lack of critical thinking is the root of all evil

Ignorance today

Our world is awash in information – but can we make sense of it?

Ignorance is the root of all evil, according to Plato, who also famously gave us a still-current definition of its opposite: knowledge. For Plato, knowledge is “justified true belief”. That definition is worthy of consideration as we reflect on the perils of ignorance in the twenty-first century.

Plato thought that three conditions must be met in order for us to “know” something: the notion in question must actually be true; we must believe it (because if we do not believe something that is true, we can hardly claim that we know it); and, most subtly, it must be justifiable – there must be reasons why we believe the notion to be true.

Consider something that we all think we know: the earth is (approximately) round. This is as true as astronomical facts get, particularly because we have sent artificial satellites into orbit and seen that our planet is indeed roundish. Most of us (except for a lunatic fringe of flat-earthers) also believe this to be the case.

What about the justification of that belief? How would you answer if someone asked you why you believe that the earth is round?

The obvious place to begin would be to point to the aforementioned satellite images, but then our skeptical interlocutor could reasonably ask if you know how those images were obtained. Unless you are an expert on space engineering and imaging software, you may have some trouble at that point.

Of course, you could fall back on more traditional reasons to believe in a round earth, like the fact that our planet projects a round-looking shadow on the moon during eclipses. Naturally, you would have to be in a position to explain – if challenged – what an eclipse is and how you know that. You see where this could easily go: if we push far enough, most of us do not actually know, in the Platonic sense, much of anything. In other words, we are far more ignorant than we realize.

Socrates, Plato’s teacher, famously goaded the Athenian authorities by maintaining that he was wiser than the Oracle at Delphi, who claimed to be the wisest, because he, unlike most people (including the Athenian authorities), knew that he did not know anything. Whether Socrates’ humility was sincere or a secret joke at the expense of the powers that be (before said powers put him to death after tiring of his irreverence), the point is that the beginning of wisdom lies in the recognition of how little we really know.

Which brings me to the paradox of ignorance in our era: on the one hand, we are constantly bombarded by expert opinion, by all sorts of people – with or without Ph.D. after their name – who tell us exactly what to think (though rarely why we should think it). On the other hand, most of us are woefully inadequate to practice the venerable and vital art of baloney detection (or, more politely, critical thinking), which is so necessary in modern society.

You can think of the paradox in another way: we live in an era when knowledge – in the sense of information – is constantly available in real time through computers, smart phones, electronic tablets, and book readers. And yet we still lack the basic skills of reflecting on such information, of sifting through the dirt to find the worthy nuggets. We are ignorant masses awash in information.

Of course, it may be that humanity has always been short on critical thinking. That’s why we keep allowing ourselves to be talked into supporting unjust wars (not to mention actually dying in them), or voting for people whose main job seems to be to amass as much wealth for the rich as they can get away with. It is also why so many people are duped by exceedingly costly sugar pills sold to them by homeopathic “doctors”, and why we follow the advice of celebrities (rather than real doctors) about whether to vaccinate our kids.

But the need for critical thinking has never been as pressing as in the Internet era. At least in developed countries – but increasingly in underdeveloped ones as well – the problem is no longer one of access to information, but of the lack of ability to process and make sense of that information.

Unfortunately, colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools are unlikely to mandate introductory courses in critical thinking on their own. Education has increasingly been transformed into a commodity system, in which the “customers” (formerly students) are kept happy with personalized curricula while being prepared for the job market (rather than being prepared to be responsible human beings and citizens).

This can and must change, but it requires a grassroots movement that uses blogs, online magazines and newspapers, book clubs and meet-up clubs, and anything else that might work to promote educational opportunities to develop critical-thinking skills. After all, we do know that it is our future.

Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

A version of this article was previously published on the Project Syndicate .

Ignorance and Evil

Philip Golabuk

If you try to cure evil with evil, you will add more pain to your fate. | Sophocles

Socrates states in the Protagoras that no one knowingly does the wrong thing, that all evil is the result of ignorance. It is a generous view to say the least. In the Gorgias , however, Socrates argues that ignorance does not absolve the wrongdoer of responsibility for his actions nor mitigate the need for appropriate punishment. In fact, he goes on to say, it is imperative that the perpetrator be punished for to commit evil and get away with it is a harm in itself of the most grievous sort, since until the debt is paid, the wrongdoer carries a spiritual burden. Doing wrong thus harms the one who so acts, and as no one knowingly acts against his own interests, all wrongdoing, all evil, must be the result of ignorance. Socrates maintains, therefore, that we always act in the service of what we believe in the moment to be our greater good. One example of this might be a man who steals bread to feed his family. He knows that stealing is wrong, but under the circumstances, believes that he is acting in the interest of a good cause.

The argument has merit and more than a little appeal in cases where those who commit evil have a conscience. Dismissing their better knowing, they act out of ignorance due to blind reaction, shortsightedness, or what Socrates called “false opinion,” and by so doing, set up interference patterns in their psyche that they may experience as guilt, shame, remorse, the fear of reprisal, and so on. But what about the many cases where conscience seems to be absent, and we see something more like a fully formed evil intent operating? The sociopathic personality, for example, may derive pleasure from deliberately and knowingly inflicting pain. Depravity along these lines seems to know no limits, as anyone can attest who has perused the voluminous records of the Nuremberg trials or read with horror how the stormtroopers of repressive regimes have tortured and murdered children in the enforcement of a heartless ideology. In Socratic terms, the Nazis could be viewed as seeking what they regarded as the “greater good” of Aryan hegemony and the extermination of “inferior” ethnic groups. Like the thief, they are seeking “the good,” but taking Socrates’s claim this far seems to reduce it to absurdity, since good and evil become indistinguishable.

It is not a trivial question whether we are to regard a certain act as proceeding from ignorance or from a deliberately evil intent. If we side with Socrates, our response would be to educate, to enlighten, to rehabilitate. If, on the other hand, we conclude that the act is born of evil intent, then the appropriate response would seem to be some form of punishment commensurate with the seriousness of the wrong done. The entire criminal legal system tries every day to sort out just such matters. We do not want to execute someone who acted in ignorance, but neither would we want to attempt to rehabilitate someone whose character may be so deformed by the will to do harm to others that he or she is beyond rehabilitation. In such cases, Socrates’s argument in the Gorgias that punishment, though painful, is good for the soul of the wrongdoer, seems naive.

In a famous series of articles written for The New Yorker in 1963, entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , Hannah Arendt describes how surprised she was at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem to see that this architect of the Third Reich with its deportation programs and death camps and mass executions was not a sociopathic fiend or monster but a most unexceptional sort of man, one motivated not by ideology or malevolence but by careerism and obedience, a stupid man with no thinking life who had accepted the clichés of the Nazi regime and was simply “following orders,” who murdered innocent people by the thousands, stacking their bodies as routinely as any office worker might stack documents, then went home at the end of the day and kissed his wife and children, sat down for the evening meal, listened to music—all without a thought about the enormity of his actions. According to Arendt’s account, it was this banality, this complete lack of moral thought and reflection, that enabled Eichmann to carry out the innumerable crimes against humanity for which he eventually was hanged.

Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann as banal rather than monstrous has been contested, in part because she attended only four days of the trial, relying largely on the transcript to write her report for The New Yorker . Her critics claim that during the parts of the trial that she missed, Eichmann was exposed as someone far more driven by anti-Semitism and ideology, and that as the testimony showed, he had been well aware of the immorality of his actions. There also were allegations that Arendt was laboring under prejudices of her own that may have slanted her journalism. These controversies aside, the point here is that Arendt’s conclusion—that evil can result not from the intent to do evil but from the failure to think and consider and hold one’s choices and actions up to a moral standard—seems consistent with Socrates’s claim. If genocide does not count as evil, it is hard to imagine what would, and it does seem that Eichmann’s banality and moral vacuousness, as reported by Arendt, constitute an extreme example of what Socrates calls “ignorance.” But where does this leave us? Was Eichmann ignorant or evil? More generally, what is the proper response? To educate or to punish?

One could make the argument that the ability to “look the other way” while committing atrocities, to suppress every native impulse of empathy and compassion and fellow feeling, is precisely where ignorance becomes evil. Aristotle, disputing the Socratic ethic, holds that it is possible to knowingly do wrong, a state the Greeks called akrasia , translated as “weakness of will.” In such cases, evil would not be the result of ignorance but of a failing of character. Socrates might reply that akrasia follows from not understanding that the good and right and virtuous course of action is always the only workable and sustainable one, not to mention the only one consistent with longterm self-interest, in which case akrasia would amount to another form of ignorance.

To muddy the waters a bit more, there is the relative nature of good and evil. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Whether an act constitutes evil or serves some greater good depends largely on whom one asks. It is possible to adjudge a suicide bomber in an open-air café to be the very embodiment of evil while justifying the dropping of a nuclear bomb on a city in the name of saving lives. We can avoid moral relativism to some extent here by considering the question in the context of excesses. Even in those cases where someone commits a wrong in the belief that some greater good is thus served, there would be moral limits to how far the wrongdoer could go without committing what we might think of as an unjustifiable act. To kill the enemy in war might be defended as a “necessary evil.” It would be much harder if not impossible, however, to justify the use of torture. Even allowing that people see things differently, evil remains evil, and the question of its nature remains.

To be thorough in our considerations of these things, we have to allow not only that there may be a point past which ignorance becomes evil, but also that evil acts, even those committed with the full intent to do wrong, the awareness that such acts are evil, and with no weakness of the will involved may yet presuppose a type of ignorance. In such cases, the ignorance lies not in banality or a failure to recognize the nature of the act, but in the assumption that through doing wrong, one can bring about some desired end. In other words, the evildoer may be ignorant of a profound truth that history has demonstrated time and time again, i.e., that evil as a method is doomed to fail, since it relies on force and on imposing one’s will upon others, strategies that invariably backfire. Beyond this, there may be yet a deeper current of ignorance at work in the assumption that one can achieve any good end by manipulating worldly conditions. Tyrants do seem to be ignorant that happiness and “human flourishing,” as Socrates tells us, are states of the soul, not the world. Using force to drive the world to its knees, in the end, leaves one far worse off in every way that matters. The mentality that tries to use force to exploit the world and others is rooted in ignorance, viz., the failure to understand that happiness is an inside job. It cannot be wrought through conquest and domination. In light of this broader perspective, Socrates may have been right, after all.

Whether we side with Socrates and his idea that “no man knowingly does evil” or subscribe to the view that there are those who, whether through thoughtlessness or cruel intent or weakness of will, commit acts of evil with full knowledge of the nature of their actions may matter little in the end. How we respond to such acts, however, matters greatly. It is crucial that we understand that in reacting to evil, we run the risk of committing evil ourselves, and it is not overstating the matter to say that the future of humanity may well depend on our steering clear of this danger. Evil, however it originates in the human psyche, begets evil. Especially in what many moderns now think of as the “age of terrorism,” with acts of evil erupting in the headlines regularly, we may feel so outraged and threatened that we deny the humanity of the evildoer and unwittingly become the thing we hate. Some exploit this dark potential. They stoke the fires of fear and in the name of law and order and security, make a bad situation worse while wiser courses of action are swept aside. To deal with inhumanity humanely; to meet evil with clarity and measured determination; to hold to a higher ethical standard than the worst among us; to respond to those who do monstrous things without becoming monsters ourselves—these are the virtues of what Socrates calls the “well-ordered soul,” the only real remedy to ignorance and evil, in others and in ourselves.

Search Musings

       © 2024 PhilosophyCenter. All rights reserved.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is known for his advocacy of atheism .

• 1.1 The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989)
• 1.2 The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
• 1.3 The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)
• 1.4 Viruses of the Mind (1993)
• 1.5 River out of Eden (1995)
• 1.6 Darwin's Dangerous Disciple: An Interview by Frank Miele (1995)
• 1.7 An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)
• 1.8 The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)
• 1.9 Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)
• 1.10 Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
• 1.11 A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
• 1.12 The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)
• 1.13 The God Delusion (2006)
• 1.14 The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)
• 1.15 "Richard Dawkins: Atheist academic calls for religion 'to be offended at every opportunity" (23 May 2016)
• 1.16 Twitter
• 2 Quotes about Dawkins
• 3 External links
• Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something, therefore religion can'.

So to the book's provocation, the statement that nearly half the people in the United States don't believe in evolution . Not just any people but powerful people, people who should know better, people with too much influence over educational policy . We are not talking about Darwin 's particular theory of natural selection. It is still (just) possible for a biologist to doubt its importance, and a few claim to. No, we are here talking about the fact of evolution itself, a fact that is proved utterly beyond reasonable doubt. To claim equal time for creation science in biology classes is about as sensible as to claim equal time for the flat-earth theory in astronomy classes. Or, as someone has pointed out, you might as well claim equal time in sex education classes for the stork theory. It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).

If that gives you offence, I'm sorry. You are probably not stupid, insane or wicked; and ignorance is no crime in a country with strong local traditions of interference in the freedom of biology educators to teach the central theorem of their subject.

• "Put Your Money on Evolution". The New York Times Review of Books : p. 35. 9 April 1989.  
• Reviewing Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution (1989) by Maitland A. Edey and Donald C. Johanson
• Last sentence expanded upon in "Ignorance is No Crime" (2001) (see below)
• From speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, 1992-04-15 . Frequently misattributed to The God Delusion .
• quoted in "EDITORIAL: A scientist's case against God". The Independent (London): p. 17. 20 April 1992.   and Paul Gomberg (27 May 2011). What Should I Believe?: Philosophical Essays for Critical Thinking . Broadview Press. p. 146. ISBN 9781554810130 .  
• Kam Patel (28 April 1995). " Going the whole hog ". Times Higher Education .
• Heart Of The Matter: God Under The Microscope | BBC (1996)

Yet scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects. And statistical analysis eliminates the suspicion (or at least measures the likelihood) that the apparent effect might have happened by chance alone.

Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the £740,000 reward of James Randi , offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe. Why don't the television editors insist on some equivalently rigorous test? Could it be that they believe the alleged paranormal powers would evaporate and bang go the ratings?

Consider this. If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of telepathy ( precognition , psychokinesis , reincarnation , whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton ? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake.

Yet the final indictment against the television decision-makers is more profound and more serious. Their recent splurge of paranormalism debauches true science and undermines the efforts of their own excellent science departments. The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudo-scientific charlatans. The public appetite for wonder can be fed, through the powerful medium of television, without compromising the principles of honesty and reason.

• "Human gullibility beyond belief,— the “paranormal” in the media". The Sunday Times . 25 August 1996.  

