Interpreting The Facts

The e-Advocate Quarterly Magazine

Interpreting the Facts

John 7:17-18 2 Timothy 3:14-17

“Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential”

Vol. XI, Issue LII – Q-4 October| November| December 2025

The Advocacy Foundation, Inc. Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential

Since its founding in 2003, The Advocacy Foundation has become recognized as an effective provider of support to those who receive our services, having real impact within the communities we serve. We are currently engaged in many community and faith-based collaborative initiatives, having the overall objective of eradicating all forms of youth violence and correcting injustices everywhere. In carrying-out these initiatives, we have adopted the evidence-based strategic framework developed and implemented by the Office of Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).

The stated objectives are: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Community Mobilization; Social Intervention; Provision of Opportunities; Organizational Change and Development; Suppression [of illegal activities].

Moreover, it is our most fundamental belief that in order to be effective, prevention and intervention strategies must generally be Community Specific, Culturally Relevant, EvidenceBased, and Collaborative. The Violence Prevention and Intervention programming we employ in implementing this community-enhancing framework include the programs further described throughout our publications, programs and special projects both domestically and internationally.

www.TheAdvocacyFoundation.org ISBN: ......... .........

../2015 Printed in the USA

Advocacy Foundation Publishers 3601 N. Broad Street, Philadlephia, PA 19140 (878) 222-0450 | Voice | Fax | SMS

Page 2 of 105

Dedication ______ Every publication in our many series‘ is dedicated to everyone, absolutely everyone, who by virtue of their calling, by Divine inspiration, direction and guidance, is on the battlefield dayafter-day striving to follow God‘s will and purpose for their lives. And this is with particular affinity for those Spiritual warriors who are being transformed into excellence through daily academic, professional, familial, and other challenges.

We pray that you will bear in mind: Matthew 19:26 (NIV) Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." (Emphasis added) To all of us who daily look past our circumstances, and naysayers, to what the Lord says we will accomplish: Blessings!

-

The Advocacy Foundation, Inc.

Page 3 of 105

Page 4 of 105

The Advocacy Foundation, Inc. Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential

The e-Advocate Quarterly

Interpreting The Facts

“Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential 1735 Market Street, Suite 3750 Philadelphia, PA 19102

| 100 Edgewood Avenue, Suite 1690 Atlanta, GA 30303

John C Johnson III Founder & CEO

(878) 222-0450 Voice | Fax | SMS www.TheAdvocacyFoundation.org

Page 5 of 105

Page 6 of 105

Biblical Authority ______

John 7:17-18 (NIV) 17

Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.

18

Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him. ______

2 Timothy 3:14-17 (NIV) 14

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15

and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

16

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17

so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Page 7 of 105

Page 8 of 105

Page 9 of 105

Table of Contents e-Advocate Quarterly Interpreting The Facts

______

Biblical Authority I.

Introduction

II.

Logic

III.

Reasoning

IV.

Critical Thinking a. b. c. d.

Critical Reading Critical Reading v. Critical Thinking Choices: The Ingredients of Text Inferences: Reading Ideas and Words i. Process ii. Analysis e. Three Ways to Review & Discuss Text V.

Creative Thinking

VI.

References Attachments A. Introduction to Critical Thinking B. Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts C. Statutory Interpretation

Copyright Š 2015 The Advocacy Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Page 10 of 105

Page 11 of 105

Introduction Open-Mindedness is receptiveness to new ideas. Open-mindedness relates to the way in which people approach the views and knowledge of others, and "incorporate the beliefs that others should be free to express their views and that the value of others‘ knowledge should be recognized." There are various scales for the measurement of open-mindedness. It has been argued that schools should emphasize open-mindedness more than relativism in their science instruction, because the scientific community does not embrace a relativistic way of thinking.

Open-mindedness is generally considered an important personal attribute for effective participation in management teams and other groups.

According to What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, closedmindedness, or an unwillingness to consider new ideas, can result from the brain's natural dislike for ambiguity. According to this view, the brain has a "search and destroy" relationship with ambiguity and evidence contradictory to people's current beliefs tends to make them uncomfortable by introducing such ambiguity. Research confirms that belief-discrepant-closed-minded persons have less tolerance for cognitive inconsistency.

Relativism Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration. As moral relativism, the term is often used in the context of moral principles, where principles and ethics are regarded as applicable in only limited context. There are many forms of relativism which vary in their degree of controversy. The term often refers to truth relativism, which is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture (cultural relativism).

Factual Relativism Factual relativism or epistemic relativism is a mode of reasoning that extends relativism and subjectivism to factual matter and reason. In factual relativism the facts used to establish the truth or falsehood of any statement are understood to be relative to the perspective of those proving or falsifying the proposition.

Page 12 of 105

Moral Relativism Moral relativism may be any of several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures. Descriptive moral relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral; meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong; and normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.

Not all descriptive relativists adopt meta-ethical relativism, and moreover, not all meta-ethical relativists adopt normative relativism. Richard Rorty, for example, argued that relativist philosophers believe "that the grounds for choosing between such opinions is less algorithmic than had been thought", but not that any belief is equally as valid as any other.

Moral relativism has been espoused, criticized, and debated for thousands of years, from ancient Greece and India to the present day, in diverse fields including philosophy, science, and religion.

Perspectivism Perspectivism (German: Perspektivismus) is the term coined by Friedrich Nietzsche in developing the philosophical view (touched upon as far back as Plato's rendition of Protagoras) that all ideations take place from particular perspectives. This means that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives in which judgment of truth or value can be made. This is often taken to imply that no way of seeing the world can be taken as definitively "true", but does not necessarily entail that all perspectives are equally valid.

Subjectivism Subjectivism is the philosophical tenet that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience". In other words, subjectivism is the doctrine that knowledge is merely subjective and that there is no external or objective truth. The success of this position is historically attributed to Descartes and his methodic doubt. Subjectivism accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law. In extreme forms like Solipsism, it may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends solely on someone's subjective awareness of it. One may consider the qualified empiricism of George Berkeley in this context, given his reliance on God as the prime mover of human perception. Thus, subjectivism.

Philosophical Realism Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that some aspect of our reality is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, perceptions, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Realism may be spoken of with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, and thought. Realism can also be promoted in an unqualified sense, in which case it asserts the mind-independent existence of a visible world, as opposed to skepticism and solipsism. Philosophers who profess realism state that truth consists in the mind's correspondence to reality.

Page 13 of 105

Realists tend to believe that whatever we believe now is only an approximation of reality and that every new observation brings us closer to understanding reality. In its Kantian sense, realism is contrasted with idealism. In a contemporary sense, realism is contrasted with anti-realism, primarily in the philosophy of science.

Idealism In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape society.

As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit. Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind.

The earliest extant arguments that the world of experience is grounded in the mental derive from India and Greece. The Hindu idealists in India and the Greek Neoplatonists gave panentheistic arguments for an all-pervading consciousness as the ground or true nature of reality. In contrast, the Yogācāra school, which arose within Mahayana Buddhism in India in the 4th century CE, based its "mind-only" idealism to a greater extent on phenomenological analyses of personal experience. This turn toward the subjective anticipated empiricists such as George Berkeley, who revived idealism in 18th-century Europe by employing skeptical arguments against materialism.

Beginning with Immanuel Kant, German idealists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Arthur Schopenhauer dominated 19th-century philosophy. This tradition, which emphasized the mental or "ideal" character of all phenomena, birthed idealistic and subjectivist schools ranging from British idealism to phenomenalism to existentialism. The historical influence of this branch of idealism remains central even to the schools that rejected its metaphysical assumptions, such as Marxism, pragmatism and positivism.

Truth Truth is most often used to mean being in accord with fact or reality, or fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal.

The commonly understood opposite of truth is falsehood, which, correspondingly, can also take on a logical, factual, or ethical meaning. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in several contexts, including philosophy and religion. Many human activities depend upon the concept, Page 14 of 105

where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most (but not all) of the sciences, law, and everyday life.

Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians. Language and words are a means by which humans convey information to one another and the method used to determine what is a "truth" is termed a criterion of truth. There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth: what things are truthbearers capable of being true or false; how to define and identify truth; the roles that faith-based and empirically based knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective or objective, relative or absolute.

Page 15 of 105

Page 16 of 105

Logic Logic (from the Ancient Greek: λογική, logike) is the use and study of valid reasoning. The study of logic features most prominently in the subjects of philosophy, mathematics, and computer science.

Logic was studied in several ancient civilizations, including India, China, Persia and Greece. In the West, logic was established as a formal discipline by Aristotle, who gave it a fundamental place in philosophy. The study of logic was part of the classical trivium, which also included grammar and rhetoric.

Logic was further extended by Al-Farabi who categorized it into two separate groups (idea and proof). Later, Avicenna revived the study of logic and developed relationship between temporalis and the implication. In the East, logic was developed by Buddhists and Jains.

Logic is often divided into three parts: inductive reasoning, abductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning.

Deductive and Inductive Reasoning, and Abductive Inference Deductive reasoning concerns what follows necessarily from given premises (if a, then b).

However, inductive reasoning—the process of deriving a reliable generalization from observations—has sometimes been included in the study of logic. Similarly, it is important to distinguish deductive validity and inductive validity (called "cogency"). An inference is deductively valid if and only if there is no possible situation in which all the premises are true but the conclusion false. An inductive argument can be neither valid nor invalid; its premises give only some degree of probability, but not certainty, to its conclusion.

The notion of deductive validity can be rigorously stated for systems of formal logic in terms of the well-understood notions of semantics. Inductive validity on the other hand requires us to define a reliable generalization of some set of observations. The task of providing this definition may be approached in various ways, some less formal than others; some of these definitions may use mathematical models of probability. For the most part this discussion of logic deals only with deductive logic.

Abduction is a form of logical inference that goes from observation to a hypothesis that accounts for the reliable data (observation) and seeks to explain relevant evidence. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) first introduced the term as "guessing". Peirce Page 17 of 105

said that to abduce a hypothetical explanation from an observed surprising circumstance is to surmise that may be true because then would be a matter of course. Thus, to abduce from involves determining that is sufficient (or nearly sufficient), but not necessary, for .

Consistency, Validity, Soundness, and Completeness Among the important properties that logical systems can have:  

 

Consistency, which means that no theorem of the system contradicts another.

Validity, which means that the system's rules of proof never allow a false inference from true premises. A logical system has the property of soundness when the logical system has the property of validity and uses only premises that prove true (or, in the case of axioms, are true by definition).

Completeness, of a logical system, which means that if a formula is true, it can be proven (if it is true, it is a theorem of the system).

Soundness, the term soundness has multiple separate meanings, which creates a bit of confusion throughout the literature. Most commonly, soundness refers to logical systems, which means that if some formula can be proven in a system, then it is true in the relevant model/structure (if A is a theorem, it is true). This is the converse of completeness. A distinct, peripheral use of soundness refers to arguments, which means that the premises of a valid argument are true in the actual world.

Some logical systems do not have all four properties. As an example, Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems show that sufficiently complex formal systems of arithmetic cannot be consistent and complete; however, first-order predicate logics not extended by specific axioms to be arithmetic formal systems with equality can be complete and consistent.

Rival Conceptions of Logic Logic arose (see below) from a concern with correctness of argumentation. Modern logicians usually wish to ensure that logic studies just those arguments that arise from appropriately general forms of inference. For example, Thomas Hofweber writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that logic "does not, however, cover good reasoning as a whole. That is the job of the theory of rationality. Rather it deals with inferences whose validity can be traced back to the formal features of the representations that are involved in that inference, be they linguistic, mental, or other representations".

By contrast, Immanuel Kant argued that logic should be conceived as the science of judgement, an idea taken up in Gottlob Frege's logical and philosophical work. But Frege's work is ambiguous in the sense that it is both concerned with the "laws of thought" as well as with the "laws of truth", i.e. it both treats logic in the context of a theory of the mind, and treats logic as the study of abstract formal structures.

Page 18 of 105

Types of Logic Syllogistic Logic The Organon was Aristotle's body of work on logic, with the Prior Analytics constituting the first explicit work in formal logic, introducing the syllogistic. The parts of syllogistic logic, also known by the name term logic, are the analysis of the judgements into propositions consisting of two terms that are related by one of a fixed number of relations, and the expression of inferences by means of syllogisms that consist of two propositions sharing a common term as premise, and a conclusion that is a proposition involving the two unrelated terms from the premises.

Aristotle's work was regarded in classical times and from medieval times in Europe and the Middle East as the very picture of a fully worked out system. However, it was not alone: the Stoics proposed a system of propositional logic that was studied by medieval logicians. Also, the problem of multiple generality was recognized in medieval times. Nonetheless, problems with syllogistic logic were not seen as being in need of revolutionary solutions.

Today, some academics claim that Aristotle's system is generally seen as having little more than historical value (though there is some current interest in extending term logics), regarded as made obsolete by the advent of propositional logic and the predicate calculus. Others use Aristotle in argumentation theory to help develop and critically question argumentation schemes that are used in artificial intelligence and legal arguments.

Propositional Logic (Sentential Logic) A propositional calculus or logic (also a sentential calculus) is a formal system in which formulae representing propositions can be formed by combining atomic propositions using logical connectives, and in which a system of formal proof rules establishes certain formulae as "theorems".

Predicate Logic Predicate logic is the generic term for symbolic formal systems such as first-order logic, secondorder logic, many-sorted logic, and infinitary logic.

Predicate logic provides an account of quantifiers general enough to express a wide set of arguments occurring in natural language. Aristotelian syllogistic logic specifies a small number of forms that the relevant part of the involved judgements may take. Predicate logic allows sentences to be analysed into subject and argument in several additional ways—allowing predicate logic to solve the problem of multiple generality that had perplexed medieval logicians.

Page 19 of 105

The development of predicate logic is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege, who is also credited as one of the founders of analytical philosophy, but the formulation of predicate logic most often used today is the first-order logic presented in Principles of Mathematical Logic by David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann in 1928. The analytical generality of predicate logic allowed the formalization of mathematics, drove the investigation of set theory, and allowed the development of Alfred Tarski's approach to model theory. It provides the foundation of modern mathematical logic.

Frege's original system of predicate logic was second-order, rather than first-order. Second-order logic is most prominently defended (against the criticism of Willard Van Orman Quine and others) by George Boolos and Stewart Shapiro.

Modal Logic In languages, modality deals with the phenomenon that sub-parts of a sentence may have their semantics modified by special verbs or modal particles. For example, "We go to the games" can be modified to give "We should go to the games", and "We can go to the games" and perhaps "We will go to the games". More abstractly, we might say that modality affects the circumstances in which we take an assertion to be satisfied.

Aristotle's logic is in large parts concerned with the theory of non-modalized logic. Although, there are passages in his work, such as the famous sea-battle argument in De Interpretatione ยง 9, that are now seen as anticipations of modal logic and its connection with potentiality and time, the earliest formal system of modal logic was developed by Avicenna, whom ultimately developed a theory of "temporally modalized" syllogistic.

While the study of necessity and possibility remained important to philosophers, little logical innovation happened until the landmark investigations of Clarence Irving Lewis in 1918, who formulated a family of rival axiomatizations of the alethic modalities. His work unleashed a torrent of new work on the topic, expanding the kinds of modality treated to include deontic logic and epistemic logic. The seminal work of Arthur Prior applied the same formal language to treat temporal logic and paved the way for the marriage of the two subjects. Saul Kripke discovered (contemporaneously with rivals) his theory of frame semantics, which revolutionized the formal technology available to modal logicians and gave a new graph-theoretic way of looking at modality that has driven many applications in computational linguistics and computer science, such as dynamic logic.

Informal Reasoning The motivation for the study of logic in ancient times was clear: it is so that one may learn to distinguish good from bad arguments, and so become more effective in argument and oratory, and perhaps also to become a better person. Half of the works of Aristotle's Organon treat inference as it occurs in an informal setting, side by side with the development of the syllogistic, and in the Aristotelian school, these informal works on logic were seen as complementary to Aristotle's treatment of rhetoric.

Page 20 of 105

This ancient motivation is still alive, although it no longer takes centre stage in the picture of logic; typically dialectical logic forms the heart of a course in critical thinking, a compulsory course at many universities.

Argumentation theory is the study and research of informal logic, fallacies, and critical questions as they relate to every day and practical situations. Specific types of dialogue can be analyzed and questioned to reveal premises, conclusions, and fallacies. Argumentation theory is now applied in artificial intelligence and law.

Mathematical Logic Mathematical logic really refers to two distinct areas of research: the first is the application of the techniques of formal logic to mathematics and mathematical reasoning, and the second, in the other direction, the application of mathematical techniques to the representation and analysis of formal logic.

Page 21 of 105

The earliest use of mathematics and geometry in relation to logic and philosophy goes back to the ancient Greeks such as Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle. Many other ancient and medieval philosophers applied mathematical ideas and methods to their philosophical claims.

One of the boldest attempts to apply logic to mathematics was undoubtedly the logicism pioneered by philosopher-logicians such as Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell: the idea was that mathematical theories were logical tautologies, and the programme was to show this by means to a reduction of mathematics to logic. The various attempts to carry this out met with a series of failures, from the crippling of Frege's project in his Grundgesetze by Russell's paradox, to the defeat of Hilbert's program by Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Both the statement of Hilbert's program and its refutation by Gödel depended upon their work establishing the second area of mathematical logic, the application of mathematics to logic in the form of proof theory. Despite the negative nature of the incompleteness theorems, Gödel's completeness theorem, a result in model theory and another application of mathematics to logic, can be understood as showing how close logicism came to being true: every rigorously defined mathematical theory can be exactly captured by a first-order logical theory; Frege's proof calculus is enough to describe the whole of mathematics, though not equivalent to it.

If proof theory and model theory have been the foundation of mathematical logic, they have been but two of the four pillars of the subject. Set theory originated in the study of the infinite by Georg Cantor, and it has been the source of many of the most challenging and important issues in mathematical logic, from Cantor's theorem, through the status of the Axiom of Choice and the question of the independence of the continuum hypothesis, to the modern debate on large cardinal axioms.

Recursion theory captures the idea of computation in logical and arithmetic terms; its most classical achievements are the undecidability of the Entscheidungsproblem by Alan Turing, and his presentation of the Church–Turing thesis. Today recursion theory is mostly concerned with the more refined problem of complexity classes—when is a problem efficiently solvable?—and the classification of degrees of unsolvability.

Philosophical Logic Philosophical logic deals with formal descriptions of ordinary, non-specialist ("natural") language. Most philosophers assume that the bulk of everyday reasoning can be captured in logic if a method or methods to translate ordinary language into that logic can be found. Philosophical logic is essentially a continuation of the traditional discipline called "logic" before the invention of mathematical logic. Philosophical logic has a much greater concern with the connection between natural language and logic. As a result, philosophical logicians have contributed a great deal to the development of non-standard logics (e.g. free logics, tense logics) as well as various extensions of classical logic (e.g. modal logics) and non-standard semantics for such logics (e.g.

Kripke's supervaluationism in the semantics of logic).

Logic and the philosophy of language are closely related. Philosophy of language has to do with the study of how our language engages and interacts with our thinking. Logic has an immediate Page 22 of 105

impact on other areas of study. Studying logic and the relationship between logic and ordinary speech can help a person better structure his own arguments and critique the arguments of others.

Many popular arguments are filled with errors because so many people are untrained in logic and unaware of how to formulate an argument correctly.

Computational Logic Logic cut to the heart of computer science as it emerged as a discipline: Alan Turing's work on the Entscheidungsproblem followed from Kurt Gödel's work on the incompleteness theorems.

The notion of the general purpose computer that came from this work was of fundamental importance to the designers of the computer machinery in the 1940s.

In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers predicted that when human knowledge could be expressed using logic with mathematical notation, it would be possible to create a machine that reasons, or artificial intelligence. This was more difficult than expected because of the complexity of human reasoning. In logic programming, a program consists of a set of axioms and rules. Logic programming systems such as Prolog compute the consequences of the axioms and rules in order to answer a query.

Today, logic is extensively applied in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, and Computer Science, and these fields provide a rich source of problems in formal and informal logic.

Argumentation theory is one good example of how logic is being applied to artificial intelligence. The ACM Computing Classification System in particular regards: 

 

Section F.3 on Logics and meanings of programs and F.4 on Mathematical logic and formal languages as part of the theory of computer science: this work covers formal semantics of programming languages, as well as work of formal methods such as Hoare logic; Boolean logic as fundamental to computer hardware: particularly, the system's section B.2 on Arithmetic and logic structures, relating to operatives AND, NOT, and OR; Many fundamental logical formalisms are essential to section I.2 on artificial intelligence, for example modal logic and default logic in Knowledge representation formalisms and methods, Horn clauses in logic programming, and description logic.

