Critical thinking academy
Over 5000 students at the critical thinker how to think, not what to promo enroll the essential thinking and essay writing skills that you should know before leaving high school (but which you will never be taught in high school)! New concepts and strategies for teaching your students how to think critically and write persuasively. I tell everyone that critical thinking skills have been around for 2500 years, but for some reason it's never made it all the way down into the general population. Kevin's work at the critical thinker academy is the bridge between the rigor of academia and the daily needs of us people out here who want to tame the complexity of the world we live in. Every course on the site and become a sustaining al thinking: what it is and why it's why critical thinking skills are important and why they can be so difficult to e your mindware. Podcast dedicated to the art, science and ethics of rational al thinking about foundations for science the formal logic you need to know for critical enough to understand formal fallacies and to think critically about the logical structure of ordinary uction to formal in reasoning due to bad al fallacies: a guided ry slopes, red herrings, straw men and more! Week i post answers to questions submitted by students and supporters of the critical thinker academy. Deep dive into what makes a good academic to cite sources and avoid hing a student needs to l topics: conspiracies, god, the big bang and the discussion on some of the popular topics from the critical thinker you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our log in and use all the features of khan academy, please enable javascript in your mming office personal al ing & on & al brand & study engine media ing ics & & mobile -digital raphy cial ional ational high your team access to udemy’s top 2,000 courses anytime, udemy for what you know into an opportunity and reach millions around the al thinker academy: learn to think like a d of using a simple lifetime average, udemy calculates a course's star rating by considering a number of different factors such as the number of ratings, the age of ratings, and the likelihood of fraudulent ratings. 538 students al thinker academy: learn to think like a to improve your grades, advance in your job and expand your mind -- by learning how to think for yourself! Your team access to udemy's top 2,000 courses anytime, udemy for uce students to fundamental concepts of critical thinking (logic, argument analysis, rhetoric, reasoning with probabilities, the importance of background knowledge, etc. The importance of critical thinking for personal development, participation in democratic society, and the pursuit of e the role that critical thinking principles play in good essay interest in improving one's critical thinking skills. Yet rather than serve as the core of any education worthy of a rational human being, we have relegated the teaching of logic, argument analysis and critical reasoning to specialty courses in universities that reach too few students, too late in their education. In this course i share my growing understanding of these topics, with a focus on what is practically important and useful for developing as independent critical thinkers. Among the topics you will learn: why critical thinking is important the difference between logic and argumentation what makes an argument good or bad the importance of background knowledge for critical thinking techniques of argument analysis and reconstruction what our growing understanding of the human mind tells us about how we actually form beliefs and make decisions how to write a good argumentative essay how to cite sources and avoid plagiarism in your writing and much more! Who thinks that critical thinking is important and would like to learn more about who is required to think and write interested in the psychology of belief and interested in philosophy and who would like to learn more about philosophical ideas and taking a logic or philosophy class who would like to brush up on their basic logic and argumentation e to other critical thinking ulum for this people are saying ... To use the course critical thinking is critical thinking is important - pdf ript to begin, i think a martial arts analogy is useful here. The situation is exactly the same when it comes to critical thinking, but people don't often think of it in this way. But in thinking about the self-defense analogy, i'm thinking more about powerful social institutions, like political parties and advertising companies, who you can think of as being in the "influence business", whose job it is to get you to think and do what another person or group or institution wants you to think and do, and who have enormous resources and expertise at their disposal to be effective at their job. So, the first reason i'm offering for caring about critical thinking, is self-defense — self-defense against the sophisticated manipulations, the bad arguments and the non-arguments that are the weapons of choice in the battle for influence. I'm saying that a good education in principles of critical thinking can help to sensitize us to the presence of these weapons, and immunize us, to a certain extent, from their effects, by learning to discriminate between good and bad reasons for belief and action. We want to be