At Work Newswire

By Jefferson Flanders

To the extent that I can claim to be a clear thinker, the credit goes to my parents. They met in the newsroom of the New York Herald Tribune and, true to their journalistic training, raised their five children with an appreciation of the power of inquiry. That my father and mother encouraged us to question, probe, and challenge our own and others’ premises, assumptions, and conclusions served as a sort of informal short course in critical thinking.

We became familiar with Kipling’s six honest serving men (”Their names are What and Why and When/ And How and Where and Who”) and we also learned that questioning alone was not enough. You had to ask the right questions.

Asking the right questions meant probing to make sure you understood the key issues or problems under consideration, and what evidence existed that addressed them. It meant asking what underlying assumptions existed, and what inferences were being drawn; it meant reviewing the alternative outcomes or resolutions that had been proposed, and considering their consequences. Finally, a last step involved making up your mind and reaching your own conclusions—and being prepared to defend them.

This questioning process meant you needed enough background and context about a given subject—be it American presidential politics or advances in genetic engineering or the state of the stock market—to ask intelligent questions. While it didn’t require becoming an outright expert, it did mean that the more you could learn, the more focused and telling your questions could be. In-depth mastery wasn’t a precondition for asking the right questions, but an informed curiosity was.

A baseline of understanding

Clear thinking commences with a baseline of understanding or knowledge; at a minimum the clear thinker achieves what writing coach Don Murray once called “intelligent ignorance,” and then moves on to ask a series of pertinent questions that spur analysis, synthesis, and eventually, lead to a well-founded conclusion. Attempts to teach critical thinking solely through a series of formulas or instruction in classical logic are misguided; this approach often ignores the role of informed curiosity and places the focus excessively on a detached process of “critical thinking.”

For example, how can you ask the right questions about the validity of a public opinion survey if you aren’t familiar with the basics of random sampling and confidence intervals, and the potential for sampling error, response bias, and other distortions? How can you ask the right questions about a proposed product launch if you haven’t researched the competitive landscape (who else makes similar products?), consumer trends, demand estimates, and the marketing costs necessary to bring the product to market? Won’t your questions about proposed legislation be more informed if you’re aware of the key pros and cons for that specific bill? Asking the right questions starts with context and comprehension.

Informed curiosity represents clear thinking in action—a series of questions that get at the heart of the matter. A New York Times Magazine article about one clear thinker, Dr. Steven Walerstein, noted his broad knowledge of medicine and his approach to problem solving: “If he didn’t know the answer right off the bat, he was known to ask questions that would lead to the answer.” In one difficult case, Walerstein, a general internist, asked a series of informed questions about a patient with liver failure and anemia, helping him “look for some kind of pattern buried in the chaotic assemblage of numbers and tests.” Reviewing the patient’s symptoms triggered Walerstein’s memories of a lecture on an inherited condition known as Wilson’s disease—which proved to be the correct diagnosis. Throughout the process, Walerstein’s questions were informed by his baseline of understanding (a baseline, which in medicine and the sciences, may require years of study and practice to acquire).

Historian David Hackett Fischer has argued that questions, and attendant hypotheses, should be “approximations, which are open to infinite refinement.” When a clear thinker arrives at a conclusion it should be regarded as tentative, one based on the most probable hypothesis. German philosopher Hans Vaihinger has noted: “The wise man is not he who avoids hypotheses, but he who asserts the most probable and who knows best how to estimate the degree of their probability.” Simply put, you have to go with the best you have.

The process of questioning should continue, however, because new information or evidence may surface that changes your evaluation and alters your hypothesis. That can be hard to accept, but intellectual honesty demands shifting your position in such cases. As the economist John Maynard Keynes once said, responding to charges of inconsistency: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Jefferson Flanders is an author, educator and independent journalist. He blogs on issues of the day at Neither Red nor Blue.

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Copyright © 2007 Jefferson Flanders

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