• " Is Science a Religion? ", The Humanist (January 1997)
• Richard Dawkins , "Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder" , John Brockman, Edge.org , 1.2.97.
• "When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf", Free Inquiry (1998)
• Foreword to Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations by John Diamond , Vintage, 2001.
• " Ignorance Is No Crime ", Free Inquiry 21 (3), Summer 2001, ISSN 0272-0701  
• Regarding his 1989 statement "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." (see above)
• When asked how the world had changed following the September 11, 2001 attacks
• Has the world changed? , The Guardian (11 October 2001)
• Richard Dawkins on militant atheism , (February 2002)
• "Bin Laden's victory " The Guardian (22 March 2003)
• "From tail to tale on the path of pilgrims in life" , The Scotsman (9 April 2005)
• Gordy Slack, "The Atheist" Salon.com (28 April 2005)
• "Let's all stop beating Basil's car" , The Edge (2006)
• Steve Paulson, "The flying spaghetti monster" Salon.com (13 October 2006)
• At Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia , {23 October 2006) Broadcasted by C-SPAN2
• At Randolph-Macon Woman's College , Broadcasted by C-SPAN2 (23 October 2016)
• Answering audience questions after a reading of The God Delusion [1] , Randolph-Macon Woman's College, (23 October 2006)
• Posed question: "This is probably going to be the most simplest one for you to answer, but: What if you're wrong?"
• "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God", The Huffington Post, 23/10/2006 [2]
• From the Afterword , The Herald (Glasgow, Scotland, 20 November 2006)
• Dawkins, Richard (24 November 1996). " Why don't animals have wheels? ". The Sunday Times . Retrieved on 29 October 2008 .  
• Banishing the Green-Eyed Monster , November 2007.
• BBC's Have Your Say (December 2007)
• The Big Questions (2008) [3]
• The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008)
• BBC , (29 January 2008)
• 2008 comment quoted in "Fury over Richard Dawkins's burka jibe as atheist tells of his 'visceral revulsion' at Muslim dress", Daily Mail (10 August 2010)
• Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (18 April 2008)
• The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) (p. 8)
• The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) (p. 164)
• "Richard Dawkins Chimpanzee Hybrid?" The Guardian, (2 January 2009)
• Heat the Hornet (a review of Jerry Coyne 's book Why Evolution is True)
• Lecture at UC Berkeley about The God Delusion, 08/03/2008 [4]
• On Q&A ( 2010-08-03 ), replying to a Muslim man who asked about 'absolute morality'. [5]
• "Has Science Buried God?" Debate, Richard Dawkins vs. John Lennox, 21/10/2008 [6]

"I can think of no moral objection to eating human road kills except for the ones that you mentioned like 'what would the relatives think about it?' and 'would the person themselves have wanted it to happen?', but I do worry a bit about slippery slopes; possibly a little bit more than you do.

There are barriers that we have set up in our minds and certainly the barrier between Homo sapiens and any other species is an artificial barrier in the sense that its a kind of 'accident' that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct. Never the less it exists and natural barriers that are there can be useful for preventing slippery slopes and therefore I think I can see an objection to breaching such a barrier because you are then in a weaker position to stop people going further.

Another example might be suppose you take the argument in favour of abortion up until the baby was one year old, if a baby was one year old and turned out to have some horrible incurable disease that meant it was going to die in agony in later life, what about infanticide? Strictly morally I can see no objection to that at all, I would be in favour of infanticide but I think i would worry about/I think I would wish at least to give consideration to the person who says 'where does it end?' "

• Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews (2009)
• As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), The Telegraph .
• "Dawkins attacks 'alien rubbish' taught in Muslim faith schools", Daily Mail (8 October 2011)

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade , and . . . yawn . . . don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee . I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

• Blog comment ( 2011-07-02 ), to PZ Myers, " Always Name Names " ( 2011-07-02 ), Pharyngula , quoted in Rebecca Watson , " The Privilege Delusion ", Skepchick .
• Regarding the Rebecca Watson elevator incident .
• Richard Dawkins-George Pell Q&A (2012)
• Richard Dawkins vs. Jonathan Sacks - BBC's RE:Think Festival (2012) [7]

• The Magic Of Reality , Duke University, 01/03/2012 [8]
• Dawkins on The Telegraph , 2012-02-24 .
• Reason Rally , National Mall, Washington, DC, 2012-03-24
• Richard Dawkins and his Foundation at the Reason Rally , YouTube, 7 April 2012  
• comment on Daniel Fincke (2 April 2012), " In Defense of Dawkins’s Reason Rally Speech ", RichardDawkins.net , retrieved on 1 May 2012  
• During his conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams , as quoted in The Telegraph , in 2012-02-24 . In " Richard Dawkins: I can't be sure God does not exist "
• When asked about why he chose to become a biologist. UR Samtiden - Verklighetens magi 27 October 2012.
• FFRF (Freedom From Religion Foundation) 2012 National Convention, 2012-12-10 [9]
• Giles Whittell, " The world according to Richard Dawkins " ( 2013-09-07 ), The Times , quoted in Trevor Grundy, " Richard Dawkins Pedophilia Remarks Provoke Outrage " ( 2013-09-09 ), The Huffington Post .
• Richard Dawkins debates Rowan Williams (2013)
• Interview with Bill Maher (2013)
• In 2014, as quoted in The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (2015), Stephen LeDrew
• Interview shown in AlJazeera [10] , [11]
• Interview shown in AlJazeera [12] , [13]
• Interview with Sophie Elmhirst (2015), [14] (9 June 2015)
• Public conversation with Penn Jillette at Live Talks Los Angeles (1 October 2015) at 50:25 in the video [15]
• As quoted in Sarah Knapton "Richard Dawkins: religious education is crucial for British schoolchildren" , The Telegraph (11 June 2017)

• Interview with Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience (2019); [16] (20 January 2019)
• Interviewed by Judith Woods, as cited in "Richard Dawkins interview: 'I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words'" , The Telegraph (19 September 2023)
• Interviewed by Judith Woods, as cited in "Richard Dawkins interview: 'I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words'" , The Telegraph (19 September 202)

The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989)

• Introduction to 30th Anniversary Edition (2005)
• Preface to Second Edition (1989)
• Preface to the first edition
• Ch. 1. Why Are People?
• Ch. 2. The replicators
• Ch. 3. Immortal Coils
• Ch. 4. The Gene machine
• Ch. 5. Aggression: stability and the selfish machine
• Ch. 6. Genesmanship
• Ch. 7. Family planning
• Ch. 8. Battle of the Generations
• Ch. 9. Battle of the Sexes
• Ch. 11. Memes: the new replicators
• Ch. 12. Nice Guys Finish First
• Ch. 13. The Long Reach of the Gene

The Blind Watchmaker (1986)

• Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable” (p. 5)
• Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable” (p. 6)
• Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable”
• Chapter 2 “Good Design” (p. 41)
• Chapter 3 “Accumulating Small Change” (p. 50)
• Chapter 5 “The Power and the Archives” (p. 122)
• Chapter 6 “Origins and Miracles” (p. 141)
• Chapter 6 “Origins and Miracles” (p. 162)
• Chapter 7 “Constructive Evolution” (p. 178)
• Chapter 7 “Constructive Evolution” (p. 179)
• Chapter 7 “Constructive Evolution” (p. 184)
• Chapter 7 “Constructive Evolution” (p. 186)
• Chapter 8 “Explosions and Spirals” (pp. 195–196)
• Chapter 9 “Puncturing Punctuationism” (p. 250)
• Chapter 10 “The One True Tree of Life” (p. 261)
• Chapter 11 “Doomed Rivals” (p. 288)
• Chapter 11 “Doomed Rivals” (p. 316)

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Full text here . The Economist (11 September 1993), vol. 328, p. 87

• There is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive – even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits evolutionary stasis (i.e., no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful continuations or reversals in direction – like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather.
• Another force driving progressive evolution is the so-called "arms-race." Prey animals evolve faster running speeds because predators do. Consequently predators have to evolve even faster running speeds, and so on, in an escalating spiral. Such arms races probably account for the spectacularly advanced engineering of eyes, ears, brains, bat "radar" and all the other high-tech weaponry that animals display.
• It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.
• It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.
• The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition – into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.
• The late Christopher Evans , a psychologist and author, calculated that if the motor car had evolved as fast as the computer , and over the same time period, "Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for £35, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough power to drive the QE2 And if you were interested in miniaturisation, you could place half a dozen of them on a pinhead."
• Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

• I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun . What chance has she?
• With so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies , Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.
• Think about the two qualities that a virus , or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.
• The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment – that it should obey a program of coded instructions – is again only quantitatively less true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca , to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to "speak in tongues" – the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive – are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability.
• Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.
• Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).
• The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as "faith".
• If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals , stirring music , moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.

River out of Eden (1995)

• pp. 131–132
• Mitochondrial DNA is blessedly celibate. (p.53)
• The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism .
• Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.
• ... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.
• The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.
• ... the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria ... All earthly living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor.
• What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital.
• There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.
• Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
• Your DNA may be destined to mingle with mine. Salutations!
• Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity". Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.
• ... it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye ... It's no wonder "the" eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom ... It is a geological blink.
• Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous – indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
• If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? ... Is He manoeuvring to maximise David Attenborough 's television ratings?
• ... the true utility function of life, that which is being maximised in the natural world, is DNA survival. But DNA is not floating free; it is locked up in living bodies and it has made the most of the levers of power at its disposal.
• Ch. 5: The Replication Bomb

Darwin's Dangerous Disciple: An Interview by Frank Miele (1995)

• Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.
• ... but the dominance hierarchy itself is not something that natural selection favours or disfavours. What natural selection favours or disfavours is the individual behaviour of which the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation. I would put war and overpopulation in that category.
• I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful. Darwinism is the differential survival of self-replicating genes in a gene pool, usually as manifested by individual behaviour, morphology, and phenotypes. Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it. There is a very vague analogy between group selection and conquest of a nation by another nation, but I don't think it's a very helpful analogy. So I would prefer not to invoke Darwinian language for that kind of historical interpretation.
• There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism .

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

• The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.
• Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

McDonald: Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are – well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good – not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort.

Dawkins: There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting – it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

• It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.
• I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

Full text here(dead link) archives have an archived copy (f8ofb). Lecture, BBC1 Television (12 November 1996)

• You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein , Planck , Watson , Crick and their colleagues.
• For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
• It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
• If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.
• But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
• It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.

It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

• How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium – in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away.
• The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.
• You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.
• You don't have to be a scientist – you don't have to play the Bunsen burner – in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.

Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

• Chapter 1, “Facing Mount Rushmore” (p. 34)
• Chapter 2, “Silken Fetters” (p. 58)
• Chapter 2, “Silken Fetters” (p. 68)
• Chapter 3, “The Message from the Mountain” (p. 77)
• Chapter 3, “The Message from the Mountain” (p. 82)
• Chapter 3, “The Message from the Mountain” (pp. 89-90)
• Chapter 4, “Getting Off the Ground” (p. 133)
• Chapter 5, “The Forty-fold Path to Enlightenment” (p. 139)
• Chapter 5, “The Forty-fold Path to Enlightenment” (p. 166)
• Chapter 6, “The Museum of All Shells” (p. 223)
• Chapter 8, “Pollen Grains and Magic Bullets” (p. 258)

Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)

• Ch. 1 : The Anaesthetic of Familiarity; Dawkins is reported to have stated that this passage will be read at his funeral; it is often quoted with an extension which does not occur in any thus-far-checked editions of the book: "We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

• "A Devil's Chaplain"
• "Gaps in the Mind"
• "Science, Genetics and Ethics: Memo for Tony Blair"
• quoting F. W. Sanderson, "The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle"
• "Viruses of the Mind"
• "Time to Stand Up"
• " Snake Oil "
• "Snake Oil"
• Compare: "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own." Bertrand Russell , What I Believe (1925)
• "Good and Bad Reasons for Believing" [open letter to his daughter]

The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

A documentary in two parts:

• The God Delusion
• The Virus of Faith
• I want to examine that dangerous thing that's common to Judaism and Christianity as well: the process of non-thinking called "faith". (Part 1, 00:00:55)
• Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
• One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
• If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Who's God trying to impress? Presumably himself, since he is judge and jury, as well as execution victim. (Part 2, 00:29:56)
• Yousef Al-Khattab : When you take the women and dress them like whores, on the street... Richard Dawkins : I don't dress women, they dress themselves... Yousef Al-Khattab : But you allow it as a norm, to let the women go on the street dressed like this. What's going on with your society?
• I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for, oh, a number of years, and one day an American visiting researcher came and he completely and utterly disproved our old man's hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you, I have been wrong these fifteen years". And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal, of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a theory, and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong and that scientific truth had been advanced. (Part 1, 00:13:32)
• Of course politics are important — Iraq , Palestine , even social deprivation in Bradford. But as we wake up to this huge challenge to our civilised values, don't let's forget the elephant in the room — an elephant called "religion". (Part 1, 00:00:24)
• I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder — it is also utterly ridiculous. (Part 1, 00:44:39)
• And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilised person today should surely find poisonous.
• Part 2: "The Virus of Faith", quoted at "The Proper Study of Mankind" blog on January 25, 2006

• Part 1: "The God Delusion"
• Part 2: "The Virus Of Faith", quoted at ibid.
• I was reminded of a quotation by the famous American physicist Steven Weinberg , Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist. Weinberg said: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you'd have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion". (Part 2, 00:35:01)
• Part 2: "The Virus of Faith"
• End of the part 2: "The Virus of Faith"

The God Delusion (2006)

• The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. (p. 31 of the hardcover edition and p. 51 of the paperback edition; see also: Dan Barker, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction , foreword by Richard Dawkins, 2016)
• Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. (p. 40)
• I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (p. 57 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)
• (Spectrum level 6) I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there. (p. 73)
• What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot? (p. 79)
• On the Argument from Degree: "That's an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion." (p. 102)
• The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: ‘Who wrote it, and when?’ ‘How did they know what to write?’ ‘Did they, in their time really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?’ ‘Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?’. (p. 118 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)
• Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true. (p. 135 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)
• On the Arguement from Scripture: "Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul , which mentioned almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus 's life. All were then copied and recopied … by falilible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas." (p. 118)
• "But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there … who take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as evidence supporting the religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice the glaring contradictions?" (p. 120)
• "The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen … The gospels that didn't make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones." (p. 121)
• "It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all … Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further evidence for any kind of deity." (p. 122)
• "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747 " (p. 138)
• On natural selection: "Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance." (p. 146)
• [...] one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. (p. 152 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)
• "What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. (p. 153)
• "A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right." (p. 178)
• On the properties of God: "Such a bandwidth! God, who may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know." (p. 184)
• Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility . The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses. (p. 176)
• "Once again, modern theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac should not be taken as literal fact. And, once again, the appropriate response is twofold. First, many many people, even to this day, do take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world . Second, if not as literal fact, how should we take the story? As an allegory ? Then an allegory for what? Surely morals could one derive from this appalling story? Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not. (p. 275 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)
• More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them - given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by - to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades . (pp. 347-348 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)
• p. 360 (Chapter 10)
• Lynchburg, Virginia, 23/10/2006 [17]

The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)

• The Enemies of Reason , "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007 , timecode 0:05:54 ff
• The Enemies of Reason , "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007 , timecode 00:38:16 ff
• The Enemies of Reason , "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007 , timecode 00:46:47 ff
• The Enemies of Reason , "The Irrational Health Service" [1.02], 20 August 2007 , timecode 00:13:05"ff"
• The Enemies of Reason , "The Irrational Health Service"
• So whereabouts in my body might there be a black hole ?
• Isn't Deepak Chopra just exploiting Quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus?
• If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn't been tested or it has failed its tests.