able to justify and claim ownership of the worldview that guides our understanding of the world and our interactions with other people and that informs our ript in part 1 i talked about critical thinking in terms of self-defense, as a means of protecting ourselves from the false rhetoric and bad arguments that are often used by people and institutions to get us to believe and do things that aren’t really in our best interest. What i want to claim is simple: if someone is well-versed in the elements of critical thinking then they’re more likely to be effective persuaders in situations like these. But as good critical thinkers we’re also going to be empowered by our understanding of human psychology and the psychology of influence and persuasion, so that when we give this argument, we’re in a position to maximize its chances of being heard and acknowledged and responded to. Now, not everyone associates critical thinking with these kinds of positive qualities, and especially this last bit about the psychology of persuasion, or at least it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when they think of critical thinking. One reason is that more often people associate critical thinking with the “self-defense” aspects that we talked about above. Another reason (and one that i think is more interesting to talk about) is a view that many people have — that critical thinking is, and should be, about good logic and good argumentation, and that’s it. However, i think it’s a mistake to think that the theory and techniques of persuasive rhetoric do not belong, do not have a proper place, in the critical thinker’s toolkit. Thinking about rhetorical technique and the psychology of persuasion is an inseparable part of the crafting of a great persuasive argument. So, my view is that a good training in critical thinking needs to pay attention not only to logic and argumentation in the abstract, but also to logic and argumentation in real-world contexts, where rhetorical choices and psychological factors inevitably come into play when you’re engaged in argumentation with real people. It follows, then, that if you’re well-versed in all these aspects of critical thinking, then you’re going to be in a better position to have your voice heard, to be effective in the role of ript in the last two lectures we’ve been talking about the value of critical thinking in terms of rational self-interest. Now, this is all well and good, but the value of critical thinking doesn’t stop with individual self-interest. What i want to talk about on this episode is the role of critical thinking specifically in liberal democratic societies, and what duties we as citizens have to try to be critical and independent thinkers.
Khan academy critical thinking
Critical thinking in liberal democracies so, getting back to critical thinking, there are two questions i want to ask: what role does critical thinking play in maintaining liberal democracies? Do citizens of liberal democracies have a civic duty to cultivate their critical thinking faculties? And doing this well requires both an informed citizenry and a citizenry capable of critically assessing arguments, pro and con, that pertain to the laws and policies in question. Now, when we think about the women’s rights movement, or the civil rights movement, or other liberation movements, i want us to consider the importance of independent critical thought in making those movements possible. So it’s not surprising that in social groups that are deeply invested in perpetuating an oppressive social order, this kind of critical inquiry isn’t going to be valued. Now, my claim is not that teaching critical thinking will magically wipe away oppression and human injustice. My claim is simply that it’s harder for oppressive policies and beliefs to gain a foothold in a democratic society that openly supports the value of critical thinking and socratic inquiry. So, to the extent that we care about freedom and equality and justice and the ideals of liberal democratic governance, i think we should also care about critical thinking and the values of socratic inquiry. If liberal democracy survives and flourishes through this century, it will be because we somehow managed to foster and exercise our capacity for critical and creative thinking in tackling these problems. The second question i wanted to ask was, in light of all this, do we as citizens have a duty to cultivate our rational, critical thinking faculties? The system just doesn’t work properly unless enough of us take up the challenge of staying informed and thinking critically about the issues that matter to us. Now, the distressing thing to me is that despite all this, we don’t (generally) teach critical thinking in the public school system. Even here in the us, the home of liberal arts education that stresses general knowledge and thinking skills, only a tiny fraction of students are ever exposed to basic principles of logic and argument analysis, beyond the elementary theorem-proving you might do in a geometry class. It’s a bit better in college and university, where you’ll actually find dedicated critical thinking courses, but it’s still the case that nationally only a fraction of students are required to take such courses. I’m worried that these trends may have the unfortunate side-effect of actually stifling the development