Critical thinking

To make an argument by appealing to the novelty of an idea— to the innovation it brings to a certain area—is not necessarily wrong. The visionary thinker Alvin Toffler coined the wonderful phrase nostalgia for the future, referring to his appreciation of the adventure the future promises through the desire many of us have to merge with 'the new' that is still developing...

Arguments must be convincing and, in order to convince, they must be valid—the minimum requirement of persuasion.

Even the most rigorously researched statistics are not immune from misinterpretation, and they can often be used in a way that obscures the truth.

The false dilemma fallacy presents an issue as if there are only two ways to solve it—often, two opposite ways—when, in fact, there are more ways than that. The conflict between the two ways presented is also false.

"Intelligent, scientifically trained people no longer believe (or can no longer believe) in God."

Almost a century ago, writer Virginia Woolf noticed people’s tendency to approach books “with clouded and divided minds, asking fiction to be true, poetry to be false, biographies to be flattering and history to chime with prejudices.”

A few years ago, the American Statistical Association carried out research on the history of statistics, tracing their use throughout the course of human society’s development. The results of the study are displayed in the form of a chart called the Timeline of statistics, available on the association's website.

What we think about ourselves, over time, becomes our reality. This is a good enough reason to identify thinking errors left running in the background and to seek out strategies for healthier thinking.

Many of us probably know at least one manipulative person — or perhaps we’ve even caught ourselves falling into that category. But do we really know when this tendency to control or influence others becomes harmful? And more importantly, how can we deal with manipulative people?

We use our experience and knowledge to understand what is unknown or inaccessible to us. We are attracted to patterns and judge the world in terms of what is already familiar to us. However, out of a desire to understand some things more quickly, we often draw conclusions without sufficient evidence. Thus we fall into the trap of the sophism called hasty generalization.

Fundamentalist movements, extremist and sectarian religious beliefs, manipulations of the mass of believers, conspiracy theories within religious sects, and other such threats, emphasise the need for critical thinking.

In practice, people often accuse each other of making logical errors, but sometimes the accusation is false. Such an accusation is made by someone who does not understand what logical fallacies are and how they work, or by a manipulative person who takes advantage of the ignorance of those in the first category.

As Christians we are interested in a perpetual spiritual, moral, general human perfecting. But can we really succeed without perfecting our way of thinking, our capacity to understand, and thus without increasing our intellectual capital?

When it comes to conspiracy theories, the public quickly becomes polarised. On one hand, you have the “experts” who reel off reliable information with credible arguments from confirmed cases. On the other hand, there are the “uninformed,” completely disinterested in the subject or outright rejecting it as a myth.

The false analogy or the faulty analogy consists of the incorrect use of the analogy argumentative scheme without first meeting the requirements of a correct comparison.