"Richard Dawkins: Atheist academic calls for religion 'to be offended at every opportunity" (23 May 2016)

"Richard Dawkins: Atheist academic calls for religion 'to be offended at every opportunity" , The Times , (23 May 2016)

• We're too stupid to decide on EU (that includes me)
• I think there really is a place for science in literature and I think that may be increasing
• People are terrified of being thought racist, there's an awful confusion in many people's minds. They think Islam is a race, which of course it isn't
• If you're seen to criticise Islam you are often accused of racism, which is absurd.
• I'm all for offending people's religion. I think it should be offended at every opportunity
• In the case of immigrants from Syria and Iraq I would like to see special preference given to apostates, people who have given up Islam, they are in particular danger.
• [18] (5 December 2012)
• [19] (23 December 2012)
• [20] (23 December 2012)
• [21] (28 February 2013)
• [22] (13 March 2013)
• [23] (16 April 2013)
• [24] (19 May 2013)
• [25] (20 July 2013)
• [26] (8 August 2013)
• [27] (13 October 2013)
• [28] (17 February 2014)
• [29] (24 March 2014)
• [30] (21 June 2014)
• [31] (25 July 2014)
• [32] (29 July 2014)
• Quoted in Lizzie Dearden , " Richard Dawkins tweets: 'Date rape is bad, stranger rape is worse' ", The Independent (30 July 2014)
• [33] (20 August 2014)
• Regarding a hypothetical fetus with Down syndrome .
• [34] (15 February 2015)
• [35] (22 April 2015)
• [36] (22 July 2015)
• [37] (30 July 2015)
• [38] (24 November 2015)
• Regarding the Ahmed Mohamed clock incident .
• [39] (30 March 2019)
• [40] (1 November 2020)
• [41] (6 March 2021)
• [42] (23 December 2022)

Quotes about Dawkins

• Mario Bunge , philosopher and physicist. Lecture " Natural Pseudosciences ", Universidad de la Punta, 57:26.
• Francis Collins , The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), Simon and Schuster, p. 163.
• Helena Cronin , "The Battle of the Sexes Revisited", in Alan Grafen, Mark Ridley (eds.), Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think (Oxford University Press, 2006)
• Marian Stamp Dawkins, "Living with The Selfish Gene ", in Alan Grafen, Mark Ridley (eds.), Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think (2006)
• Daniel Dennett , " The Selfish Gene as a Philosophical Essay", in Alan Grafen, Mark Ridley (eds.), Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think (2006)
• Niall Ferguson , as qtd. in Huw Spanner, Past Master: In-depth Interview with Niall Ferguson , High Profiles (Published on 1 November 2007)
• Jane Goodall , The Bonobo in All of Us (2007)
• Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy , The Spectator , in a review of Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow (2000).
• John Gray , "The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins", New Republic (2 October 2014)
• Richard Harries , the 41st Bishop of Oxford , "A Fellow Humanist", as quoted in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think , p. 236.
• Peter Higgs , Nobel Prize laureate in physics . In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo .
• John Krebs, "Richard Dawkins: Intellectual Plumber—and More", in Alan Grafen, Mark Ridley (eds.), Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think (2006)
• Amanda Marcotte "Atheism's shocking woman problem: What's behind the misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?" , Salon (October 3, 2014)
• Alister McGrath , " The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine " (2011)
• Simon Conway Morris , in The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 9.
• Simon Conway Morris , in Life's Solution (2003), p. 315.
• Trey Parker , "Go God Go XII," South Park .
• Steven Pinker , The Better Angels of Our Nature (2012)
• Andrew F. Read, "Ballooning Parrots and Semi-Lunar Germs" in Alan Grafen, Mark Ridley (eds.), Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think (2006)
• Stanley A. Rice, Life of Earth : Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-aged Stressed-out World (2011)
• Steven Shapin , "Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science by Richard Dawkins – review", Guardian (26 Aug 2015)
• Ian Stewart , The Mathematics of Life (2011)
• Colin Wilson in Alien Dawn , pp. 301-302
• [w:Andrew Brown (writer)|Andrew Brown], "Dawkins The Dogmatist", Prospect Magazine , 21st October 2006
• Antony Flew 's review of The God Delusion
• American Humanist Association Board Statement Withdrawing Honor from Richard Dawkins , American Humanist Association (19 April 2021)
• Robyn E. Blumner , Identitarianism Is Incompatible with Humanism , Free Inquiry , Volume 42, No. 4, June/July 2022

External links

• Richard Dawkins Foundation
• Dawkins at Positive Atheism

• 1941 births
• Living people
• Philosophers from England
• Non-fiction authors from England
• Science authors
• Biologists from England
• Atheists from England
• Feminists from England
• Atheism activists
• Critics of religion
• Social critics
• Secularists
• Memoirists from England
• People from Nairobi
• Geneticists
• Scientists from Kenya
• University of Oxford alumni
• University of Oxford faculty
• University of California, Berkeley faculty
• Fellows of the Royal Society
• Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature

Navigation menu

Lack of Critical Thinking: 14 Reasons Why Do We Lack

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and evaluate information objectively and rationally. It is essential for making informed decisions and solving problems. However, many people lack this skill and rely on biases, emotions, or external influences. We hope that by reading this post, you have gained some insights into your own critical thinking abilities and how to improve them. Remember, critical thinking is not something you are born with or without; it is something you can learn and develop with time and effort.

Sanju Pradeepa

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and evaluate information objectively and rationally. It is a skill that can help us make better decisions, solve problems, and avoid biases and fallacies. However, many of us lack critical thinking skills or do not use them effectively. In this blog post, we will explore some of the reasons why we lack of critical thinking and how we can improve it.

Table of Contents

Common barriers to critical thinking.

Critical thinking is a fundamental life skill that most people struggle with. It involves an individual’s ability to think logically and critically about different situations. Unfortunately, several common barriers can prevent people from being able to think critically and apply their skills effectively.

First, many people develop cognitive biases over time due to years of repeating the same behaviors and failing to step outside their comfort zone. This can prevent them from being able to look at problems objectively and make decisions that benefit them in the long run.

Second, people often don’t recognize their limitations and may be too quick to make decisions without considering potential consequences or other perspectives. And finally, a lack of self-awareness can lead individuals to draw invalid conclusions or take unnecessary risks to avoid failure.

These are only a few of the potential barriers that people face when it comes to critical thinking. The good news is that with the right tools, anyone can learn how to think more critically and make better decisions in any situation.

Reasons We Lack of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and evaluate information objectively and rationally. It helps us to make better decisions and solve problems effectively. However, many people lack critical thinking skills for various reasons, such as cognitive biases, emotional influences, social pressures, lack of education, or misinformation. These factors can impair our judgment and prevent us from seeing the truth clearly.

1. Lack of Fundamental Skills

It’s easy to blame our lack of critical thinking on external factors, but the reality is that we may also lack the fundamental skills, like reading comprehension and problem-solving, that is required to engage in practical and profound thinking.

We all know somebody who can put together an impressive argument using facts but then has difficulty articulating how these facts work together in a wider context.

Tip- These skills can be developed through practice and education. Improving your reading comprehension and problem-solving abilities are important steps on the road to becoming a better critical thinker. 

2. Too Quick to Accept Mediocrity

It’s too easy to accept the status quo of mediocrity. We live in a world that rewards instant gratification, which doesn’t lend itself to engaging in deep thought or taking the time to think critically.

We have become accustomed to quick fixes and simple solutions instead of taking a few extra moments to contemplate the problems we face and deduce better solutions.

Think of it this way: we are presented with a “comfortable” path that is easy to follow but is not necessarily the best solution. Our default setting is to take this path and not look for any alternatives.

Unfortunately, this leads us down a road that does not require us to think deeply about the problem, so we never really get to the root cause.

As a result, we accept failure more readily than success. We do not examine our failures objectively and try to learn from them; instead, we just shrug off any failures as mediocre outcomes.

After all, it was easy and comfortable and move on without addressing or resolving the issue at hand.

3. Fear of the Unknown

Fear of the unknown is a big factor when it comes to our lack of critical thinking. We often don’t challenge our beliefs and assumptions because it’s uncomfortable or we don’t want to admit we were wrong.

That’s why, when presented with something we don’t agree with or understand, rather than challenging it, we tend to stick with what feels safe and familiar.

Tip- So how can we overcome this fear of the unknown?

• Reframe the Conversation: This will help us become more open-minded instead of automatically dismissing anything that doesn’t fit in with our own beliefs and experiences.
• Push Beyond Your Comfort Zone : By doing this, you’ll be questioning your assumptions and engaging in dialog with people who have different opinions or approaches.

By taking these steps, we can start to move beyond our fear of the unknown and begin critically thinking about the world around us. 

4. Confirmation Bias

Have you ever heard of confirmation bias? It’s the tendency to look for, focus on, and interpret information that confirms your beliefs while disregarding information that contradicts them.

Say you’re trying to decide if product A is better than product B. You read studies and reviews that tell you that product A is great, but when you come across a study or review that says the opposite, you quickly dismiss it. That’s confirmation bias in action.

This way of thinking has been proven to be detrimental to our society because it can cause us to form flawed conclusions and make poor decisions without even knowing it.

It can also lead to incorrect assumptions based on incomplete evidence, and what’s worse, we may become so attached to these assumptions that we won’t take in any new information that could potentially change our minds.

5. Unwillingness to Challenge Assumptions

At times, we can be too complacent and accepting of the status quo, not questioning or challenging what is already established and accepted.

On the surface, this might make sense; it can feel safer to go along with what we already know than to rock the boat. But if we don’t challenge assumptions, then our thinking quickly stagnates and never evolves. We miss out on life-changing opportunities because we don’t think critically and challenge ourselves to expand our horizons.

Even if you’re not comfortable directly challenging another person or idea, the good news is that there are many other ways to test assumptions without causing major disruption or conflict.

Tip- Here are a few ideas:

• Start brainstorming: Think of creative solutions or alternative ways of doing something that challenges existing beliefs.
• Ask questions: Ask yourself why something needs to be done a certain way—you might just uncover a better solution that no one else thought of before!
• Test your ideas: Run experiments to assess how well your ideas will work in practice.
• Listen to others: Seek out different opinions and listen carefully to open up your mind and gain fresh perspectives that can help you challenge existing assumptions effectively.

6. Avoidance of critical feedback

Are you afraid of criticism? If so, you’re not alone. Everyone experiences criticism in some form or another, and it can be hard to take it in when it’s coming your way. This fear of being judged or rejected can lead to a fear of critical feedback, which can in turn hinder your ability to think critically.

Critical thinking involves analyzing and evaluating information to draw conclusions. Without proper feedback, you don’t get the opportunity to practice this skill or learn by reviewing the results of your efforts.

Unfortunately, many people are so scared of being criticized that they avoid giving or receiving critical feedback, which makes it hard for them to develop their critical thinking skills.

If this sounds familiar to you, there are a few things you can do:

• Make sure that criticism is constructive and focused on the task at hand rather than on the person.
• Ask for more specific advice so that it is easier for you to apply it.
• Take the time to listen and absorb what’s being said.
• Step back from the situation and take a look at it from an objective point of view.
• Have an open mind when receiving criticism.

By taking steps like these and actively seeking out constructive feedback, you will be able to better develop your critical thinking skills.

7. Over dependence on technology

We rely on technology for almost every aspect of our lives, and this extreme dependence has had a not-so-positive effect on our ability to think critically. As soon as we get used to having something done for us, it can become almost impossible to do it ourselves.

Take searching for information, for example. It’s become second nature to type a few words into the search bar and have a wealth of information at our fingertips from the comfort of our home or office.

We’ve become so dependent on it that many people don’t think about where the information is coming from or if it’s accurate or reliable.

Moreover, when people become too comfortable depending on technology, they lose valuable opportunities to practice their critical thinking skills like problem-solving and decision-making.

Without regular practice, these skills atrophy over time, leaving us less able to think critically when faced with complex issues that require high-level analysis.

8. Ignoring Alternative Choices

Maybe you’re in the habit of making decisions without considering any alternatives. But if you really want to make progress in your critical thinking skills, then you must start taking into account all the possible options.

• Weighing Pros and Cons Doing this allows you to see things from multiple perspectives and helps trigger more creative ideas. This way, when faced with a decision, you can thoroughly analyze it before settling on a solution.
• Brainstorming Ideas: Take a few minutes to jot down a list of different ideas, even if some of them seem too wild or impractical at first glance. This can help you come up with unexpected solutions that are tailored to each case.
• Consulting Others: Talking through your ideas with people who are experienced and wise can give you the boost of confidence needed to make the best choice for yourself and your situation.

9. Failure to cultivate intellectual curiosity

You may not know this, but a lack of critical thinking stems partially from a lack of intellectual curiosity. Many people simply don’t take the time to explore new ideas and perspectives, even when they are presented.

• Curiosity Gap: People have a problem with constantly wanting to be “right,” which keeps them in this so-called “curiosity gap,” which is when we make assumptions and tend to stick within our comfort zones of beliefs. It’s easy to accept what makes sense to us without really exploring it scientifically or logically.
• Mental Laziness: Humans also tend towards mental laziness, meaning we easily take shortcuts instead of dedicating energy or time to critically analyzing an idea or concept. 

10. Influenced by cognitive biases

Let’s face it, we all have cognitive biases. A cognitive bias is when we make snap judgments about people and situations without really thinking about them first. This happens all the time and can cause us to make decisions based on false assumptions or incorrect conclusions.

And these biases can lead to some pretty major obstacles when it comes to critical thinking. For instance, we might be more likely to think positively about a decision if it comes from someone we know and trust, even if that decision isn’t actually the best one.

Or, we might dismiss ideas that don’t match our preconceived notions instead of considering them on their own merits.

So how do you fix this? It takes practice and a conscious effort to try not to let your biases impact your decisions. Start by being aware of them, and try to identify any prior beliefs that you have that might be influencing your thinking. Then take a step back and take the time to evaluate an idea or situation objectively before making a decision or forming an opinion.

11. Reluctant To Challenge Their Assumptions, Opinions, Or Worldviews

One of the main reasons people lack critical thinking skills is their reluctance to challenge their assumptions, opinions, or worldviews. It’s quite natural for humans to stay in their comfort zones and avoid questioning the status quo or examining issues from different perspectives.

This can be attributed to our evolutionary roots, which favored a more conservative approach to risk-taking and decision-making.

But if you want to sharpen your critical thinking skills, then this is something you must overcome. You must challenge your beliefs and opinions , question things that you take for granted, and be ready to accept opposing opinions or views.

12. Overconfident in Their Knowledge, Skills, Or Abilities

When it comes to lacking critical thinking, another issue could be that some people are just overconfident in their knowledge, skills, or abilities and don’t take the time to consider other points of view.

It’s a common mistake to think that you know everything there is to know and don’t need to consider other perspectives. After all, if you knew how to solve every problem in life, we’d live in a perfect world. Unfortunately, this kind of attitude cuts off potential solutions to problems.

Luckily, there are a few easy ways for us all to start developing better critical thinking skills:

• Take an honest look at your own knowledge and admit where you lack understanding or information.
• Ask yourself questions and look critically at the answers.
• Look for multiple solutions or perspectives when trying to solve a problem.
• Listen carefully when others provide feedback, and make sure you understand what they’re saying.

13. Underestimate the complexity or uncertainty.

You may be underestimating the complexity or uncertainty of certain situations and decisions, which can make it hard to think critically. Critical thinking is all about considering multiple perspectives and weighing the pros and cons of different courses of action.

But if you don’t open your mind to the possibility that there are more than two sides to a story, then you might be missing out on important information.

Moreover, when people fail to take into account the uncertainty involved with certain outcomes, they’re more likely to make decisions without properly weighing their options.

For example, if you think that a particular decision is black and white, without any room for doubt or differing opinions, then you’re unlikely to exercise critical thinking skills to explore other options or consider possible risks or rewards involved.

So if you find yourself struggling with critical thinking, it could be because you’re failing to recognize that there are always complexities and uncertainties associated with any decision-making process. So, it’s important to take these into account before making any final call.

14. Lack of Motivation 

Doing something well often requires effort , and that effort isn’t easy. The same goes for critical thinking; you need to put in the hard work to become a better thinker. That takes dedication and motivation, but unfortunately, many people don’t have it.

There are lots of things that can get in the way of motivation, everything from being too comfortable with how things are to not feeling like your efforts will make a difference.