of important critical thinking skills. Democracy and civic ript in this lecture i want to talk about the importance of critical thinking for philosophical thinking and the pursuit of “philosophical wisdom”. The other wisdom tradition that i’m thinking of is the one we associate with various forms of mysticism. So, having said all that, let’s get back to our main question, which is “what is the relationship of critical thinking to the pursuit of philosophical wisdom? If you have any interest in reading or understanding what philosophers have written and said about the big questions, then you’ll need to acquire some basic critical thinking skills. And if you want to think critically and independently about the big questions for yourself, it’s unavoidable. Philosophers who hold these critical positions typically don’t go around saying that they came to them through some mystical insight or by the revealed word of god. In this respect we’re all playing on the same field, if not always following the same ophy and the search for five pillars of critical five pillars of critical thinking - pdf ript the title of this episode is “the five essential components of critical thinking”. Just about everything i have to say about critical thinking falls into one or another of these five component areas. The first component that we need to understand to be effective critical thinkers is, not surprising, logic. We’ll talk more about this distinction in this episode the third component that we as critical thinkers need to understand is rhetoric. One of the dirty secrets of critical thinking instruction is that all the logic and argumentation skills in the world will not make up for ignorance -- if you don’t know what you’re talking about, your arguments are going to suck, no matter how good your skills at logical analysis. And finally, the fifth essential component of critical thinking is the cultivation of a certain set of attitudes and values -- attitudes toward yourself and to other people, attitudes toward uncertainty and doubt, attitudes toward the value of truth and knowledge, and so on. Critical thinking text books don’t talk about this very much, but it’s an absolutely essential component of critical thinking. Okay, that’s a first pass through the five areas or components of critical thinking. My claim is that you can’t really be an effective critical thinker unless you commit to working on all five areas, because they’re mutually dependent on one another to work properly. Five pillars of critical ript the main goal of this lecture is to help you better understand what’s important about logic from a critical thinking standpoint. Logic is a science, it’s a technical discipline that you can study for its own sake, but most of what professional logicians study is irrelevant for critical thinking purposes.
Will learning how to symbolize sentences and prove theorems in any of these logical systems help you to become a better critical thinker? So this gives us some reason to question just how effective taking a single course on formal logic will be in improving critical thinking skills. But a more specific reason for skepticism has to do with the fact that most of the skills you learn in a formal logic class just aren’t relevant to real world critical thinking contexts. So these are some reasons to question whether a background in formal logic, by itself, is going to do much to improve your critical thinking skills. The important question is, which parts of logic are important for critical thinking, and which parts aren’t, and why? Five benefits of studying formal logic to answer this i’m going to list five real-world benefits, five ways that the study of logic can really improve your critical thinking skills. You learn fundamental concepts that are important for argument analysis a background in logic gives you a basic vocabulary for talking and thinking about arguments. You will master the most common logical fallacies once you’ve mastered this small handful of basic argument forms, then you’re in a good position to begin studying fallacies of argumentation, which no one disputes is important for critical thinking. You will understand the fundamental role that consistency and contradiction play in argumentation i consider this the most important benefit of learning logic for critical thinking purposes. The take-away message is that if you want to develop as an independent critical thinker, you shouldn’t ignore logic, you should devote some time to studying elementary logic. Just about everything else you’ll learn in a formal logic course won’t be of much direct use to you for critical thinking purposes. At the critical thinker academy i have a tutorial courses called “basic concepts in propositional logic” and “common valid and invalid argument forms”, which introduce what i think are the important logical concepts, based on the criteria i just gave here. Anyone taking a symbolic logic course will find this material very incomplete, but that’s on purpose, i’ve intentionally selected the bits that i think are actually helpful from a critical thinking standpoint and ignored the for critical ript just to recap, i’m working down my list of the five essential components of critical thinking: logic, argumentation, rhetoric, background knowledge, and character. My claim is that effective critical