Is Critical Thinking A Skill?
We appear to be living in a time when critical thinking enjoys extraordinary traction. Yet perhaps it is worth pausing for a moment here to reflect and wonder if, amid all the enthusiasm and lip service, people actually think more critically today or if they ever think about what it means to think critically. But how does one go about thinking critically about critical thinking? What is Critical Thinking?
What we constantly hear from the media, educators, politicians, even corporate leaders is that critical thinking is an essential skill in the 21st century. Such a proposition opens virtually every discussion on critical thinking and is accordingly treated as self-evident—it has the form of “it is undeniable that . . . .” However, I have precisely chosen not to begin with this proposition, as my intention is to problematise its assumptions and implications. The predicate of this ubiquitous proposition, “skill”, strikes me. Why is critical thinking a skill? Is thinking a skill?
What is Critical Thinking?
What is critical thinking? What kind of thing is it? This question is hardly ever formulated and even more rarely contemplated. The reason for this seems clear: everyone already knows what thinking is—it’s a skill, just like leadership, collaboration, communication, and so on, are skills.
But why is it a skill? Indeed, why is everything spontaneously considered a skill today? Why is it natural to assume that the role of education is to equip students with the proper skills needed to successfully navigate the spheres of economic and social life?
It has often been repeated that children must be taught how to think, not what to think—a principle which anyone with good sense agrees with. And yet, I claim, the choice of rhetorical device in this slogan ends up introducing a certain ambiguity to its implications.
For, by juxtaposing “how to think” with “what to think,” and by further emphasising that it is the “how” that pre-eminently concerns the task of education, in a way, it creates the opportunity for a conceptual sleight of hand: the belief that we should be teaching “how to think” quickly becomes the belief that “thinking is a how.”
In other words, we run the risk of reducing thinking to a mere instrumental activity, to a form without content, to a means indifferent to ends.
Instrumentalisation of Reason
Of course, this is not a new problem. Already in the 1940s, Frankfurt School critical theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer had identified and critiqued a prevalent phenomenon at the time, which they referred to as “the instrumentalisation of reason.”
In his 1947 book Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer details how modernity has progressively reduced reason to nothing more than “the faculty of classification, inference, and deduction, no matter what the specific content” or “the ability to calculate probabilities and thereby to co-ordinate the right means with a given end.”
Horkheimer calls this post-Enlightenment conception of reason “subjective (instrumental) reason,” which he opposes to the “objective reason” exemplified in the Greek concept of logos. According to subjective reason, there are no such things as rational ends, only rational means to achieve subjective ends. The discussion over the rational value of ends is meaningless because the selection of ends depends ultimately on the individual and his preferences.
The Origin of Reason (Logos)
Natural as this view appears to us today, it is important to note how contrary it runs to so many of the dominant currents of philosophical thought from Plato and Aristotle up to the pioneers of the Enlightenment.
In the ancient world, reason (logos) was thought to inhere not only in the minds of rational subjects but also in the structure of objective reality itself. Reason used to have an objective and normative dimension which it has lost today in becoming something subjective and instrumental.
It used to be that a good life meant a life lived in accordance with the standards of reason—a conviction which obviously rests on the premise that reason has substantive standards of its own in the first place.
Consequences of Instrumental Thinking
For Horkheimer, one of the chief dangers that the instrumentalisation of reason posed was that modern society would eventually come to forget the intellectual roots of many of the ideals and values it takes for granted, such as justice, equality, liberty, democracy, etc., thereby creating the opportunity for their destruction.
This is because subjective reason has no real grounds to claim whether it is rational or irrational to prefer injustice over justice or oppression over freedom since these claims are scientifically unverifiable and reason has no intrinsic preference of its own.
Perhaps the most extreme consequence of this pure instrumental thinking can be found documented in Hannah Arendt’s infamous report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. There Arendt put forward what is widely considered her most scandalous thesis, namely that what Eichmann—one of the key figures in the Nazi’s Final Solution—was truly guilty of was not so much personal genocidal intentions but much more his utter failure to think about the consequences of his own actions.
Clearly, what had struck her during her witnessing of Eichmann’s trial was his pathetic defence that he was just “obeying orders” as a lawful citizen and that he had only a circumscribed role to play in a large-scale process that exceeded him. To be sure, Eichmann did not carry out the Führer’s orders without thinking; we can be confident that plenty of meticulous thought went into planning how the Nazis were going to identify and transport millions of Jews to the extermination camps. And yet, such calculations of logistics, while not trivial, can hardly be called thinking in the proper sense if thinking is to be regarded as a worthy activity at all.
For Arendt, thinking means reflecting on one’s own actions, judging right from wrong, and thinking in the place of others. It is in this sense that Eichmann’s actions were completely thoughtless. And it was precisely this kind of banal thoughtlessness practised on a nationwide scale, according to Arendt, that resulted in one of the greatest atrocities committed against humanity.
From Rational Being to Economical Being?
In many ways, Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason all those years ago nonetheless remains relevant when it comes to analysing our predicament today. There is a case to be made that reason since then has gradually become even more instrumentalised, particularly under the sway of neoliberalism. We humans have always distinguished ourselves from animals by our capacity to think and reason.
