The Essential Reading (2) —— 《Beyond Feelings》

No doubt thinking play a crucial role in everybody's daily life. However, I hadn't paid enough attention before to the questions such as how to think, how to organize our thinking, how to change our wishful thinking into critical thinking, how to be more on objectivity than on subjectivity, more on though than on feeling, how to wrestle with our own negative tendencies which prevent us from critical thinking etc.

Written by Vincent Ryan Ruggiero, this book is designed to introduce the concept of critical thinking, try to help us acquire the intellectual skills necessary to solve problems. The content is divided into 4 sections. Section 1 elaborates the fundamental concepts; Section 2 describes the problems to impede the clear thinking; Section 3 articulates the strategy to achieve critical thinking; Section 4 presents the contemporary issues that occupy the attentions of the best thinkers of our age.

Basic Concepts:

Individuality: Popular definition is "doing your own thing, responding to life's situations in whatever way seems most natural." However, individuality must be the habit of developing your own personal responses to people, issues, and situation, rather than mindlessly endorsing the reponses you have been conditioned to make. 4 guideline to help you achieve individality:

1. resist the influence of your conditioning, refuse to embrace the first reaction.
2. decide why you reacted as you did.
3. think of other reactions you might have
4. evaluate the different ractions

Critical thinking: It is the process of evaluating ideas, in other words: judge the accuracy of statements and the soundness of the reasoning that leads to conclusios.

Key to critical thinking is the skill in asking appropriate questions, the skill to take charge of their thoughts, to use their minds actively as well as passively.

Misconceptions of critical thinker	Right perception
being able to support beliefs with reasons	the reasons are good and sufficient
never imitate others in thought or action.	making wise decision, regardless of how common those decisions are.
critical thinking is synonymous with having a lot of right answers in one's head.	critical thinking is the process of finding answers when they are not readily avaiable.
cannot be learned	a matter of habbit

Truth: The truth about sth is what is so about it, the facts about it in their exact arrangement and proportions. Truth is relative, depend on:

1. the quality of perception
2. the quality of information: reality has many faces, the quality of belief depends to a considerable extend on the quality of this information that backs it up.
3. all too often, what is taken as truth today by the most repected minds is proved erroneous tomorrow.
   

Truth is difficult to purse. We all have limitations and can easily be mistaken. And surely we'll never find all the answers we'd like to. But we can observe a little more accurately, weight things a little more thoroughly, and make up our mind a little more carefully. By doing so, we'll be a little closer to the truth. It is far different from saying "Everyone makes his or her own truth" or "It all depends on how you look at it." And it is more reasonabe to do so.

Knowing: The requirement of knowing are:

1. have the right answer
2. the realization you have it.
3. the ability to express what is known and how you come to know it.

It is different from three other mental processes:

• Assuming: taking something for granted
• Guessing: offering a judgment on a hunch or taking a chance on an answer without any confidence that it is correct.
• Speculating: making an "educated" guess, selecting an answer without any confidence that it is correct but with some evidence for believing it is probably correct.
  

The problems obstruct critical thinking:

1. "Mine is better" thinking: prefer your own ideas for no other reason than that they are yours.
It can shut us off from other perspectives, blind us to unfamiliar truths, enslave us to yesterday's conclusions, readily to accept uncritically those who appeal to our preconceived notions, leave us vunlnerable to those who would manipulate us for their own purpose. "Mine is better thinking"'s influence will be strongest when the subject is one that we really care about.

2. Resistance to change: prefer familiar to unfamiliar ideas.

3. conformity: thinking the way others do(/do not) because of the group or your desire to belong.

4. face saving: attempting to preserve your self-image
Face-saving tendency leads us to rationalize, prompt us to misinterpret our perceptions and substitute wishful thinking for reality. Rationalizing is the very opposite of reasoning; whereas reasoning works from evidence to conclusion, rationalizing works from conclusion to evidence.

5. stereotyping: making fixed, unbending generalizations about people, places or things.
the cause of stereotyping is "mine is better" thinking, another is the principle of least effort

6. oversimplification: simplifying that does not merely scale down complex matters to more manageable proportion but twists and distorts them.
The cause of oversimplification:

• unwillingness to invest the time necessary to probe the complexity of issues.
• mine is better thinking
• insecurity
• the habit of seeing only what affects us
  

7. Hasty conclusion: judgments made before sufficient evidence is obtained.
The cause of hasty conclusions:

• convenience. Some people are afraid of arduous analysis and rattled by complexity, as a result, they leap at the first conclusion that occurs to them.
• the desire to sound authoritative. Feeling some insecurity and wanting to compensate for it, or wanting to make their conversation livelier, many people have the habit of escalating every statement to a higher level of generalization.
• the tendency to prefer one idea over all others.

8. Unwarranted assumptions: ideas that you have in mind and that influence your reasoning without your being conscious of it; ideas you take for granted.

9. logical fallacies: specific errors that occur in reasoning.

• illogical conclusion
• either-or thinking: extreme views are seldom reasonable views.
• attaching the person: when an idea is under discussion, it is inappropriate to focus on the person.
• shifting the burden of proof (also known as argument from ignorance): whenever we make an assertion, it is our responsiblity to support it. You cann't demand others to disprove our assertions.
• false cause: ignore the coincidence
• straw man: straw man is an argument without substance. This fallacy consists of pretending one's adversary has said sth false and then proceeding to demonstrate that it is false.
• irrational appeals: to accept ideas at face value or on some other bias than reasonableness. It can take many forms like emotion, tradition or faith, moderation, authority, common sense.

Strategy:

Knowing ourselves: it is important, because so many of the obstacles to clear thinking are found not in the problems we deal with, but in ourselves.

Be observant: clear and sound thinking often depends on subtleties that are revealed only by close observation.

By knowing oursleves and being observant, we improve our perception and guard against error. by systematically clarifying issues, conducting inquiry, interpreting evidence, and analyzing viewpoints, we rescue our thinking from preconceived notions and first impressions. Chance favors the prepared mind and the observant eye.

The guidelines to forming judgements:

• Strive for a balanced view
• Deal with Probability
• Make your subject appropriately specific
• Make your predicate exact
• Include all appropriate qualifications: to include the qualifications of time, place and condition.
• Avoid Exaggeration