Thinking

We rarely think, because thinking is not in vogue. Why invest time and effort required to think? If really forced to think then why about others who are closely related. Why about matters that affect many, say about social issues? I like to think! But what is to to think creatively, that is to do good thinking. I begin by quoting a bit from an article entitled Cetris Paribus (All things Being Equal), authored by Pascal Boyer! Good thinking requires intellectual style. ............... Thinking requires that you use the appropriate tools, and the tool I want to tell you about is perhaps the most modest of all, a tool so discrete in most theories and arguments that some people do not even notice its existence. You cannot even think about any problem at all, scientific or otherwise, in a way that makes genuine sense. Let me go even further. There is a distinction between those who use this tool and those who do not; it is always difficult for these two kinds of people to communicate. The tool has a Latin name which makes it respectable and mysterious, ceteris paribus, which is, in fact, more deceptive for being so simple, all else (Or other things) being equal. If you spend some time pondering what this phrase really means and how it can be used, you will soon touch upon some very important aspects of intellectual style. In order to explain the importance of this tool, let me take an example that is only partly imaginary. Let us suppose you have been wondering about the way people make decisions in situations where they cannot have access to all the relevant information. People buy lottery tickets without knowing which numbers will be drawn; they apply for jobs without knowing whether they are the best candidate; they behave in a friendly way toward people whom it might be better to avoid. In such situations, you know that people are likely to make a certain decision if they think that it might bring about the result they expect, and if the expected result is one they desire. You have noticed, and this is your great discovery, that the likelihood that people will make a decision can be predicted by multiplying these two factors. That is to say, if you can measure the probability of success and the desirability of the outcome, then the product of those two measurements will give you the probability that the subject will take that course of action. This principle has interesting consequences. For instance, it seems to predict that people ate equally likely to make a

certain decision, in two very different situations: (a) when the outcome is highly desirable, although not very likely to occur, and (b) when the outcome is not quite as desirable, but slightly more likely to be achieved. This is a consequence of your idea of a multiplication: A product is the same when one factor is increased and the other decreased in the same proportion. You can explain why some lotteries are more popular than others in that way; you can also explain why people apply for jobs that they have only a slim chance of getting but which seem so desirable. One may very well ask, What is it to think? that is what does it mean to think? And in response, i quote a bit from another thinker, Derek Melser, from a book he authored, entitled The Act of Thinking: By thinking we usually mean such activities as calculating, cogitating, pondering, musing, reflecting, meditating, and ruminating. But we might also mean any of a broader range of actions or activities (or dispositions, states, processes, or whatever). I mean remembering, intending, imagining, conceiving, believing, desiring, hoping, feeling emotion, empathizing, following what someone is saying, minding, being conscious of something, and so on. This is admittedly a mixed bag. It might seem that feeling, in particular, should be separated out. Certainly thinking and feeling can be contrasted, ................... Anyway, I would like to include all the above as thinking. The general term most philosophers would use is mental phenomena, but, for various reasons, I want to try to do without it. We can use thinking instead. The notion of thinking helps us to explain peoples behavior. We appeal to thinking to explain actions, qualities of action, abilities and dispositions to act, and even certain kinds of bodily agitation. Consider the distinctive posture of Rodins Penseur, an attentive and methodical performance, any goal-directed activity, explaining to someone what one is doing, producing a list of relevant facts, finding the solution to a problem of woodworking or arithmetic, having a disposition to racist remarks or effusive greetings, and trembling or blushing at what someone is saying. We explain these different behaviors and aspects of behavior, and many others, by positing different kinds of thinking going on behind the scenes. The thinking determines the nature of the behavior, then motivates and guides its performance, from within. What kind of thing is thinking? Is it a 'mental' process? Is it a physiological process in the brain? Is it both? Or is it something different againan action or activity the person performs? What does thinking involve, if it is brain then what part of it? Do all human beings use the same part of the brain when they indulge in this activity?

Now, i quote from a newspaper report, published in Times of India!