We take pride in calling ourselves Homo sapiens, meaning wise hominin. And yet, today it seems that being rational has very little to do with being wise. Rationality has since acquired a new meaning: being rational today means being economical—indeed, we have all evolved into Homo economicus.
Accordingly, rationality is no longer considered the object of study of the philosopher but of the economist. Recall the ambitious neoclassical definition of economics supplied by Lionel Robbins:
The science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.
An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science: economics, Lionel Robbins
What’s incredible about this definition is that it attempts to define economics without any reference to the typical mechanisms of production, exchange, and consumption. Economics is now the study of rational human behaviour—rational in the sense of maximising utility given constraints and human in the sense of being Homo economicus.
By casting its net as widely as possible, neoclassical economics effectively legitimises the extension and generalisation of its mode of analysis to encompass any rational conduct, including non-economic activities such as healthcare and education.
As a result, not only can we apply an economic lens to analyse sectors such as education, but we also gradually come to perceive those sectors as being essentially economic activities.
We start to see education as a form of “investment” whose goal is the formation of “human capital.” We start to see schools as vehicles of social mobility, subjects as career paths, and academic skills as an individual’s means of production.
There is a prevailing sense today that although more people are receiving a proper education, fewer people turn out to be highly educated, or at least, the two have not grown in proportion. And this has less to do with the massification of educational institutions and more to do with how we conceptualise the purpose of education in our culture.
On this point, let us confine ourselves to one example: we’re all aware that in many countries (including Malaysia), the perceived value of the humanities has been in steady decline. Putting aside the practical motivations for steering students towards STEM subjects and away from the humanities, there is a more fundamental reason as to why the humanities are not taken as seriously as the sciences: namely, people no longer find it meaningful to attribute a “what” to thinking.
If thinking is only sufficient for determining means, and if ends are motivated only by personal factors, then the function of the humanities in education—the elevation of ends which complements the equipment of means—becomes obsolete. It is a waste of time to try and deepen one’s appreciation of literature, or to speculate about the good life, or to heighten one’s historical awareness if tastes, values, and meaning are ultimately subjective and arbitrary. As anybody’s opinion is just as valid as anybody else’s, there is no good reason to change one’s perspective on anything, much less in bettering it.
Read more on the values of Philosophy and Critical Thinking to Malaysians here.
What Really Is Critical Thinking?
Critical Thinking vs Clever Argumentation
Taking all of the above into consideration, I suppose this gives us sufficient grounds to be sceptical of the uncritical insistence that thinking is a skill, or, at the very least, to question the supposed neutrality of such an assertion.
We’ve already run through very casually the consequences that the instrumentalisation of thinking has for society at large; what is left for us to consider now are its consequences for thinking itself. What becomes of critical thinking in the context of this instrumental-subjectivist attitude?
The answer is that it gets assimilated to clever argumentation, and with this comes the immanent danger of sophistry. To be fair, sophistry, in reality, shares a great many similarities with critical thinking—more than people like to admit—which makes distinguishing the two a rather challenging task. But the stakes are high, I contend, since it seems to me that many of today’s critical thinking coaches are more aptly characterised as modern-day sophists.
The term “sophistry” comes from a group of itinerant intellectuals in the fifth century BC known as “the Sophists.” But the term wasn’t always used as a pejorative. In fact, most of the negative connotations we associate with sophistry today, such as the deliberate use of fallacious reasoning, deception, and trickery to make the weaker argument seem stronger, stem directly from the criticisms made by Plato and Aristotle, who regarded the Sophists as the sworn enemies of all authentic philosophy.
Back in Ancient Athens, the Sophists were mainly known as professional instructors who trained citizens in the art of public speaking and debate in exchange for a fee. Recall that Ancient Athens was a direct democracy (unlike ours which is representative) and that all free citizens were expected to take an active part in political and judicial affairs.
This created a strong demand for sophistic instruction that could help regular Athenians argue persuasively in front of a critical audience. Persuasion was key—its compulsive force in a large gathering such as the ekklēsia far outstripped that of cold sober reasoning. Argumentation has always had a theatrical element to it, and thus, rhetoric became the most valuable trade the Sophists could teach.
Despite common usage, sophistry—or perhaps more accurately, “sophistics”—is not so much about twisting what is true and convincing others of what is false by means of calculated manipulation. If we’re being charitable here, sophistry is a pure means. The Sophists taught methods of argument and rhetoric which could then be adapted for whatever ends an individual saw fit to pursue. Sophistry is all about the “how,” not about the “what.” What is right and what is wrong is not the Sophists’ business. Their craft consists solely of methods of evaluating arguments and refuting them effectively, as well as ways of convincingly demonstrating the superiority of one’s own position over that of one’s opponents through the use of various logical and rhetorical tactics.
Evidently, the problem with sophistry is that, compared to critical thought, it is unreflective.
Reasoning becomes mere rationalisation in the hands of the Sophist, and truth a synonym for victory. In this sense, we could say that “sophistry” is somewhat of a misnomer since it is more about cleverness than actual wisdom (sophia). And while there is a certain charm to cleverness, it quickly wears thin on people the moment they realise it’s all vanity without any real insight.