Furthermore, computers can be used as tools for logicians. For example, in symbolic logic and mathematical logic, proofs by humans can be computer-assisted. Using automated theorem proving the machines can find and check proofs, as well as work with proofs too lengthy to write out by hand.

Page 23 of 105

Bivalence and The Law of The Excluded Middle; Non-Classical Logics The logics discussed above are all "bivalent" or "two-valued"; that is, they are most naturally understood as dividing propositions into true and false propositions. Non-classical logics are those systems that reject bivalence.

Hegel developed his own dialectic logic that extended Kant's transcendental logic but also brought it back to ground by assuring us that "neither in heaven nor in earth, neither in the world of mind nor of nature, is there anywhere such an abstract 'either–or' as the understanding maintains. Whatever exists is concrete, with difference and opposition in itself".

In 1910, Nicolai A. Vasiliev extended the law of excluded middle and the law of contradiction and proposed the law of excluded fourth and logic tolerant to contradiction. In the early 20th century Jan Ĺ ukasiewicz investigated the extension of the traditional true/false values to include a third value, "possible", so inventing ternary logic, the first multi-valued logic.

Logics such as fuzzy logic have since been devised with an infinite number of "degrees of truth", represented by a real number between 0 and 1.

Intuitionistic logic was proposed by L.E.J. Brouwer as the correct logic for reasoning about mathematics, based upon his rejection of the law of the excluded middle as part of his intuitionism. Brouwer rejected formalization in mathematics, but his student Arend Heyting studied intuitionistic logic formally, as did Gerhard Gentzen. Intuitionistic logic is of great interest to computer scientists, as it is a constructive logic and can be applied for extracting verified programs from proofs.

Modal logic is not truth conditional, and so it has often been proposed as a non-classical logic.

However, modal logic is normally formalized with the principle of the excluded middle, and its relational semantics is bivalent, so this inclusion is disputable.

"Is Logic Empirical?"

What is the epistemological status of the laws of logic? What sort of argument is appropriate for criticizing purported principles of logic? In an influential paper entitled "Is logic empirical?"

Hilary Putnam, building on a suggestion of W. V. Quine, argued that in general the facts of propositional logic have a similar epistemological status as facts about the physical universe, for example as the laws of mechanics or of general relativity, and in particular that what physicists have learned about quantum mechanics provides a compelling case for abandoning certain familiar principles of classical logic: if we want to be realists about the physical phenomena described by quantum theory, then we should abandon the principle of distributivity, substituting for classical logic the quantum logic proposed by Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann.

Another paper of the same name by Sir Michael Dummett argues that Putnam's desire for realism mandates the law of distributivity. Distributivity of logic is essential for the realist's understanding of how propositions are true of the world in just the same way as he has argued

Page 24 of 105

the principle of bivalence is. In this way, the question, "Is logic empirical?" can be seen to lead naturally into the fundamental controversy in metaphysics on realism versus anti-realism.

Implication: Strict or Material?

The notion of implication formalized in classical logic does not comfortably translate into natural language by means of "if ... then ...", due to a number of problems called the paradoxes of material implication.

The first class of paradoxes involves counterfactuals, such as If the moon is made of green cheese, then 2+2=5, which are puzzling because natural language does not support the principle of explosion. Eliminating this class of paradoxes was the reason for C. I. Lewis's formulation of strict implication, which eventually led to more radically revisionist logics such as relevance logic.

The second class of paradoxes involves redundant premises, falsely suggesting that we know the succedent because of the antecedent: thus "if that man gets elected, granny will die" is materially true since granny is mortal, regardless of the man's election prospects. Such sentences violate the Gricean maxim of relevance, and can be modelled by logics that reject the principle of monotonicity of entailment, such as relevance logic.

Tolerating The Impossible Hegel was deeply critical of any simplified notion of the Law of Non-Contradiction. It was based on Leibniz's idea that this law of logic also requires a sufficient ground to specify from what point of view (or time) one says that something cannot contradict itself. A building, for example, both moves and does not move; the ground for the first is our solar system and for the second the earth. In Hegelian dialectic, the law of non-contradiction, of identity, itself relies upon difference and so is not independently assertable.

Closely related to questions arising from the paradoxes of implication comes the suggestion that logic ought to tolerate inconsistency. Relevance logic and paraconsistent logic are the most important approaches here, though the concerns are different: a key consequence of classical logic and some of its rivals, such as intuitionistic logic, is that they respect the principle of explosion, which means that the logic collapses if it is capable of deriving a contradiction.

Graham Priest, the main proponent of dialetheism, has argued for paraconsistency on the grounds that there are in fact, true contradictions.

Rejection of Logical Truth The philosophical vein of various kinds of skepticism contains many kinds of doubt and rejection of the various bases on which logic rests, such as the idea of logical form, correct inference, or meaning, typically leading to the conclusion that there are no logical truths. Observe that this is opposite to the usual views in philosophical skepticism, where logic directs skeptical enquiry to doubt received wisdoms, as in the work of Sextus Empiricus.

Page 25 of 105

Friedrich Nietzsche provides a strong example of the rejection of the usual basis of logic: his radical rejection of idealization led him to reject truth as a "... mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short ... metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins." His rejection of truth did not lead him to reject the idea of either inference or logic completely, but rather suggested that "logic [came] into existence in man's head [out] of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished". Thus there is the idea that logical inference has a use as a tool for human survival, but that its existence does not support the existence of truth, nor does it have a reality beyond the instrumental: "Logic, too, also rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world".

This position held by Nietzsche however, has come under extreme scrutiny for several reasons.

He fails to demonstrate the validity of his claims and merely asserts them rhetorically. Although, since he is criticising the established criteria of validity, this does not undermine his position for one could argue that the demonstration of validity provided in the name of logic was just as rhetorically based. Some philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas, claim his position is selfrefuting—and accuse Nietzsche of not even having a coherent perspective, let alone a theory of knowledge. Again, it is unclear if this is a decisive critique for the criteria of coherency and consistent theory are exactly what is under question. Georg Lukács, in his book The Destruction of Reason, asserts that, "Were we to study Nietzsche's statements in this area from a logicophilosophical angle, we would be confronted by a dizzy chaos of the most lurid assertions, arbitrary and violently incompatible." Still, in this respect his "theory" would be a much better depicition of a confused and chaotic reality than any consistent and compatible theory. Bertrand Russell described Nietzsche's irrational claims with "He is fond of expressing himself paradoxically and with a view to shocking conventional readers" in his book A History of Western Philosophy.

Page 26 of 105

Page 27 of 105

Reasoning Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or

existing information. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, mathematics, and art and is normally considered to be a definitive characteristic of human nature. The concept of reason is sometimes referred to as rationality and sometimes as discursive reason, in opposition to intuitive reason.

Reason or "reasoning" is associated with thinking, cognition, and intellect. Reason, like habit or intuition, is one of the ways by which thinking comes from one idea to a related idea. For example, it is the means by which rational beings understand themselves to think about cause and effect, truth and falsehood, and what is good or bad. It is also closely identified with the ability to self-consciously change beliefs, attitudes, traditions, and institutions, and therefore with the capacity for freedom and self-determination.

Page 28 of 105

In contrast to reason as an abstract noun, a reason is a consideration which explains or justifies some event, phenomenon or behaviour. The field of logic studies ways in which human beings reason through argument.

Psychologists and cognitive scientists have attempted to study and explain how people reason, e.g. which cognitive and neural processes are engaged, and how cultural factors affect the inferences that people draw. The field of automated reasoning studies how reasoning may or may not be modeled computationally. Animal psychology considers the question of whether animals other than humans can reason.

Reason Compared to Related Concepts Reason Compared to Logic The terms "logic" or "logical" are sometimes used as if they were identical with the term "reason" or with the concept of being "rational", or sometimes logic is seen as the most pure or the defining form of reason. For example in modern economics, rational choice is assumed to equate to logically consistent choice.

Reason and logic can however be thought of as distinct, although logic is one important aspect of reason. Author Douglas Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach, characterizes the distinction in this way. Logic is done inside a system while reason is done outside the system by such methods as skipping steps, working backward, drawing diagrams, looking at examples, or seeing what happens if you change the rules of the system.

Reason is a type of thought, and the word "logic" involves the attempt to describe rules or norms by which reasoning operates, so that orderly reasoning can be taught. The oldest surviving writing to explicitly consider the rules by which reason operates are the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, especially Prior Analysis and Posterior Analysis. Although the Ancient Greeks had no separate word for logic as distinct from language and reason, Aristotle's newly coined word "syllogism" (syllogismos) identified logic clearly for the first time as a distinct field of study. When Aristotle referred to "the logical" (hē logikē), he was referring more broadly to rational thought.

Reason Compared to Cause-and-Effect Thinking, and Symbolic Thinking As pointed out by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume, some animals are also clearly capable of a type of "associative thinking", even to the extent of associating causes and effects. A dog once kicked, can learn how to recognize the warning signs and avoid being kicked in the future, but this does not mean the dog has reason in any strict sense of the word. It also does not mean that humans acting on the basis of experience or habit are using their reason.

Human reason requires more than being able to associate two ideas, even if those two ideas might be described by a reasoning human as a cause and an effect, perceptions of smoke, for example, and memories of fire. For reason to be involved, the association of smoke and the fire would have to be thought through in a way which can be explained, for example as cause and Page 29 of 105

effect. In the explanation of Locke, for example, reason requires the mental use of a third idea in order to make this comparison by use of syllogism.

More generally, reason in the strict sense requires the ability to create and manipulate a system of symbols, as well as indices and icons, according to Charles Sanders Peirce, the symbols having only a nominal, though habitual, connection to either smoke or fire.[38] One example of such a system of artificial symbols and signs is language.

The connection of reason to symbolic thinking has been expressed in different ways by philosophers. Thomas Hobbes described the creation of "Markes, or Notes of remembrance" (Leviathan Ch.4) as speech. He used the word speech as an English version of the Greek word logos so that speech did not need to be communicated.

When communicated, such speech becomes language, and the marks or notes or remembrance are called "Signes" by Hobbes. Going further back, although Aristotle is a source of the idea that only humans have reason (logos), he does mention that animals with imagination, for whom sense perceptions can persist, come closest to having something like reasoning and nous, and even uses the word "logos" in one place to describe the distinctions which animals can perceive in such cases.

Reason, Imagination, Mimesis, and Memory Reason and imagination rely on similar mental processes. Imagination is not only found in humans. Aristotle, for example, stated that phantasia (imagination: that which can hold images or phantasmata) and phronein (a type of thinking that can judge and understand in some sense) also exist in some animals. According to him, both are related to the primary perceptive ability of animals, which gathers the perceptions of different senses and defines the order of the things that are perceived without distinguishing universals, and without deliberation or logos. But this is not yet reason, because human imagination is different.

The recent modern writings of Terrence Deacon and Merlin Donald, writing about the origin of language, also connect reason connected to not only language, but also mimesis, More specifically they describe the ability to create language as part of an internal modeling of reality specific to humankind. Other results are consciousness, and imagination or fantasy. In contrast, modern proponents of a genetic pre-disposition to language itself include Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, to whom Donald and Deacon can be contrasted.

Page 30 of 105

As reason is symbolic thinking, and peculiarly human, then this implies that humans have a special ability to maintain a clear consciousness of the distinctness of "icons" or images and the real things they represent. Starting with a modern author, Merlin Donald writes A dog might perceive the "meaning" of a fight that was realistically play-acted by humans, but it could not reconstruct the message or distinguish the representation from its referent (a real fight). [...] Trained apes are able to make this distinction; young children make this distinction early – hence, their effortless distinction between play-acting an event and the event itself In classical descriptions, an equivalent description of this mental faculty is eikasia, in the philosophy of Plato. This is the ability to perceive whether a perception is an image of something else, related somehow but not the same, and therefore allows humans to perceive that a dream or memory or a reflection in a mirror is not reality as such. What Klein refers to as dianoetic eikasia is the eikasia concerned specifically with thinking and mental images, such as those mental symbols, icons, signes, and marks discussed above as definitive of reason. Explaining reason from this direction: human thinking is special in the way that we often understand visible things as if they were themselves images of our intelligible "objects of thought" as "foundations" (hypothēses in Ancient Greek). This thinking (dianoia) is "...an activity which consists in making the vast and diffuse jungle of the visible world depend on a plurality of more 'precise' noēta."

Both Merlin Donald and the Socratic authors such Plato and Aristotle emphasize the importance of mimesis, often translated as imitation or representation. Donald writes Imitation is found especially in monkeys and apes [... but ...] Mimesis is fundamentally different from imitation and mimicry in that it involves the invention of intentional representations. [...]

Mimesis is not absolutely tied to external communication.

Mimēsis is a concept, now popular again in academic discussion, that was particularly prevalent in Plato's works, and within Aristotle, it is discussed mainly in the Poetics. In Michael Davis's account of the theory of man in this work.

It is the distinctive feature of human action, that whenever we choose what we do, we imagine an action for ourselves as though we were inspecting it from the outside. Intentions are nothing more than imagined actions, internalizings of the external. All action is therefore imitation of action; it is poetic...

Donald like Plato (and Aristotle, especially in On Memory and Recollection), emphasizes the peculiarity in humans of voluntary initiation of a search through one's mental world. The ancient Greek anamnēsis, normally translated as "recollection" was opposed to mneme or memory.

Memory, shared with some animals, requires a consciousness not only of what happened in the past, but also that something happened in the past, which is in other words a kind of eikasia "...but nothing except man is able to recollect." Recollection is a deliberate effort to search for and recapture something once known. Klein writes that, "To become aware of our having forgotten something means to begin recollecting." Donald calls the same thing autocueing, which he explains as follows: "Mimetic acts are reproducible on the basis of internal, self-

Page 31 of 105

generated cues. This permits voluntary recall of mimetic representations, without the aid of external cues – probably the earliest form of representational thinking."

In a celebrated paper in modern times, the fantasy author and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his essay "On Fairy Stories" that the terms "fantasy" and "enchantment" are connected to not only "...the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires..." but also "...the origin of language and of the mind."

Logical Reasoning Methods and Argumentation Looking at logical categorizations of different types of reasoning the traditional main division made in philosophy is between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Formal logic has been described as the science of deduction. The study of inductive reasoning is generally carried out within the field known as informal logic or critical thinking.

Deductive Reasoning A subdivision of Philosophy is Logic. Logic is the study of reasoning. Deduction is a form of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from the stated premises. A deduction is also the conclusion reached by a deductive reasoning process. One classic example of deductive reasoning is that found in syllogisms like the following:   

Premise 1: All humans are mortal.

Premise 2: Socrates is a human.

Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

The reasoning in this argument is valid, because there is no way in which the premises, 1 and 2, could be true and the conclusion, 3, be false.

Inductive Reasoning Induction is a form of inference producing propositions about unobserved objects or types, either specifically or generally, based on previous observation. It is used to ascribe properties or relations to objects or types based on previous observations or experiences, or to formulate general statements or laws based on limited observations of recurring phenomenal patterns.

Inductive reasoning contrasts strongly with deductive reasoning in that, even in the best, or strongest, cases of inductive reasoning, the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion. Instead, the conclusion of an inductive argument follows with some degree of probability. Relatedly, the conclusion of an inductive argument contains more information than is already contained in the premises. Thus, this method of reasoning is ampliative.

A classic example of inductive reasoning comes from the empiricist David Hume:

Page 32 of 105

Premise: The sun has risen in the east every morning up until now.

Conclusion: The sun will also rise in the east tomorrow.

Abductive Reasoning Abductive reasoning, or argument to the best explanation, is a form of inductive reasoning, since the conclusion in an abductive argument does not follow with certainty from its premises and concerns something unobserved. What distinguishes abduction from the other forms of reasoning is an attempt to favour one conclusion above others, by attempting to falsify alternative explanations or by demonstrating the likelihood of the favoured conclusion, given a set of more or less disputable assumptions. For example, when a patient displays certain symptoms, there might be various possible causes, but one of these is preferred above others as being more probable.

Analogical Reasoning Analogical reasoning is incorrectly reasoning from the particular to the particular. An example follows:   

Premise 1: Socrates is human and mortal.

Premise 2: Plato is human.

Conclusion: Plato is mortal.

Analogical reasoning can be viewed as a form of inductive reasoning from a single example, but if it is intended as inductive reasoning it is a bad example, because inductive reasoning typically uses a large number of examples to reason from the particular to the general. Analogical reasoning often leads to wrong conclusions. For example   

Premise 1: Socrates is human and male.

Premise 2: Beyoncé is human.

Conclusion: Therefore Beyoncé is male.

Fallacious Reasoning Flawed reasoning in arguments is known as fallacious reasoning. Bad reasoning within arguments can be because it commits either a formal fallacy or an informal fallacy.

Formal fallacies occur when there is a problem with the form, or structure, of the argument. The word "formal" refers to this link to the form of the argument. An argument that contains a formal fallacy will always be invalid.

An informal fallacy is an error in reasoning that occurs due to a problem with the content, rather than mere structure, of the argument.

Page 33 of 105

Traditional Problems Raised Concerning Reason Philosophy is sometimes described as a life of reason, with normal human reason pursued in a more consistent and dedicated way than usual. Two categories of problem concerning reason have long been discussed by philosophers concerning reason, essentially being reasonings about reasoning itself as a human aim, or philosophizing about philosophizing. The first question is concerning whether we can be confident that reason can achieve knowledge of truth better than other ways of trying to achieve such knowledge. The other question is whether a life of reason, a life that aims to be guided by reason, can be expected to achieve a happy life more so than other ways of life (whether such a life of reason results in knowledge or not).

Reason Versus Truth, and "First Principles" Since classical times a question has remained constant in philosophical debate (which is sometimes seen as a conflict between movements called Platonism and Aristotelianism) concerning the role of reason in confirming truth. People use logic, deduction, and induction, to reach conclusions they think are true. Conclusions reached in this way are considered more certain than sense perceptions on their own. On the other hand, if such reasoned conclusions are only built originally upon a foundation of sense perceptions, then, our most logical conclusions can never be said to be certain because they are built upon the very same fallible perceptions they seek to better.

This leads to the question of what types of first principles, or starting points of reasoning, are available for someone seeking to come to true conclusions. In Greek, "first principles" are archai, "starting points", and the faculty used to perceive them is sometimes referred to in Aristotle and Plato as nous which was close in meaning to awareness or consciousness.

Empiricism (sometimes associated with Aristotle but more correctly associated with British philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume, as well as their ancient equivalents such as Democritus) asserts that sensory impressions are the only available starting points for reasoning and attempting to attain truth. This approach always leads to the controversial conclusion that absolute knowledge is not attainable. Idealism, (associated with Plato and his school), claims that there is a "higher" reality, from which certain people can directly arrive at truth without needing to rely only upon the senses, and that this higher reality is therefore the primary source of truth.

Page 34 of 105

Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, Aquinas and Hegel are sometimes said to have argued that reason must be fixed and discoverable—perhaps by dialectic, analysis, or study. In the vision of these thinkers, reason is divine or at least has divine attributes. Such an approach allowed religious philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and Étienne Gilson to try to show that reason and revelation are compatible. According to Hegel, "...the only thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of reason; that reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process."

Since the 17th century rationalists, reason has often been taken to be a subjective faculty, or rather the unaided ability (pure reason) to form concepts. For Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, this was associated with mathematics. Kant attempted to show that pure reason could form concepts (time and space) that are the conditions of experience. Kant made his argument in opposition to Hume, who denied that reason had any role to play in experience.

Reason Versus Emotion or Passion After Plato and Aristotle, western literature often treated reason as being opposed to emotions or feelings. This was an understanding of human nature developed, for example, by Stoic philosophy in Roman times. People might say their passions made them behave contrary to reason, or that their reason kept the passions under control. This is often expressed colloquially as the dilemma between following "the head" (reason) "or the heart" (emotions).

Reason has been seen as a slave, or judge, of the passions, notably in the work of David Hume, and more recently of Freud. Reasoning which claims that the object of a desire is demanded by logic alone is called rationalization.

Rousseau first proposed, in his second Discourse, that reason and political life is not natural and possibly harmful to mankind. He asked what really can be said about what is natural to mankind.