To overcome this lack of motivation and become the problem-solving machine you’re meant to be, you’ll need to start with some basic steps:

• Identify the reasons why you lack the motivation to think critically. Is it because you don’t see any value in doing it or because you’re afraid of making mistakes?
• Break down tasks into manageable chunks so that it doesn’t feel too overwhelming or intimidating to tackle problems one step at a time. This will help make each task seem more achievable, giving you a sense of accomplishment along the way instead of dreading every new challenge before even starting it.
• Set goals for yourself and reward yourself when you meet them. Make sure the rewards are motivating and meaningful.

Critical thinking is a valuable skill that can help us make better decisions, solve problems, and avoid biases. However, many of us lack this skill due to various reasons, such as lack of education, exposure, practice, feedback, or motivation. In this blog post, we have explored some of these reasons and suggested some ways to overcome them.

We hope that by reading this post, you have gained some insights into your own critical thinking abilities and how to improve them. Remember, critical thinking is not something you are born with or without; it is something you can learn and develop with time and effort.

• What Causes a Lack of Critical Thinking Skills? by ALEX SAEZ published in study.com
• 10 things that cause a lack of critical thinking in society by Nguyet Yen Tran   published in deapod.com

Call to action

If you want to learn more about this types of topic and discover some tips and tricks to boost your brain power, click the link below and subscribe to our newsletter.

Let’s boost your self-growth with Believe in Mind.

Interested in self-reflection tips, learning hacks, and knowing ways to calm down your mind? We offer you the best content which you have been looking for.

Follow Me on

You May Like Also

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

theDiagonal

Ignorance [is] the root and stem of all evil.

Massimo Pigliucci over at Rationally Speaking gives us his take on Platonic Ignorance. His caution is appropriate: in this age of information overload and extreme politicization it is ever more important for us to realize and acknowledge our own ignorance. Spreading falsehoods and characterizing opinion as fact to others — transferred ignorance — is rightly identified by Plato as a moral failing. In his own words (of course translated), “Ignorance [is] the Root and Stem of All Evil”.

[div class=attrib]From Rationally Speaking:[end-div]

Plato famously maintained that knowledge is “justified true belief,” meaning that to claim the status of knowledge our beliefs (say, that the earth goes around the sun, rather than the other way around) have to be both true (to the extent this can actually be ascertained) and justified (i.e., we ought to be able to explain to others why we hold such beliefs, otherwise we are simply repeating the — possibly true — beliefs of someone else).

It is the “justified” part that is humbling, since a moment’s reflection will show that a large number of things we think we know we actually cannot justify, which means that we are simply trusting someone else’s authority on the matter. (Which is okay, as long as we realize and acknowledge that to be the case.)

I was recently intrigued, however, not by Plato’s well known treatment of knowledge, but by his far less discussed views on the opposite of knowledge: ignorance. The occasion for these reflections was a talk by Katja Maria Vogt of Columbia University, delivered at CUNY’s Graduate Center, where I work. Vogt began by recalling the ancient skeptics’ attitude toward ignorance, as a “conscious positive stand,” meaning that skepticism is founded on one’s realization of his own ignorance. In this sense, of course, Socrates’ contention that he knew nothing becomes neither a self-contradiction (isn’t he saying that he knows that he knows nothing, thereby acknowledging that he knows something?), nor false modesty. Socrates was simply saying that he was aware of having no expertise while at the same time devoting his life to the quest for knowledge.

Vogt was particularly interested in Plato’s concept of “transferred ignorance,” which the ancient philosopher singled out as morally problematic. Transferred ignorance is the case when someone imparts “knowledge” that he is not aware is in fact wrong. Let us say, for instance, that I tell you that vaccines cause autism, and I do so on the basis of my (alleged) knowledge of biology and other pertinent matters, while, in fact, I am no medical researcher and have only vague notions of how vaccines actually work (i.e., imagine my name is Jenny McCarthy).

The problem, for Plato, is that in a sense I would be thinking of myself as smarter than I actually am, which of course carries a feeling of power over others. I wouldn’t simply be mistaken in my beliefs, I would be mistaken in my confidence in those beliefs. It is this willful ignorance (after all, I did not make a serious attempt to learn about biology or medical research) that carries moral implications.

So for Vogt the ancient Greeks distinguished between two types of ignorance: the self-aware, Socratic one (which is actually good) and the self-oblivious one of the overconfident person (which is bad). Need I point out that far too little of the former and too much of the latter permeate current political and social discourse? Of course, I’m sure a historian could easily come up with a plethora of examples of bad ignorance throughout human history, all the way back to the beginning of recorded time, but it does strike me that the increasingly fact-free public discourse on issues varying from economic policies to scientific research has brought Platonic transferred ignorance to never before achieved peaks (or, rather, valleys).

And I suspect that this is precisely because of the lack of appreciation of the moral dimension of transferred or willful ignorance. When politicians or commentators make up “facts” — or disregard actual facts to serve their own ideological agendas — they sometimes seem genuinely convinced that they are doing something good, at the very least for their constituents, and possibly for humanity at large. But how can it be good — in the moral sense — to make false knowledge one’s own, and even to actively spread it to others?

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump .[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Socrates and Plato in a medieval picture. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Subscribe to receive weekly emails of the Reasons for Hope blog.

A biblical foundation for critical thinking.

Plato's Mirror

Plato: ‘ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.’.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil. This powerful quote by Plato encapsulates the inherent relationship between knowledge and morality. In its straightforward interpretation, the quote suggests that ignorance is the fundamental cause of all wrongdoing and immorality. When individuals lack knowledge or understanding, they are more likely to engage in harmful actions or contribute to societal ills. This concept highlights the importance of education and the pursuit of knowledge in fostering a more just and virtuous world.

However, to delve deeper into this topic, let’s introduce the philosophical concept of moral ambiguity. This notion challenges the black-and-white view that ignorance leads unequivocally to evil. Moral ambiguity signifies the existence of actions or situations that are neither purely good nor purely evil but lie on a moral continuum. It recognizes the complexity of human nature and the intricate web of factors that contribute to our choices.

While Plato’s quote emphasizes the negative consequences of ignorance, there are instances where ignorance may not necessarily lead to evil. Consider a child who unintentionally breaks a valuable antique, unaware of its significance. The child’s action may cause damage, but without malicious intent, it would be unjust to label it as inherently evil. The key distinction here lies in the absence of knowledge and intention.

Conversely, there are situations where knowledge and understanding can be used to perpetuate evil. A well-educated individual may possess the skills and knowledge necessary to manipulate and deceive others, leading to acts of cruelty or injustice. In this scenario, we witness how knowledge can be wielded as a tool of evil, challenging the idea that ignorance is solely responsible for wrongdoing.

While ignorance can certainly contribute to fostering an environment conducive to evil, it is important to acknowledge the multidimensionality of morality and the multifaceted nature of human actions. The extent to which ignorance plays a role in perpetuating evil depends on various factors, including intent, context, and the individual’s capacity for self-reflection.

To truly address the root causes of evil, we must strive for a society that values not only the pursuit of knowledge but also the cultivation of empathy, compassion, and critical thinking. By fostering an educational system that encourages moral development alongside intellectual growth, we can equip individuals with the tools necessary to navigate the complex ethical landscape.

While Plato’s quote serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of knowledge in combatting evil, it is crucial to explore the nuances and intricacies surrounding this topic. By embracing the concept of moral ambiguity, we can enhance our understanding of the complex relationship between knowledge, ignorance, and morality.

In conclusion, Plato’s quote, “Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil,” encapsulates the fundamental role that lack of knowledge plays in perpetuating wrongdoing. However, it is important to recognize that moral ambiguity exists and challenges the notion that ignorance alone leads unequivocally to evil. By fostering a society that values both knowledge and moral development, we can strive for a world that is not only informed but also compassionate and just.

Share this:

Discover more from plato's mirror.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

How to go to Heaven

How to get right with god.

Why is the love of money the root of all kinds of evil?

For further study, related articles, subscribe to the, question of the week.

Get our Question of the Week delivered right to your inbox!

Mark Twain: 'The lack of money is the root of all evil.'

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

Mark Twain's quote, "The lack of money is the root of all evil," is a powerful statement that delves into the complex relationship between money and morality. At first glance, the quote may seem straightforward, suggesting that financial deprivation can lead individuals to commit immoral acts in pursuit of wealth. However, a deeper analysis reveals a more nuanced interpretation. Twain's words point to the pivotal role that economic factors play in shaping human behavior and societal structures.The significance of this quote lies in its exploration of the ways in which financial constraints can impact individual choices and societal dynamics. Money serves as a means of fulfilling basic needs, achieving goals, and exerting power in various spheres of life. When individuals face a lack of financial resources, they may experience heightened feelings of insecurity, desperation, and vulnerability. These emotions can, in turn, drive individuals to engage in unethical behaviors as they seek to alleviate their financial struggles or maintain a sense of control in a world defined by economic disparities.While Twain's quote provides a thought-provoking perspective on the relationship between money and evil, it also invites us to consider a more profound philosophical concept - the interconnectedness of human experiences. In the realm of philosophy, the principle of interconnectedness posits that all aspects of existence are intertwined and influence each other in intricate ways. From relationships between individuals to the structures of society, everything is interconnected and interdependent. This philosophical framework challenges us to perceive the world not as a series of isolated events but as a web of interconnected phenomena where every action, choice, and consequence reverberates throughout the fabric of existence.Drawing a parallel between Twain's quote and the concept of interconnectedness unveils a deeper layer of understanding regarding the nature of evil and its roots. Through this philosophical lens, we come to recognize that the lack of money is not solely to blame for evil deeds but is rather one of many interconnected factors that contribute to moral complexities. It highlights that societal inequalities, personal values, cultural norms, and psychological factors also shape how individuals navigate the moral landscape.Ultimately, Twain's quote serves as a catalyst for introspection and critical examination of the moral implications of economic disparities. By intertwining this quote with the philosophical concept of interconnectedness, we are encouraged to contemplate the multifaceted nature of evil and its underlying causes. This juxtaposition invites us to explore the intricate connections between money, morality, and human experiences, prompting us to reflect on how we can foster a more just and ethical society where financial deprivation does not dictate the course of morality. In doing so, we embark on a journey of philosophical inquiry that challenges us to perceive the world through a lens of interconnectedness, striving for a deeper understanding of the complex tapestry of human existence.

Henry David Thoreau: 'Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.'

John adams: 'fear is the foundation of most governments.'.

Ethics and Morality

What actually is evil and what makes people carry out evil acts, the myth of “pure evil,” and the real reasons why people do “evil” things..

Posted June 10, 2021 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• "Evil people" and "evil acts" are common, but much less common than is generally believed. Most people are moral and self-controlled.
• Most people who intentionally harm others don't think of themselves as evil, tending to minimize or justify their actions—in crime and in war.
• Some of the worst atrocities have been motivated by Utopian ideals, especially coupled with irrational conspiratorial belief and dehumanization.
• Biological and cultural evolution have favored cooperation and compassion in humans. Violence has in fact been declining in human societies.

From genocide to malware and everything in between, it’s easy to feel demoralized about the moral fiber and caring of our fellow humans. It can certainly seem that malice is endemic to humans. The default state, perhaps.

And yet, as the highly cited social psychology researcher Roy Baumeister noted in his seminal work Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty : 1 "One starts a work like this wondering, ‘Why is there evil?’ But after reviewing what is known about the causes of aggression , violence, oppression, and other forms of evil, one is led to the opposite question: Why isn't there more evil than there is?"

For starters, Baumeister debunks the very notion of evil, “the myth of pure evil,” making the point that the factors driving people to do bad things to each other are highly complex. The notion of evil is a simplistic one. Nevertheless, for practical purposes, he uses the term in his analysis: 2

"There are four major root causes of evil or reasons that people act in ways that others will perceive as evil. Ordinary, well-intentioned people may perform evil acts when under the influence of these factors, singly or in combination."

• The simple desire for material gain
• Threatened egotism
• Idealism: "Noble ends are often seen as justifying violent means." 2
• The pursuit of sadistic pleasure: "only 5 or 6 percent of perpetrators actually get enjoyment out of inflicting harm." 2

Why is “evil” not more prevalent than it is?

Bad people or bad actions?

A disproportionate amount of violence and crime in ordinary societies is perpetrated by the small minority of people with antisocial personality traits. And an even smaller percentage are psychopaths, at the extreme end of the spectrum of antisocial traits—the ones most likely to commit sadistic acts of violence. 3

But aside from the disproportionate contribution of nasty personality types, a lot of other violence is simply committed impulsively rather than premeditated, and many of those kinds of perpetrators do actually feel regret or shame for their actions afterward. Human interpersonal violence is often carried out by people acting impulsively, fearfully, insecurely, passionately, vengefully, or misguidedly. A lot of this is reactive aggression. Only some violence is premeditated, calculated, or predatory (proactive aggression). And when violence and crime are committed by groups, there is also the huge factor of peer pressure and influence. 4

So far, we have mostly been talking about “ordinary” violence and crime, not war or government tyranny.

People who do evil things generally don’t consider themselves evil

People often tend to minimize the harmful impact of what they are doing or rationalize their reasons (even if motivated primarily by the simple desire for material gain or by threatened egotism), often seeing their action as much less of a big deal than the impact experienced from the victim’s point of view, or feeling that the victim threatened or provoked them or deserved what was done to them. Baumeister suggests that while the victims’ motto is “Never forget,” the perpetrators’ motto is “Let bygones be bygones,” 5

Evil villains in Hollywood movies aside, Baumeister notes that “most people who do evil do not think of themselves as doing evil […], most of them regard themselves as good people who are trying to defend themselves as the good guys fighting against the forces of evil. The world breaks down into us against them, and it almost invariably turns out that evil lies on the side of ‘them’” 6 (referring here more to violence between groups, nations, ideologies, etc., than to individual criminal acts).

Even Hitler considered himself and the German people to be victims—principally of the Jews, whom (together with the leftists) he blamed for Germany’s defeat in the First World War and its subsequent crushing economic conditions and humiliation . 7 He portrayed the Jews as a greedy amoral race living parasitically off the German people and set on destroying Germany. He viewed the Nazi persecution of, and subsequent mass murder of, the Jews as self-defense. An anxious man with a nervous digestive system, neurotic contamination obsessions, volatile temper, lack of formal education (not having completed his secondary schooling), and a strong tendency to externalize blame for his personal failures, Hitler was just the sort of person to believe and propagate bizarre paranoid conspiracy theories. 8-12

[Note: This blog post is a bare-bones summary of a vast and complex topic. It warrants elaboration, which I’ve provided in the footnotes, with additional illuminating material, for readers who want to understand more about the motivations of evil-doers. The footnotes include, for example, quotes by Heinrich Himmler—a foremost architect of the Holocaust, explaining and justifying his own motivations.]