.....Researchers have found those who use the right side of the brain typically creative and impulsive types have a carefree live for today attitude, credit card debts and no savings, the Daily Mail reported. But deeper thinkers, who use the left side of brain careful and logical types are more comfortable managing their finances, the study found. Researchers at Hertfordshire University asked 500 adults a brainteaser. They examined their answers and found that only one in three people got the answer right. Most of these were reflectors who think with the left-side of the brain. Many of the people got the question wrong were intuitors, people who tend to use the right side of the brain. When participants who gave the wrong answer were asked about their

money, it was found they had fewer savings, credit card debt and a lax attitude to money management. Lead researcher Karen Pine said: Reactive people cant suppress the first answer that springs to mind. Theyre the kind of people who live for the moment and avoid putting effort into anything that doesnt bring short-term gain. The report of the study also showed 43% of intuitors had been with the same bank since leaving school. For some, this was 30 years ago or longer. The study also revealed that almost one in four reflectors had changed where they bank at least twice, while 43% of intuitors had never changed bank. It also emerged twice as many intuitors than reflectors pay off only the minimum on their credit cards. PTI Stroll in countryside sharpens the mind A stroll in the countryside is not only good for your body, but it sharpens up your mind too, a new study has claimed. Researchers at Sage Colleges have found that a common friendly bacteria found in soil boosts intelligence and speeds up learning time, the Daily Mail reported. According to them, Mycobacterium vaccae, the microbe which is blown around by the wind and is inhaled also appears to act as an antidepressant as it stimulates the brains feel good chemical serotonin. Can various thought processes be differentiated from one another? Are some more useful then others? Well Sir Bertrand Russell coined a term 'Critical Thinking' . Would you care to know what is critical thinking, if your answer in affirmative you may like to read the following lines written by William Hare! The ideal of critical thinking is a central one in Russell's philosophy, though this is not yet generally recognized in the literature on critical thinking. For Russell, the ideal is embedded in the fabric of philosophy, science, liberalism and rationality,................. It appears that he has developed a rich conception, involving a complex set of skills, dispositions and attitudes, which together delineate a virtue which has both intellectual and moral aspects. It is a view which is rooted in Russell's epistemological conviction that knowledge is difficult but not impossible to attain, and in his ethical conviction that freedom and independence in inquiry are vital. Russell's account anticipates many of the insights to be found in the recent critical thinking literature, and his views on critical thinking are of enormous importance in understanding the nature of educational aims. Moreover, it is argued that Russell manages to avoid many of the objections which have been raised against recent accounts. With respect to impartiality, thinking for oneself, the importance of feelings and relational skills, the connection with action, and the problem of generalizability, Russell shows a deep understanding of problems and issues which have been at the forefront of recent debate.

Then there are the following lines written by a college teacher James Lett: There are many reasons for the popularity of paranormal beliefs........ , including: the irresponsibility of
the mass media, who exploit the public taste for nonsense, the irrationality of the ............, which supports such unsupportable claims as life after death and the efficacy of the polygraph, and the ineffectiveness of

public education, which generally fails to teach students the essential skills of critical thinking. As a college professor, I am especially concerned with this third problem. Most of the freshman and sophomore students in my classes simply do not know how to draw reasonable conclusions from the evidence. At most, they've been taught in high school what to think; few of them know how to think. In an attempt to remedy this problem at my college, I've developed an elective course called "Anthropology and the Paranormal." The course examines the complete range of paranormal beliefs in contemporary American culture, from precognition and psychokinesis to channeling and crypto-zoology and everything between and beyond, including astrology, UFOs, and creationism. I teach the students very little about anthropological theories and even less about anthropological terminology. Instead, I try to communicate the essence of the anthropological perspective, by teaching them, indirectly, what the scientific method is all about. I do so by teaching them how to evaluate evidence. I give them six simple rules to follow when considering any claim, and then show them how to apply those six rules to the examination of any paranormal claim. The six rules of evidential reasoning are my own distillation and simplification of the scientific method. To make it easier for students to remember these half-dozen guidelines, I've coined an acronym for them: Ignoring the vowels, the letters in the word "FiLCHeRS" stand for the rules of Falsifiability, Logic, Comprehensiveness, Honesty, Replicability, and Sufficiency. Apply these six rules to the evidence offered for any claim, I tell my students, and no one will ever be able to sneak up on you and steal your belief. You'll be filch-proof. Falsifiability It must be possible to conceive of evidence that would prove the claim false. It may sound paradoxical, but in order for any claim to be true, it must be falsifiable. The rule of falsifiability is a guarantee that if the claim is false, the evidence will prove it false; and if the claim is true, the evidence will not disprove it (in which case the claim can be tentatively accepted as true until such time as evidence is brought forth that does disprove it). The rule of falsifiability, in short, says that the evidence must matter, and as such it is the first and most important and most fundamental rule of evidential reasoning. The rule of falsifiability is essential for this reason: If nothing conceivable could ever disprove the claim, then the evidence that does exist would not matter; it would be pointless to even examine the evidence, because the conclusion is already known -- the claim is invulnerable to any possible evidence. This would not mean, however, that the claim is true; instead it would mean that the claim is meaningless. This is so because it is impossible -- logically impossible -- for any claim to be true no matter what. For every true claim, you can always conceive of evidence that would make the claim untrue -- in other words, again, every true claim is falsifiable. For example, the true claim that the life span of human beings is less than 200 years is falsifiable; it would be falsified if a single human being were to live to be 200 years old. Similarly, the true claim that water freezes at 32 F is falsifiable; it would be falsified if water were to freeze at, say, 34 F. Each of these claims is firmly established as scientific "fact," and we do not expect either claim ever to be falsified; however, the point is that either could be. Any claim that could not be