What, other than reason and civil society, "best suits his constitution"? Rousseau saw "two principles prior to reason" in human nature. First we hold an intense interest in our own wellbeing. Secondly we object to the suffering or death of any sentient being, especially one like ourselves. These two passions lead us to desire more than we could achieve. We become dependent upon each other, and on relationships of authority and obedience. This effectively puts the human race into slavery. Rousseau says that he almost dares to assert that nature does not destine men to be healthy. According to Velkley, "Rousseau outlines certain programs of rational self-correction, most notably the political legislation of the Contrat Social and the moral education in Émile. All the same, Rousseau understands such corrections to be only ameliorations of an essentially unsatisfactory condition, that of socially and intellectually corrupted humanity."

This quandary presented by Rousseau led to Kant's new way of justifying reason as freedom to create good and evil. These therefore are not to be blamed on nature or God. In various ways, German Idealism after Kant, and major later figures such Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, remain pre-occupied with problems coming from the metaphysical demands or urges of reason. The influence of Rousseau and these later writers is also large upon art and

Page 35 of 105

politics. Many writers (such as Nikos Kazantzakis) extol passion and disparage reason. In politics modern nationalism comes from Rousseau's argument that rationalist cosmopolitanism brings man ever further from his natural state.

Another view on reason and emotion was proposed in the 1994 book titled Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio. In it, Damasio presents the "Somatic Marker Hypothesis" which states that emotions guide behavior and decision-making. Damasio argues that these somatic markers (known collectively as "gut feelings") are "intuitive signals" that direct our decision making processes in a certain way that cannot be solved with rationality alone. Damasio further argues that rationality requires emotional input in order to function.

Reason Versus Faith or Tradition Though theologies and religions typically do not claim to be irrational, there is often a perceived conflict or tension between faith and tradition on the one hand, and reason on the other, as potentially competing sources of wisdom, law and truth. Defenders of traditions and faiths from claims that they are irrationalist for ignoring or even attempting to forbid reason and argument concerning some subjects, typically maintain that there is no real conflict with reason, because reason itself is not enough to explain such things as the origins of the universe, or right and wrong, and so reason can and should be complemented by other sources of knowledge, or in other words first principles. The counter claim to this is that such a defense does not logically explain why some arguments from reason would be forbidden or ignored, while others are favoured.

There are enormously wide differences between different faiths, or even schools within different faiths, concerning this matter.

Some commentators have claimed that Western civilization can be almost defined by its serious testing of the limits of tension between "unaided" reason and faith in "revealed" truths— figuratively summarized as Athens and Jerusalem, respectively. Leo Strauss spoke of a "Greater West" that included all areas under the influence of the tension between Greek rationalism and Abrahamic revelation, including the Muslim lands. He was particularly influenced by the great Muslim philosopher Al-Farabi. To consider to what extent Eastern philosophy might have partaken of these important tensions, Strauss thought it best to consider whether dharma or tao may be equivalent to Nature (by which we mean physis in Greek). According to Strauss the beginning of philosophy involved the "discovery or invention of nature" and the "prephilosophical equivalent of nature" was supplied by "such notions as 'custom' or 'ways'", which appear to be really universal in all times and places. The philosophical concept of nature or natures as a way of understanding archai (first principles of knowledge) brought about a peculiar tension between reasoning on the one hand, and tradition or faith on the other.

Although there is this special history of debate concerning reason and faith in the Islamic, Christian and Jewish traditions, the pursuit of reason is sometimes argued to be compatible with the other practice of other religions of a different nature, such as Hinduism, because they do not define their tenets in such an absolute way.

Page 36 of 105

Page 37 of 105

Critical Thinking Critical Thinking is clear, reasoned thinking involving critique. Its details vary amongst those who define it. According to Beyer (1995), critical thinking means making clear, reasoned judgements. During the process of critical thinking, ideas should be reasoned and well thought out/judged. The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.'

Critical thinking is variously defined as: 

"the process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion"



"disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence"



"reasonable, reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do"



"purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations

upon which that judgment is based" 

"includes a commitment to using reason in the formulation of our beliefs"



in critical social theory, it is the commitment to the social and political practice of participatory democracy; willingness to imagine or to remain open to considering alternative perspectives; willingness to integrate new or revised perspectives into our ways of thinking and acting; and willingness to foster criticality in others.



the skill and propensity to engage in an activity with reflective scepticism (McPeck, 1981)



disciplined, self-directed thinking which exemplifies the perfection of thinking appropriate to a particular mode or domain of thinking (Paul, 1989, p. 214)

Page 38 of 105



thinking about one's thinking in a manner designed to organize and clarify, raise the efficiency of, and recognize errors and biases in one's own thinking. Critical thinking is not 'hard' thinking nor is it directed at solving problems (other than 'improving' one's own thinking). Critical thinking is inward-directed with the intent of maximizing the rationality of the thinker. One does not use critical thinking to solve problems — one uses critical thinking to improve one's process of thinking.

Skills The list of core critical thinking skills includes observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and metacognition. According to Reynolds (2011), an individual or group engaged in a strong way of critical thinking gives due consideration to establish for instance:     

Evidence through reality Context skills to isolate the problem from context Relevant criteria for making the judgment well Applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment Applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the problem and the question at hand

In addition to possessing strong critical-thinking skills, one must be disposed to engage problems and decisions using those skills. Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance, and fairness.

Procedure Critical thinking calls for the ability to:           

Recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems Understand the importance of prioritization and order of precedence in problem solving Gather and marshal pertinent (relevant) information Recognize unstated assumptions and values Comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discernment Interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments Recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions Draw warranted conclusions and generalizations Put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives Reconstruct one's patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience Render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life

In sum: "A persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports or refutes it and the further conclusions to which it tends."

Page 39 of 105

Habits or Traits of Mind The habits of mind that characterize a person strongly disposed toward critical thinking include a desire to follow reason and evidence wherever they may lead, a systematic approach to problem solving, inquisitiveness, even-handedness, and confidence in reasoning.

According to a definition analysis by Kompf & Bond (2001), critical thinking involves problem solving, decision making, metacognition, rationality, rational thinking, reasoning, knowledge, intelligence and also a moral component such as reflective thinking. Critical thinkers therefore need to have reached a level of maturity in their development, possess a certain attitude as well as a set of taught skills.

Research Edward Glaser proposed that the ability to think critically involves three elements: 1. An attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one's experiences 2. Knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning 3. Some skill in applying those methods.

Page 40 of 105

Educational programs aimed at developing critical thinking in children and adult learners, individually or in group problem solving and decision making contexts, continue to address these same three central elements.

Contemporary cognitive psychology regards human reasoning as a complex process that is both reactive and reflective.

The relationship between critical thinking skills and critical thinking dispositions is an empirical question. Some people have both in abundance, some have skills but not the disposition to use them, some are disposed but lack strong skills, and some have neither. A measure of critical thinking dispositions is the California Measure of Mental Motivation.

Education John Dewey is one of many educational leaders who recognized that a curriculum aimed at building thinking skills would benefit the individual learner, the community, and the entire democracy.

Critical thinking is significant in academics due to being significant in learning. Critical thinking is significant in the learning process of internalization, in the construction of basic ideas, principles, and theories inherent in content. And critical thinking is significant in the learning process of application, whereby those ideas, principles, and theories are implemented effectively as they become relevant in learners' lives. Good teachers cultivate critical thinking (intellectually engaged thinking) at every stage of learning, including initial learning. This process of Page 41 of 105

intellectual engagement is at the heart of the Oxford, Durham, Cambridge and London School of Economics tutorials. The tutor questions the students, often in a Socratic manner (see Socratic questioning). The key is that the teacher who fosters critical thinking fosters reflectiveness in students by asking questions that stimulate thinking essential to the construction of knowledge.

Each discipline adapts its use of critical thinking concepts and principles (principles like in school). The core concepts are always there, but they are embedded in subject-specific content.

For students to learn content, intellectual engagement is crucial. All students must do their own thinking, their own construction of knowledge. Good teachers recognize this and therefore focus on the questions, readings, activities that stimulate the mind to take ownership of key concepts and principles underlying the subject.

In the UK school system, Critical Thinking is offered as a subject that 16- to 18-year-olds can take as an A-Level. Under the OCR exam board, students can sit two exam papers for the AS: "Credibility of Evidence" and "Assessing and Developing Argument". The full Advanced GCE is now available: in addition to the two AS units, candidates sit the two papers "Resolution of Dilemmas" and "Critical Reasoning". The A-level tests candidates on their ability to think critically about, and analyze, arguments on their deductive or inductive validity, as well as producing their own arguments. It also tests their ability to analyze certain related topics such as credibility and ethical decision-making. However, due to its comparative lack of subject content, many universities do not accept it as a main A-level for admissions. Nevertheless, the AS is often useful in developing reasoning skills, and the full Advanced GCE is useful for degree courses in politics, philosophy, history or theology, providing the skills required for critical analysis that are useful, for example, in biblical study.

There used to also be an Advanced Extension Award offered in Critical Thinking in the UK, open to any A-level student regardless of whether they have the Critical Thinking A-level.

Cambridge International Examinations have an A-level in Thinking Skills.

From 2008, Assessment and Qualifications Alliance has also been offering an A-level Critical Thinking specification; OCR exam board have also modified theirs for 2008. Many examinations for university entrance set by universities, on top of A-level examinations, also include a critical thinking component, such as the LNAT, the UKCAT, the BioMedical Admissions Test and the Thinking Skills Assessment.

In its 2012 platform, the Republican Party of Texas rejected the teaching of "Higher Order Thinking Skills... critical thinking skills and similar programs," giving as a reason that this sort of teaching has "the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." Media ridicule led to a response from RPT Communications Director Chris Elam that the inclusion of the term "critical thinking skills" was an oversight which cannot be corrected until 2014, when the next state convention will occur.

In Qatar, Critical thinking was offered by AL-Bairaq which is an out-reach, non-traditional educational program that targets high school students and focuses on a curriculum based on

Page 42 of 105

STEM fields. The idea behind AL-Bairaq is to offer high school students the opportunity to connect with the research environment in the Center for Advanced Materials (CAM) at Qatar University. Faculty members train and mentor the students and help develop and enhance their critical thinking, problemsolving, and teamwork skills.

Efficacy In 1995, a meta-analysis of the literature on teaching effectiveness in higher education was undertaken. The study noted concerns from higher education, politicians and business that higher education was failing to meet society's requirements for well-educated citizens. It concluded that although faculty may aspire to develop students' thinking skills, in practice they have tended to aim at facts and concepts utilizing lowest levels of cognition, rather than developing intellect or values.

Importance in Academia Critical thinking is an important element of all professional fields and academic disciplines (by referencing their respective sets of permissible questions, evidence sources, criteria, etc.). Within the framework of scientific skepticism, the process of critical thinking involves the careful acquisition and interpretation of information and use of it to reach a well-justified conclusion.

The concepts and principles of critical thinking can be applied to any context or case but only by reflecting upon the nature of that application. Critical thinking forms, therefore, a system of related, and overlapping, modes of thought such as anthropological thinking, sociological thinking, historical thinking, political thinking, psychological thinking, philosophical thinking, mathematical thinking, chemical thinking, biological thinking, ecological thinking, legal thinking, ethical thinking, musical thinking, thinking like a painter, sculptor, engineer, business person, etc. In other words, though critical thinking principles are universal, their application to disciplines requires a process of reflective contextualization.

Critical thinking is considered important in the academic fields because it enables one to analyze, evaluate, explain, and restructure their thinking, thereby decreasing the risk of adopting, acting on, or thinking with, a false belief. However, even with knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning, mistakes can happen due to a thinker's inability to apply the methods or because of character traits such as egocentrism. Critical thinking includes identification of prejudice, bias, propaganda, self-deception, distortion, misinformation, etc. Given research in cognitive psychology, some educators believe that schools should focus on teaching their students critical thinking skills and cultivation of intellectual traits.

Socratic method is defined as "a prolonged series of questions and answers which refutes a moral assertion by leading an opponent to draw a conclusion that contradicts his own viewpoint."

Page 43 of 105

Critical thinking skills through Socratic method taught in schools help create leaders. Instructors that promote critical thinking skills can benefit the students by increasing their confidence and creating a repeatable thought process to question and confidently approach a solution. Students also accomplish follower-ship skills that can be used to probe the leader's foundations. Critical thinking skills through Socratic method serve to produce professionals that are self-governing.

However, Socratic method for critical thinking skills can become confusing if an instructor or leader uses the method too rigidly, the student may not know what the instructor or leader wants from him.

An instructor or leader may disillusion the students if he uses particular style of questioning. Instructors must reveal their reasoning behind the questions in order to guide the students in the right direction.

"Socratic method can serve twenty-first-century leaders to instruct students, mentor protĂŠgĂŠs, motivate followers, advise other leaders, and influence peers."

Critical thinking skills can be used to help nurses during the assessment process. Through the use of critical thinking, nurses can question, evaluate, and reconstruct the nursing care process by challenging the established theory and practice.

Critical thinking skills can help nurses problem solve, reflect, and make a conclusive decision about the current situation they face. Critical thinking creates "new possibilities for the development of the nursing knowledge."

Due to the sociocultural, environmental, and political issues that are affecting healthcare delivery, it would be helpful to embody new techniques in nursing. Nurses can also engage their critical thinking skills through the Socratic method of dialogue and reflection.

This practice standard is even part of some regulatory organizations such as the College of Nurses of Ontario - Professional Standards for Continuing Competencies (2006). It requires nurses to engage in Reflective Practice and keep records of this continued professional development for possible review by the College.

Critical thinking also is considered important for human rights education for toleration. The Declaration of Principles on Tolerance adopted by UNESCO in 1995 affirms that "education for tolerance could aim at countering factors that lead to fear and exclusion of others, and could help young people to develop capacities for independent judgement, critical thinking and ethical reasoning."

Page 44 of 105

Critical thinking is used as a way of deciding whether a claim is true, partially true, or false. It is a tool by which one can come about reasoned conclusions based on a reasoned process. ______

Critical Reading

by Daniel J. Kurland

What Is Critical Reading?

Note: These remarks are primarily directed at non-fictional texts.

Facts v. Interpretation To non -critical readers, texts provide facts. Readers gain knowledge by memorizing the statements within a text.

To the critical reader, any single text provides but one portrayal of the facts, one individual‘s ―take‖ on the subject matter. Critical readers thus recognize not only what a text says, but also how that text portrays the subject matter.

They recognize the various ways in which each and every text is the unique creation of a unique author.

A non-critical reader might read a history book to learn the facts of the situation or to discover an accepted interpretation of those events. A critical reader might read the same work to appreciate how a particular perspective on the events and a particular selection of facts can lead to particular understanding.

What a Text Says, Does, and Means: Reaching for an Interpretation Non-critical reading is satisfied with recognizing what a text says and restating the key remarks.

Critical reading goes two steps further. Having recognized what a text says , it reflects on what the text does by making such remarks. Is it offering examples? Arguing? Appealing for sympathy? Making a contrast to clarify a point? Finally, critical readers then infer what the text, as a whole, means , based on the earlier analysis.

These three steps or modes of analysis are reflected in three types of reading and discussion:   

What a text says – restatement What a text does – description What a text means – interpretation .

You can distinguish each mode of analysis by the subject matter of the discussion:   

What a text says – restatement – talks about the same topic as the original text What a text does – description – discusses aspects of the discussion itself What a text means – interpretation — analyzes the text and asserts a meaning for the text as a whole

Goals of Critical Reading Textbooks on critical reading commonly ask students to accomplish certain goals:

Page 45 of 105

  

to recognize an author‘s purpose to understand tone and persuasive elements to recognize bias

Notice that none of these goals actually refers to something on the page. Each requires inferences from evidence within the text:   

recognizing purpose involves inferring a basis for choices of content and language recognizing tone and persuasive elements involves classifying the nature of language choices recognizing bias involves classifying the nature of patterns of choice of content and language

Critical reading is not simply close and careful reading. To read critically, one must actively recognize and analyze evidence upon the page.

Analysis and Inference: The Tools of Critical Reading These web pages are designed to take the mystery out of critical reading. They are designed to show you what to look for ( analysis ) and how to think about what you find ( inference ) .

The first part —what to look for— involves recognizing those aspects of a discussion that control the meaning.

The second part —how to think about what you find— involves the processes of inference, the interpretation of data from within the text.

Recall that critical reading assumes that each author offers a portrayal of the topic. Critical reading thus relies on an examination of those choices that any and all authors must make when framing a presentation: choices of content, language, and structure. Readers examine each of the three areas of choice, and consider their effect on the meaning.

Critical Reading, at its Core, Plain and Simple Non-critical (or pre-critical) reading is concerned with recognizing what a text says about the topic. The goal is to make sense of the presentation as a sequence of thoughts, to understand the information, ideas, and opinions stated within the text from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph. This is a linear activity.

Critical reading is an analytic activity. The reader rereads a text to identify patterns of elements -- information, values, assumptions, and language usage-- throughout the discussion. These elements are tied together in an interpretation, an assertion of an underlying meaning of the text as a whole.

Critical thinking involves bringing outside knowledge, biases, and values to bear to evaluate the presentation and decide what ultimately to accept as true.

The initial step of critical reading involves recognizing a text as a presentation in its own right. This step is concerned with identifying such elements as     

The existence of a beginning, middle, and end The use of illustrations to explicate remarks The use of evidence to support remarks The use of stylish language to portray topics Organization, or a method of sequencing remarks – such as whether chronological, different aspects of the topic, steps in a logical sequence

Page 46 of 105

The next step involves describing the nature of these aspects of the text, of classifying the nature of the material within the text   

The nature of the examples – what the examples are examples of The nature of the evidence – what kinds of authorities are invoked, what types of evidence are provided The nature of the choice or terms– what types of terms are applied to what topics

The final step involves inferring the underlying assumptions and perspectives of the discussion, taking into account of all of the elements of the text being as they are throughout the text as a whole. This step is concerned less with sequential development and more with recognizing patterns of elements interwoven throughout the presentation as a whole.  

What is achieved by describing topics a certain way What is assumed by selecting certain types of evidence

Throughout, critical reading relies on abstracting, on classifying the nature of things,     

The nature of the structure of the text The nature of the language employed The nature of the examples invoked The nature of the illustrations brought to bear And the nature of the thinking that would explain all aspects of the text being as they are.

In the end, readers must take control of the text, not just repeat its assertions. At its core, critical reading involves becoming the author of one's own understanding.

Critical Reading v. Critical Thinking We can distinguish between critical reading and critical thinking in the following way:  

Critical reading is a technique for discovering information and ideas within a text.

Critical thinking is a technique for evaluating information and ideas, for deciding what to accept and believe.

Critical reading refers to a careful, active, reflective, analytic reading. Critical thinking involves reflecting on the validity of what you have read in light of our prior knowledge and understanding of the world.

For example, consider the following (somewhat humorous) sentence from a student essay: Parents are buying expensive cars for their kids to destroy them.

As the terms are used here, critical reading is concerned with figuring out whether, within the context of the text as a whole, " them " refers to the parents, the kids, or the cars, and whether the text supports that practice. Critical thinking would come into play when deciding whether the chosen meaning was indeed true, and whether or not you, as the reader, should support that practice.

By these definitions, critical reading would appear to come before critical thinking: Only once we have fully understood a text (critical reading) can we truly evaluate its assertions (critical thinking).

The Two Together in Harmony In actual practice, critical reading and critical thinking work together.

Page 47 of 105

Critical thinking allows us to monitor our understanding as we read. If we sense that assertions are ridiculous or irresponsible (critical thinking), we examine the text more closely to test our understanding (critical reading).

Conversely, critical thinking depends on critical reading. You can think critically about a text (critical thinking), after all, only if you have understood it (critical reading). We may choose to accept or reject a presentation, but we must know why. We have a responsibility to ourselves, as well as to others, to isolate the real issues of agreement or disagreement. Only then can we understand and respect other people‘s views. To recognize and understand those views, we must read critically.

The Usefulness of the Distinction If critical thinking and critical reading are so closely linked, why is this still a useful distinction?

The usefulness of the distinction lies in its reminder that we must read each text on its own merits, not imposing our prior knowledge or views on it. While we must evaluate ideas as we read, we must not distort the meaning within a text. We must not allow ourselves to force a text to say what we would otherwise like it to say—or we will never learn anything new!

