Critical thinking

There are a lot of claims out there. So what claims should be believed? What constitutes a good method for determining the likelihood of a claim? These questions are usually not easy, and they naturally come up for any claim that anyone makes. We must examine the details and determine if the foundations of the idea are solid or not. In this post, I will examine several different methods of determining the quality of an idea, and how much one should rely upon the method to establish personal beliefs.

There's a good reason to determine if a claim is good or not. Not all ideas can be true, and anything that is true has implications for one's knowledge about reality. Knowledge about the world in turn affects the way one acts in the world. If someone is misinformed about the truth or likelihood of a particular idea, then they're likely to act in a way that just won't work as intended or is destructive to themselves or to others.

Fortunately, if our behavior yields unexpected results, or we find out about surprising new facts that challenge our formerly held notions about the world, we do have the power to reexamine those beliefs. This can be a tricky thing to do as it tends to make people a little uncomfortable. It is important that a person does engage in such activities, though, lest they consistently have negative impacts upon the world around them.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to determine if a claim is good or not. There are many ways to judge the quality of claims, but they require a lot of work from the examiner. Fortunately, it is something that can be practiced and studied, and people do have the capability to improve at such thinking ability.

It is important that we are aware of these methods, so we may all improve our ability to determine what is true about the world and what is not. These methods are not likely to be new to you, but it is all too common for people to simply forget to apply them properly. They are presented here to raise awareness of what the methods are, and their relative strengths and weaknesses. All of these methods have advantages and disadvantages I will attempt to highlight for you.



-Consistency: Examine the consistency of the idea presented

Ideas presented to you must hold up to some level of scrutiny and must make sense with your conception of the world around you. In short, this means that if someone tells you something which does not make sense with what you know, it cannot be true if what you already believe to be true holds, since self-contradiction automatically implies falsehood. So if you have been absolutely rigorous in your examination of reality, additional ideas presented to you must first and foremost be examined to ensure that they match with your present ideas about the world.

This method of examination is useful for it can help to ensure that you build an internally self-consistent understanding of the world around yourself. Knowledge, in order to be genuine, real knowledge, must not contradict itself and must not contradict other knowledge.

In contrast, this method can fail in that a self-consistent understanding isn't necessarily true. If your understanding of the world is flawed, then this method could lead you to an erroneous conclusion. Also, not all wrong ideas can be rejected simply by applying this method of examination. For these reasons, nobody should rely exclusively upon this method of examining an idea.



-Factual Basis: Research facts relevant to the claim

Not all claims will be presented with a full listing of the relevant facts. Indeed, many claims are made with a host of supposed facts presented to you that may not be true at all. The only way to ensure the facts presented to you are indeed true is to do research.

The person trying to tell you something is not going to do research for you. They might have already researched the claim and know it to be solid. They might have not researched anything whatsoever, and just have taken the presented argument and claims from someone else as true. Or they might be deliberately lying to you, hoping that you'll believe something they say. Without any of your own examination efforts, there is no way to tell which of these scenarios is the case.

The benefit using this method is that you can take steps to ensure the supposed facts presented along with a claim are indeed true. This method takes a lot more effort than many other methods used, because of the inherent difficulties surrounding research, but it is one of the best ways to filter ideas because you can rely upon your own academic credibility.

Obviously, this method takes a lot of time to employ, because all supposed facts can be ultimately questioned by a sufficiently stubborn examiner. You could research a subject for a long time and still have an incomplete understanding of the ideas within the subject. Because of this, it is important to build communities of individuals who engage in rigorous examination of ideas. This brings us to the next method.



-Community Consensus: Build a community of experts

It is impossible for a single individual to understand and examine all possible knowledge by themselves, and judge all ideas ever presented to them. Because of this, a thinking individual is left with a dilemma. How is one to determine the validity of many complicated ideas which all require a significant investment of time in order to judge?

Experts and communities are important for this reason. Individuals cannot determine the quality of all ideas presented, but together, communities can. A community is not perfect, but within an appropriately thoughtful community, ideas can be presented to others and anyone who may want to examine those ideas can use various methods in order to do so. Disagreements between experts in a subject are enlightening for the fact that they encourage fresh debate and research about a subject. Likewise, an individual can read the arguments that experts come up with to support their claims and judge the arguments on the presented merits.

The advantage is thus that a community can invest the time required to examine claims. The experts a community develops are thus capable of forming better arguments and evidence in favor of their claims, and anyone who has become a real expert should be familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of their own arguments because all experts should be aware of the methods I am presenting here. If this is done well, one can establish personal beliefs to be the overall generally most agreed upon beliefs held by experts in their respective fields.

The disadvantage to a community is that they can be led astray just as an individual can. When a community believes something strange or false, it is more difficult to divert the community away from a strange belief. Likewise, there is no guarantee that the people within the community have ever applied any serious method to filter claims.

It is difficult to be within a community. The best one can do is to work constantly to ensure that community is faithful to the pursuit of truth, and all ideas within the community are presented with a great deal of thought and examination at all times. This means that even within a community, you must personally participate within the community to keep it honest.




All of these methods must be used to filter ideas and reach sensible conclusions about the world. An accurate understanding of the world around yourself must be built in order to ensure a better world for all of us. Every one of us is capable of doing this kind of thinking, and we must all practice it on a regular basis in order to become better individuals with a better understanding of our world.

Be careful about what you choose to believe is true about the world, and always try to keep your mind open enough to evaluate and reevaluate your assumed beliefs. Read, think and communicate.