Societal control and self-control

Baumeister states: "All told, the four root causes of evil are pervasive, which leads one to wonder why violence and oppression are not even more common than they are. The answer is that violent impulses are typically restrained by inner inhibitions; people exercise self-control to avoid lashing out at others every time they might feel like it." 13 Violence is often the result of reduced self-control or a breakdown of societal control. 14

Inhibitory control or self-control is largely a function of the frontal lobes of our brains (especially the prefrontal cortex). As the neuroscientist and biological anthropologist Robert Sapolsky pithily puts it: The frontal lobe helps us do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do. 15

There is very wide variability in frontal lobe functioning across individuals—probably best described by a bell curve, like most traits. A great many people have relatively lower frontal cortical brain activity and consequently lower self-control (and, more generally, weaker executive functioning ). The most common clinically defined “disorder” associated with these characteristics is ADHD . 16 ADHD plays an outsized role in human aggressive and criminal behavior. A recent meta-analysis of the prevalence of ADHD in incarcerated populations found that compared with published general population prevalence, there is a fivefold increase in the prevalence of ADHD in youth prison populations (30.1 percent) and a 10-fold increase in adult prison populations (26.2 percent). 17

Context, context, context

The biological and social-cultural determinants of human behavior are vastly complex, as Sapolsky lucidly demonstrates in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst —his richly complex multilayered explanation of the many biological and cultural factors influencing human behavior including aggression. He repeats a cautionary statement several times throughout the book, whenever we might be tempted to conclude that we have arrived at a complete explanation and understanding of what makes humans do the things they do: “It’s complicated.” Genes and the environment interact inextricably, all the time. And he reminds us of the importance of “context, context, context,” in influencing the basic biological factors that underlie human behavior. 18

How a person will behave is strongly influenced by genetic predisposition, past experience (especially early childhood experience), socio-economic and cultural factors, the presence of an intact society with prosocial norms, specific interpersonal dynamics between individuals, and the particularities of the immediate circumstances.

Innate tendencies and long-term trends

There is a larger philosophical debate about whether humans in their natural uncivilized state are innately “bad” or “good,” often referred to as “Hobbes” vs. “Rousseau” views. Sapolsky helps us see why, unsurprisingly, it’s “a mixture of both.” 19, 20

Steven Pinker’s magisterial work, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined , 21 provided mountains of data demonstrating that violence has actually been substantially declining in the last few centuries. Among the very many factors contributing to this, a major one was the establishment of centralized societal control in the form of the state (initially religious and authoritarian, and later democratic in many countries). There has also been an increase in norms of (and possibly even capacity for) self-control in modern societies. Improving standards of living, literacy, education, employment, and health have of course all contributed hugely too. Economic interdependence, cosmopolitanism, the resultant expanding notion of within-group (“us”), and the generally increased ability of people to understand the points of view of others very different from themselves, have also contributed greatly. The empowerment of women has also been enormously influential.

The internet and social media have amplified both the best and worst aspects of human nature, increasing the availability of both high- and low-quality information, equalizing the ability of individuals and groups to disseminate information far and wide, breaking down traditional group boundaries while also fostering new “tribal” affiliations. 22

People who do bad things often tend to believe that their actions are on the side of the good, or they rationalize that their actions are justified or not such a big deal. Biological and cultural evolution have conferred many brakes on violence and malice, and have favored cooperation and even compassion . In the long view of history, there has been an uneven but unmistakable trend toward less violence and more interdependent cooperation within and between human societies.

Being a victim of an evil act is utterly devastating, demoralizing, and disillusioning, and telling victims that evil is not as common as it seems does nothing to reduce their trauma . But it might help a little to know that the world is not a pervasively bad place , that most people are not innately “evil,” and that the world is steadily becoming a less violent place. 23

1. Roy F. Baumeister, Evil - Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997), p. 13. See also: Baumeister, R. F. (2012). Human evil: The myth of pure evil and the true causes of violence . In M. Mikulincer & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Herzliya series on personality and social psychology. The social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil (p. 367–380). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/13091-020 .

We will refer in this article only to intentional acts committed by people, not to accidents, illnesses, natural disasters, or attacks by non-human animals. We will take it as self-evident that such events don't happen for an intentional "reason" (apart from the mostly instinct-driven agency of animals).

2. Baumeister, Evil - Inside Human Violence and Cruelty , p.376-7.

3. An especially malevolent combination of overlapping traits that has gained recognition in the psychological literature in the last couple of decades is the so-called dark triad, marked by narcissism (characterized by egocentrism), Machiavellianism (exploitativeness) and psychopathy (lack of empathy). Milder versions of these traits are not uncommon. People with such traits may even have many positive traits too. The really malevolent and potentially dangerous people are the small minority of the population with more marked versions of these traits.

[Click 'more' to view footnotes 4-23, below.]

[The footnotes below contain illuminating material for readers who want to understand more about the motivations of evil-doers, with a particular emphasis on the Nazis. The footnotes include, for example, quotes by Heinrich Himmler—a foremost architect of the holocaust, explaining and justifying his own motivations. There are also evolutionary psychology perspectives on evil, and other insights.]

4. A few of the obvious factors contributing to violence and crime:

-- countries with weak or corrupt systems of government and law enforcement, where criminals are seen to act with impunity.

-- communities / neighborhoods lower in socio-economic status, disadvantaged, under-educated or under-employed.

-- communities whose social fabric has been badly damaged by long histories of collective trauma, oppression and discrimination.

-- high rates of alcohol and drug use.

-- low intelligence (applicable more to crime than to aggression; and probably applicable more to criminals from communities where sociological factors like those listed above are not the main cause).

-- brain disorders, brain injuries, mental illnesses, and developmental disorders (applicable more to aggression than to crime; while rates of aggression are higher in these groups than in the general population, people with such disorders tend generally to be at greater risk for self-harm and harm from others than harm to others).

-- regardless of culture or background, most violence is committed by young men (this is a simple fact of biology and evolutionary psychology).

5. Baumeister, p.43

6. Baumeister, p.62

7. The stab-in-the-back myth

8. The point of understanding Hitler’s deluded beliefs is not in any way to exonerate him and the Nazis—the fanatical and callous ruthlessness with which he and his inner circle implemented their murderous agenda constituted crimes against humanity of the highest degree, and probably required no small measure of psychopathic traits. The point here is to illustrate how deeply irrational was their obsession with the Jews—irrational to the point of diverting resources from their war effort to the program of systematic persecution and genocide.

There has been debate among historians, psychiatrists and psychologists as to whether Hitler’s beliefs were full delusions in the clinical sense of meaning that he suffered from a psychotic illness. It is important to understand that irrational beliefs exist on a continuum, with psychosis existing at one end of that continuum. The vast majority of people with irrational beliefs running counter to reality are merely credulous and lacking critical thinking; most people who believe weird things are not delusional in the clinical sense. Belief in implausible conspiracy theories is simply a more extreme manifestation of the tendency of most of us to hold implausible beliefs that are totally contradicted by evidence . The prevalence and dangerousness of irrational beliefs and human credulity in contributing to violence and war underscores the enormous importance of extensively teaching rigorous critical thinking.

9. A great many violent conflicts are driven by irrational ideologies, religious and secular. Utopian ideologies are among the worst offenders, since practically any means can come to be “rationally” seen as a regrettable but justifiable action toward achieving an imagined utopian end. Particularly when coupled with dehumanization of a group of people who are believed to be an obstacle to achieving the perfect society. As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has noted, utopian ends are seen as infinitely good, and the extermination of a group of people who are believed to be preventing the achievement of a perfect, pure society appears to be justifiable [Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), pp. 320–43]. Racist nationalistic political regimes exploit this lack of identification with, and dehumanization of, other racial groups through xenophobic propaganda and indoctrination. Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews by labeling them as subhuman vermin, pollution, a pathogen, or a malignant presence. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, wrote in his diary in March 1942: “ A judgment is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric but thoroughly deserved. " Similar political strategies of dehumanization have been used prior to other orchestrated genocides, such as in Rwanda in 1994 (in which the Tutsis were referred to as “cockroaches”). Dehumanization provokes disgust and blocks the natural human inclination toward empathy. David Livingston Smith in his books Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011) and On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), provides an in-depth analysis of dehumanization.

10. Hitler seems to have been a true believer in his crazy theories about a global Jewish conspiracy and about the Jews having been responsible for Germany’s defeat in WWI and economic woes. Many of his followers bought into these theories too. But it must also no doubt have been the case that many high-ranking Nazis did not truly believe these implausible theories yet simply considered it expedient to have a political scapegoat to blame for Germany’s problems. Many Nazi officials were simply opportunists who put their own career advancement ahead of any reservations they may have had about being a cog in the vast killing machine, and they likely found ways to rationalize and mentally compartmentalize what they were doing. Nevertheless, many were probably highly motivated by what they regarded as the idealistic “noble ends” referred to by Baumeister (i.e. utopianism), in justifying their violent means. Certainly, there were also many psychopaths, thugs and opportunists who jumped on the bandwagon for reasons of self-interest, and people with personal feelings of inadequacy seduced by the prospect of power. And undoubtedly there were a great many people who were “just following orders”. Most people, of course, were more simply either inactive bystanders or complicit in small ways—small cogs in the giant Nazi machine. But it is deeply disturbing that many Nazis who were willingly and enthusiastically complicit in the genocide, and deeply committed to the irrational ideology that drove it, were educated professionals, and even intellectuals. [For more disturbing insights into how far “ordinary” people will go in following orders, or under the influence of peer pressure or group conformity, see Christopher R. Browning's book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), and the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo .]

We struggle to understand how these people went home at night and tenderly kissed and played with their children, loved their dogs, appreciated classical music and read philosophy. As Michael Berenbaum, project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts it: “The killers were civilized men and women of an advanced culture. They were both ordinary and extraordinary, a cross section of the men and women of Germany, its allies, and their collaborators as well as the best and the brightest.” [Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), p.220]

The Holocaust was primarily an ideologically-driven phenomenon that drew in far too many otherwise ordinary people as perpetrators.

To be sure, there were certainly a great many people in the midst of all this madness who were not taken up by the Nazi ideology, and some of those people actively resisted the regime at great personal risk. There were many who secretly hid or rescued Jews and other victims. They could have been, and in many cases were, killed for doing so. Most of us cannot know if we would have had the courage to do what those people did.

11. It is important to understand as well that the Nazi leadership’s “Final Solution” to “the Jewish Question”, the plan of mass murder of all European Jewry, was developed after a number of years of Nazi rule and war (probably in 1941). There was some initial hesitation and ambivalence in the Nazi hierarchy about the plan, for pragmatic reasons. The plan had progressed to the point of systematized genocide along a slippery slope of gradually increasing persecution and marginalization of Jews from society, and after the less bureaucratically systematic and less “efficient” killings by death squads. It took time for the process to assume the infamously industrial quality of en-masse rail transportation of victims to death camps, which gassed hundreds of people to death at a time and quickly cremated their bodies. It had also followed after the secret program of systematically “euthanizing” mentally disabled and mentally ill institutionalized patients. Hitler may have felt particularly justified embarking on this “solution” after the Allied countries refused to accept as refugees the large number of Jews he wanted to expel from German occupied Europe. As is well-known, the Nazis also attempted to “cleanse” their society of other undesirables, such as Roma, homosexuals, and communists.

In the analysis of many historians, genocide of the Jews was not initially the goal of the Nazis. As summarized by the respected historian Peter Hayes in his book Why? Explaining the Holocaust (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), p. 326:

“Why murder and with these means? Because of a process of problem-solving mission creep, a cumulative radicalization of policy, as increasingly harsh efforts to ‘remove’ Jews from German territory proved insufficient or unworkable and gave way to ever more extreme methods of ‘elimination.’”

In the conclusion to his book, Hayes writes (p. 342):

“The Holocaust was not mysterious and inscrutable; it was the work of humans acting on familiar human weaknesses and motives: wounded pride, fear, self-righteousness, prejudice, and personal ambition being among the most obvious. Once persecution gathered momentum, however, it was unstoppable without the death of millions of people, the expenditure of vast sums of money, and the near destruction of the European continent. Perhaps no event in history, therefore, better confirms that very difficult warning embedded in a German proverb that captures the meaning I hope readers will take away from this book: Webret den Anfängen, ‘Beware the beginnings.’”

12. One of the most revealing insights into the minds of actual perpetrators and architects of the Holocaust can be obtained from the speeches of Heinrich Himmler . Himmler was leader of the SS and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. As "Architect of the Final Solution", he was one of the people most directly responsible for the Holocaust. In October 1943, in Posen (Poznan), Poland, Himmler delivered secret speeches to officials of the Nazi party, including SS officers—the “most secret circle”. In these speeches, Himmler spoke explicitly of the extermination of the Jews, dispensing with the more usual veiled or euphemistic terms. He framed the extermination program as a very difficult but necessary historical mission of the Nazis, the necessity for which would be more fully understood and appreciated by future generations but must remain secret at the time. In these speeches, extracts of which are quoted below, he is talking to fellow officials who are involved in the extermination program and is essentially praising them for their unflinching commitment to this difficult undertaking. He remarks about how others who are less directly involved in the program and who think of it more abstractly and theoretically, tend to underestimate its magnitude and its difficulty:

"I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It's one of those things that is easily said: 'The Jewish people are being exterminated', says every party member, 'this is very obvious, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we're doing it, hah, a small matter.' And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swines, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and 17 [...]"

What is particularly interesting here is his point about remaining “a decent person”—what he is saying is essentially that they are doing the dirty work, the unpleasant job of eliminating this scourge (the Jews) which, if not eliminated, would ultimately bring down society. He is speaking of the psychological strain that the extermination program puts on those carrying it out. The Nazis had convinced themselves that the Jews were a conspiring and contaminating force which was responsible for Germany’s loss of World War I and for many of their and the world’s societal and economic problems. He speaks of the Jews elsewhere as a “ bacillus ” (bacteria), They are the main obstacle to achieving a utopian future of a pure, noble and decent super-race of pure-bred Aryans.

Himmler’s speech goes on to say:

"I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. [...] I felt obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary, as the most superior dignitary of the party, this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly and to say how it has been. The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews that managed to find hiding places will be left over."

In other speeches given to Nazi Generals in Sonthofen, Germany in May and June, 1944, Himmler states:

"Another question which was decisive for the inner security of the Reich and Europe, was the Jewish question. It was uncompromisingly solved after orders and rational recognition. I believe, gentlemen, that you know me well enough to know that I am not a bloodthirsty person; I am not a man who takes pleasure or joy when something rough must be done. However on the other hand, I have such good nerves and such a developed sense of duty – I can say that much for myself – that when I recognise something as necessary I can implement it without compromise. I have not considered myself entitled – this concerns especially the Jewish women and children – to allow the children to grow into the avengers who will then murder our children and our grandchildren. That would have been cowardly. Consequently the question was uncompromisingly resolved."

And (in the second of these Sonthofen speeches):

"It was the most terrible task and the most terrible order which could have been given to an organisation: the order to solve the Jewish question. In this circle, I may say it frankly with a few sentences. It is good that we had the severity to exterminate the Jews in our domain."

13. Baumeister p. 377. He adds: " The four root causes of evil must therefore be augmented by an understanding of the proximal cause, which is the breakdown of these inner restraints. " Baumeister states elsewhere (in his 2012 book chapter referenced in footnote 1):

"Many circumstances give rise to aggressive impulses, but people restrain themselves from acting on them. Humans are social animals, and as such, they have the same aggressive impulses that enabled their evolutionary predecessors to resolve disputes in their favor and thereby to survive and reproduce. Yet humans also have a capacity for self-regulation that is at least as strong as that of other social animals. Culture relies heavily on self-regulation because culture consists partly of a system with rules and standards, and it can function only if people alter their behavior to bring it into line with those rules and standards. More and more, that includes restraining violence, which is mostly disruptive to the smooth inner functioning of cultural systems. [...] When things are going according to a culture’s plan, individuals check their aggressive impulses. When those checks fail, the impulses lead to violent action."

14. I would add that violence can also result from excessive, obsessive, rigid self-control (“tightly wound control freaks”) and excessive societal control (as in the case of Nazism and other totalitarian societies, especially those driven by perfectionist utopian ideologies).

15. Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

16. As I have argued elsewhere , the ADHD diagnosis is misunderstood and too limiting. It ought to be reconceptualized as a common set of traits—traits that are fundamental to human functioning—rather than just one among many kinds of psychiatric disorders. It can be understood as one end of a normal continuum (i.e. one broad end of a bell-curve, with no exact cut-off defining it), for executive functioning and associated self-control / self-regulation. Its high prevalence in the human population can be understood as the result of an evolutionary mismatch relative to the high executive functioning demands placed on people by the modern society we have created.