thinking requires that we develop some understanding and skills in all five components, because they’re all mutually dependent — for any of them to work right, they need to work together as a team, so if you’re weak in one area it hurts the whole team, not just that one area. Instead i want to give you a simple way of thinking about what rhetoric is in relation to argumentation, and why both the rhetorical tradition and the philosophical tradition are indispensable for the kind of argumentation that critical thinkers should care about. The problem, from a philosophical or a critical thinking standpoint, is that this set of skills can be used for good or for evil. They can be used to pursue knowledge and wisdom through reason, or they can be used to suppress reason by appealing to emotion or tradition or group-think in a way that bypasses critical reflection. Philosophy needs a distinction between merely persuasive arguments and genuinely good arguments, and critical thinking does too, for the same reason. Unfortunately there aren’t many critical thinking or argumentation texts that really embrace both perspectives. In the standard critical thinking texts written by philosophers trained in logic you won’t see much discussion of rhetorical theory or rhetorical strategy. So, if you want to get educated on argumentation and effective persuasion from the rhetorical tradition, you really need to diversify your ntation versus ript in this lecture i want to talk about the fourth item on our list of the five essential components of critical thinking, five areas of study or personal development that you need to pay attention to if you really want to develop as an independent critical thinker. Here we’re going to talk about the importance of background knowledge to critical thinking. I titled this episode “critical thinking’s dirty secret”, but what i really mean is critical thinking instruction’s dirty secret. For anyone who teaches critical thinking, or for the industries devoted to cranking out textbooks on critical thinking, a guiding premise of the whole enterprise is that critical thinking skills can actually be taught, and the crude version of this view is that if students can master some formal and informal logic and some fallacies, they’ll be better critical thinkers. The dirty secret of critical thinking instruction, which everyone knows if they’ve done it for a while, is that while logic and argument analysis are necessary components of effective critical thinking, they aren’t sufficient, not by a long shot. Background knowledge informs critical thinking at multiple levels, and in my view it’s among the most important components of critical thinking. The most important component of critical thinking can’t be taught, at least not in the way you can teach, say, formal logic and fallacies. Mastering this component of critical thinking requires a dedication to life-long learning, a genuine openness to different points of view, and a certain humility in the face of all that you don’t know. There are at least two importantly different types of background knowledge that are relevant to critical thinking, and they each deserve attention. Now here’s the point i want to emphasize: this step, where you assess the truth or falsity of the premises, is not something you can teach in a logic or critical thinking class. If you want to become an independent critical thinker about a particular subject matter, you need to learn something about that subject matter. This is part of what it means to take responsibility for your own al thinking's dirty ript last lecture we talked about the importance of background knowledge for critical thinking.
There are different types of background knowledge that are relevant to critical thinking in different ways. And a third kind of background knowledge that is relevant (for critical thinking in general) is a kind of meta-knowledge. This is knowledge of how human beings acquire knowledge at all, of our strengths and limitations as critical reasoners, of how our minds work, of our cognitive biases and intellectual habits. Becoming educated on an issue how should a person who is dedicated to critical thinking go about becoming educated about the different sides of an issue? I want to argue that this requires a certain kind of psychological orientation, that it requires an attitude of openness to different points of view that can be very challenging to sustain, but one that we absolutely have to cultivate if we’re really serious about critical thinking. But if you want to claim that you’re critically informed about an issue, and you come across a position that may be diametrically opposed to yours, but that informed, intelligent people find compelling, then the intellectually responsible thing to do, i think, is to spend at least some time trying to understand why those people find it compelling. By looking at a position through such a selective prism you’re more likely to misrepresent it and deceive yourself into thinking you’ve understood it when you really haven’t. The goal of critical thinking it to take intellectual ownership of your beliefs and come to a closer understanding of the truth of the matter. And this is where the title of this lecture gets its name, “what critical thinkers can learn from actors”. But it’s the kind of understanding that we have to strive