition,” at least in a way which prevents the student from critically examining it. The danger of indoctrination she points to is real. But her discussion acknowledges nonetheless that “the ultimate aim that one has in teaching critical thinking is the dispositional aim.” Moreover, my discussion in “The Indoctrination Objection” makes the very same point about critical thinking and indoctrination that hers does. So, contrary to appearances, there is no substantive disagreement between us here.

These brief critical remarks do not adequately engage McCarthy’s excellent discussion. While it does not, I think, do the work she wants it to, her distinction between episodic and dispositional accounts of critical thinking is nevertheless an important and instructive addition to our understanding of critical thinking.

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¹ In his response to these papers, Robert H. Ennis urges that Norris broaden his categories to include a fourth kind of term, one which denotes educational (or philosophical) ideals. As the following discussion indicates, I agree with Ennis on this point. I concur with Norris in regarding “critical thinker” as a non-strict natural kind term, but only on the understanding that such terms can, in virtue of their non-strictness, reflect values and ideals. Otherwise, Ennis is right that a fourth category is needed.