17. Young S, Moss D, Sedgwick O, Fridman M, Hodgkins P. A meta-analysis of the prevalence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in incarcerated populations. Psychological Medicine . 2015;45(2):247-258. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291714000762 .

18. For example, higher levels of testosterone do not inevitably cause higher levels of aggression, and the hyped hormone oxytocin only increases trust and empathy toward people with whom we identify as within our group. I would add that ADHD, or the broader traits of weaker executive functioning associated with that construct, certainly do not confer an inevitability of criminal behavior and violence. Similarly, even people with psychopathic traits do not inevitably become violent, exploitative and predatory.

19. A parallel question is the evolutionary one: Which of our two equally related “first cousin” species do we humans more closely resemble: chimpanzees or bonobos? Chimpanzees tend to be more violent, including intragroup hierarchical violence, violence against females, and extragroup murdering raids, but they are capable of being very cooperative within-group. Their groups are dominated by related males. Bonobos are generally far less violent, more sexual, and also capable of high levels of cooperative behavior. Their groups are dominated by female alliances (female social organization among bonobos does not tolerate male aggression). There are evolutionary and ecological-environmental reasons for these differences between the two species. Again, the answer for humans is a mixture of both: human characteristics are somewhere in between these two closely related species. (Similarly, human characteristics are somewhere in between several other categories that are more clear-cut and dichotomous in other species, e.g. somewhere in between classic pair-bonding species and “tournament species”— tournament species are those in which males compete to mate with the most females). It was only discovered in the last decade that humans are equally related genetically to chimps and bonobos (previously it was thought that we were more closely related to chimps). A 2012 study found that we share 98.7% of our DNA with each of the two species, which in turn share 99.6% of their DNA with each other. [Prüfer K, Munch K, Hellmann I, et al. The bonobo genome compared with the chimpanzee and human genomes. Nature . 2012;486(7404):527-531. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11128 ]

20. More evolutionary psychology perspectives on aggression:

In his book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (New York: Pantheon, 2019), the primatologist Richard Wrangham, who has spent his career studying the ecology of primate social systems and the evolutionary history of human aggression, highlights the contrast between the relatively low levels of human aggression within-group (compared with other primates, humans are very tolerant and unreactive to provocation) versus the much higher levels of between-group human aggression. He concludes that reactive aggression (see definitions provided earlier in this article) has progressively diminished much more in humans compared with other primates, whereas proactive aggression (which is more often, though not exclusively, directed at members of another group) remains quite high in humans. (To be clear: while humans have far better control of reactive aggressive impulses compared with other primates, most individual acts of human violence are still reactive rather than proactive). Wrangham hypothesizes that the reduction of reactive aggression in humans was brought about by a process of self-domestication, analogous to the selective breeding of domesticated animals for traits of tameness (or analogous to the domesticated silver foxes experiment in Siberia). He cites bonobos as an example of self-domestication (through different means and driven by different factors, compared with humans). His hypothesis for humans is that self-domestication was achieved in large part by the acquisition of language and also by a process of what amounted to capital punishment: members of a hunter-gatherer group would conspire to kill an individual who was behaving too aggressively or tyrannically. While these would have been relatively uncommon occurrences, the cumulative effect over time would have been to remove the most aggressive men from the gene pool. Wrangham makes it clear that this theory is not an endorsement of capital punishment in modern society. The anthropologist Christopher Boehm also proposed this hypothesis in his book Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (New York: Basic Books, 2012).

The sociologist Nicholas Christakis takes a more positive view of human nature in Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2019), arguing that the evolved human proclivity for cooperativeness (and learning, love, selflessness, and other prosocial traits) outweighs our capacity for aggression and has adaptive advantages over it. Christakis provides diverse examples of historical and contemporary societies and social groups to illustrate his point.

Also informative are Michael Shermer's The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom (New York: Henry Holt, 2015), especially Ch. 9 of that book: “ Moral Regress and Pathways to Evil. ” And Shermer’s The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), in which, among other insights, he describes the self-domestication hypothesis for the lower rates of violence than our primate ancestors and current primates.

Another very important angle on human aggression comes from evolutionary psychology theories of sexual conflict in human mating, which contributes to a sizeable proportion of all human violence. Those theories are very well articulated by David Buss in When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault . (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2021).

21. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011)

22. In our present information age, with every person having access to almost unlimited information and a potential megaphone to the world, and with the rampant misinformation, online idiocy and vitriol we all encounter every day on the internet, it can really seem like humans are a predominantly idiotic and vile lot. But it is important to keep sight of the fact that much of the noise is produced by a loudmouthed know-nothing minority (many of whom are convinced that they are doing society a great service in combatting what they believe are malevolent conspiracies, while greatly overestimating their simplistic understanding of highly complex issues). But the majority of people, while vulnerable to misinformation, are quite reasonable and are eager to obtain more accurate information from actual experts. The prominent Canadian science educator and debunker Timothy Caulfield has studied these challenges. He writes in the context of the pandemic, “We are living through an infodemic – an era when harmful misinformation has resulted in or contributed to an increase in deaths, hospitalizations, stigma, and poor health and science policy.” He notes: “A growing body of evidence tells us that experts play a vital role in the battle against bunk. In general, the public trusts academics, scientists and health care providers. And studies have consistently shown that efforts to counter misinformation – such as on social media, where much of the noise resides and is distributed – are both needed and can have a real impact , especially if the debunking comes from an expert.” He adds: “A recent study found that the public likes seeing online corrections of misinformation, broadly endorses the practice and sees it as a public responsibility.” But “Studies have found that battling misinformation invites trouble.” Caulfield speaks from personal experience: “In the past year, I’ve received death threats and have been sued. I’ve been lied about and constantly trolled on social media. And, of course, there is the hate mail. My experience is far from unique.”

23. Baumeister, in his 2012 book chapter referenced in footnote 1, elaborates on his earlier 1997 work: "Since writing my book about evil, I have come to look at things in more evolutionary terms, and my strong impression is that instrumental violence is in some respects a hangover from an earlier stage of evolution." By "instrumental violence," he is referring to "the simple desire for material gain," and also to a large extent "threatened egotism"—which from an evolutionary psychology point of view is mostly about protecting one's status and thereby defending one's privileged access to resources, as in the case of alpha-male primates. Instrumental violence even to some degree refers to ideologically-driven violence, as such violence is usually directed at achieving practical goals. From an evolutionary point of view, "aggression enabled the biggest and strongest to survive and hence reproduce better than their weaker rivals." Baumeister makes the point that while instrumental violence often achieves its goals in the short-term, it is very often an unsuccessful strategy in the long-term—both at the level of criminal or violent individuals and at the level of violent groups, such as terrorist organizations and (arguably) even warring nation-states. "Aggression is thus evolutionarily obsolete. We have accepted better ways of resolving our conflicts" (ways that are the product of cultural evolution, such as money / business / trade, courts of law, negotiation, compromise, voting). "Yet we remain social animals underneath the cultural veneer, and sometimes people fall back on aggression to get their way. This may occur especially among people who feel that the avenues provided by their culture do not work for them."

Ralph Lewis, M.D. , is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and a consultant at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Did Paul Teach That 'Money Is the Root of All Evil'?

Paul is not rebuking a Christian for being rich in this verse. Paul is warning about the desire to be rich. The desire, if fed over time, can lead to various kinds of temptations.

Paul is trying to warn Christians about the danger of having a love for money. He is not saying that having a lot of money is evil, but that loving money is going to motivate various kinds of evils in your life. By evil, Paul is referring to morally reprehensible behavior. 

In fact, Paul’s warning is very serious, for he says in the rest of the verse that by craving after money, some people have left the Christian faith and caused themselves a significant amount of pain. 

Why Is Love of Money the Root of All Evil in 1 Timothy 6:10 ?

It is of utmost importance to understand clearly what this verse does not say. I’ve heard 1 Timothy 6:10 cited as saying “money is evil.” That’s not what Paul said. I’ve also heard it cited as “the love of money is evil.” That’s also not what Paul said.

The first part of the verse says, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (CSB). This is very different than the two ways this verse has been cited above. The first statement is an absolute declaration that money, in all its forms, is evil in itself. The second statement claims that loving money is a sin. While it is true that our affections should primarily be directed toward God, that is not Paul’s point in this verse.

The very first word in the verse is significant: “for.” This indicates that the contents of verse 10 are explaining what Paul said in verse 9: “But those who want to be rich fall into temptation, a trap, and many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge people into ruin and destruction” (CSB). 

Verse 9 is not a statement claiming that rich people will be destroyed or that rich people are, by default, sinful. The word translated “want” (CSB) or “desire” (ESV) refers to desiring to have something and it implies that the person has a plan to accomplish the goal of their desire. 

Paul is not rebuking a Christian for being rich, Paul is warning about the desire to be rich. The desire, if fed over time, can lead to various kinds of temptations. So, how does verse 9 connect to verse 10? The desire to be rich leads to a love for money.

The consequences of desiring to be rich are very serious (similar to the danger of having a love for money). Paul says that this desire will cause the offender to fall into temptation and a trap. The word for “trap” refers to being surprisingly brought under the control of something. 

The result of the temptations and trap is that they will have foolish and harmful desires. Desires can be good or bad, but here the modifiers “foolish” and “harmful” make it clear that this is a bad desire. These foolish and harmful desires then lead to ruin and destruction. This is the context for 1 Timothy 6:10 .

Photo credit: Unsplash/Micheile Henderson

What Was Paul’s Point in Telling Timothy This?

Paul is warning Timothy (and therefore the church in Ephesus) about the love of money, not money itself. Paul says that this love for money is a root of all kinds of evil. The word for root literally refers to the part of a plant that is below ground. Here, Paul uses a figurative extension that refers to the reason or cause of something. 

Love for money is a cause of all kinds of evil. Notice that Paul refers to “a root,” not “the root.” He isn’t saying that all evil in the world can be traced back to the love for money, but that many different evils can find their root in someone having a love for money. 

When people are craving money, it leads to some very negative consequences. First, some who have a love for money forsake Christianity. Second, they cause themselves a lot of pain and grief. But how does a love for money lead to such horrible consequences?

Money magnifies someone’s character. If someone is arrogant, being rich can magnify their arrogance. It can make them believe they are invincible, untouchable, and unassailable. If someone is lustful, being rich can magnify their lust, providing them with endless opportunities to indulge in sinful desires. And some people have such a deep love for money, that they can never get enough. 

Just a taste of being rich causes their character flaw of greed to overtake them.  

How Should Christians View Money and Wealth?

A few verses later, Paul gives Timothy instructions for rich Christians. One thing that is important to recognize is that Paul does not tell Timothy to command them to get rid of their riches. Some interpreters have understood Jesus’ command to the rich young man in Matthew 19:21 (“go, sell your belongings and give to the poor”) as a command for all Christians today. 

Instead of giving that command, Paul wants them to know how they are to live while they are rich.

Rich Christians are warned against arrogance. It could be easy for someone who is rich to think less of those who are poor. They could conclude that since they were able to become rich, everyone should be able to become rich. Paul wants them to avoid this temptation of pride.

Rich Christians must place their hope on God, not wealth. It can be tempting for someone with wealth to conclude that they don’t need God anymore, they can rely upon themselves since they have riches. This was a trap that the Christians in Laodicea fell into: 

“For you say, ‘I’m rich; I have become wealthy and need nothing,’ and you don’t realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked” ( Revelation 3:17 ). They had ceased depending on and fellowshipping with their Savior, Jesus Christ, and instead they leaned upon themselves.

Photo credit: ©Getty Images/ipopba

One particular sin that the love of money can lead to is stinginess. Many years ago I was listening to a Christian finance radio show. A fifty-year-old man called up and explained how he and his wife had been very frugal and saved as much money as they could. 

The radio host asked him how much money he and his wife made in a year. He answered, “About fifty thousand dollars.” Then the man stated that they had already saved about 1.5 million dollars. The radio host praised the man, telling his audience that this man was the example for them, that they should all be like him.

But the man had called to ask a question, for he was struggling with something. He said that they had trained themselves so diligently to save that they were having a difficult time giving money to support Christian ministries. He said that they didn’t have a desire to be generous with their giving. He even claimed that they had a “mentality of hoarding money.” 

To my shock, the radio host ignored his concern and praised him for how much he had saved. This man was literally confessing that he had a love for money and, instead of rebuking him, he was praised. His love for money prevented him from living in obedience to God’s commands to give generously and cheerfully ( 2 Corinthians 8:2-3 ; 13; 2 Corinthians 9:7 ). 

If all Christians ceased the desire to be rich and cast off their love for money, so much more money could be used for evangelism and missions to the glory of God.

Two Extremes of Money

Finally, two extremes need to be avoided. There are some false preachers of the gospel that proclaim that God desires for every Christian to be wealthy and that personal sin prevents that from occurring. There is no place in Scripture where it says that all Christians should be rich. 

There are others who believe that truly spiritual Christians will sell all they have and give it to the poor. Ascetic Christians are examples of this. God permits some Christians to be rich, some to be middle class, and some to be poor. 

The main concern of Scripture is not your economic standing in society, but your attitude toward your money and possessions. Christians in any economic status can have a sinful attitude toward money that leads to their spiritual destruction.

Photo Credit: ©Unsplash/Rawpixel

David A. Croteau (Ph.D. Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Professor of New Testament, Associate Dean, and Director of the PhD program for the Seminary and School of Ministry at Columbia International University . His publications include Urban Legends of the Old Testament (co-author with Gary Yates, B&H, 2019), Urban Legends of the New Testament (B&H, 2015), Tithing After the Cross (Energion, 2013), and You Mean I Don’t Have to Tithe (Pickwick, 2010).

How to Build Harmony in a World of Differences

I Am a Christian - Aubrey Sampson

10 Pocket Prayers for the College Student

Morning Prayers to Start Your Day with God

7 Outdated Church Traditions that Need to Go

The Best Birthday Prayers to Celebrate Friends and Family 

31 Night Prayers: Powerful to Pray Evening Rest and Bedtime

35 Prayers for Healing the Sick and Hurting

Prayer is so important when fighting temptation that Jesus told the disciples to do it twice in the same evening.

Bible Baseball

Play now...

Saintly Millionaire

Bible Jeopardy

Bible Trivia By Category

Bible Trivia Challenge

Critical Thinking: The Problem of Evil

• Post author: Rick Thiessen
• Post published: January 17, 2021
• Post category: Ask Anything / General

An AC3er sent me this short Tik Tok video of a young skeptic who found his way out of the Church through “critical thinking”.  I want to respond to it below.  First, check it out here, it’s less than a minute: The Problem of Evil.

The Skeptic’s Key Question

You can see the thinking this skeptic done, which led to a loss of faith, is on the classic problem of evil.  It boils down to a question:  how can the Christian God of Love exist with all the evil in the world?  He takes classic counter arguments against the problem of evil and attempts to debunk them in 60 seconds.

At first this seems compelling, but pulling it apart, we can see his critical thinking didn’t go far enough.

The First Misunderstanding

First, what the vlogger has done is made the mistake of mischaracterizing our argument which is most evil is a by-product of human choice.  When told love cannot exist without the choice to love, he makes a sheer jump to presume choice must itself be evil. But this is not true, nor fair to the free will defense.