for, if we’re really serious about critical thinking. The fifth item on my list of five essential components of critical thinking is ”character”, or “attitudes and values”, and this is a good example of the sort of thing i’m referring to when i talk about attitudes and values. I don’t have a good single word to describe this virtue, but i hope i’ve conveyed a sense of what’s involved in it and why it’s important for critical critical thinkers can learn from good ive biases and critical ive biases and critical thinking - pdf ript 1. Cognitive biases: what they are and why they’re important everyone agrees that logic and argumentation are important for critical thinking. One of the things that i try to emphasize in my “five pillars” model of critical thinking is that background knowledge is also very important. There are different types of background knowledge that are relevant to critical thinking in different ways. Because as critical thinkers, we need to be aware of the processes that influence our judgments, especially if those processes systematically bias us in ways that make us prone to error and bad decisions. So as critical thinkers we should be interested in these debates, for this reason, and because they’re relevant on a deeper level to how we should think of ourselves as rational beings. It’s known as the argumentative theory of reason, and it claims that the central adaptive function of human reasoning is to generate and evaluate arguments within a social setting, to generate arguments that will convince others of your point of view, and to develop critical faculties for evaluating the arguments of others. Take-away messages so, what are the take-away messages of this story for us as critical thinkers? I don’t think these skeptical worries are warranted, but the shift in perspective does have implications worth thinking about. Well, remember that the theory involves a shift from thinking of the primary function of human reason as improving the quality of our individual beliefs and decisions, to thinking of the primary function as persuasion within human social groups. First, the story that sperber and mercier give about the evolutionary function of reason explicitly builds in a capacity for critically assessing the quality of arguments. This message is one that i’ve been trying to emphasize in these lectures, and it has to do with the importance of background knowledge for critical thinking. In previous lectures i’ve distinguished three different kinds of background knowledge that are relevant for critical thinking. The views on the evolution of human reasoning that we’ve been talking about here — along with the two previous lectures on cognitive biases — fit into this third category of background knowledge from my perspective, it’s clear that the more we understand how our minds actually work, the greater is our ability to bring critical thought to bear on our judgments and decisions. And it can help us identify the sorts of psychological attitudes and dispositions that are most conducive to critical thinking. But to pull this off we need to cultivate the right kind of epistemic virtues that are informed by the right kind of background knowledge, and through knowledge and experience, learn to develop the appropriate judgment about the right level of epistemic humility to adopt in any particular ive biases and the evolution of al thinking about conspiracies - pdf ebook. Why conspiracy theories are interesting (from a critical thinking perspective) this gives us some idea of what we’re talking about when we talk about conspiracy theories. I think you’ll agree that the topic is fascinating in its own right, but why is this topic interesting from a critical thinking perspective? 3) the relationship between conspiracy theorists and critical thinking there’s another reason why conspiracy theories are interesting from a critical thinking perspective. It has to do with the attitude that conspiracy theorists have toward critical thinking itself. It turns out that many people who endorse conspiracy theories are also passionate advocates for critical thinking education.
I know this because i receive emails from people, on both the right and the left, who say they’re admirers of the podcast, they love what i’m doing, they want to spread the word about the importance of critical thinking, and who follow up with “have you ever looked at this website? For some of these groups, the more global and all-encompassing the posited conspiracy is, the more importance they place on logic and critical thinking skills. What’s fascinating (and ironic) is that this runs exactly counter to what, for lack of a better term i’ll call the “establishment” view of conspiracies and critical thinking, which is that the more global and all-encompassing the conspiracy is, the less plausible it is, and the more irrational it is to believe it. Hence, identifying a conspiracy, seeing it for what it is, is an act of successful critical thinking. And consequently the more broad and encompassing the conspiracy, the greater the challenge for critical thinking, requiring even more vigilance and more rigor in our thinking. Now, what makes the identification of conspiracies even harder still (and i’ve learned that this is a widely shared view, especially among new world order theorists) is that one of the techniques