Critical thinking

Conspiracy theories and fake news are not the same thing, although the two categories have much in common.

It is crucial to realise that while words can be seductive and magnetic, they can also put us in great danger if we let ourselves be carried away by their charms, driven by emotional impulses without reason.

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.

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?

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.

When we consider that a conclusion is founded only if a lot of people consider it true, we fall into the trap of the argumentum ad populum or the appeal to popularity.

We live surrounded by words—spoken with confidence, written with authority, and shared at astonishing speed. Yet behind many of them lie confusion, prejudice, and unexamined assumptions. From everyday conversations to public decisions, gaps in reasoning and expression reveal something deeper than mere slips of the tongue: they expose deficiencies in education. In such a climate, critical thinking is no luxury; it is a...

Western societies pride themselves on their access to information. Compared to our predecessors, we seem to be the most informed generation to have ever lived on Earth. However, paradoxically, the more data we have access to, the harder it is to determine what is true and what is false.

Critical thinking is not a cure-all, but it proves very useful in dealing with, clarifying, and solving some decision-making problems, as well as the thought and belief disputes which occupy our minds.

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.”

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

No one has ever seen a thought, not even a neurosurgeon. However, today we know more about the way we think than what we were able to visualise, yet still less than we would like to know.

"Logic suffers from a great logical fallacy: it believes that reality itself is of a logical nature. If it encounters something that cannot be understood logically, it will claim that this something doesn't exist, but only appears to exist..." (Lucian Blaga, Horizons and Stages)

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.