Reading Critically: How Well Does The Text Do What It Does We can think of a writer as having taken on a job. No matter what the topic, certain tasks must be done:       

a specific topic must be addressed terms must be clearly defined evidence must be presented common knowledge must be accounted for exceptions must be explained causes must be shown to precede effects and to be capable of the effect conclusions must be shown to follow logically from earlier arguments and evidence

As critical readers and writers, we want to assure ourselves that these tasks have been completed in a complete, comprehensive, and consistent manner. Only once we have determined that a text is consistent and coherent can we then begin to evaluate whether or not to accept the assertions and conclusions.

Thinking Critically: Evaluating the Evidence Reading to see what a text says may suffice when the goal is to learn specific information or to understand someone else's ideas. But we usually read with other purposes. We need to solve problems, build roads, write legislation, or design an advertising campaign. We must evaluate what we have read and integrate that understanding with our prior understanding of the world. We must decide what to accept as true and useful.

As readers, we want to accept as fact only that which is actually true. To evaluate a conclusion, we must evaluate the evidence upon which that conclusion is based. We do not want just any information; we want reliable information. To assess the validity of remarks within a text, we must go outside a text and bring to bear outside knowledge and standards.

Choices: The Ingredients of Texts When examining a text, we would like to look for those elements, obviously, that control the meaning of a text. But what are they?

Page 48 of 105

Choice: Photography We can find a useful analogy between photography and texts. Photography seems objective. Photographs record "what's there," and nothing more. Or so it might seem.

In fact, all photographers make choices that affect the final photograph. Anyone taking a picture must select     

the situation—where to be, and when the camera and lens—whether to view a wide or narrow angle, with or without filters that adjust the color balance or image the film—whether to use black and white or color film, slide, print or digital film, and the sensitivity of the film to low light (ASA rating) the settings—the effects of the lens opening (f-stop) and exposure time (shutter speed) on the sharpness and clarity of the image the shot—where to aim, what to focus on, and when to click the shutter

Finally, photographers must choose how to process the film and develop subsequent prints—factors that further affect the clarity and impact of the final image.

A single photograph can only depict one portion of a particular scene at a particular instant as seen from a particular perspective. Every photograph presents a subjective view of the world. This is not to say that photographs do not have value. Clearly they do. While the selection may be subjective, the image may indeed provide an objective account of that portion off reality. Yet the choices outlined above ultimately control any meaning a viewer might find in the final print. Photographs don't lie, as the saying goes, but they do offer only select testimony.

Choice: Texts As with photography, all written expression involves choices. Imagine you are seated before a blank page. What choices must be made?

For openers you have to say something. Whether you start with an observation, a statement of belief, or simply a thought, you have to say something. We'll call that content.

Having decided on something to say, you have to decide how to phrase your remark. What words will you use?

Different terminology, after all, can change the meaning of a remark. Will you claim someone cheated, bent the rules, or committed a crime? Will you refer to President Bill Clinton, William Jefferson Clinton, or Monika's Bill?

We'll call that a choice of language.

Finally, you cannot simply rattle off disconnected remarks. (Well, you could, but they would have little meaning!)

The remarks must be related to one another, from sentence to sentence and within the discussion as a whole. We'll call that structure, the choice of content They look at the content, at the evidence marshaled for an argument, the illustrations used to explain ideas, and the details presented within a description.

That uniqueness is defined by choices of content, language and structure. . They distinguish between assertions of fact, opinion, and belief. They are aware whether evidence consists of references to published data, anecdotes, or speculation, and they evaluate the persuasiveness of a text accordingly. how language is being used. They notice whether a text refers to someone as a "bean counter" (no respect) or "an academic statistician" (suggesting professionalism), whether some is said to have "asserted a claim" (with confidence, and no need for proof) or "floated a claim" (without backing, as a trial balloon). And they draw inferences from the choice of language they observe.

Page 49 of 105

Critical readers are aware of the structure of a discussion, both in terms of the movement of ideas from beginning to end and in terms of the relationship of ideas throughout the discussion. They distinguish between assertions offered as reason or conclusion, cause or effect, evidence or illustration. They recognize patterns of contrast and distinguish whether contrasting ideas are shown to be dissimilar, competing, or contradictory.

All authors confront three areas of choice:   

the choice of content the choice of language the choice of structure

Choices must be made in each of these areas, and each choice contributes to the thought of the text as a whole.

Note that we do not list elements such as tone, style, perspective, purpose, and message. While these are all useful perspectives for discussing texts, they are all based on, and reflect, the choice of content, language, and structure.

Implications for Reading To non-critical readers, texts provide facts. Knowledge comes from memorizing the statements within a text. To the critical reader, any single text provides but one portrayal of the facts, one individual's ―take‖ on the subject. The content of a text reflects what an author takes as ―the facts of the matter.‖ By examining these choices, readers recognize not only what a text says, but also how the text portrays the subject matter.

The first step in an analysis of a text, then, must be to look at the content, at the evidence marshaled for an argument, the illustrations used to explain ideas, and the details presented within a description. Not that any particular author/text is necessarily wrong. We simply recognize the degree to which each and every text is the unique creation of a unique author. That uniqueness is defined by choices of content, language and structure.

Critical reading thus relies on an analysis of choices of content, language, and structure.  



Critical readers are consciously aware of the act of choice underlying the content. They distinguish between assertions of fact, opinion, and belief. They are aware whether evidence consists of references to published data, anecdotes, or speculation, and they evaluate the persuasiveness of a text accordingly.

Critical readers are aware of how language is being used. They notice whether a text refers to someone as a bean counter (no respect) or an academic statistician (suggesting professionalism), whether some is said to have asserted a claim (with confidence, and no need for proof) or floated a claim (without backing, as a trial balloon). And they draw inferences from the choice of language they observe.

Critical readers are aware of the structure of a discussion, both in terms of the movement of ideas from beginning to end and in terms of the relationship of ideas throughout the discussion. They distinguish between assertions offered as reason or conclusion, cause or effect, evidence or illustration. They recognize patterns of contrast and distinguish whether contrasting ideas are shown to be dissimilar, competing, or contradictory.

These web pages examine each of the three areas of choice. They considers their effect on the meaning, and how readers might identify and respond to them.

Implications for Writing Your first step as a writer is to generate some content, to put forth assumptions, evidence, and arguments that you can then defend and from which you can draw conclusions.

Page 50 of 105

Having generated some initial discussion, the task as editor is then to adjust the discussion to assure that it presents a coherent, consistent, and comprehensive discussion As we shall see in Chapter Twelve, what we take as evidence lies at the basis of all argument, and shapes and predetermines the outcome of an argument.

Writing is ultimately concerned with   

what we say (content), how we say it (language), and the flow from one assertion to another, how ideas connect to one another to convey broader meaning (structure).

We may initially write in an unstructured manner, concerned simply with getting some ideas on the page rather than in creating a finished document right off the bat. Revision and editing then focuses on two concerns:  

correcting spelling, grammar, and punctuation ensuring a coherent flow of ideas.

To ensure a coherent flow of ideas, we must focus on the three areas of choice:   

providing appropriate and sufficient arguments and examples? choosing terms that are precise, appropriate, and persuasive? making clear the transitions from one thought to another and assured the overall logic of the presentation

We edit to assure the content and language and structure. An increased awareness of the impact of choices of content, language, and structure can help students develop habits of rewriting and revision.

Interpretation: Analyzing What a Text Means This final level of reading infers an overall meaning. We examine features running throughout the text to see how the discussion shapes our perception of reality. We examine what a text does to convey meaning: how patterns of content and language shape the portrayal of the topic and how relationships between those patterns convey underlying meaning.

Repeating v. Analyzing: Making The Leap Rightly or wrongly, much of any student's career is spent reading and restating texts. For many, the shift to description and interpretation is particularly hard. They are reluctant to trade the safety of repeating an author's remarks for responsibility for their own assertions. They will freely infer the purpose of an action, the essence of a behavior, or the intent of a political decision. But they will hesitate to go beyond what they take a text to "say" on its own. They are afraid to take responsibility for their own understanding. Others are so attuned to accepting the written word that they fail to see the text as a viable topic of conversation.

Look at Leonardo da Vinci's painting Mona Lisa, and you see a woman smiling. But you are also aware of a painting. You see different color paint (well, not in this illustration!) and you see how the paint was applied to the wood. You recognize how aspects of the painting are highlighted by their placement or by the lighting.

When examining a painting, you are aware that you are examining a work created by someone. You are aware of an intention behind the work, an attempt to portray something a particular way. Since the painting does not come out and actively state a meaning, you are consciously aware of your own efforts to find meaning in the painting: Is she smiling? Self-conscious? Alluring? Aloof?

Page 51 of 105

Looking at the Mona Lisa, you know that you are not looking at Mona Lisa, a person, but The Mona Lisa, a painting. You can talk not only about the meaning of the picture, but also about how it was crafted. What is the significance of the dream landscape in the background? Why, when we focus on the left side of the picture, does the woman looks somehow taller or more erect than if we focus on the right side? The more features of the painting that you recognize, the more powerful your interpretation will be.

When reading texts, as when reading paintings, we increase understanding by recognizing the craftsmanship of the creation, the choices that the artist/author made to portray the topic a certain way. And yet there is still that feeling that texts are somehow different. Texts do differ from art insofar as they actually seem to come out and say something. There are assertions "in black and white" to fall back on. We can restate a text; we cannot restate a painting or action. Yet a text is simply symbols on a page. Readers bring to their reading recognition of those symbols, an understanding of what the words mean within the given social and historical context, and an understanding of the remarks within their own framework of what might make sense, or what they might imagine an author to have intended.

There is no escape; one way or another we are responsible for the meaning we find in our reading. When a text says that someone burned their textbooks, that is all that is there: an assertion that someone burned their textbooks. We can agree on how to interpret sentence structure enough to agree on what is stated in a literal sense. But any sense that that person committed an irresponsible, impulsive, or inspired act is in our own heads. It is not stated as such on the page (unless the author says so!). Stories present actions; readers infer personalities, motives, and intents. When we go beyond the words, we are reading meaning.

Readers infer as much, if not more, than they are told. Readers go beyond the literal meaning of the words to find significance and unstated meanings—and authors rely on their readers' ability to do so! The reader's eye may scan the page, but the reader's mind ranges up, down, and sideways, piecing together evidence to make sense of the presentation as a whole.

Additional Observations A number of observations should be made lest there be misunderstanding.

All Three Modes of Reading and Discussion Are Legitimate The models are designed to identify varying levels of sophistication and insight in reading and discussion. While one approach may be more complex than another, no one way of reading a text is necessarily better than another.

They are simply different, and involve different observations and reasoning. The key thing is to know which style of reading you want to do at any time, how to do it, and how to tell whether you are actually doing it successfully.

All Reading Involves More Than One Form of Reading The divisions between the three modes of reading are, to some extent, artificial. Dividing reading into reading what a text says, does, and means is somewhat like dividing bicycle riding into concern for balance, speed, and direction.

They are all necessary and affect one another. Speed and direction both affect balance; we will fall off, or crash, without all three. And yet we may focus on one or another at any particular time. We can parse each out for analysis.

While the modes of reading and discussing texts can be separated out for purposes of discussion, and it is relatively easy to distinguish between the resulting forms of discussion, in practice these reading techniques overlap. Any particular text can, and will, be read at various levels of understanding at once. We cannot understand what a text says without recognizing relationships between sentences. We cannot even understand sentences without drawing inferences that extend beyond the words on the page. Observations and realizations at any one level of reading invariably support and spark observations at another. Observations characteristic of all three forms of response can be included in an interpretation.

Page 52 of 105

Finally, while it is relatively easy to distinguish between forms of discussion.—restatement, description, and interpretation—a description might include restatement for the purposes of illustration, and an interpretation may be supported with descriptions of various portions of the text and even restatement of key points (see the example above). In the end, the "highest" level of remark characterizes the discussion a whole.

These Are Not the Only Ways to Respond to a Text Restatement, description and interpretation are not the only ways one can respond to a text. But they are the ones of interest here, if only because they are the responses that must precede most other forms of response. Readers can obviously offer their own ideas on a topic—but that does not fall under the topic of discussing a text. Readers can criticize an author's handling of a topic based on their own knowledge or views, evaluate the writing style, or attack the honesty of the author. These too are legitimate forms of response, but they require a critical reading of the text first if they are to be meaningful. The first order of business is to make sense of the text, and it is with that task that our efforts are concerned here.

Finally, we might note that book reports or reviews often contain additional elements, such as a feeling for the writing style, comparison to other works, the reviewer's emotional response to the reading experience, or the circumstances of publication. And book reviewers often use the book under reviews as a taking-off point for a discussion of the topic itself—all elements that go beyond, but depend on, a careful reading of the text in question.

Inference: Reading Ideas as Well as Words Ideally, speakers mean what they say and say what they mean. Spoken communication is not that simple. Much of what we understand—whether when listening or reading—we understand indirectly, by inference. Listening involves a complex combination of hearing words, analyzing sentence structure, and attempting to find meaning within the context of the given situation.

The situation with the written word is no different. A text does not contain a meaning. Readers construct meaning by what they take the words to mean and how they process sentences to find meaning. Readers draw on their knowledge of the language and of conventions of social communication. They also draw on other factors, such as knowledge of the author (―Would Henry say such a thing?), the occasion (―No one knew such things then!‖), or the audience (―He‘d never admit that publicly.‖) They infer unstated meanings based on social conventions, shared knowledge, shared experience, or shared values. They make sense of remarks by recognizing implications and drawing conclusions.

Readers read ideas more than words, and infer, rather than find, meaning.

Inferring Meaning Consider the following statement: The Senator admitted owning the gun that killed his wife.

On the face of it, we have a simple statement about what someone said. Our understanding, however, includes much that is not stated. We find meaning embedded in the words and phrases. Unpacking that meaning, we can see that the Senator was married and his wife is now dead—although this is not actually stated as such. (In fact, the sentence is about an admission of gun ownership.) It is as though the single sentence contains a number of assertions:      

There is a Senator.

He owns a gun.

He is married.

His wife is dead.

That gun caused her death.

The Senator admitted owning that gun.

Page 53 of 105

Clearly, the original sentence is a clearer and simpler way of conveying all of this information. Writers take note!

On a more subtle level, we recognize that a public figure confronts involvement in a major crime. Our understanding need not stop there. We infer that the gun (or at least a bullet) has probably been recovered and identified as the murder weapon—or the notion of an admission would make little sense.

We also recognize the danger of unwarranted inferences. We recognize that we do not necessarily know if the Senator's admission is true. We do not really know whether the Senator is in any way responsible for his wife's death, nor do we know that she died of gun shot wounds (she could have been hit over the head with the gun). We do not even know if it was murder—it might have been suicide or an accident.

Are we reading things in here? Or are these meanings truly within the sentence? We are going beyond that the text says, but not beyond what it actually means to most readers.

Inferences such as these are essential to both written and spoken communication. Writers often only hint at what they mean, and mean much more than they actually seem to say. On the other hand, we can see the danger (and temptation) of assuming facts or interpretations for which evidence is not present, and recognize that a critical reader reads with an open mind, open to many possible interpretations.

The following story is often presented as a brain twister. In fact, it‘s a reading exercise.

A man and his son are driving in a car. The car crashes into a tree, killing the father and seriously injuring his son.

At the hospital, the boy needs to have surgery. Upon looking at the boy, the doctor says (telling the truth), "I cannot operate on him. He is my son."

How can this be? Decide on your answer before reading further.

Whether this passage is a brain twister or a reading passage, readers must assume that any lack of understanding is not due to the story, but due to their own lack of understanding. We must work harder to think about how the story might make sense.

We quickly see that we have to explain how a doctor can have a son ("I cannot operate on him. He is my son.") when at the same time the father is dead (―The car crashes into a tree, killing the father‖). The answer: The doctor is the boy's mother. Many readers are blinded to this meaning by the sexist assumption that the doctor must be a male.

A somewhat similar example has been offered by Robert Skoglund, The Humble Farmer of Public Radio in Maine (http//www.TheHumbleFarmer.com), as follows: We had visitors a week or so ago. Houseguests. Six of them. One of them was Oscar who teaches geology at the University in Utrecht. Now I love houseguests. Usually. But when they arrived I discovered that two of them couldn't even walk into the house. Had to be carried in. And then I found out they couldn't talk, either. What would you have done if you'd been in my place? How do you handle a situation like that?

See the end of the page for possibly the most appropriate advice.

Implications for Reading All reading is an active, reflective, problem-solving process. We do not simply read words; we read ideas, thoughts that spring from the relationships of various assertions. The notion of inference equations is particularly powerful in this regard. Readers can use the notion of inference equations to test whether or not the ingredients for a given inferences are indeed present. To show lying, for instance, a text must show that someone made a statement that they knew was incorrect and that they made that assertion with the specific purpose of deception. If they did not know it was wrong at the time, it‘s an error, not a lie. If they did not make the statement for the specific purpose of deception, we have a misstatement, not lying.

Page 54 of 105

Implications for Writing The notion of inference equations is equally useful for writing.

Writers must assure that the ingredients of the equation are present and clear, and that the desired relationships are signaled in a clear and effective way. As writers, we must be aware that our readers will interpret our thoughts.

We must strive to make our meaning as clear as possible. We must provide sufficient examples to make our ideas clear, as well as to short-circuit undesired interpretations. We must recognize what evidence is necessary and sufficient for our purpose, and assure that it is included.

And we must choose our terms carefully for accuracy and clarity of meaning, and spell out our exact thoughts in as much detail as possible. We must recognize biases our readers might bring to the text and explain and support our evidence as much as our conclusions The advice: Buy diapers. ______

Inference: The Process Inference is a mental process by which we reach a conclusion based on specific evidence.

Inferences are the stock and trade of detectives examining clues, of doctors diagnosing diseases, and of car mechanics repairing engine problems. We infer motives, purpose, and intentions.

Inference is essential to, and part of, being human. We engage in inference every day. We interpret actions to be examples of behavior characteristics, intents, or expressions of particular feelings. We infer it is raining when we see someone with an open umbrella. We infer people are thirsty if they ask for a glass of water. We infer that evidence in a text is authoritative when it is attributed to a scholar in the field.

We want to find significance. We listen to remarks, and want to make sense of them. What might the speaker mean?

Why is he or she saying that? We go beyond specific remarks to underlying significance or broader meaning. When we read that someone cheated on his or her income taxes, we might take that as an example of financial ingenuity, daring, or stupidity. We seek purposes and reasons.

Inferences are not random. While they may come about mysteriously with a sudden jump of recognition, a sense of "Ah ha!," inferences are very orderly. Inferences may be guesses, but they are educated guesses based on supporting evidence. The evidence seems to require that we reach a specific conclusion.

Evidence is said to imply; readers infer. While this image suggests an intent or power on the part of evidence that does not exist—how, after all, can a fact compel a certain conclusion?—the image and resulting terminology are useful nonetheless. The sense of inevitability to the conclusion suggests that we did not jump to that conclusion or make it up on our own, but found it by reasoning from the evidence.

The above image implies that everyone will reach the same conclusion. That obviously is not the case—as the examples above suggest. The umbrella might be protection from the sun, the request for water might indicate a need to take a pill, and a footnote may cite only one side of a controversy. Here again, the line between inference and jumping to a conclusion can be awfully thin.

Page 55 of 105

A man gets on a bus. What might be implied by each of the following?   

He ran to catch the bus.

He is carrying a suitcase.

He asks the driver for change of a $100 bill.

Inferences are not achieved with mathematical rigor. Inferences do not have the certainty obtained with deductive reasoning. Inferences tend to reflect prior knowledge and experience as well as personal beliefs and assumptions.

Inferences thus tend to reflect one's stake in a situation or one's interests in the outcome. People may reason differently or bring different assumptions or premises to bear.

Given evidence that PCB's cause cancer in people, and that PCB's are in a particular water system, all reasonable people would reach the conclusion that that water system is dangerous to people. But given evidence that there is an increase in skin cancer among people who sun bathe, not all people would conclude that sunbathing causes skin cancer. Sun bathing, they might argue, may be coincidental with exposure to other cancer causing factors.

More often than not, disagreements are based not on differences in reasoning, but in the values, assumptions, or information brought to bear. If we believe that all politicians are crooks, we will infer that a specific politician's actions are scurrilous. If we believe that politicians act for the good of all, we will look for some benefit in their actions. Either way, we will try to use reason to explain the actions. We will look for some coherent explanation as a way of making sense of things. As we saw earlier, if we can understand why someone would do something, why someone might say something, why someone might act in a certain way, we feel we have made sense of the act or statement. It's like a murder trial: if we can put together opportunity, motive, and means, we can make a case.

