Concept · Unit 1 of 5 · 7 min
What thinking well actually means
Critical thinking is not scepticism, and it is not cleverness. A sceptic doubts everything equally, which is just as lazy as believing everything equally. Critical thinking is the practice of proportioning what you believe to how good the reasons are.
That means every belief you hold can be broken into parts, and each part can be examined on its own. Most disagreements that feel enormous turn out to be disagreements about one small part that nobody named out loud.
The four parts of any claim
- The claim itself — what exactly is being asserted, stated precisely enough that it could be wrong.
- The evidence — what observations, data or experiences are offered in support.
- The reasoning — how the evidence is supposed to get you to the claim.
- The assumptions — what has to be true, unstated, for the reasoning to work at all.
The part almost everyone skips
Assumptions. People argue endlessly about evidence while sharing a hidden assumption that neither has noticed, or they talk past each other because their hidden assumptions differ. Naming an assumption out loud is often the single most useful thing anyone says in a disagreement.
A claim can have true evidence and still be badly supported, because the reasoning does not carry you from one to the other. "Crime went down after the new mayor took office" can be entirely true and tell you almost nothing about the mayor.
Strong beliefs, held by reasons
The goal is not to end up with fewer convictions. It is to end up with convictions you could actually defend, and to know which of them are load-bearing and which you are carrying out of habit.