that the powerful elite have used to maintain control is by a deliberate program of “dumbing down” the general public, by suppressing the development of critical thinking capacities among the unwashed masses. And they’ll point to the systematic elimination of critical thinking education from the public school curriculum. We can’t have the masses going around thinking for themselves and criticizing the status quo, that’s not part of the elite game plan. So, critical thinking education for the general public becomes important (again, on this view) because its suppression has been instrumental in maintaining and perpetuating the conspiracy. It follows, then, that if the goal is to unmask the conspiracy and free people’s minds to see reality as it truly is, then we need to promote critical thinking skills, and make critical thinking resources more available to the general public. And that’s why so many conspiracy theory proponents are also strong advocates of critical thinking education. It’s a very romantic vision of the critical thinker as an anti-establishment culture warrior, whose special knowledge and skills can help us to see the behind the veil of appearances, free our minds and begin to live a life outside the “matrix”, as it were. They see a call for critical thinking education from these people as bizarrely ironic as astrologers or flat-earthers advocating for better science education in the public schools! Next we’ll take a closer look at some of the more common arguments for default scepticism about conspiracy al thinking about conspiracies (i): argument for default skepticism about global conspiracies 1. As the conspiracy scales in size and complexity, the more likely it is to fail, and less likely that rational people would even attempt al thinking about conspiracies (ii): the argument for default racy theories, mind control and falsifiability in part 2 i reviewed an argument for default skepticism about global conspiracy theories. There’s also a long tradition of academic writing on the left, for example, from writers influenced by freud and marx and hegel, that is deeply critical of the control of media in the service of government and corporate propaganda. M thinking here of names like theodore adorno and herbert mercuse and jacques ellul and noam chomsky, who all have written extensively on the threat to democracy and human freedom posed by propaganda through the mass media. We might forgive the skeptic for thinking that there’s a threat of circularity looming in this line of response. The skeptic is asking for evidence for their more substantive claims about covert activities, evidence that will withstand critical scrutiny in the public square. This is necessary, i think, for beginning a dialogue in openness and good faith, rather than prejudging the conclusion at the very al thinking about conspiracies (iii): mind control and ion, god and the big bang - pdf ion, god and the big bang one of the things i wanted to do with the podcast was devote some shows to answering viewer questions. After thinking about it i thought that this would be a good topic for a video response. So, to that extent, i don’t think a defender of the kalam argument is going to find this compelling, since they’re already thinking of the cause of this first event as a very special kind of cause. My point is that critical thinking about causation requires that we know something about the landscape of alternative theories of causality that are out there. If you’re thinking that this is a pretty cheap way of settling the issue, i’m on your side. However, i don’t see how the conserved quantity approach gives you any traction at all in thinking about the origins of the universe itself, when you don’t have any conserved quantities to start with. An argument can satisfy both conditions but still fail to be good for other , these are the two most important conditions to be thinking about when you're doing argument later lectures we'll look more closely at both the truth condition and the logic condition, and we'll also look at ways in which an argument can satisfy both conditions and still fail to be ons and comments. The problem is that they don’t provide any independent reasons for accepting that and critical thinking texts will treat this kind of argument as fallacious, a bad argument. Can see how people might initially get this impression, since so many of the introductory examples you see in logic and critical thinking texts are short two-premise arguments. Since” is used to indicate that john’s being here the longest is a reason for thinking that he will probably receive the next promotion. Just to note, for the rest of these lectures i'll keep using the expression "truth condition", even though it's really a "plausibility” condition, just because the language of "truth" is so commonly used in logic and critical thinking texts when describing this feature of good arguments. This distinction, between truth and logic, is arguably the most important distinction for critical argument your understanding of the concepts introduced in this vs invalid arguments an argument has to satisfy the logic condition in order for it to qualify as a good argument. This is an invalid inference, and the name for the fallacy, which you’ll find in any logic or critical thinking textbook, is “affirming the consequent”.