The more evidence we have before us, and the more carefully we reason, the more valid our inferences. This principle plays an important role with reading: the more evidence within a text we incorporate into our interpretation, the more likely we have not gone astray from any intended meaning.

Inference and Analysis Inferences are based on evidence. To infer, we must collect evidence. And evidence is collected by the process of analysis.

Analysis is a particular form of investigation. In general usage, analysis refers to any close, careful, or systematic examination. In the discussion here, the term ―analysis― is used in its more technical meaning. Analysis is a process of investigating something by breaking it into parts for closer examination. Complex topics are broken down into simpler ones. Intricate patterns are broken down into less complicated elements. A problem is simplified by limiting the amount that must be examined at any one time.

The goal of analysis is not simply to discover parts within the whole, but to understand the whole. Once the parts are identified, analysis then seeks to determine how those parts are related. From a recognition of  

the nature of the parts, and the relationships between the parts

we infer additional meaning. In the analytic model, the whole is seen as greater than the sum of its parts.

Page 56 of 105

Levels of Analysis Analysis can be carried out on various levels. Any part can be analyzed into smaller parts. A table of contents, for instance, indicates the contents of a book at various levels of analysis: parts, chapters, sections, etc.

Bases of Analysis Finally, note that a single topic can often be broken up for analysis in a number of ways. An anthropologist might view society in terms of cultural values and institutions; the sociologist might look at issues of group identity and social interaction. The anthropologist might look at how justice is administered, the sociologist at the social status of judges. One would speak in terms of mores and ethical principles, the other in terms of social class and socioeconomic status. They may analyze the same society, but their different bases of analysis lead to different understandings.

Analyzing Texts What are the parts of a text? The simplest answer is that texts are composed of words, which form sentences, which form paragraphs, which form larger sections of a the text as a whole. Texts can also be analyzed in terms of elements or themes occurring throughout the discussion, like colors throughout plaid cloth.

The discussion throughout these web pages focuses on analysis of three basic elements of choice by the author: content, language, and structure.

______ Three Ways to Read and Discuss Texts How we discuss a text is directly related to how we read that text. More to the point here, how we read a text is shaped by how we expect to discuss it. While you may not be asked to write about texts at school, and probably will not be asked to write about texts in your job, you must learn how to talk about texts to discover what makes them work.

Reading and Discussion The follow excerpt (from the sample text ) serves as an example to define three forms of reading and discussion.

In his social history of venereal disease, No Magic Bullet , Allan M. Brandt describes the controversy in the US military about preventing venereal disease among soldiers during World War I. Should there be a disease prevention effort that recognized that many young American men would succumb to the charms of French prostitutes, or should there be a more punitive approach to discourage sexual contact? Unlike the New Zealand Expeditionary forces, which gave condoms to their soldiers, the United States decided to give American soldiers after-the-fact, and largely ineffective, chemical prophylaxis. American soldiers also were subject to court martial if they contracted a venereal disease. These measures failed. More than 383,000 soldiers were diagnosed with venereal diseases between April 1917 and December 1919 and lost seven million days of active duty. Only influenza, which struck in an epidemic, was a more common illness among servicemen.

You have read this passage, and someone asks you "to write about it." What should you say?

What you write will vary, of course, with how you read. Your response to the text might take any of the following:

Page 57 of 105

1.

2.

3.

Unlike the New Zealand soldiers in WWI, who received condoms, American soldiers received after-thefact and ineffective medicine that resulted in the loss of seven million days of active duty over close to a three year period.

The passage compares the prevention techniques and disease outcomes of American and New Zealand soldiers in World War I, noting that unlike the New Zealand soldiers in WWI, who received condoms, American soldiers received after-the-fact and ineffective medicine that resulted in the loss of seven million days of active duty over close to a three year period.

By examining the outcome of various approaches to condom use during World War I, the text makes a case for more realistic approaches to disease prevention in the future.

Each of these responses reflects a different type of reading, resulting in a different form of discussion.

The major difference in the discussions above is in what is being discussed.

1.

2.

3.

Unlike the New Zealand soldiers in WWI, who received condoms, American soldiers received after-thefact and ineffective medicine that resulted in the loss of seven million days of active duty over close to a three year period.

The passage compares the prevention techniques and disease outcomes of American and New Zealand soldiers in World War I, noting that unlike the New Zealand soldiers in WWI, who received condoms, American soldiers received after-the-fact and ineffective medicine that resulted in the loss of seven million days of active duty over close to a three year period.

By examining the outcomes of various approaches to condom use during World War I, the text makes a case for more realistic approaches to disease prevention in the future.

Only the first response is about the topic of the original text: American soldiers. The next two discussions are in some way about the text. More specifically, the three modes of response mirror our earlier distinction between what a text says, does, and means.

1.

2.

3.

The first discusses the behavior of soldiers, the same topic as the original text. It restates the original information.

The second indicates how ideas or information are introduced and developed. It describes the presentation.

The third attempts to find a deeper meaning in the discussion. It interprets the overall meaning of the presentation.

In each of the responses above, a reader gains, and is accountable for, a different kind of understanding.   

Restatement restating what the text says talks about the original topic Description describing what a text does identifies aspects of the presentation Interpretation analyze what a text means asserts an overall meaning

We can tell which type of discussion we have before us by examining what it talks about.

How are these three different understandings achieved?

To look beyond a literal, sentence-by-sentence meaning (restatement), you might ask two questions: What is the text doing, and what are the example examples of?

In this example the text contrasts two approaches to potential venereal disease among military troops, A -- recognizing that soldiers would succumb to prostitutes and providing condoms B -- attempting to discourage sexual contact combined with after-the-fact, and largely ineffective, chemical prophylaxis and the threat of court marshals.

Page 58 of 105

The text claims that approach A was a failure and offers evidence of that failure in terms of statistics ["More than 383,000 soldiers were diagnosed with venereal diseases between April 1917 and December 1919 and lost seven million days of active duty." ] and a comparison ["Only influenza, which struck in an epidemic, was a more common illness among servicemen."]. The extent of failure is conveyed by examples of a large number of affected persons and a comparison to a major disease outbreak.

These realizations lead to the description of the text.

An interpretation goes one step further. In this example, we recognize a message is conveyed by showing the failure of one approach over another. To find a greater meaning, we must recognize what the two approaches are examples of , and what the choice of one over the other might represent.

Example: A Statement Your doctor tells you to eat less chocolate and drink less beer. A restatement would repeat the statement, The doctor said I should eat less chocolate and drink less beer.

A description would describe the remark: The doctor advised me to change my diet.

An interpretation would find underlying meaning in the remark: The doctor warned me to reduce my calories for the sake of my health.

Only this final discussion attempts to find significance in the examples, that the foods mentioned are high calorie.

Example: Nursery Rhyme Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go.

A restatement would talk about Mary and the lamb.

Mary had a lamb that followed her everywhere.

A description would talk about the story within the fairy tale.

The nursery rhyme describes a pet that followed its mistress everywhere.

The interpretation talks about meaning within the story, here the idea of innocent devotion.

An image of innocent devotion is conveyed by the story of a lamb‘s devotion to its mistress. The devotion is emphasized by repetition that emphasizes the constancy of the lamb‘s actions (―everywhere‖…‖sure to go.‖) The notion of innocence is conveyed by the image of a young lamb, ―white as snow.‖ By making it seem that this is natural and good, the nursery rhyme asserts innocent devotion as a positive relationship.

Note the effort here to offer as much evidence from the text as possible. The discussion includes references to the content (the specific actions referred to), the language (the specific terms used), and the structure (the relationship between characters). Try another nursery rhyme yourself.

Different Ways of Reading for Different Occasions Readers read in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes. They can read for information, sentence by sentence, taking each assertion as a discrete fact. They can read for meaning, following an argument and weighing its logical and persuasive effects. They can read critically, evaluating unstated assumptions and biases, consciously identifying patterns of language and content and their interrelationships.

We can read any text, whether a nursery rhyme or complicated treatise on the origins of the American political system, in various ways. On the simplest level, Cinderella is a story about a girl who marries a prince. On another level, it is about inner goodness triumphing over deceit and pettiness.

Page 59 of 105

On occasion, we might read the same text differently for different purposes. We can read a newspaper editorial backing a tax proposal     

to learn the content of the proposal, to see why that newspaper supports the proposal, to identify the newspaper's political leanings, to learn facts, to discover opinions, or to determine an underlying meaning.

We can read a newspaper article on a drive by shooting as an account of the death of an individual or as a symptom of a broader disintegration of civility in contemporary society. We can even look at the names in a telephone book to find the phone number we want or to assess the ethnic diversity of the community. No single way of reading a text is necessarily better. They are simply different.

Which Way to Read How we choose to read a particular text will depend on the nature of the text and our specific goals at the time.

When we assume a factual presentation, we might read for what a text says. When we assume personal bias, we look deeper to interpret underlying meanings and perspectives.

Recall the opening paragraph of the health care article at the beginning of the chapter. To answer the question, How did the New Zealand army prevent its soldiers from contracting venereal disease during World War I? we read to see what the essay says.

To answer the question, What issues does the text discuss? we read to see what the essay does.

To answer the question, What concerns underlie the essay‘s analysis of history? we read to see what the essay means.

As a reader, you must know what you intended to do, and whether or not you have accomplished it. You must adjust how you read to the nature of the reading material, the nature of the reading assignment, and the manner in which you will be held accountable for your reading.

Page 60 of 105

Page 61 of 105

Creative Thinking Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed, such as an idea, a scientific theory, an invention, a literary work, a painting, a musical composition, a joke, etc.

Scholarly interest in creativity involves many definitions and concepts pertaining to a number of disciplines: psychology, cognitive science, education, philosophy (particularly philosophy of science), technology, theology, sociology, linguistics, business studies, songwriting, and economics, covering the relations between creativity and general intelligence, mental and neurological processes, personality type and creative ability, creativity and mental health; the potential for fostering creativity through education and training, especially as augmented by technology; and the application of creative resources to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

Definition In a summary of scientific research into creativity, Michael Mumford suggested: "Over the course of the last decade, however, we seem to have reached a general agreement that creativity involves the production of novel, useful products" (Mumford, 2003, p. 110). Creativity can also be defined "as the process of producing something that is both original and worthwhile" or "characterized by originality and expressiveness and imaginative". What is produced can come in many forms and is not specifically singled out in a subject or area. Authors have diverged dramatically in their precise definitions beyond these general commonalities: Peter Meusburger reckons that over a hundred different analyses can be found in the literature.

Aspects Theories of creativity (particularly investigation of why some people are more creative than others) have focused on a variety of aspects. The dominant factors are usually identified as "the four Ps" — process, product, person and place (according to Mel Rhodes). A focus on process is

Page 62 of 105

shown in cognitive approaches that try to describe thought mechanisms and techniques for creative thinking. Theories invoking divergent rather than convergent thinking (such as Guilford), or those describing the staging of the creative process (such as Wallas) are primarily theories of creative process. A focus on creative product usually appears in attempts to measure creativity (psychometrics, see below) and in creative ideas framed as successful memes. The psychometric approach to creativity reveals that it also involves the ability to produce more. A focus on the nature of the creative person considers more general intellectual habits, such as openness, levels of ideation, autonomy, expertise, exploratory behavior and so on. A focus on place considers the circumstances in which creativity flourishes, such as degrees of autonomy, access to resources and the nature of gatekeepers. Creative lifestyles are characterized by nonconforming attitudes and behaviors as well as flexibility.

"Four C" Model James C. Kaufman and Beghetto introduced a "four C" model of creativity; mini-c ("transformative learning" involving "personally meaningful interpretations of experiences, actions and insights"), little-c (everyday problem solving and creative expression), Pro-C (exhibited by people who are professionally or vocationally creative though not necessarily eminent) and Big-C (creativity considered great in the given field). This model was intended to help accommodate models and theories of creativity that stressed competence as an essential component and the historical transformation of a creative domain as the highest mark of creativity. It also, the authors argued, made a useful framework for analyzing creative processes in individuals.

The contrast of terms "Big C" and "Little c" has been widely used. Kozbelt, Beghetto and Runco use a little-c/Big-C model to review major theories of creativity Margaret Boden distinguishes between h-creativity (historical) and p-creativity (personal).

Robinson and Anna Craft have focused on creativity in a general population, particularly with respect to education. Craft makes a similar distinction between "high" and "little c" creativity. and cites Ken Robinson as referring to "high" and "democratic" creativity. MihĂĄly CsĂ­kszentmihĂĄlyi has defined creativity in terms of those individuals judged to have made significant creative, perhaps domain-changing contributions. Simonton has analysed the career trajectories of eminent creative people in order to map patterns and predictors of creative productivity.

Theories of Creative Processes There has been much empirical study in psychology and cognitive science of the processes through which creativity occurs. Interpretation of the results of these studies has led to several possible explanations of the sources and methods of creativity.

Incubation Incubation is a temporary break from creative problem solving that can result in insight. There has been some empirical research looking at whether, as the concept of "incubation" in Wallas' Page 63 of 105

model implies, a period of interruption or rest from a problem may aid creative problem-solving.

Ward lists various hypotheses that have been advanced to explain why incubation may aid creative problem-solving, and notes how some empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that incubation aids creative problem-solving in that it enables "forgetting" of misleading clues. Absence of incubation may lead the problem solver to become fixated on inappropriate strategies of solving the problem. This work disputes the earlier hypothesis that creative solutions to problems arise mysteriously from the unconscious mind while the conscious mind is occupied on other tasks.

Convergent and Divergent Thinking J. P. Guilford drew a distinction between convergent and divergent production (commonly renamed convergent and divergent thinking).

Convergent thinking involves aiming for a single, correct solution to a problem, whereas divergent thinking involves creative generation of multiple answers to a set problem.

Divergent thinking is sometimes used as a synonym for creativity in psychology literature.

Other researchers have occasionally used the terms flexible thinking or fluid intelligence, which are roughly similar to (but not synonymous with) creativity.

Creative Cognition Approach In 1992, Finke et al. proposed the "Geneplore" model, in which creativity takes place in two phases: a generative phase, where an individual constructs mental representations called preinventive structures, and an exploratory phase where those structures are used to come up with creative ideas. Some evidence shows that when people use their imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are heavily structured in predictable ways by the properties of existing categories and concepts. Weisberg argued, by contrast, that creativity only involves ordinary cognitive processes yielding extraordinary results.

The Explicit窶的mplicit Interaction (EII) Theory Helie and Sun recently proposed a unified framework for understanding creativity in problem solving, namely the Explicit窶的mplicit Interaction (EII) theory of creativity. This new theory constitutes an attempt at providing a more unified explanation of relevant phenomena (in part by reinterpreting/integrating various fragmentary existing theories of incubation and insight). The EII theory relies mainly on five basic principles, namely 1) The co-existence of and the Page 64 of 105

difference between explicit and implicit knowledge; 2) The simultaneous involvement of implicit and explicit processes in most tasks; 3) The redundant representation of explicit and implicit knowledge; 4) The integration of the results of explicit and implicit processing; and 5) The iterative (and possibly bidirectional) processing. A computational implementation of the theory was developed based on the CLARION cognitive architecture and used to simulate relevant human data. This work represents an initial step in the development of process-based theories of creativity encompassing incubation, insight, and various other related phenomena.

Conceptual Blending In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler introduced the concept of bisociation—that creativity arises as a result of the intersection of two quite different frames of reference. This idea was later developed into conceptual blending. In the '90s, various approaches in cognitive science that dealt with metaphor, analogy and structure mapping have been converging, and a new integrative approach to the study of creativity in science, art and humor has emerged under the label conceptual blending.

Honing Theory Honing theory posits that creativity arises due to the self-organizing, self-mending nature of a worldview, and that it is by way of the creative process the individual hones (and re-hones) an integrated worldview. Honing theory places equal emphasis on the externally visible creative outcome and the internal cognitive restructuring brought about by the creative process. Indeed one factor that distinguishes it from other theories of creativity is that it focuses on not just restructuring as it pertains to the conception of the task, but as it pertains to the worldview as a whole. When faced with a creatively demanding task, there is an interaction between the conception of the task and the worldview. The conception of the task changes through interaction with the worldview, and the worldview changes through interaction with the task. This interaction is reiterated until the task is complete, at which point not only is the task conceived of differently, but the worldview is subtly or drastically transformed. Thus another distinguishing feature of honing theory is that the creative process reflects the natural tendency of a worldview to attempt to resolve dissonance and seek internal consistency amongst its components, whether they be ideas, attitudes, or bits of knowledge; it mends itself as does a body when it has been injured.

Yet another central, distinguishing feature of honing theory is the notion of a potentiality state.

Honing theory posits that creative thought proceeds not by searching through and randomly ‗mutating‘ predefined possibilities, but by drawing upon associations that exist due to overlap in the distributed neural cell assemblies that participate in the encoding of experiences in memory.

Midway through the creative process one may have made associations between the current task and previous experiences, but not yet disambiguated which aspects of those previous experiences are relevant to the current task. Thus the creative idea may feel ‗half-baked‘. It is at that point that it can be said to be in a potentiality state, because how it will actualize depends on the different internally or externally generated contexts it interacts with.

Page 65 of 105

Honing theory can account for many phenomena that are not readily explained by other theories of creativity. For example, creativity was commonly thought to be fostered by a supportive, nurturing, trustworthy environment conducive to self-actualization. However, research shows that creativity is actually associated with childhood adversity, which would stimulate honing.

Honing theory also makes several predictions that differ from what would be predicted by other theories. For example, empirical support has been obtained using analogy problem solving experiments for the proposal that midway through the creative process one's mind is in a potentiality state. Other experiments show that different works by the same creator exhibit a recognizable style or 'voice', and that this same recognizable quality even comes through in different creative outlets. This is not predicted by theories of creativity that emphasize chance processes or the accumulation of expertise, but it is predicted by honing theory, according to which personal style reflects the creator's uniquely structured worldview. This theory has been developed by Liane Gabora.

Everyday Imaginative Thought In everyday thought, people often spontaneously imagine alternatives to reality when they think "if only...". Their counterfactual thinking is viewed as an example of everyday creative processes. It has been proposed that the creation of counterfactual alternatives to reality depends on similar cognitive processes to rational thought.

Assessing Individual Creative Ability Creativity Quotient Several attempts have been made to develop a creativity quotient of an individual similar to the intelligence quotient (IQ), however these have been unsuccessful.

Page 66 of 105

Psychometric Approach J. P. Guilford's group, which pioneered the modern psychometric study of creativity, constructed several tests to measure creativity in 1967:   

  

Plot Titles, where participants are given the plot of a story and asked to write original titles.

Quick Responses is a word-association test scored for uncommonness.

Figure Concepts, where participants were given simple drawings of objects and individuals and asked to find qualities or features that are common by two or more drawings; these were scored for uncommonness.

Unusual Uses is finding unusual uses for common everyday objects such as bricks.

Remote Associations, where participants are asked to find a word between two given words (e.g. Hand _____ Call) Remote Consequences, where participants are asked to generate a list of consequences of unexpected events (e.g. loss of gravity)

Building on Guilford's work, Torrance developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking in 1966. They involved simple tests of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:   

Fluency – The total number of interpretable, meaningful and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.

Originality – The statistical rarity of the responses among the test subjects.

Elaboration – The amount of detail in the responses.

The Creativity Achievement Questionnaire, a self-report test that measures creative achievement across 10 domains, was described in 2005 and shown to be reliable and valid when compared to other measures of creativity and to independent evaluation of creative output.

Such tests, sometimes called Divergent Thinking (DT) tests have been both supported and criticized.

Considerable progress has been made in automated scoring of Divergent Thinking tests using semantic approach. When compared to human raters, NLP techniques were shown to be reliable and valid in scoring the originality (when compared to human raters). The reported computer programs were able to achieve a correlation of 0.60 and 0.72 respectively to human graders.

Semantic networks were also used to devise originality scores that yielded significant correlations with socio-personal measures. Most recently, An NSF-funded team of researchers led by James C. Kaufman and Mark A. Runco combined expertise in creativity research, natural language processing, computational linguistics, and statistical data analysis to devise a scalable system for computerized automated testing (SparcIt Creativity Index Testing system). This system enabled automated scoring of DT tests that is reliable, objective, and scalable, thus addressing most of the issues of DT tests that had been found and reported. The resultant computer system was able to achieve a correlation of 0.73 to human graders.