falsified would be devoid of any propositional content; that is, it would not be making a factual assertion -it would instead be making an emotive statement, a declaration of the way the claimant feels about the world. Non falsifiable claims do communicate information, but what they describe is the claimant's value orientation. They communicate nothing whatsoever of a factual nature, and hence are neither true nor false. Non falsifiable statements are propositionally vacuous. There are two principal ways in which the rule of falsifiability can be violated -- two ways, in other words, of making non falsifiable claims. The first variety of non falsifiable statements is the undeclared claim: a statement that is so broad or vague that it lacks any propositional content. The undeclared claim is basically unintelligible and consequently meaningless. Consider, for example, the claim that crystal therapists can use pieces of quartz to restore balance and harmony to a person's spiritual energy. What does it mean to have unbalanced spiritual enemas. For example, the true claim that the life span of human beings is less than 200 years is falsifiable; it would be falsified if a single human being were to live to be 200 years old. Similarly, the true claim that water freezes at 32 F is falsifiable; it would be falsified if water were to freeze at, say, 34 F. Each of these claims is firmly established as scientific "fact," and we do not expect either claim ever to be falsified; however, the point is that either could be. Any claim that could not be falsified would be devoid of any propositional content; that is, it would not be making a factual assertion -- it would instead be making an emotive statement, a declaration of the way the claimant feels about the world. Non falsifiable claims do communicate information, but what they describe is the claimant's value orientation. They communicate nothing whatsoever of a factual nature, and hence are neither true nor false. Non falsifiable statements are propositionally vacuous. ................. The second variety of non falsifiable statements, which is even more popular among paranormalists, involves the use of the multiple out, that is, an inexhaustible series of excuses intended to explain away the evidence that would seem to falsify the claim. Creationists, for example, claim that the universe is no more than 10,000 years old. They do so despite the fact that we can observe stars that are billions of light-years from the earth, which means that the light must have left those stars billions of years ago, and which proves that the universe must be billions of years old. How then do the creationists respond to this falsification of their claim? By suggesting that God must have created the light already on the way from those distant star at the moment of creation 10,000 years ago. No conceivable piece of evidence, of course, could disprove that claim. Additional examples of multiple outs abound in the realm of the paranormal. UFO proponents, faced with a lack of reliable physical or photographic evidence to buttress the claims, point to a secret "government conspiracy" that is allegedly preventing the release of evidence that would support their case. Psychic healers say they can heal you if you have enough faith in their psychic powers. Psycho kinetics say they can bend spoons with their minds if they are not exposed to negative vibrations from skeptic observers. Tarot readers can predict your fate if you're sincere in your desire for knowledge. The multiple out means, in effect, "Heads I win, tails you lose."

Logic Any argument offered as evidence in support of any claim must be sound. An argument is said to be "valid" if its conclusion follows unavoidably from its premises; it is "sound" if it is valid and if all the premises are true. The rule of logic thus governs the validity of inference. Although philosophers have codified and named the various forms of valid arguments, it is not necessary to master a course in form logic in order to apply the rules of inference consistently and correctly. An invalid argument can be recognize by the simple method of counter example: If you can conceive of a single imaginable instance whereby the conclusion would not necessarily follow from the premises even if the premises were true, then the argument is invalid. Consider the following syllogism for example: All dogs have fleas; Xavier has fleas; therefore Xavier is a dog. That argument is invalid because a single flea-ridden feline named Xavier would provide an effective counterexample. If an argument is invalid, then it is, by definition, unsound. Not all valid arguments are sound, however. Consider this example: All dogs have fleas; Xavier is a dog; therefore Xavier has fleas. That argument is unsound, even though it is valid, because the first premise is false: All dogs do not have fleas. To determine whether a valid argument is sound is frequently problematic; knowing whether a given premise is true or false often demands additional knowledge about the claim that may require empirical investigation. If the argument passes these two tests, however -- if it is both valid and sound -- then the conclusion can be embraced with certainty.... Next, a bit from the writings of the famous Guru , J. Krishnamurthy! He wrote: ...........creative thinking is free of division, which creates conflict between thought, emotion, and action. And division exists only when there is search for a goal, when there is adjustment and the complacency of certainty. Action is this movement which is itself thought and emotion. This action is the relationship between the individual and society. It is conduct, work, cooperation, which we call fulfillment. That is, when mind is functioning without seeking a culmination, a goal and, therefore, thinking creatively. Thinking is action, which is the relationship between individual and society. Now if this movement of thought is clear, simple, direct, spontaneous, profound, then there is no conflict in the individual against society, for action then is the very expression of this living, creative movement. So to me there is no art of thinking, there is only creative thinking. There is no technique of thinking, but only spontaneous creative functioning of intelligence, which is the harmony of reason, emotion and action, not divided or divorced from each other If there is practice of self-discipline it is change towards an end. It is merely an action within the confines of the limited thought which you call self-consciousness. So mere practice does not bring about creative thinking. To think creatively is to bring about harmony between mind, emotion and action. That is, if you are convinced of an action, without the search of a reward at the end, then that action, being the result of intelligence, releases all hindrances that have been placed on the mind through a lack of understanding.