Well, you can figure it out just by thinking about the semantics and knowing what a contradictory is, but there’s a formal shortcut we can use to check the answer. This is very broad, i know, but i’m thinking of cases where someone’s mind is clearly made up, and their main aim is to convert people to their side, or undermine opposing views, by whatever means that are judged to be most effective. Here i’m thinking of cases like, if someone is very upset or very emotional, they’re often not able to reason well, and if that’s the case, arguing with them really isn’t appropriate. To hypocrisy (tu quoque) an “appeal to hypocrisy” is a type of ad hominem where you reject someone’s conclusion or someone’s argument because that person is somehow being inconsistent or hypocritical. And it illustrates nicely the kind of thinking you might have to do when evaluating appeals to authority. When false dilemma shows up in this form, it’s sometimes called the fallacy of “black-and-white thinking”, for obvious reasons. So, human beings in general are quite vulnerable to slippery slope reasoning, and knowing these facts should motivate you to be more critical when you encounter these kinds of man we’re moving on now to fallacies that involve what i’ve called violations of the rules of rational argumentation. This key premise assumes precisely what is really at issue in the argument, it’s the offending circular premise, but because it goes unstated, it’s less likely to be called out and brought under critical scrutiny, and this helps to make the argument seem superficially persuasive. Now, imagine that i’m a pro-choice person, so i go into this thinking that abortion is morally acceptable, or at least its not always unjust. I want to start off by acknowledging that studying probability theory isn’t high on most people’s “bucket lists” of things to do before they die, so we should probably spend some time talking about why this stuff is important from a critical thinking standpoint. There are many interesting fallacies associated with probabilistic reasoning, and critical thinkers should be aware of at least some of these fallacies. Finally, probability is philosophically very interesting, and a lot of important philosophical debates turn on the interpretation of probabilistic statements, so some grounding in the philosophy of probability can be very helpful in both understanding those debates and making informed critical judgments about those issues. With this under our belt we’ll then be in a good position to understand the material on probabilistic fallacies and probability blindness, which is really, really important from a critical thinking is inductive logic? This is just about all i want to say about probability as a mathematical concept, since for critical thinking purposes this is about all you need to know. We’re going to look at a range of these and their variations in the next section of the course: the classical interpretation the logical interpretation frequency interpretations subjective interpretations propensity interpretations they each represent a distinct way of thinking about chance and uncertainty in the world. That’s why, as critical thinkers, it helps to be familiar with these different interpretations, because no single interpretation is suitable for every situation. These objections lead some to believe that the frequency interpretation just won’t cut it as a general theory of probability, but for my purposes i’m more concerned about developing critical judgment, knowing when a particular interpretation is appropriate and when it isn’t. By the end you should have a better idea what this approach is all about and why many people find it an attractive framework for thinking about probabilities. This language only tricks us into thinking we understand something when we really don’t. Here i’m thinking of work by david lewis and isaac levi and hugh mellor and including more recent work by people like carl hoefer and michael strevins and others. From a critical thinking standpoint, however, i don’t think that much of this matters. Critical thinking about probabilities and probabilistic fallacies requires a certain level of basic philosophical literacy, but i don’t think it requires anything beyond what we’ve covered sity in now to see your channels and recommendations! Queuequeuewatch next video is ibesubscribedunsubscribe22, knowledge nt ninja academy , identity and resistance - duration: 12 knowledge illusion - duration: 13 minutes. Why we need the argument ninja academy (interview with storyhinge podcast) - duration: 58 minutes. 541 views11 months item has been e your mindware: a first course on cognitive biases and critical most important discovery of modern psychology - duration: 3 minutes, 35 seconds. 516 views2 years item has been al thinking about first degree was in physics, and i'm a philosopher of science by training, so it's a bit surprising that i've waited so long to do a series specifically on critical thinking about science. The essence of science literacy is the ability to think critically about science and its role in modern life. Our natural tendency to make judgments that either ignore or run contrary to basic laws of probability is one of the primary obstacles to critical thinking and rational decision making. The current set includes videos on critical thinking about coincidences and the gambler's fallacy, but i'll be adding additional videos on small sample fallacies, regression fallacies, base rate fallacies, and others. In a later series of videos i'll be talking about the psychological origins of many of these fallacies, and what we can do to avoid falling into them or neutralize their negative al thinking about coincidences (1/5) - duration: 110 seconds. 199 views3 years item has been critical thinker versions of my podcast show on critical thinking. Just search for "critical thinker podcast" in the itunes search 018: conspiracies, mind control and falsifiability - duration: 27 minutes.