Page 67 of 105

Social-Personality Approach Some researchers have taken a social-personality approach to the measurement of creativity. In these studies, personality traits such as independence of judgement, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation and risk-taking are used as measures of the creativity of individuals. A meta-analysis by Gregory Feist showed that creative people tend to be "more open to new experiences, less conventional and less conscientious, more self-confident, self-accepting, driven, ambitious, dominant, hostile,and impulsive." Openness, conscientiousness, selfacceptance, hostility and impulsivity had the strongest effects of the traits listed. Within the framework of the Big Five model of personality some consistent traits have emerged. Openness to experience has been shown to be consistently related to a whole host of different assessments of creativity. Among the other Big Five traits, research has demonstrated subtle differences between different domains of creativity. Compared to non-artists, artists tend to have higher levels of openness to experience and lower levels of conscientiousness, while scientists are more open to experience, conscientious, and higher in the confidence-dominance facets of extraversion compared to non-scientists.

Creativity and Intelligence The potential relationship between creativity and Intelligence has been of interest since the late 1900s, when a multitude of influential studies - from Getzels & Jackson, Barron, Wallach & Kogan, and Guilford - focused not only on creativity, but also on intelligence. This joint focus highlights both the theoretical and practical importance of the relationship: researchers are interested not only if the constructs are related, but also how and why.

There are multiple theories accounting for their relationship, with the 3 main theories as follows:

Page 68 of 105







Threshold Theory - Intelligence is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for creativity There is a moderate positive relationship between creativity and intelligence until IQ ~120 Certification Theory – Creativity is not intrinsically related to intelligence. Instead individuals are required to meet the requisite level intelligence in order to gain a certain level of education/work, which then in turn offers the opportunity to be creative. Displays of creativity are moderated by intelligence Interference Theory – Extremely high intelligence might interfere with creative ability

Sternberg and O‘Hara proposed a framework of 5 possible relationships between creativity and intelligence: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Creativity is a subset of intelligence Intelligence is a subset of creativity Creativity and intelligence are overlapping constructs Creativity and intelligence are part of the same construct (coincident sets) Creativity and intelligence are distinct constructs (disjoint sets)

Creativity as a Subset of Intelligence A number of researchers include creativity, either explicitly or implicitly, as a key component of intelligence.

Examples of theories that include creativity as a subset of intelligence 





Gardner‘s Theory of multiple intelligences (MIT) - implicitly includes creativity as a subset of MIT. To demonstrate this, Gardner cited examples of different famous creators, each of whom differed in their types of intelligences e.g. Picasso (spatial intelligence); Freud (intrapersonal); Einstein (logical-mathematical); and Gandhi (interpersonal).

Sternberg‘s Theory of Successful intelligence (see Triarchic theory of intelligence) includes creativity as a main component, and comprises 3 sub-theories: Componential (Analytic), Contextual (Practical) and Experiential (Creative). Experiential sub-theory the ability to use pre-existing knowledge and skills to solve new and novel problems - is directly related to creativity.

The Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory includes creativity as a subset of intelligence.

Specifically, it is associated with the broad group factor of long-term storage and retrieval (Glr). Glr narrow abilities relating to creativity include: ideational fluency, associational fluency and originality/creativity. Silvia et al. conducted a study to look at the relationship between divergent thinking and verbal fluency tests, and reported that both fluency and originality in divergent thinking were significantly affected by the broad level Glr factor. Martindale extended the CHC-theory in the sense that it was proposed that those individuals who are creative are also selective in their processing speed Martindale argues that in the creative process, larger amounts of information are processed more slowly in the early stages, and as the individual begins to understand the problem, the processing speed is increased.

Page 69 of 105



The Dual Process Theory of Intelligence posits a two-factor/type model of intelligence.

Type 1 is a conscious process, and concerns goal directed thoughts, which are explained by g. Type 2 is an unconscious process, and concerns spontaneous cognition, which encompasses daydreaming and implicit learning ability. Kaufman argues that creativity occurs as a result of Type 1 and Type 2 processes working together in combination. The use of each Type in the creative process can be used to varying degrees.

Intelligence as a Subset of Creativity In this relationship model, intelligence is a key component in the development of creativity.

Theories of creativity that include intelligence as a subset of creativity 



Sternberg & Lubart‘s Investment Theory. Using the metaphor of a stock market, they demonstrate that creative thinkers are like good investors - they buy low and sell high (in their ideas). Like under/low-valued stock, creative individuals generate unique ideas that are initially rejected by other people. The creative individual has to persevere, and convince the others of the ideas value. After convincing the others, and thus increasing the ideas value, the creative individual ‗sells high‘ by leaving the idea with the other people, and moves onto generating anther idea. According to this theory, six distinct, but related elements contribute to successful creativity: intelligence, knowledge, thinking styles, personality, motivation, and environment. Intelligence is just one of the six factors that can either solely, or in conjunction with the other five factors, generate creative thoughts.

Amabile‘s Componential Model of Creativity. In this model there are 3 within-individual components needed for creativity - domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes, Page 70 of 105



and task motivation - and 1 component external to the individual: their surrounding social environment. Creativity requires a confluence of all components. High creativity will result when an individual is: intrinsically motivated, possesses both a high level of domain-relevant skills and has high skills in creative thinking, and is working in a highly creative environment.

Amusement Park Theoretical Model. In this 4-step theory, both domain-specific and generalist views are integrated into a model of creativity. The researchers make use of the metaphor of the amusement park to demonstrate that within each of these creative levels, intelligence plays a key role: o To get into the amusement park, there are initial requirements (e.g., time/transport to go to the park). Initial requirements (like intelligence) are necessary, but not sufficient for creativity. They are more like prerequisites for creativity, and if an individual does not possess the basic level of the initial requirement (intelligence), then they will not be able to generate creative thoughts/behavior. o Secondly are the subcomponents - general thematic areas - that increase in specificity. Like choosing which type of amusement park to visit (e.g. a zoo or a water park), these areas relate to the areas in which someone could be creative (e.g. poetry). o Thirdly there are specific domains. After choosing the type of park to visit e.g. water park, you then have to choose which specific park to go to. Within the poetry domain, there are many different types (e.g. free verse, riddles, sonnet, etc.) that have to be selected from. o Lastly, there are micro-domains. These are the specific tasks that reside within each domain e.g. individual lines in a free verse poem / individual rides at the water park.

Creativity and Intelligence As Overlapping Yet Distinct Constructs This possible relationship concerns creativity and intelligence as distinct, but intersecting constructs.

Theories that include Creativity and Intelligence as Overlapping Yet Distinct Constructs 





Renzulli‘s Three-Ring Conception of Giftedness. In this conceptualization, giftedness occurs as a result from the overlap of above average intellectual ability, creativity, and task commitment. Under this view, creativity and intelligence are distinct constructs, but they do overlap under the correct conditions.

PASS theory of intelligence. In this theory, the planning component - relating to the ability to solve problems, make decisions and take action - strongly overlaps with the concept of creativity.

Threshold Theory (TT). A number of previous research findings have suggested that a threshold exists in the relationship between creativity and intelligence – both constructs are moderately positively correlated up to an IQ of ~120. Above this threshold of an IQ of 120, if there is a relationship at all, it is small and weak. TT posits that a moderate level of intelligence is necessary for creativity.

Page 71 of 105

In support of the TT, Barron reported finding a non-significant correlation between creativity and intelligence in a gifted sample; and a significant correlation in a non-gifted sample.

Yamamoto in a sample of secondary school children, reported a significant correlation between creativity and intelligence of r = .3, and reported no significant correlation when the sample consisted of gifted children. Fuchs-Beauchamp et al. in a sample of preschoolers found that creativity and intelligence correlated from r = .19 to r = .49 in the group of children who had an IQ below the threshold; and in the group above the threshold, the correlations were r = <.12. Cho et al. reported a correlation of .40 between creativity and intelligence in the average IQ group of a sample of adolescents and adults; and a correlation of close to r = .0 for the high IQ group.

Jauk et al. found support for the TT, but only for measures of creative potential; not creative performance.

Much modern day research reports findings against TT. Wai et al. in a study using data from the longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth - a cohort of elite students from early adolescence into adulthood - found that differences in SAT scores at age 13 were predictive of creative real-life outcomes 20 years later. Kimâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s meta-analysis of 21 studies did not find any supporting evidence for TT, and instead positive correlations were reported between intelligence, creativity, and divergent thinking both below and above IQ's of 120. Preckel et al., investigating fluid intelligence and creativity, reported small correlations of r = .3 to r = .4 across all levels of cognitive ability.

Creativity and Intelligence As Coincident Sets Under this view, researchers posit that there are no differences in the mechanisms underlying creativity in those used in normal problem solving; and in normal problem solving, there is no need for creativity. Thus, creativity and Intelligence (problem solving) are the same thing.

Perkins referred to this as the â&#x20AC;&#x2014;nothing-specialâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC; view.

Page 72 of 105

Weisberg & Alba examined problem solving by having participants complete the 9-dot problem (see Thinking outside the box#Nine dots puzzle) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; where the participants are asked to connect all 9 dots in the 3 rows of 3 dots using 4 straight lines or less, without lifting their pen or tracing the same line twice. The problem can only be solved if the lines go outside the boundaries of the square of dots. Results demonstrated that even when participants were given this insight, they still found it difficult to solve the problem, thus showing that to successfully complete the task it is not just insight (or creativity) that is required.

Creativity and Intelligence as Disjoint Sets In this view, creativity and intelligence are completely different, unrelated constructs.

Getzels and Jackson administered 5 creativity measures to a group of 449 children from grades 6-12, and compared these test findings to results from previously administered (by the school) IQ tests. They found that the correlation between the creativity measures and IQ was r = .26. The high creativity group scored in the top 20% of the overall creativity measures, but were not included in the top 20% of IQ scorers. The high intelligence group scored the opposite: they scored in the top 20% for IQ, but were outside the top 20% scorers for creativity, thus showing that creativity and intelligence are distinct and unrelated.

However, this work has been heavily criticised. Wallach and Kogan highlighted that the creativity measures were not only weakly related to one another (to the extent that they were no more related to one another than they were with IQ), but they seemed to also draw upon noncreative skills. McNemar noted that there were major measurement issues, in that the IQ scores were a mixture from 3 different IQ tests.

Wallach and Kogan administered 5 measures of creativity, each of which resulted in a score for originality and fluency; and 10 measures of general intelligence to 151 5th grade children. These tests were untimed, and given in a game-like manner (aiming to facilitate creativity). Intercorrelations between creativity tests were on average r = .41. Inter-correlations between intelligence measures were on average r = .51 with each other. Creativity tests and intelligence measures correlated r = .09.

Affect Some theories suggest that creativity may be particularly susceptible to affective influence. As noted in voting behavior the term "affect" in this context can refer to liking or disliking key aspects of the subject in question. This work largely follows from findings in psychology regarding the ways in which affective states are involved in human judgment and decisionmaking.

Positive Affect Relations According to Alice Isen, positive affect has three primary effects on cognitive activity:

Page 73 of 105

1. Positive affect makes additional cognitive material available for processing, increasing the number of cognitive elements available for association; 2. Positive affect leads to defocused attention and a more complex cognitive context, increasing the breadth of those elements that are treated as relevant to the problem; 3. Positive affect increases cognitive flexibility, increasing the probability that diverse cognitive elements will in fact become associated. Together, these processes lead positive affect to have a positive influence on creativity.

Barbara Fredrickson in her broaden-and-build model suggests that positive emotions such as joy and love broaden a person's available repertoire of cognitions and actions, thus enhancing creativity.

According to these researchers, positive emotions increase the number of cognitive elements available for association (attention scope) and the number of elements that are relevant to the problem (cognitive scope).

Various meta-analyses, such as Baas et al. (2008) of 66 studies about creativity and affect support the link between creativity and positive affect

Formal Theory J端rgen Schmidhuber's formal theory of creativity postulates that creativity, curiosity and interestingness are by-products of a simple computational principle for measuring and optimizing learning progress. Consider an agent able to manipulate its environment and thus its own sensory inputs. The agent can use a black box optimization method such as reinforcement learning to learn (through informed trial and error) sequences of actions that maximize the expected sum of its future reward signals.

There are extrinsic reward signals for achieving externally given goals, such as finding food when hungry.

But Schmidhuber's objective function to be maximized also includes an additional, intrinsic term to model "wow-effects."

This non-standard term motivates purely creative behavior of the agent even when there are no external goals. A wow-effect is formally defined as follows. As the agent is creating and predicting and encoding the continually growing history of actions and sensory inputs, it keeps improving the predictor or encoder, which can be implemented as an artificial neural network or some other machine learning device that can exploit regularities in the data to improve its performance over time.

The improvements can be measured precisely, by computing the difference in computational costs (storage size, number of required synapses, errors, time) needed to encode new observations before and after learning. This difference depends on the encoder's present subjective knowledge, which changes over time, but the theory formally takes this into account. The cost difference measures the strength of the present "wow-effect" due to sudden improvements in data compression or computational speed.

It becomes an intrinsic reward signal for the action selector. The objective function thus motivates the action optimizer to create action sequences causing more wow-effects. Irregular, Page 74 of 105

random data (or noise) do not permit any wow-effects or learning progress, and thus are "boring" by nature (providing no reward). Already known and predictable regularities also are boring.

Temporarily interesting are only the initially unknown, novel, regular patterns in both actions and observations. This motivates the agent to perform continual, open-ended, active, creative exploration.

According to Schmidhuber, his objective function explains the activities of scientists, artists and comedians. For example, physicists are motivated to create experiments leading to observations obeying previously unpublished physical laws permitting better data compression. Likewise, composers receive intrinsic reward for creating non-arbitrary melodies with unexpected but regular harmonies that permit wow-effects through data compression improvements. Similarly, a comedian gets intrinsic reward for "inventing a novel joke with an unexpected punch line, related to the beginning of the story in an initially unexpected but quickly learnable way that also allows for better compression of the perceived data." Schmidhuber argues that that ongoing computer hardware advances will greatly scale up rudimentary artificial scientists and artists[clarification needed] based on simple implementations of the basic principle since 1990. He used the theory to create low-complexity art and an attractive human face.

Mental Health A study by psychologist J. Philippe Rushton found creativity to correlate with intelligence and psychoticism. Another study found creativity to be greater in schizotypal than in either normal or schizophrenic individuals. While divergent thinking was associated with bilateral activation of the prefrontal cortex, schizotypal individuals were found to have much greater activation of their right prefrontal cortex. This study hypothesizes that such individuals are better at accessing both hemispheres, allowing them to make novel associations at a faster rate. In agreement with this hypothesis, ambidexterity is also associated with schizotypal and schizophrenic individuals.

Three recent studies by Mark Batey and Adrian Furnham have demonstrated the relationships between schizotypal and hypomanic personality and several different measures of creativity.

Particularly strong links have been identified between creativity and mood disorders, particularly manic-depressive disorder (a.k.a. bipolar disorder) and depressive disorder (a.k.a. unipolar disorder). In Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Kay Redfield Jamison summarizes studies of mood-disorder rates in writers, poets and artists. She also explores research that identifies mood disorders in such famous writers and artists as Ernest Hemingway (who shot himself after electroconvulsive treatment), Virginia Woolf (who drowned herself when she felt a depressive episode coming on), composer Robert Schumann (who died in a mental institution), and even the famed visual artist Michelangelo.

A study looking at 300,000 persons with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or unipolar depression, and their relatives, found overrepresentation in creative professions for those with bipolar disorder as well as for undiagnosed siblings of those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

There was no overall overrepresenation, but overrepresentation for artistic occupations, among those diagnosed with schizophrenia. There was no association for those with unipolar depression or their relatives.

Page 75 of 105

Another study involving more than one million people, conducted by Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute, reported a number of correlations between creative occupations and mental illnesses. Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, and were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves. Dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder.

However, as a group, those in the creative professions were no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people, although they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reports.

According to psychologist Robert Epstein, PhD, creativity can be obstructed through stress.

In Various Contexts Creativity has been studied from a variety of perspectives and is important in numerous contexts.

Most of these approaches are undisciplinary, and it is therefore difficult to form a coherent overall view. The following sections examine some of the areas in which creativity is seen as being important.

Creativity Profiles Creativity can be expresses in a number of different forms, depending on the unique people and environments it exists. A number of different theorists have suggested models of the creative person. One model suggests that there are kinds to produce growth, innovation, speed, etc. These are referred to as the four "Creativity Profiles" that can help achieve such goals. (i) Incubate (Long-term Development)

Page 76 of 105

(ii) Imagine (Breakthrough Ideas) (iii) Improve (Incremental Adjustments) (iv) Invest (Short-term Goals) Research by Dr Mark Batey of the Psychometrics at Work Research Group at Manchester Business School has suggested that the creative profile can be explained by four primary creativity traits with narrow facets within each (i) "Idea Generation" (Fluency, Originality, Incubation and Illumination) (ii) "Personality" (Curiosity and Tolerance for Ambiguity) (iii) "Motivation" (Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Achievement) (iv) "Confidence" (Producing, Sharing and Implementing) This model was developed in a sample of 1000 working adults using the statistical techniques of Exploratory Factor Analysis followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis by Structural Equation Modelling.

An important aspect of the creativity profiling approach is to account for the tension between predicting the creative profile of an individual, as characterised by the psychometric approach, and the evidence that team creativity is founded on diversity and difference.

One characteristic of creative people, as measured by some psychologists, is what is called divergent production. divergent production is the ability of a person to generate a diverse assortment, yet an appropriate amount of responses to a given situation. One way of measuring divergent production is by administering the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking assesses the diversity, quantity, and appropriateness of participants responses to a variety of open-ended questions.

Other researchers of creativity see the difference in creative people as a cognitive process of dedication to problem solving and developing expertise in the field of their creative expression.

Hard working people study the work of people before them and within their current area, become experts in their fields, and then have the ability to add to and build upon previous information in innovative and creative ways. In a study of projects by design students, students who had more knowledge on their subject on average had greater creativity within their projects.

The aspect of motivation within a person's personality may predict creativity levels in the person.

Motivation stems from two different sources, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is an internal drive within a person to participate or invest as a result of personal interest, desires, hopes, goals, etc. Extrinsic motivation is a drive from outside of a person and might take the form of payment, rewards, fame, approval from others, etc. Although extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation can both increase creativity in certain cases, strictly extrinsic motivation often impedes creativity in people.

From a personality-traits perspective, there are a number of traits that are associated with creativity in people. Creative people tend to be more open to new experiences, are more self-

Page 77 of 105

confident, are more ambitious, self-accepting, impulsive, driven, dominant, and hostile, compared to people with less creativity.

From an evolutionary perspective, creativity may be a result of the outcome of years of generating ideas. As ideas are continuously generated, the need to evolve produces a need for new ideas and developments. As a result, people have been creating and developing new, innovative, and creative ideas to build our progress as a society.

In studying exceptionally creative people in history, some common traits in lifestyle and environment are often found. Creative people in history usually had supportive parents, but rigid and non-nurturing. Most had an interest in their field at an early age, and most had a highly supportive and skilled mentor in their field of interest. Often the field they chose was relatively uncharted, allowing for their creativity to be expressed more in a field with less previous information. Most exceptionally creative people devoted almost all of their time and energy into their craft, and after about a decade had a creative breakthrough of fame. Their lives were marked with extreme dedication and a cycle of hard-work and breakthroughs as a result of their determination Another theory of creative people is the investment theory of creativity. This approach suggest that there are many individual and environmental factors that must exist in precise ways for extremely high levels of creativity opposed to average levels of creativity. In the investment sense, a person with their particular characteristics in their particular environment may see an opportunity to devote their time and energy into something that has been overlooked by others.

The creative person develops an undervalued or under-recognised idea to the point that it is established as a new and creative idea. Just like in the financial world, some investments are

Page 78 of 105

worth the buy in, while others are less productive and do not build to the extent that the investor expected. This investment theory of creativity views creativity in a unique perspective compared to others, by asserting that creativity might rely to some extent on the right investment of effort being added to a field at the right time in the right way.

In Diverse Cultures Creativity is viewed differently in different countries. For example, cross-cultural research centred on Hong Kong found that Westerners view creativity more in terms of the individual attributes of a creative person, such as their aesthetic taste, while Chinese people view creativity more in terms of the social influence of creative people e.g. what they can contribute to society.

Mpofu et al. surveyed 28 African languages and found that 27 had no word which directly translated to 'creativity' (the exception being Arabic). The principle of linguistic relativity, i.e. that language can affect thought, suggests that the lack of an equivalent word for 'creativity' may affect the views of creativity among speakers of such languages. However, more research would be needed to establish this, and there is certainly no suggestion that this linguistic difference makes people any less (or more) creative; Africa has a rich heritage of creative pursuits such as music, art, and storytelling. Nevertheless, it is true that there has been very little research on creativity in Africa, and there has also been very little research on creativity in Latin America.