Critical thinking is most often initiated by asking a question!! I conclude by quoting last two pages from the book, "Asking the Right Questions, A guide to critical thinking" authored by Browne: Critical thinking is hard. systematic work. We are always searching for ways to avoid its rigors. Each bias in this chapter can be seen as an attempt to avoid mental effort. I may rely on personal experience. stereotyping. simplification, and my current beliefs because in each case the alternative requires more rigorous "panning." Another misleading bias that promises to help us reach sound judgments without critical thinking is the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a guide for understanding or discovery. The availability heuristic refers to our tendency to rely on information and memories that are easily retrieved as a basis for our decisions and judgments. The weight attached to a particular piece of evidence therefore depends more on its availability than its appropriateness as a reason. You can observe the dangers of the availability heuristic all around you. Newspaper headlines about a particularly brutal slaying convince residents that more police must be hired. Reservoirs are built because a recent drought suggested to residents that we may be entering an era with less rainfall. Parents warn their children not to associate with people who dress in a bizarre fashion because the parents vividly remember the trouble caused in their youth by people who wore those kinds of clothes. To recognize the power of the availability heuristic, imagine that you were asked to compare the safety of airplanes and automobiles. There are volumes of comparative data that you could use to form your judgment. Would you consult them or rely on the availability heuristic? Recent events, for instance, tend to have a disproportionate impact on our perceptions. While the recency of plane crashes in Tokyo, Detroit, or Dallas should not distort your comparison, the resulting tendency to exaggerate the occurrence of plane crashes is common. We may remember better those instances that just occurred even though they may have been exceptions to what normally occurs. The availability of recent events in our memory bank must be consciously checked by asking, "Were those recent events typical?" Another factor affecting the availability of evidence is its vividness. Striking examples tend to overwhelm typical examples in our memory. One fiery plane crash with dozens of casualties can etch powerful images in our mind. The strength of these images may be totally unrelated to the number of safe flights typically experienced by airlines. Statistics describing what is typical can often be very dry; typical experiences can be dull and safe. Because we have a tendency to remember startling and unusual events, we must struggle to place available information into a broader context. Our desire to engage in strong-sense critical thinking requires us to process "available" information by asking: Is it typical? Answering that question forces us to study evidence, compiled more systematically. "Available" evidence must be diluted with evidence collected from perspectives different from our own. Panning for Gold in Many Streams The biases can interfere with your search for gold. They can cause you to overlook many possible sources of good arguments. They restrict your panning efforts to a few streams.

How can you avoid these biases? The primary antidote is to adopt the attitudes of a critical thinker. An attitude is a mental stance with which you approach events and issues. Critical thinking is enhanced when you struggle to maintain the following attitudes: 1. Intellectual Curiosity: Look for causes and answers every chance you get. 2. Open-mindedness to Multiple Realities: Seek out and respect alternative viewpoints and perspectives. 3. Flexibility: Be willing to change your mind in the face of strong reasoning. 4. Humility Concerning Your Beliefs: Recognize that certainty is almost always an illusion. 5. Intellectual Skepticism: Require support for claims or opinions before adopting them. None of these attitudes is easy to maintain, but the rewards from trying are worth the effort. For a critical thinker, knowing about these biases is just a first step toward overcoming them. That we tend to stereotype or rely too much on vivid piece of evidence is a habit of mind that requires conscious resistance. In a sense, critical thinkers must censor themselves. They must recognize that they will begin conversations or thought with certain tendencies inconsistent with critical thinking. What distinguishes strong-sense critical thinkers is their drive to resist these biases, to keep searching for improved beliefs, and to conduct that search in diverse streams. I think, I have thought well. Have I?

Rakesh Mohan Hallen