Critical Thinking Is Not Merely A Skill
This is why I contend that thinking is not a skill and should not be construed as one. But let me be precise here: I am not saying that there are no skills involved in thinking. This would again be confounding “how to think” with “thinking is a how.” I am well aware that thinking involves many skills—analysis, interpretation, questioning, reasoning, etc.—and yet, my claim is that thinking is irreducible to them in the final analysis.
A valuable analogy can be drawn here between thinking and reading. Likewise, there are many skills involved in reading—word awareness, fluency, comprehension, etc.—but reading itself is not a skill, this being contrary to what many educators believe. It is not a skill because true reading hasn’t so much to do with whether or not I understand the text or whether or not I can extract and manipulate the information contained within—such is reading under examination conditions which could not be more artificial.
On the contrary, reading is about opening ourselves up to the thoughts and experiences of others, not about withdrawing into the comprehension of the self. It is not about comprehending everything the author says but precisely attending to those things we don’t yet comprehend. To reduce reading to comprehension then—which is exactly what school does (the reading paper is literally called the comprehension paper)—is thus to foreclose this dimension of otherness entirely, which in practice has the effect of sucking all the joy and serendipity from reading as an activity.
The same can be said for thinking. Being good at thinking has nothing to do with winning debates over others or with claiming intellectual superiority over others—what Plato called “eristics.” It is not judged by one’s ability to argue for any viewpoint persuasively, much less by one’s ability to refute any argument hurled one’s way—what Plato called “antilogic.” Thinking is not about being clever. Thinking is not argumentation. What is thinking, then? Perhaps Plato can offer us a clue.
Critical Thinking Involves Dialectic
For Plato, what distinguishes philosophy from sophistry is that the philosopher practices the dialectic. It is unfortunate that the concept of dialectic so often gets assimilated to debate, considering that it constitutes the way out of ceaseless combative argumentation. This isn’t to suggest that debate is somehow an unworthy activity for thought, however. I’m aware that many educators are now trying to incorporate debates into their lessons as a means of stimulating critical thinking.
And I am in full agreement with them so long as we stress to students the mere preparatory character of debate; otherwise, we’re just encouraging sophistry. Though it may seem contrary to what I’ve said earlier, I can acknowledge a certain didactic value in teaching students how to deconstruct arguments from both sides and to think in the shoes of people they personally disagree with. For someone who has not yet begun to think independently, it is essential that we jolt them out of their complacent beliefs by forcing them to confront contrary and conflicting viewpoints.
The goal is to induce a state of aporia—that is, a state of puzzlement brought about by the equal strength of contradictory viewpoints. Every debater knows that, with enough skill and wit, a convincing case can be made for either side. But in learning this lesson from experience, one no longer allows oneself to be impressed by mere argumentation. This is when one properly begins to think. The error here is to suppose that aporia is the dead end of thinking, that it is unthinkable, when it is really its true beginning.
Aporia, contradiction, is not what stops thinking in its tracks; quite the contrary, as Hegel knew better than anybody else, contradiction is precisely what drives the movement of thought forward, it gives thought something to think through. If there is any value in learning debate, it is ultimately so that one can go beyond positing one-sided arguments and internalise this contradictory spirit within oneself. Thinking now learns to posit its own opposition in order to arrive at more nuanced insights, and in so doing, it transcends mere clever argumentation.
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Critical Thinking Is An Activity
So, what is critical thinking? In the final analysis, thinking reveals itself to no longer be a skill but an activity. Why “activity” over “skill”? This question may seem to suggest that, in the end, our problem reduces to a mere semantic dispute—a question over the meaning of words that is itself meaningless. But the fact is, our choice of words betrays a lot about how we implicitly conceptualise things.
By calling thinking a “skill,” we ask others to conceive of it as essentially an instrument for determining sufficient means towards given ends or for constructing arguments in favour of or in opposition to given stances.
A skill is, after all, an acquired ability to perform a specific task proficiently. While this conception does contain some element of truth, nonetheless, it constitutes only a part of the whole picture.
As we showed earlier, abstracting this part and treating it as the whole leads to a conception of thinking that is indistinguishable from mere calculation and sophistry. What this reductive account fails to appreciate are the subversive and transformative potentials of thinking —and critical thinking especially—which can be accounted for only when we regard thinking as essentially an activity.
To be clear, activities and skills are not mutually exclusive; again, to repeat my formula: there are skills involved in an activity, but the activity itself is not a skill. In the case of thinking, what holds greater significance is not an individual’s ability to calculate or argue—this is not a question of competence—but much more their willingness to reflect upon the ends and stances they pursue.
But, most importantly, what counts is their openness to otherness. The purpose of engaging in the activity of thinking is not to satisfy individual ends, but instead to dialogue with other people, to encounter other ideas, and to experiment with other perspectives.
For, it is only through engagement with otherness that we can come to transform our personal worldviews, to subvert our natural positions, and to become critical thinkers by being critical of ourselves.
*Disclaimer: This article has been edited for clarity. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the stance of the Malaysian Philosophy Society.