Creativity has been more thoroughly researched in the northern hemisphere, but here again there are cultural differences, even between countries or groups of countries in close proximity. For example, in Scandinavian countries, creativity is seen as an individual attitude which helps in coping with life's challenges, while in Germany, creativity is seen more as a process that can be applied to help solve problems.

Creative Industries and Services Today, creativity forms the core activity of a growing section of the global economyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the socalled "creative industries"â&#x20AC;&#x201D;capitalistically generating (generally non-tangible) wealth through the creation and exploitation of intellectual property or through the provision of creative services.

The Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001 provides an overview of the creative industries in the UK. The creative professional workforce is becoming a more integral part of industrialized nations' economies.

Creative professions include writing, art, design, theater, television, radio, motion pictures, related crafts, as well as marketing, strategy, some aspects of scientific research and development, product development, some types of teaching and curriculum design, and more.

Since many creative professionals (actors and writers, for example) are also employed in secondary professions, estimates of creative professionals are often inaccurate. By some estimates, approximately 10 million US workers are creative professionals; depending upon the depth and breadth of the definition, this estimate may be double.

Creativity is required at all stages of the product development process, from the generation of new product ideas to their commercialization. A work environment that stimulates employee creativity is generally believed to be beneficial for a firm's new product performance. When people at any level in the organization have creative capabilities they can contribute to Page 79 of 105

innovation, despite claims that people at lower levels of an organization introduce fewer and less radical innovation. All organizational members can directly (e.g., as part of new product development (NPD) team) or indirectly contribute to product innovation, especially in less structured organizations.

In Other Professions Creativity is also seen as being increasingly important in a variety of other professions.

Architecture and industrial design are the fields most often associated with creativity, and more generally the fields of design and design research. These fields explicitly value creativity, and journals such as Design Studies have published many studies on creativity and creative problem solving.

Fields such as science and engineering have, by contrast, experienced a less explicit (but arguably no less important) relation to creativity. Simonton shows how some of the major scientific advances of the 20th century can be attributed to the creativity of individuals. This ability will also be seen as increasingly important for engineers in years to come.

Accounting has also been associated with creativity with the popular euphemism creative accounting. Although this term often implies unethical practices, Amabile has suggested that even this profession can benefit from the (ethical) application of creative thinking.

In a recent global survey of approximately 1600 CEO's, the leadership trait that was considered to be most crucial for success was creativity. This suggests that the world of business is beginning to accept that creativity is of value in a diversity of industries, rather than being simply the preserve of the creative industries. For instance, the civil service (opularly derided as wholly opposite to the creative), has benefitted from employing creative writers, from John Milton, to Anthony Trollope, to 'Flann O'Brien', who are capable of analysing the workings of their own institutions.

In Organizations It has been the topic of various research studies to establish that organizational effectiveness depends on the creativity of the workforce to a large extent. For any given organization, measures of effectiveness vary, depending upon its mission, environmental context, nature of Page 80 of 105

work, the product or service it produces, and customer demands. Thus, the first step in evaluating organizational effectiveness is to understand the organization itself — how it functions, how it is structured, and what it emphasizes.

Amabile argued that to enhance creativity in business, three components were needed:   

Expertise (technical, procedural and intellectual knowledge), Creative thinking skills (how flexibly and imaginatively people approach problems), and Motivation (especially intrinsic motivation).

There are two types of motivation:  

extrinsic motivation – external factors, for example threats of being fired or money as a reward, intrinsic motivation – comes from inside an individual, satisfaction, enjoyment of work etc.

Six managerial practices to encourage motivation are:      

Challenge – matching people with the right assignments; Freedom – giving people autonomy choosing means to achieve goals; Resources – such as time, money, space etc. There must be balance fit among resources and people; Work group features – diverse, supportive teams, where members share the excitement, willingness to help and recognize each other's talents; Supervisory encouragement – recognitions, cheering, praising; Organizational support – value emphasis, information sharing, collaboration.

Nonaka, who examined several successful Japanese companies, similarly saw creativity and knowledge creation as being important to the success of organizations. In particular, he emphasized the role that tacit knowledge has to play in the creative process.

In business, originality is not enough. The idea must also be appropriate—useful and actionable.

Creative competitive intelligence is a new solution to solve this problem. According to Reijo Siltala it links creativity to innovation process and competitive intelligence to creative workers.

Creativity can be encouraged in people and professionals and in the workplace. It is essential for innovation, and is a factor affecting economic growth and businesses.

In 2013 the sociologist Silvia Leal Martín, using the Innova 3DX method, suggested measuring the various parameters that encourage creativity and innovation: corporate culture, work environment, leadership and management, creativity, self-esteem and optimism, locus of control and learning orientation, motivation and fear.

Page 81 of 105

Economic Views of Creativity Economic approaches to creativity have focussed on three aspects — the impact of creativity on economic growth, methods of modelling markets for creativity, and the maximisation of economic creativity (innovation).

In the early 20th century, Joseph Schumpeter introduced the economic theory of creative destruction, to describe the way in which old ways of doing things are endogenously destroyed and replaced by the new. Some economists (such as Paul Romer) view creativity as an important element in the recombination of elements to produce new technologies and products and, consequently, economic growth. Creativity leads to capital, and creative products are protected by intellectual property laws.

Mark A. Runco and Daniel Rubenson have tried to describe a "psychoeconomic" model of creativity.

In such a model, creativity is the product of endowments and active investments in creativity; the costs and benefits of bringing creative activity to market determine the supply of creativity. Such an approach has been criticised for its view of creativity consumption as always having positive utility, and for the way it analyses the value of future innovations.

The creative class is seen by some to be an important driver of modern economies. In his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, economist Richard Florida popularized the notion that regions with "3 T's of economic development: Technology, Talent and Tolerance" also have high concentrations of creative professionals and tend to have a higher level of economic development.

The creative industries in Europe — including the audiovisual sector — make a significant contribution to the EU economy, creating about 3% of EU GDP — corresponding to an annual market value of €500 billion — and employing about 6 million people. In addition, the sector plays a crucial role in fostering innovation, in particular for devices and networks. The EU records the second highest TV viewing figures globally, producing more films than any other region in the world. In that respect, the newly proposed 'Creative Europe' programme will help preserve cultural heritage while increasing the circulation of creative works inside and outside the EU. The programme will play a consequential role in stimulating cross border co-operation, promoting peer learning and making these sectors more professional. The Commission will then propose a financial instrument run by the European Investment Bank to provide debt and equity

Page 82 of 105

finance for cultural and creative industries. The role of the non-state actors within the governance regarding Medias will not be neglected anymore due to a holistic approach.

Social Network View of Creativity Creativity research has long been polarized between the â&#x20AC;&#x2014;romanticâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC; view that major creative achievements are sparked by imaginative and uniquely gifted individuals at the margin of an intellectual field. Although this remains the dominant approach when examining individual creativity, an increasingly large number of studies have stressed the importance of also looking at social factors. Following this line of thought and drawing more explicitly from research by sociologists and sociopsychologists, organizational scholars have increasingly recognized the importance of the network side of individual creativity.

The key idea of this perspective is that a deeper understanding of how creative outputs are generated and become accepted can be achieved only by placing the individual within a network of interpersonal relationships. The influence of the social context in which individuals are embedded determines the range of information and opportunities available to them during the creative process. Several studies have begun to expose the network mechanisms that underlie the genesis and legitimacy of creative work.

Fostering Creativity Daniel Pink, in his 2005 book A Whole New Mind, repeating arguments posed throughout the 20th century, argues that we are entering a new age where creativity is becoming increasingly important. In this conceptual age, we will need to foster and encourage right-directed thinking (representing creativity and emotion) over left-directed thinking (representing logical, analytical thought). However, this simplification of 'right' versus 'left' brain thinking is not supported by the research data.

Nickerson provides a summary of the various creativity techniques that have been proposed.

These include approaches that have been developed by both academia and industry: 1. Establishing purpose and intention 2. Building basic skills 3. Encouraging acquisitions of domain-specific knowledge 4. Stimulating and rewarding curiosity and exploration 5. Building motivation, especially internal motivation 6. Encouraging confidence and a willingness to take risks 7. Focusing on mastery and self-competition 8. Promoting supportable beliefs about creativity 9. Providing opportunities for choice and discovery 10. Developing self-management (metacognitive skills) 11. Teaching techniques and strategies for facilitating creative performance 12. Providing balance

Page 83 of 105

Some see the conventional system of schooling as "stifling" of creativity and attempt (particularly in the pre-school/kindergarten and early school years) to provide a creativityfriendly, rich, imagination-fostering environment for young children. Researchers have seen this as important because technology is advancing our society at an unprecedented rate and creative problem solving will be needed to cope with these challenges as they arise. In addition to helping with problem solving, creativity also helps students identify problems where others have failed to do so. See the Waldorf School as an example of an education program that promotes creative thought.

Promoting intrinsic motivation and problem solving are two areas where educators can foster creativity in students. Students are more creative when they see a task as intrinsically motivating, valued for its own sake. To promote creative thinking educators need to identify what motivates their students and structure teaching around it. Providing students with a choice of activities to complete allows them to become more intrinsically motivated and therefore creative in completing the tasks.

Teaching students to solve problems that do not have well defined answers is another way to foster their creativity. This is accomplished by allowing students to explore problems and redefine them, possibly drawing on knowledge that at first may seem unrelated to the problem in order to solve it.

Several different researchers have proposed methods of increasing the creativity of an individual.

Such ideas range from the psychological-cognitive, such as Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process, Synectics, Science-based creative thinking, Purdue Creative Thinking Program, and Edward de Bono's lateral thinking; to the highly structured, such as TRIZ (the Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving) and its variant Algorithm of Inventive Problem Solving (developed by the Russian scientist Genrich Altshuller), and Computer-Aided Morphological analysis.

Page 84 of 105

Understanding and Enhancing the Creative Process with New Technologies A simple but accurate review on this new Human-Computer Interactions (HCI) angle for promoting creativity has been written by Todd Lubart, an invitation full of creative ideas to develop further this new field.

Groupware and other Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) platforms are now the stage of Network Creativity on the web or on other private networks. These tools have made more obvious the existence of a more connective, cooperative and collective nature of creativity rather than the prevailing individual one. Creativity Research on Global Virtual Teams is showing that the creative process is affected by the national identities, cognitive and conative profiles, anonymous interactions at times and many other factors affecting the teams members, depending on the early or later stages of the cooperative creative process. They are also showing how NGO's cross-cultural virtual team's innovation in Africa would also benefit from the pooling of best global practices online. Such tools enhancing cooperative creativity may have a great impact on society and as such should be tested while they are built following the Motto: "Build the Camera while shooting the film". Some European FP7 scientific programs like Paradiso are answering a need for advanced experimentally driven research including large-scale experimentation test-beds to discover the technical, societal and economic implications of such groupware and collaborative tools to the Internet.

On the other hand, creativity research may one day be pooled with a computable metalanguage like IEML from the University of Ottawa Collective Intelligence Chair, Pierre Levy. It might be a good tool to provide an interdisciplinary definition and a rather unified theory of creativity. The creative processes being highly fuzzy, the programming of cooperative tools for creativity and innovation should be adaptive and flexible. Empirical Modelling seems to be a good choice for Humanities Computing.

The Creativity and Cognition conference series, sponsored by the ACM and running since 1993, has been an important venue for publishing research on the intersection between technology and creativity. The conference now runs biennially, next taking place in 2015.

Social Attitudes Although the benefits of creativity to society as a whole have been noted, social attitudes about this topic remain divided. The wealth of literature regarding the development of creativity and the profusion of creativity techniques indicate wide acceptance, at least among academics, that creativity is desirable.

There is, however, a dark side to creativity, in that it represents a "quest for a radical autonomy apart from the constraints of social responsibility". In other words, by encouraging creativity we are encouraging a departure from society's existing norms and values. Expectation of conformity runs contrary to the spirit of creativity. Ken Robinson argues that the current education system is "educating people out of their creativity".

Page 85 of 105

Nevertheless, employers are increasingly valuing creative skills. A report by the Business Council of Australia, for example, has called for a higher level of creativity in graduates. The ability to "think outside the box" is highly sought after. However, the above-mentioned paradox may well imply that firms pay lip service to thinking outside the box while maintaining traditional, hierarchical organization structures in which individual creativity is condemned.

Page 86 of 105

Page 87 of 105

References ______ 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mindedness 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativism 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking 6. http://www.criticalreading.com/critical_reading.htm 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity 8. http://www.arn.org/realscience/kog1asample/kog-ct-chem-1a-sample.pdf 9. http://www.student.uwa.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1922502/Critical-ThinkingWhat-it-is-and-why-it-counts.pdf 10. http://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/academic-programs/legal-writingscholarship/writing-center/upload/statutoryinterpretation.pdf 11. http://www.fgcu.edu/General_Education/files/9-Critical_Thinking_Module.pdf 12. https://www.criticalthinking.org/files/Concepts_Tools.pdf 13. http://smartthinking.ir/dl/Asking%20the%20Right%20Questions,%20A%20Guide%20to %20Critical%20Thinking,%208th%20Ed.pdf 14. http://anon.eastbaymediac.m7z.net/anon.eastbaymediac.m7z.net/teachingco/CourseGuide Books/DG9344_B618F.PDF 15. http://www.mcu.usmc.mil/csc/Documents/Critical%20Thinking%20Concepts%20and%2 0Tools.pdf 16. http://courses.umass.edu/phil110-gmh/text/c01_3-99.pdf 17. http://www.unc.edu/~ramckinn/Documents/NealRameeGuide.pdf

Page 88 of 105

Notes ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________

Page 89 of 105

Notes ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________

Page 90 of 105

Page 91 of 105

Attachment A Introduction to Critical Thinking

Page 92 of 105

I

Introduction to Critical Thinking

I.1 What is critical thinking?

I.2 The tools of critical thinking I.3 Tools for getting the facts I.4 Tools for evaluating the facts

I.5 Tools for drawing a conclusion-using logic I.6 Tools for evaluating a conclusion I.7

Putting it all together-critical thinking

I.8

Building a critical thinking lens

I.9

Summary

I.10 Discussion questions

2 Chemistry connects to...

I.1 What

is critical thinking?

Humans think. You know this. Everyone, whether they seem to or not, thinks. You are thinking at this moment as you read these words. You might be thinking about where the person writing these words (me,

the author) is going with this topic on thinking. You might be thinking that this a good way to start a paragraph on

thinkingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;telling you that you think. You might be thinking

that this is a lousy way to introduce

a topic on thinking because it is

obvious you are

thinking, and you

donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need anyone

to tell you that. You might be thinking that you might

learn something new about thinking you never thought about. You

might be thinking that you already know all there is to know about thinking, and you might be wondering why you are reading this in

the first place. The point is that you are thinking right now. You think because you are human, and humans think.

Critical Thinking

Level I

Introduction

But how do you think? Yes, there is a â&#x20AC;&#x153;biology of thinkingâ&#x20AC;? or a process that is going on in your brain as chemicals are being activated and

deactivated as a result of your thinking. However, beyond biology, how do you think, and what do you think? What do you think exactly?

Do you think that you think clearly, or do you get lost in your

thinking? Do you sometimes wonder if you are the only one thinking

what you are thinking, or do you wonder if everyone thinks the way you think?

Can you think through a problem, or does it seem like thinking through a problem is the problem? Do you think that there are people who are just naturally good thinkers, like Albert Einstein? Do you think that these naturally good thinkers are the only thinkers who think and

think, and with all their gifted thinking, discover amazing things? Or do you think that you could ever learn to think like Albert Einstein,

and someday, think through and discover your own amazing things?

3

4 Chemistry connects to...

The fact is that almost anyone can learn to think like Albert Einstein.

Yes, some people pick thinking up easily, but everyone can learn to

think as well as Albert Einstein. Because everyone can learn to think

well, everyone has within him or her new thoughts that could turn into

new discoveries that are just as amazing as Albert Einsteinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s discoveries.

However, good thinking is hard work. Learning to think clearly and

carefully takes training, patience, and practice. Thinking carefully with

clarity, depth, precision, accuracy, and logic is thinking critically. Great scientists, like Albert Einstein, who discover amazing things about the world, have trained themselves to think critically. Critical thinking is the process of thinking in a certain way. Critical thinking is the

process of thinking clearly, with accuracy and precision; of thinking carefully, with logic and depth; and of thinking open-mindedly, by

examining points of view and acknowledging assumptions and biases

within a given viewpoint. The point is that everyone can learn how to think critically if the time is taken to learn.

I.2 The

tools of critical thinking

So what does it take to think critically? What are the nuts and bolts of critical thinking? Just like math or language or science, critical thinking has necessary tools and a method for using those tools.

There are two main activities we do all the time when we think. The first activity is gathering information or collecting data. As humans,

our minds are constantly observing and collecting information about the world around us. We use our five senses to gather information

Critical Thinking

Level I

Introduction

about the world we live in. We are observing the height, size, weight, color, texture, and odor of the objects around us, and we are observing these qualities in relation to each other.

The second activity we do when we think is drawing a conclusion

based on the information we’ve collected. We may conclude a building is too high to jump over, or an atom is too small to see with our

eyes, or a boulder is too heavy to lift with our hands. However, what separates a critical thinker from a non-critical thinker is how she

evaluates both the data she’s collected and the conclusions she’s drawn.

5

6 Chemistry connects to...

To evaluate both information and conclusions, the critical thinker

must use the most important tools in the critical thinking toolbox: questions. To think critically, we must ask questions about the information or data we have collected. “Is it important?” “Is it

relevant?” “Is it applicable?” “Is it significant?” But that’s not enough.

We must also ask questions about the conclusion we’ve drawn from

the information we’ve collected. We need to ask the following types of questions: “Is the conclusion fair?” “Is is it logical?” “Is it reasonable?” and “Is it consistent with all the information collected?”

There are different kinds of questions (critical thinking tools) for

different activities. There are tools for Getting the Facts, Evaluating the Facts, Drawing a Conclusion, and Evaluating the Conclusion.

I.3 Tools When you first

hear a statement or an argument, it is important

to get the facts.

If an officer has

been called to an

accident, the very

first thing he does is get the facts.

Who was involved?

How were they

for getting the facts

Critical Thinking

Level I

Introduction

involved? Which car hit first? Which car hit second? Who was driving?

Who wasn’t driving? Exactly how fast was the first car going? When

looking at something critically, it is important to collect as many facts as you can.

Tools for Getting the Facts include questions like ““Who?” “What?”

“Where?” “When?” and “How?” The facts need to be accurate, clear,

and precise. Questions that get to the details of facts, with words like “exactly,” “how much,” “what time,” etc., help to clarify the facts.

I.4 Tools for evaluating the facts Now that you know the facts, it is important to

evaluate the facts. When an officer has collected all the facts for the accident, he

needs to evaluate the facts.

Evaluating facts is not as

easy as it sounds because evaluations involve not

only facts, but also involve opinions and preferences.

For example, one driver in

the accident may claim that because there was a full

moon, the accident was the

7

8 Chemistry connects to...

other driver’s fault. It might be a fact that there was a full moon, but is this fact relevant to the accident? Is it a significant fact concerning the accident? The officer has to evaluate the facts to find out if they are facts that should or should not be used to draw a conclusion.

Tools for Evaluating the Facts include questions that explore the

relevance and significance of the facts and questions that explore whether or not the facts are substantial, crucial, or applicable to the conclusion.

I.5

Tools for drawing a conclusion-using logic

Now that we have collected the facts and evaluated the facts, we can “draw a

conclusion.” A

conclusion is a

statement that sums up all of

the information collected in

order to make a point or a

decision. But how do you

know if the conclusion

Critical Thinking

Level I

Introduction

you’ve made is valid and consistent, or logically flawed? For example, one driver might not like men in flowered shirts. This driver might

want to say that it was not the moon that caused the accident, but that it was the man in the flowered shirt that caused the accident

because “men in flowered shirts always cause accidents.” Is this true, or is the driver making a logical error?

Tools for Drawing a Conclusion use logic (a method that investigates arguments) to help the critical thinker avoid making errors by exploring validity, consistency, and logical flaws.