Freedom does not presume or demand evil.  All Freedom does is presume the ability, the power, to make a choice between competing options. So, it’s a sheer jump to presume giving the gift of freedom is the same as God creating evil. To divorce freedom from evil, we simply point to God:  God is the freest being (with the most ability to do the most things) in the universe.  And yet he never uses his freedom to choose evil. So freedom is not inherently a flaw in creation, and neither is freedom inherently evil. An evil choice is what’s evil and what God grants is the freedom to make this evil choice. But by granting the freedom he does not thereby create evil. We do.

Now, freedom certainly risks evil, but it does not create it. So we may quibble with God’s wisdom in making a very risky world which, for the sake of love, risks incredible evil. However, this is different from laying the blame of the actual evil freely chosen by beings other than God, at God’s feet.

The Second Misunderstanding

Secondly, the skeptic misunderstands what omnipotence means. He admits, maybe evil is not what God chooses, but then this means God is not all-powerful because evil is something outside of his control.

But this is exactly what freedom means!  God cannot give us some delegated parts of his power and yet exercise the power himself at the same time. It’s an illogical impossibility.   Now does this mean God is no longer omnipotent. No. Omnipotence simply means God is the source of all power and God delegates some of his all-controlling power to us, and all the power returns to him finally in the end. This is what we mean by omnipotence . We do not mean omni-controlling .

A Common Trouble Spot About Omnipotence

This is where people get into trouble thinking which an omnipotent God is out there pulling the trigger of murderers’ guns and executing the rapes of rapists. If God was omni-controlling he would be doing those actions through those moral agents but then they wouldn’t really be free would they?

We believe those agents are totally free and therefore God has truly delegated some of his power to them, a power he no longer controls .

However, this doesn’t mean the universe is “out of control”.  In God’s sovereignty, he maintains oversight over human history in such a way even these freely chosen actions can be made to work together towards an overarching plan which God nevertheless does control, and He will see to it, it comes to his desired, good conclusion.

The Third Misunderstanding

Third, about Satan’s temptation, we have simply here the outworking of the implications of free will.  So the argument is no different for Satan than for human interactions.  If my will (or Satan’s) is to remain free, it must be allowed “follow through”, even when it means harm to another.  Imagine God stepped in to counteract every abuse of our free will.  We wouldn’t really be free, right?  Our decisions would be nullified as soon as they negatively affected another, thus nullifying freedom.

Further, notice he says, “it’s God’s job to protect her [Eve] from Satan”, as if this is in a different category from protecting us from each other.  It’s not.  And here he simply misunderstands the Bible’s whole story and therefore makes an unwarranted presumption about what “God’s job” should be.  What if it turns out God’s aim is not our moment by moment safety?  What if, instead, His aim is to call a people of his own and bring all who will freely come, into his eternal goodness and glory?  If this is the case, then what God’s role is in “protecting” Adam and Eve may look quite different than if we were to draw up God’s role.

Our beloved critic in this video likely reads the whole Bible story through the lens of modern, western, pampered comforts, and so assumes God’s aim in our lives is to keep us safe.  No one who reads the Bible’s story would get this impression.  Now, does this mean God is not loving, if he allows trouble or trial or temptation into the lives of those he loves?  Not if the ultimate design of such allowances isn’t our protection from potential harm, but our final and permanent bliss.

Countering the Final Argument

Finally, he makes the argument belief in an omnipotent God leads to power abuses by parents and other authorities. Now, it may be true in doctrinal streams or even religions like Islam where God’s power is his key attribute, these Traditions tend towards control. But as I think we’re seeing, God’s primary attribute is not control but rather love. For the Bible says “God is love” (1 Jon 4:8). If this is the case, then he prioritizes Freedom over Control.

And if this is true, then we cannot have it both ways. Our friend cannot complain God gives too much freedom on one hand and then in the exact same breath complain that God is too powerful and inserts himself too much (and people who follow God’s example are thus too controlling). We can’t have it both ways. You can’t say there is no God because there’s no intervention and then complain when the Bible says God intervened.

For more discussions like this check out our Ask Anything page. For more questions you can reach us here .

You Might Also Like

Questioning The Faith Follow Up (Part 2)

Questioning the Faith: Follow Up

Ask Anything: Atonement Theory?

• Times & Directions
• Happening Now
• Prayer & Care Requests
• Your First Visit
• Our Beliefs
• Our C.O.A.T. Initiative
• Celebrate Recovery
• Small Groups
• Applications
• Discipleship & Classes
• Young Adults
• Compassion & Outreach
• WATCH, Read & Listen
• Ask Anything
• Connect on Social

• Font Family Default Arial Verdana Helvetica Tahoma Georgia Times New Roman
• Font Size Default 1.0 1.2 1.5 2

1 Timothy 6:10

What does 1 timothy 6:10 mean.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.

2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples

2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.

Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as

active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)

and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.

In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.

Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment.

For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .

2. Examples and Non-Examples

Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.

Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.

Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o’clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68–69; 1933: 91–92)

Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.

“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.

“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot’s position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69–70; 1933: 92–93)

Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).

Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.

Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).

Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).

Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).

Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).

Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).

Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond lane from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.

Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.

Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as

a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)

A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.

Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.

What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as

a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)

Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.

• It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
• The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
• The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.

One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.

If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses. As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009, 2021), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on responsiveness to reasons (Siegel 1988). Kuhn (2019) takes critical thinking to be more a dialogic practice of advancing and responding to arguments than an individual ability.

In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.

Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).

Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.

Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:

• suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
• an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
• the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
• the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
• testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)

The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).

The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).

Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.

If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.

• Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
• Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in spacing in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
• Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
• Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
• Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
• Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
• Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the spacing of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
• Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
• Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
• Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
• Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.

By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.

Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.

Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.

Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)

8. Critical Thinking Dispositions

Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016a) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).

On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.

A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.

Facione (1990a: 25) divides “affective dispositions” of critical thinking into approaches to life and living in general and approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. Adapting this distinction, one can usefully divide critical thinking dispositions into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.

Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.

• Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
• Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
• Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking. In three studies, Haran, Ritov, & Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking, including “the tendency to weigh new evidence against a favored belief, to spend sufficient time on a problem before giving up, and to consider carefully the opinions of others in forming one’s own”, led study participants to acquire information and thus to make accurate estimations.
• Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
• Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
• Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.

Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .

Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.

Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).

The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.

Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.

Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.

Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).

Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.

Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.

Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.

Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.

Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.

In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.

We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), Black (2012), and Blair (2021).

According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work. It is also helpful to be aware of the prevalence of “noise” (unwanted unsystematic variability of judgments), of how to detect noise (through a noise audit), and of how to reduce noise: make accuracy the goal, think statistically, break a process of arriving at a judgment into independent tasks, resist premature intuitions, in a group get independent judgments first, favour comparative judgments and scales (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein 2021). It is helpful as well to be aware of the concept of “bounded rationality” in decision-making and of the related distinction between “satisficing” and optimizing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2001).

Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .

What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? In a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of strategies for teaching students to think critically, Abrami et al. (2015) found that dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.

Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .

12. Controversies

Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), Bailin et al. (1999b), and Willingham (2019).

McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.

The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.

It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.

Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:

• reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
• distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
• indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
• orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
• being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
• being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
• doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
• reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
• attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
• winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)

A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as

thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)

Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should

be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)

Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.

The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:

• Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
• Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
• Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
• In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
• Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).

A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.

What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .

As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

• Abrami, Philip C., Robert M. Bernard, Eugene Borokhovski, David I. Waddington, C. Anne Wade, and Tonje Person, 2015, “Strategies for Teaching Students to Think Critically: A Meta-analysis”, Review of Educational Research , 85(2): 275–314. doi:10.3102/0034654314551063
• Aikin, Wilford M., 1942, The Story of the Eight-year Study, with Conclusions and Recommendations , Volume I of Adventure in American Education , New York and London: Harper & Brothers. [ Aikin 1942 available online ]
• Alston, Kal, 1995, “Begging the Question: Is Critical Thinking Biased?”, Educational Theory , 45(2): 225–233. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1995.00225.x
• –––, 2001, “Re/Thinking Critical Thinking: The Seductions of Everyday Life”, Studies in Philosophy and Education , 20(1): 27–40. doi:10.1023/A:1005247128053
• American Educational Research Association, 2014, Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing / American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education , Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
• Anderson, Lorin W., David R. Krathwohl, Peter W. Airiasian, Kathleen A. Cruikshank, Richard E. Mayer, Paul R. Pintrich, James Raths, and Merlin C. Wittrock, 2001, A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives , New York: Longman, complete edition.
• Bailin, Sharon, 1987, “Critical and Creative Thinking”, Informal Logic , 9(1): 23–30. [ Bailin 1987 available online ]
• –––, 1988, Achieving Extraordinary Ends: An Essay on Creativity , Dordrecht: Kluwer. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-2780-3
• –––, 1995, “Is Critical Thinking Biased? Clarifications and Implications”, Educational Theory , 45(2): 191–197. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1995.00191.x
• Bailin, Sharon and Mark Battersby, 2009, “Inquiry: A Dialectical Approach to Teaching Critical Thinking”, in Juho Ritola (ed.), Argument Cultures: Proceedings of OSSA 09 , CD-ROM (pp. 1–10), Windsor, ON: OSSA. [ Bailin & Battersby 2009 available online ]
• –––, 2016a, “Fostering the Virtues of Inquiry”, Topoi , 35(2): 367–374. doi:10.1007/s11245-015-9307-6
• –––, 2016b, Reason in the Balance: An Inquiry Approach to Critical Thinking , Indianapolis: Hackett, 2nd edition.
• –––, 2021, “Inquiry: Teaching for Reasoned Judgment”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 31–46. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_003
• Bailin, Sharon, Roland Case, Jerrold R. Coombs, and Leroi B. Daniels, 1999a, “Common Misconceptions of Critical Thinking”, Journal of Curriculum Studies , 31(3): 269–283. doi:10.1080/002202799183124
• –––, 1999b, “Conceptualizing Critical Thinking”, Journal of Curriculum Studies , 31(3): 285–302. doi:10.1080/002202799183133
• Blair, J. Anthony, 2021, Studies in Critical Thinking , Windsor, ON: Windsor Studies in Argumentation, 2nd edition. [Available online at https://windsor.scholarsportal.info/omp/index.php/wsia/catalog/book/106]
• Berman, Alan M., Seth J. Schwartz, William M. Kurtines, and Steven L. Berman, 2001, “The Process of Exploration in Identity Formation: The Role of Style and Competence”, Journal of Adolescence , 24(4): 513–528. doi:10.1006/jado.2001.0386
• Black, Beth (ed.), 2012, An A to Z of Critical Thinking , London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
• Bloom, Benjamin Samuel, Max D. Engelhart, Edward J. Furst, Walter H. Hill, and David R. Krathwohl, 1956, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain , New York: David McKay.
• Boardman, Frank, Nancy M. Cavender, and Howard Kahane, 2018, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life , Boston: Cengage, 13th edition.
• Browne, M. Neil and Stuart M. Keeley, 2018, Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking , Hoboken, NJ: Pearson, 12th edition.
• Center for Assessment & Improvement of Learning, 2017, Critical Thinking Assessment Test , Cookeville, TN: Tennessee Technological University.
• Cleghorn, Paul. 2021. “Critical Thinking in the Elementary School: Practical Guidance for Building a Culture of Thinking”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessmen t, Leiden: Brill, pp. 150–167. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_010
• Cohen, Jacob, 1988, Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2nd edition.
• College Board, 1983, Academic Preparation for College. What Students Need to Know and Be Able to Do , New York: College Entrance Examination Board, ERIC document ED232517.
• Commission on the Relation of School and College of the Progressive Education Association, 1943, Thirty Schools Tell Their Story , Volume V of Adventure in American Education , New York and London: Harper & Brothers.
• Council for Aid to Education, 2017, CLA+ Student Guide . Available at http://cae.org/images/uploads/pdf/CLA_Student_Guide_Institution.pdf ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• Dalgleish, Adam, Patrick Girard, and Maree Davies, 2017, “Critical Thinking, Bias and Feminist Philosophy: Building a Better Framework through Collaboration”, Informal Logic , 37(4): 351–369. [ Dalgleish et al. available online ]
• Dewey, John, 1910, How We Think , Boston: D.C. Heath. [ Dewey 1910 available online ]
• –––, 1916, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education , New York: Macmillan.
• –––, 1933, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process , Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
• –––, 1936, “The Theory of the Chicago Experiment”, Appendix II of Mayhew & Edwards 1936: 463–477.
• –––, 1938, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry , New York: Henry Holt and Company.
• Dominguez, Caroline (coord.), 2018a, A European Collection of the Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions Needed in Different Professional Fields for the 21st Century , Vila Real, Portugal: UTAD. Available at http://bit.ly/CRITHINKEDUO1 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• ––– (coord.), 2018b, A European Review on Critical Thinking Educational Practices in Higher Education Institutions , Vila Real: UTAD. Available at http://bit.ly/CRITHINKEDUO2 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• ––– (coord.), 2018c, The CRITHINKEDU European Course on Critical Thinking Education for University Teachers: From Conception to Delivery , Vila Real: UTAD. Available at http:/bit.ly/CRITHINKEDU03; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• Dominguez Caroline and Rita Payan-Carreira (eds.), 2019, Promoting Critical Thinking in European Higher Education Institutions: Towards an Educational Protocol , Vila Real: UTAD. Available at http:/bit.ly/CRITHINKEDU04; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• Ennis, Robert H., 1958, “An Appraisal of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal”, The Journal of Educational Research , 52(4): 155–158. doi:10.1080/00220671.1958.10882558
• –––, 1962, “A Concept of Critical Thinking: A Proposed Basis for Research on the Teaching and Evaluation of Critical Thinking Ability”, Harvard Educational Review , 32(1): 81–111.
• –––, 1981a, “A Conception of Deductive Logical Competence”, Teaching Philosophy , 4(3/4): 337–385. doi:10.5840/teachphil198143/429
• –––, 1981b, “Eight Fallacies in Bloom’s Taxonomy”, in C. J. B. Macmillan (ed.), Philosophy of Education 1980: Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society , Bloomington, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, pp. 269–273.
• –––, 1984, “Problems in Testing Informal Logic, Critical Thinking, Reasoning Ability”, Informal Logic , 6(1): 3–9. [ Ennis 1984 available online ]
• –––, 1987, “A Taxonomy of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities”, in Joan Boykoff Baron and Robert J. Sternberg (eds.), Teaching Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice , New York: W. H. Freeman, pp. 9–26.
• –––, 1989, “Critical Thinking and Subject Specificity: Clarification and Needed Research”, Educational Researcher , 18(3): 4–10. doi:10.3102/0013189X018003004
• –––, 1991, “Critical Thinking: A Streamlined Conception”, Teaching Philosophy , 14(1): 5–24. doi:10.5840/teachphil19911412
• –––, 1996, “Critical Thinking Dispositions: Their Nature and Assessability”, Informal Logic , 18(2–3): 165–182. [ Ennis 1996 available online ]
• –––, 1998, “Is Critical Thinking Culturally Biased?”, Teaching Philosophy , 21(1): 15–33. doi:10.5840/teachphil19982113
• –––, 2011, “Critical Thinking: Reflection and Perspective Part I”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 26(1): 4–18. doi:10.5840/inquiryctnews20112613
• –––, 2013, “Critical Thinking across the Curriculum: The Wisdom CTAC Program”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 28(2): 25–45. doi:10.5840/inquiryct20132828
• –––, 2016, “Definition: A Three-Dimensional Analysis with Bearing on Key Concepts”, in Patrick Bondy and Laura Benacquista (eds.), Argumentation, Objectivity, and Bias: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA), 18–21 May 2016 , Windsor, ON: OSSA, pp. 1–19. Available at http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/OSSA11/papersandcommentaries/105 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• –––, 2018, “Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum: A Vision”, Topoi , 37(1): 165–184. doi:10.1007/s11245-016-9401-4
• Ennis, Robert H., and Jason Millman, 1971, Manual for Cornell Critical Thinking Test, Level X, and Cornell Critical Thinking Test, Level Z , Urbana, IL: Critical Thinking Project, University of Illinois.
• Ennis, Robert H., Jason Millman, and Thomas Norbert Tomko, 1985, Cornell Critical Thinking Tests Level X & Level Z: Manual , Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publication, 3rd edition.
• –––, 2005, Cornell Critical Thinking Tests Level X & Level Z: Manual , Seaside, CA: Critical Thinking Company, 5th edition.
• Ennis, Robert H. and Eric Weir, 1985, The Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test: Test, Manual, Criteria, Scoring Sheet: An Instrument for Teaching and Testing , Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publications.
• Facione, Peter A., 1990a, Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction , Research Findings and Recommendations Prepared for the Committee on Pre-College Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association, ERIC Document ED315423.
• –––, 1990b, California Critical Thinking Skills Test, CCTST – Form A , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
• –––, 1990c, The California Critical Thinking Skills Test--College Level. Technical Report #3. Gender, Ethnicity, Major, CT Self-Esteem, and the CCTST , ERIC Document ED326584.
• –––, 1992, California Critical Thinking Skills Test: CCTST – Form B, Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
• –––, 2000, “The Disposition Toward Critical Thinking: Its Character, Measurement, and Relationship to Critical Thinking Skill”, Informal Logic , 20(1): 61–84. [ Facione 2000 available online ]
• Facione, Peter A. and Noreen C. Facione, 1992, CCTDI: A Disposition Inventory , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
• Facione, Peter A., Noreen C. Facione, and Carol Ann F. Giancarlo, 2001, California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory: CCTDI: Inventory Manual , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
• Facione, Peter A., Carol A. Sánchez, and Noreen C. Facione, 1994, Are College Students Disposed to Think? , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press. ERIC Document ED368311.
• Fisher, Alec, and Michael Scriven, 1997, Critical Thinking: Its Definition and Assessment , Norwich: Centre for Research in Critical Thinking, University of East Anglia.
• Freire, Paulo, 1968 [1970], Pedagogia do Oprimido . Translated as Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Myra Bergman Ramos (trans.), New York: Continuum, 1970.
• Gigerenzer, Gerd, 2001, “The Adaptive Toolbox”, in Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (eds.), Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 37–50.
• Glaser, Edward Maynard, 1941, An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking , New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.
• Groarke, Leo A. and Christopher W. Tindale, 2012, Good Reasoning Matters! A Constructive Approach to Critical Thinking , Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 5th edition.
• Halpern, Diane F., 1998, “Teaching Critical Thinking for Transfer Across Domains: Disposition, Skills, Structure Training, and Metacognitive Monitoring”, American Psychologist , 53(4): 449–455. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.53.4.449
• –––, 2016, Manual: Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment , Mödling, Austria: Schuhfried. Available at https://pdfcoffee.com/hcta-test-manual-pdf-free.html; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• Hamby, Benjamin, 2014, The Virtues of Critical Thinkers , Doctoral dissertation, Philosophy, McMaster University. [ Hamby 2014 available online ]
• –––, 2015, “Willingness to Inquire: The Cardinal Critical Thinking Virtue”, in Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education , New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 77–87.
• Haran, Uriel, Ilana Ritov, and Barbara A. Mellers, 2013, “The Role of Actively Open-minded Thinking in Information Acquisition, Accuracy, and Calibration”, Judgment and Decision Making , 8(3): 188–201.
• Hatcher, Donald and Kevin Possin, 2021, “Commentary: Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking Assessment”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 298–322. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_017
• Haynes, Ada, Elizabeth Lisic, Kevin Harris, Katie Leming, Kyle Shanks, and Barry Stein, 2015, “Using the Critical Thinking Assessment Test (CAT) as a Model for Designing Within-Course Assessments: Changing How Faculty Assess Student Learning”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines , 30(3): 38–48. doi:10.5840/inquiryct201530316
• Haynes, Ada and Barry Stein, 2021, “Observations from a Long-Term Effort to Assess and Improve Critical Thinking”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 231–254. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_014
• Hiner, Amanda L. 2021. “Equipping Students for Success in College and Beyond: Placing Critical Thinking Instruction at the Heart of a General Education Program”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 188–208. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_012
• Hitchcock, David, 2017, “Critical Thinking as an Educational Ideal”, in his On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking , Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 477–497. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-53562-3_30
• –––, 2021, “Seven Philosophical Implications of Critical Thinking: Themes, Variations, Implications”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 9–30. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_002
• hooks, bell, 1994, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom , New York and London: Routledge.
• –––, 2010, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom , New York and London: Routledge.
• Johnson, Ralph H., 1992, “The Problem of Defining Critical Thinking”, in Stephen P, Norris (ed.), The Generalizability of Critical Thinking , New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 38–53.
• Kahane, Howard, 1971, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
• Kahneman, Daniel, 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow , New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Kahneman, Daniel, Olivier Sibony, & Cass R. Sunstein, 2021, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment , New York: Little, Brown Spark.
• Kenyon, Tim, and Guillaume Beaulac, 2014, “Critical Thinking Education and Debasing”, Informal Logic , 34(4): 341–363. [ Kenyon & Beaulac 2014 available online ]
• Krathwohl, David R., Benjamin S. Bloom, and Bertram B. Masia, 1964, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook II: Affective Domain , New York: David McKay.
• Kuhn, Deanna, 1991, The Skills of Argument , New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511571350
• –––, 2019, “Critical Thinking as Discourse”, Human Development, 62 (3): 146–164. doi:10.1159/000500171
• Lipman, Matthew, 1987, “Critical Thinking–What Can It Be?”, Analytic Teaching , 8(1): 5–12. [ Lipman 1987 available online ]
• –––, 2003, Thinking in Education , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition.
• Loftus, Elizabeth F., 2017, “Eavesdropping on Memory”, Annual Review of Psychology , 68: 1–18. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044138
• Makaiau, Amber Strong, 2021, “The Good Thinker’s Tool Kit: How to Engage Critical Thinking and Reasoning in Secondary Education”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 168–187. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_011
• Martin, Jane Roland, 1992, “Critical Thinking for a Humane World”, in Stephen P. Norris (ed.), The Generalizability of Critical Thinking , New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 163–180.
• Mayhew, Katherine Camp, and Anna Camp Edwards, 1936, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 , New York: Appleton-Century. [ Mayhew & Edwards 1936 available online ]
• McPeck, John E., 1981, Critical Thinking and Education , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Moore, Brooke Noel and Richard Parker, 2020, Critical Thinking , New York: McGraw-Hill, 13th edition.
• Nickerson, Raymond S., 1998, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises”, Review of General Psychology , 2(2): 175–220. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175
• Nieto, Ana Maria, and Jorge Valenzuela, 2012, “A Study of the Internal Structure of Critical Thinking Dispositions”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 27(1): 31–38. doi:10.5840/inquiryct20122713
• Norris, Stephen P., 1985, “Controlling for Background Beliefs When Developing Multiple-choice Critical Thinking Tests”, Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice , 7(3): 5–11. doi:10.1111/j.1745-3992.1988.tb00437.x
• Norris, Stephen P. and Robert H. Ennis, 1989, Evaluating Critical Thinking (The Practitioners’ Guide to Teaching Thinking Series), Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publications.
• Norris, Stephen P. and Ruth Elizabeth King, 1983, Test on Appraising Observations , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
• –––, 1984, The Design of a Critical Thinking Test on Appraising Observations , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland. ERIC Document ED260083.
• –––, 1985, Test on Appraising Observations: Manual , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
• –––, 1990a, Test on Appraising Observations , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2nd edition.
• –––, 1990b, Test on Appraising Observations: Manual , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2nd edition.
• OCR [Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations], 2011, AS/A Level GCE: Critical Thinking – H052, H452 , Cambridge: OCR. Past papers available at https://pastpapers.co/ocr/?dir=A-Level/Critical-Thinking-H052-H452; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• Ontario Ministry of Education, 2013, The Ontario Curriculum Grades 9 to 12: Social Sciences and Humanities . Available at http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/ssciences9to122013.pdf ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• Passmore, John Arthur, 1980, The Philosophy of Teaching , London: Duckworth.
• Paul, Richard W., 1981, “Teaching Critical Thinking in the ‘Strong’ Sense: A Focus on Self-Deception, World Views, and a Dialectical Mode of Analysis”, Informal Logic , 4(2): 2–7. [ Paul 1981 available online ]
• –––, 1984, “Critical Thinking: Fundamental to Education for a Free Society”, Educational Leadership , 42(1): 4–14.
• –––, 1985, “McPeck’s Mistakes”, Informal Logic , 7(1): 35–43. [ Paul 1985 available online ]
• Paul, Richard W. and Linda Elder, 2006, The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools , Dillon Beach, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking, 4th edition.
• Payette, Patricia, and Edna Ross, 2016, “Making a Campus-Wide Commitment to Critical Thinking: Insights and Promising Practices Utilizing the Paul-Elder Approach at the University of Louisville”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines , 31(1): 98–110. doi:10.5840/inquiryct20163118
• Possin, Kevin, 2008, “A Field Guide to Critical-Thinking Assessment”, Teaching Philosophy , 31(3): 201–228. doi:10.5840/teachphil200831324
• –––, 2013a, “Some Problems with the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment (HCTA) Test”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 28(3): 4–12. doi:10.5840/inquiryct201328313
• –––, 2013b, “A Serious Flaw in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Test”, Informal Logic , 33(3): 390–405. [ Possin 2013b available online ]
• –––, 2013c, “A Fatal Flaw in the Collegiate Learning Assessment Test”, Assessment Update , 25 (1): 8–12.
• –––, 2014, “Critique of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Test: The More You Know, the Lower Your Score”, Informal Logic , 34(4): 393–416. [ Possin 2014 available online ]
• –––, 2020, “CAT Scan: A Critical Review of the Critical-Thinking Assessment Test”, Informal Logic , 40 (3): 489–508. [Available online at https://informallogic.ca/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/6243]
• Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Rear, David, 2019, “One Size Fits All? The Limitations of Standardised Assessment in Critical Thinking”, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education , 44(5): 664–675. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2018.1526255
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1762, Émile , Amsterdam: Jean Néaulme.
• Scheffler, Israel, 1960, The Language of Education , Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
• Scriven, Michael, and Richard W. Paul, 1987, Defining Critical Thinking , Draft statement written for the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking Instruction. Available at http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
• Sheffield, Clarence Burton Jr., 2018, “Promoting Critical Thinking in Higher Education: My Experiences as the Inaugural Eugene H. Fram Chair in Applied Critical Thinking at Rochester Institute of Technology”, Topoi , 37(1): 155–163. doi:10.1007/s11245-016-9392-1
• Siegel, Harvey, 1985, “McPeck, Informal Logic and the Nature of Critical Thinking”, in David Nyberg (ed.), Philosophy of Education 1985: Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society , Normal, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, pp. 61–72.
• –––, 1988, Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education , New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1999, “What (Good) Are Thinking Dispositions?”, Educational Theory , 49(2): 207–221. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1999.00207.x
• Simon, Herbert A., 1956, “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment”, Psychological Review , 63(2): 129–138. doi: 10.1037/h0042769
• Simpson, Elizabeth, 1966–67, “The Classification of Educational Objectives: Psychomotor Domain”, Illinois Teacher of Home Economics , 10(4): 110–144, ERIC document ED0103613. [ Simpson 1966–67 available online ]
• Skolverket, 2018, Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare , Stockholm: Skolverket, revised 2018. Available at https://www.skolverket.se/download/18.31c292d516e7445866a218f/1576654682907/pdf3984.pdf; last accessed 2022 07 15.
• Smith, B. Othanel, 1953, “The Improvement of Critical Thinking”, Progressive Education , 30(5): 129–134.
• Smith, Eugene Randolph, Ralph Winfred Tyler, and the Evaluation Staff, 1942, Appraising and Recording Student Progress , Volume III of Adventure in American Education , New York and London: Harper & Brothers.
• Splitter, Laurance J., 1987, “Educational Reform through Philosophy for Children”, Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children , 7(2): 32–39. doi:10.5840/thinking1987729
• Stanovich Keith E., and Paula J. Stanovich, 2010, “A Framework for Critical Thinking, Rational Thinking, and Intelligence”, in David D. Preiss and Robert J. Sternberg (eds), Innovations in Educational Psychology: Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Human Development , New York: Springer Publishing, pp 195–237.
• Stanovich Keith E., Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak, 2011, “Intelligence and Rationality”, in Robert J. Sternberg and Scott Barry Kaufman (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, pp. 784–826. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511977244.040
• Tankersley, Karen, 2005, Literacy Strategies for Grades 4–12: Reinforcing the Threads of Reading , Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
• Thayer-Bacon, Barbara J., 1992, “Is Modern Critical Thinking Theory Sexist?”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines , 10(1): 3–7. doi:10.5840/inquiryctnews199210123
• –––, 1993, “Caring and Its Relationship to Critical Thinking”, Educational Theory , 43(3): 323–340. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1993.00323.x
• –––, 1995a, “Constructive Thinking: Personal Voice”, Journal of Thought , 30(1): 55–70.
• –––, 1995b, “Doubting and Believing: Both are Important for Critical Thinking”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 15(2): 59–66. doi:10.5840/inquiryctnews199515226
• –––, 2000, Transforming Critical Thinking: Thinking Constructively , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Toulmin, Stephen Edelston, 1958, The Uses of Argument , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Turri, John, Mark Alfano, and John Greco, 2017, “Virtue Epistemology”, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition). URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/epistemology-virtue/ >
• Vincent-Lancrin, Stéphan, Carlos González-Sancho, Mathias Bouckaert, Federico de Luca, Meritxell Fernández-Barrerra, Gwénaël Jacotin, Joaquin Urgel, and Quentin Vidal, 2019, Fostering Students’ Creativity and Critical Thinking: What It Means in School. Educational Research and Innovation , Paris: OECD Publishing.
• Warren, Karen J. 1988. “Critical Thinking and Feminism”, Informal Logic , 10(1): 31–44. [ Warren 1988 available online ]
• Watson, Goodwin, and Edward M. Glaser, 1980a, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, Form A , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
• –––, 1980b, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal: Forms A and B; Manual , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation,
• –––, 1994, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, Form B , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
• Weinstein, Mark, 1990, “Towards a Research Agenda for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking”, Informal Logic , 12(3): 121–143. [ Weinstein 1990 available online ]
• –––, 2013, Logic, Truth and Inquiry , London: College Publications.
• Willingham, Daniel T., 2019, “How to Teach Critical Thinking”, Education: Future Frontiers , 1: 1–17. [Available online at https://prod65.education.nsw.gov.au/content/dam/main-education/teaching-and-learning/education-for-a-changing-world/media/documents/How-to-teach-critical-thinking-Willingham.pdf.]
• Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus, 1996, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139174763

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT)
• Critical Thinking Across the European Higher Education Curricula (CRITHINKEDU)
• Critical Thinking Definition, Instruction, and Assessment: A Rigorous Approach
• Critical Thinking Research (RAIL)
• Foundation for Critical Thinking
• Insight Assessment
• Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21)
• The Critical Thinking Consortium
• The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities , by Robert H. Ennis

abilities | bias, implicit | children, philosophy for | civic education | decision-making capacity | Dewey, John | dispositions | education, philosophy of | epistemology: virtue | logic: informal

Copyright © 2022 by David Hitchcock < hitchckd @ mcmaster . ca >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054