I.6 Tools for evaluating a conclusion Sometimes it’s not enough to have a logical conclusion. Sometimes it is necessary to evaluate your conclusion. We need to ask the following

types of questions: “Is my conclusion fair?” “Has my conclusion taken into

9

10 Chemistry connects to...

account all the information available?” “Is my conclusion reasonable?”

and “Is there more information that should be considered?” For example, the officer may conclude that the moon did not cause the accident,

and that the man in the flowered shirt did not cause the accident, but that instead, neither man was watching where he was going. One was

looking at the moon, and the other was fixing a button on his shirt; so they are both at fault. But does that conclusion take into account all the information available, or is there more information that must be considered before the officer can make a fair conclusion?

Tools for Evaluating a Conclusion include questions that explore the fairness, reasonableness, depth, and breadth of a conclusion.

I.7 Putting

it all togethercritical thinking

In summary, the four main types of critical thinking tools are: Getting the Facts, Evaluating the Facts, Drawing a Conclusion using Logic, and Evaluating a Conclusion.

As we’ve mentioned, asking questions is the key for critical thinking,

and it is important to ask questions that incorporate all of the critical thinking tools we’ve discussed. It is important that we ask questions not just of other people’s thinking, but that we also challenge, and ask questions of, our own thinking.

The critical thinking tools we’ve discussed are different kinds of

questions that explore different aspects of the information gathered,

Critical Thinking

Level I

Introduction

and that explore different aspects of the conclusions drawn from that information. Throughout this workbook, we will be asking questions using all of the critical thinking tools.

Finally, one of the most important questions you can ask another

person is, “Let me understand what you are saying. Are you saying…?”

Then in different words, repeat what you think the other person is

saying, or repeat what you think you are saying in a different way. To admit you may not understand what someone else is saying is a way to open up more critical thinking questions.

I.8 Building a critical thinking lens We have been talking about “critical thinking tools,” but what exactly do all of these critical thinking tools look like together? One way to envision all of the critical thinking tools is to think about a lens. If our eyes

do not function properly, a lens helps us see objects

more clearly. In the same way, a critical thinking lens can help you think through problems more clearly.

Constructing a critical

thinking lens is not very

11

12 Chemistry connects to...

difficult. It amounts to asking

questions using the four critical

thinking tools we have been learning.

As you improve your ability to ask

good questions, your critical thinking lens will improve. A critical thinking

lens can help you decide what kinds

of statements are scientifically valid, and what kinds of statements may not be scientifically valid.

I.9 Summary

 Critical thinking tools are questions.

 There are four main types of critical thinking tools (questions): Getting the Facts, Evaluating the Facts, Drawing a Conclusion using Logic, and Evaluating a Conclusion.

 Tools for Getting the Facts include questions like “Who?” “What?”

“Where?” “When?” and “How?”

 Tools for Evaluating the Facts include the following types of questions: “Is this fact relevant or significant?” “Is this fact

substantial, crucial, and applicable?” and “Does it support the conclusion?”

 Tools for Drawing a Conclusion use logic to help the critical thinker to avoid making errors by asking: “Is this valid and consistent with other information?” and “Are there any logical flaws in this conclusion?”

 Tools for Evaluating a Conclusion include the following types of

questions: “Is this fair and reasonable?” and “Does my conclusion have the necessary depth and breadth?”

Critical Thinking

Level I

Introduction

I.10 Discussion questions Look at the following scientific claim: The moon is made of green cheese.

Look at the critical thinking lens on page 15.

1. Can you pick out two Getting the Facts questions?   2. Can you pick out two Evaluating the Facts questions?   3. Based on the critical thinking lens, do you think that the moon is made of green cheese? Why or why not?

13

14 Chemistry connects to...

4. Have you considered enough information to draw that conclusion?

(Does your answer have depth and breadth?). If not, what other information should you consider?

Critical Thinking

Level I

Introduction

critical thinking lens

These are the thinking tools (the questions) that, together, make the critical thinking lens.

15

1

16 Chemistry connects to...

The Atom Critical Thinking

1.1 The atom 1.2 Gathering the tools 1.3 Building the critical thinking lens 1.4 Using the critical thinking lens 1.5 Now you try 1.6 Make your own

Critical Thinking

1.1 The

Level I

Chapter 1

17

atom

In chapter 1 of Chemistry Level I, you learned all about the atom.

You also read about the history of the atom and how atoms were

discovered. Now you will construct a critical thinking lens to evaluate this scientific claim:

Matter is made of atoms.

[Note: You will need to consider the information you find in your textbook and other resources as “facts” in order to complete this exercise. However, know that the “facts” in your textbook and in other resources are really conclusions that are based on many other facts that have been collected over years of investigation and that have been evaluated by many scientists. As a critical thinker, you are encouraged to examine all “facts” and to evaluate them for yourself, even those facts that have already been evaluated by other scientists.]

1.2 Gathering

the tools

First, we need to gather the critical thinking tools. The four types of tools we will be using are as follows: Tools for Getting the Facts

questions regarding clarity, precision, accuracy, and detail

Tools for Evaluating the Facts

questions regarding significance, relevancy, and application

Tools for Drawing Conclusions (using logic)

questions regarding logical validity, consistency, and flaws

Tools for Evaluating Conclusions

questions regarding fairness, depth, breadth, and reasonableness

18 Chemistry connects to...

A. Tools for Getting the Facts

questions regarding clarity, precision, accuracy, and detail

Answer the following Getting the Facts questions for the statement:

Matter is made of atoms.

1. Q: Who discovered the atom, and in what year was it discovered?

A:

2. Q: What are atoms made of?

A:

B. Tools for Evaluating the Facts

questions regarding significance, relevancy, and application

Answer the following Evaluating the Facts questions for the statement:

Matter is made of atoms.

1. Q: Is the fact that the atom was discovered significant to the A:

argument that matter is made of atoms?

2. Q: Is the data that says what atoms are made of relevant to the A:

argument that matter is made of atoms?

Critical Thinking

Level I

Chapter 1

19

C. Tools for Drawing a Conclusion (using Logic)

questions regarding logical validity, consistency, and flaws

In this section, you will learn how to recognize valid arguments and

logical fallacies. A logical fallacy is an inaccurate way to formulate an

argument. In this chapter, you will be introduced to the logical fallacy called equivocation.

Logical Fallacy: Equivocation (fallacy of ambiguity) Definition: A word or phrase used in the argument that is not clearly defined, or that changes definition during the argument.

Example: Because metal sinks in water, you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make a sink from metal.

To prevent committing the logical fallacy of equivocation, the

definitions of all of the terms in the argument must stay the same.

We are using statements of fact to support this argument:

Matter is made of atoms.

Write a definition for matter.

Write a definition for atom.

20 Chemistry connects to...

Look at the following two statements and the conclusion.

1. Atoms contain protons, neutrons, and electrons.

2. Matter contains protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Therefore (conclusion),

Matter is made of atoms.

Determine if the definitions for matter and atom stay the same.

Q: Does the conclusion that matter is made of atoms commit the fallacy of equivocation based on the information you have?

A:

Yes

No

D. Tools for Evaluating the Conclusion

questions regarding fairness, depth, breadth, and reasonableness

Answer the following Evaluating the Conclusion questions for the statement:

Matter is made of atoms.

1. Q: Is the fact that the atom was discovered significant to the A:

argument that matter is made of atoms?

2. Q: Is the data that says what atoms are made of relevant to the A:

argument that matter is made of atoms?

Critical Thinking

Level I

Chapter 1

21

1.3 Building the critical thinking lens You have gathered the facts, evaluated the facts, checked the conclusion using logic, and evaluated the conclusion:

Matter is made of atoms.

Next, put all of the facts, evaluations, and logical checks together to construct a critical thinking lens.

Write the statement you are evaluating in the critical thinking lens.

Write the two Getting the Facts critical thinking questions.

Write the two Evaluating the Facts questions.

Write two Drawing a Conclusion using Logic statements that don’t commit a logical fallacy.

Write the two Evaluating the Conclusion questions.

Matter is made of atoms.

 

 

 

 

22 Chemistry connects to...

1.4 Using the critical thinking lens Look at the critical thinking lens you constructed and think about the

answers to the critical thinking questions in your critical thinking lens.

Do you think that the statement â&#x20AC;&#x153;matter is made of atomsâ&#x20AC;? is a good scientific argument?

Why or why not?

Yes

No

Critical Thinking

1.5 Now

Level I

Chapter 1

23

you try

You run into a scientist on the street, and you start talking. He tells you his scientific opinion:

The cow jumped over the moon.

Evaluate his argument by constructing a critical thinking lens.

Tools for Getting the Facts

Write two questions regarding clarity, precision, accuracy, and detail.

  Tools for Evaluating the Facts

Write two questions regarding significance, relevancy, and application.

  Tools for Drawing Conclusions (using logic)

Write two questions regarding logical validity, consistency, and flaws.

  Tools for Evaluating Conclusions

Write two questions regarding fairness, depth, breadth, and reasonableness.

 

24 Chemistry connects to...

1.6 Make

your own

Using the questions you came up with in section 1.5, construct your own critical thinking lens.

The cow jumped over the moon.

NOTES

 

 

 

 

Attachment B Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts

Page 93 of 105

Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts Peter A. Facione The late George Carlin worked “critical thinking” into one of his comedic monologue rants on the perils of trusting our lives and fortunes to the decision-making of people who were gullible, uninformed, and unreflective. Had he lived to experience the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009, he would have surely added more to his caustic but accurate assessments regarding how failing to anticipate the consequences of one’s decisions often leads to disastrous results not only for the decision maker, but for many other people as well.

After years of viewing higher education as more of a private good which benefits only the student, we are again beginning to appreciate higher education as being also a public good which benefits society. Is it not a wiser social policy to invest in the education of the future workforce, rather than to suffer the financial costs and endure the fiscal and social burdens associated with economic

weakness, public health problems, crime, and avoidable poverty? Perhaps that realization, along with its obvious advantages for high level strategic decision making, is what lead the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to comment on critical thinking in his commencement address to a graduating class of military officers.

Teach people to make good decisions and you equip them to improve

© 1992, 1998, 2004, 2006, 2011 Peter A. Facione, Measured Reasons and The California Academic Press, Millbrae, CA Permission to Reprint for Non-Commercial Uses This essay is published by Insight Assessment. The original appeared in 1992 and has been updated many times over the years.

Although the author and the publisher hold all copyrights, in the interests of advancing education and improving critical thinking, permission is hereby granted for paper, electronic, or digital copies to be made in unlimited amounts, provided that their distribution is free of charge provided that whenever material from this essay is cited or extracted in whole or in part that appropriate citation is made by indicating this essay’s full title, author’s name, publisher’s name, year, and page or pages where it appears in this edition.

For permission for reprints intended for sale contact Insight Assessment by phone at 650-697-5628 or by email to jmorante@insightassessment.com. ISBN 13: 978-1-891557-07-1.

To support the expenses of making this essay available free for non-commercial uses, the publisher has inserted information about its critical thinking testing instruments. These tools assess the critical thinking skills and habits of mind described in this essay. To build critical thinking skills and habits of mind use Dr. Facione’s newest book THINK_Critically, Pearson Education 2011.

their own futures and become contributing members of society, rather than burdens on society. Becoming educated and practicing good judgment does not absolutely guarantee a life of happiness, virtue, or economic success, but it surely offers a better chance at those things. And it is clearly better than enduring the consequences of making bad decisions and better than burdening friends, family, and all the rest of us with the unwanted and avoidable consequences of those poor choices.

commonly used concept contains? Take care, though, we would not want to make the definition so broad that all movie violence would be automatically “offensive.”

And check to be sure your way of defining “offensive violence” fits with how the rest of the people who know and use English would understand the term. Otherwise they will not be able to understand what you mean when you use that expression.

Defining “Critical Thinking”

What you just did with the expression “offensive violence” is very much the same as what had to be done with the expression “critical thinking.” At one level we all know what “critical thinking” means — it means good thinking, almost the opposite of illogical, irrational, thinking. But when we test our understanding further, we run into questions. For example, is critical thinking the same as creative thinking, are they different, or is one part of the other? How do critical thinking and native intelligence or scholastic aptitude relate? Does critical thinking focus on the subject matter or content that you know or on the process you use when you reason about that content?

Yes, surely we have all heard business executives, policy makers, civic leaders, and educators talking about critical thinking.

At times we found ourselves wondering exactly what critical thinking was and why is it considered so useful and important. This essay takes a deeper look at these questions.

But, rather than beginning with an abstract definition – as if critical thinking were about memorization, which is not the case – give this thought experiment a try: Imagine you have been invited to a movie by a friend. But it’s not a movie you want to see. So, your friend asks you why. You give your honest reason.

The movie offends your sense of decency. Your friend asks you to clarify your reason by explaining what bothers you about the film. You reply that it is not the language used or the sexuality portrayed, but you find the violence in the film offensive.

Sure, that should be a good enough answer. But suppose your friend, perhaps being a bit philosophically inclined or simply curious or argumentative, pursues the matter further by asking you to define what you mean by “offensive violence.”

Take a minute and give it a try.

How would you define “offensive violence” as it applies to movies? Can you write a characterization which captures what this Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

Did you come up with a definition that works? How do you know?

It might not hurt at all if you formed some tentative preliminary ideas about the questions we just raised. We humans learn better when we stop frequently to reflect, rather than just plowing from the top of the page to the bottom without coming up for air.

Fine. So how would you propose we go about defining “critical thinking.” You do not really want a definition plopped on the page for you to memorize, do you? That would be silly, almost counterproductive.

The goal here is to help you sharpen your critical thinking skills and cultivate your critical thinking spirit. While memorization definitely has many valuable uses, fostering critical thinking is not among them. So, let’s look back at what you might have done to define “offensive violence” and see if we can learn from you. Did you think of some 2011 update

Page 2

scenes in movies that were offensively violent, and did you contrast them with other scenes that were either not violent or not offensively violent? If you did, good. That is one (but not the only) way to approach the problem. Technically it is called finding paradigm cases. Happily, like many things in life, you do not have to know its name to do it well.

Back to critical thinking – let’s ask ourselves to come up with possible examples of strong critical thinking? How about the adroit and clever questioning of Socrates or a good attorney or interviewer?

Or, what about the clever investigative approaches used by police detectives and crime scene analysts? Would we not want to also include people working together to solve a problem as they consider and discuss their options? How about someone who is good at listening to all sides of a dispute, considering all the facts, and then deciding what is relevant and what is not, and then rendering a thoughtful judgment?

And maybe too, someone who is able to summarize complex ideas clearly with fairness to all sides, or a person who can come up with the most coherent and justifiable explanation of what a passage of written material means? Or the person who can readily devise sensible alternatives to explore, but who does not become defensive about abandoning them if they do not work? And also the person who can explain exactly how a particular conclusion was reached, or why certain criteria apply?

Or, considering the concept of critical thinking from the opposite direction, we might ask what the consequences of failing to use our critical thinking might be.

Imagine for a moment what could happen Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

when a person or a group of people decides important matters without pausing first to think things through.

Expert Opinion An international group of experts was asked to try to form a consensus about the meaning of critical thinking.1 One of the first things they did was to ask themselves the question: Who are the best critical thinkers we know and what is it about them that leads us to consider them the best?

So, who are the best critical thinkers you know? Why do you think they are strong critical thinkers? Can you draw from those examples a description that is more abstract? For example, consider effective trial lawyers, apart from how they conduct their personal lives or whether their client is really guilty or innocent, just look at how the lawyers develop their cases in court. They use reasons to try to convince the judge and jury of their client’s claim to guilt or innocence. They offer evidence and evaluate the significance of the evidence presented by the opposition lawyers. They interpret testimony.

They analyze and evaluate the arguments advanced by the other side.

1

Many useful characterizations of critical thinking by noted theorists and teachers are captured in Conversations with Critical Thinkers , John Esterle and Dan Clurman (Eds.).

Whitman Institute. San Francisco, CA. 1993

2011 update

Page 3

Now, consider the example of the team of people trying to solve a problem.

The team members, unlike the courtroom’s adversarial situation, try to collaborate. The members of an effective team do not compete against each other. They work in concert, like colleagues, for the common goal. Unless they solve the problem, none of them has won. When they find the way to solve the problem, they all have won. So, from analyzing just two examples we can generalize something very important: critical thinking is thinking that has a purpose (proving a point, interpreting what something means, solving a problem), but critical thinking can be a collaborative, noncompetitive endeavor. And, by the way, even lawyers collaborate. They can work together on a common defense or a joint prosecution, and they can also cooperate with each other to get at the truth so that justice is done.

We will come to a more precise definition of critical thinking soon enough.

But first, there is something else we can learn from paradigm examples. When you were thinking about “offensive violence” did you come up with any examples that were tough to classify? Borderline cases, as it were — an example that one person might consider offensive but another might reasonably regard as non-offensive. Yes, well, so did we. This is going to happen with all abstract concepts. It happens with the concept of critical thinking as well.

There are people of whom we would say, on certain occasions this person is a good thinker, clear, logical, thoughtful, attentive to the facts, open to alternatives, but, wow, at other times, look out! When you get this person on such-and-such a topic, well it is all over then. You have pushed some kind of button and the person does not want to hear what anybody else has to say. The person’s mind is made up ahead of time.

New facts are pushed aside. No other point of view is tolerated.

Do you know any people that might fit that general description?

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

Good. What can we learn about critical thinking from such a case? Maybe more than we can learn from just looking at the easy cases. For when a case is on the borderline, it forces us to make important distinctions. It confronts us and demands a decision: In or Out! And not just that, but why? So, our friend who is fair-minded about some things, but close-minded about others, what to do? Let’s take the parts we approve of because they seem to us to contribute to acting rationally and logically and include those in the concept of critical thinking, and let’s take the parts that work against reason, that close the mind to the possibility of new and relevant information, that blindly deny even the possibility that the other side might have merit, and call those poor, counterproductive, or uncritical thinking.

2

Now, formulate a list of cases — people that are clearly strong critical thinkers and clearly weak critical thinkers and some who are on the borderline.

Considering all those cases, what is it about them that led you to decide which were which? Suggestion: What can the strong critical thinkers do (what mental abilities do they have), that the weak critical thinkers have trouble doing?

What skills or approaches do the strong critical thinkers 2

Spoken by the Vampire Marius in Ann Rice’s book The Vampire Lestat Ballantine Books. New York, NY. 1985.

2011 update

Page 4

habitually seem to exhibit which the weak critical thinkers seem not to possess?

Core Critical Thinking Skills Above we suggested you look for a list of mental skills and habits of mind, the experts, when faced with the same problem you are working on, refer to their lists as including cognitive skills and dispositions.

As to the cognitive skills here is what the experts include as being at the very core of critical thinking: interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and selfregulation. (We will get to the dispositions in just a second.) Did any of these words or ideas come up when you tried to characterize the cognitive skills — mental abilities — involved in critical thinking?

Quoting from the consensus statement of the national panel of experts: interpretation is “to comprehend and express the meaning or significance of a wide variety of experiences, situations, data, events, judgments, conventions, beliefs, rules, procedures, or criteria.”3 Interpretation 3

The findings of expert consensus cited or reported in this essay are published in Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction. Peter A. Facione, principle investigator, The California Academic Press, Millbrae, CA, 1990. (ERIC ED 315 423). In 1993/94 the Center for the Study of Higher

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

includes the sub-skills of categorization, decoding significance, and clarifying meaning. Can you think of examples of interpretation? How about recognizing a problem and describing it without bias?

How about reading a person’s intentions in the expression on her face; distinguishing a main idea from subordinate ideas in a text; constructing a tentative categorization or way of organizing something you are studying; paraphrasing someone’s ideas in your own words; or, clarifying what a sign, chart or graph means?

What about identifying an author’s purpose, theme, or point of view? How about what you did above when you clarified what “offensive violence” meant?

Again from the experts: analysis is “to identify the intended and actual inferential relationships among statements, questions, concepts, descriptions, or other forms of representation intended to express belief, judgment, experiences, reasons, information, or opinions.”

The experts include examining ideas, detecting arguments, and analyzing arguments as sub-skills of analysis. Again, can you come up with some examples of analysis? What about identifying the similarities and differences between two approaches to the solution of a given problem? What about picking out the main claim made in a newspaper editorial and tracing back the various reasons the editor offers in support of that claim? Or, what about identifying unstated assumptions; constructing a way to represent a main conclusion and the various reasons given to support or criticize it; sketching the relationship of sentences or paragraphs to each other and to the main Education at The Pennsylvania State University undertook a study of 200 policy-makers, employers, and faculty members from two-year and four-year colleges to determine what this group took to be the core critical thinking skills and habits of mind. The Pennsylvania State University Study, under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Jones, was funded by the US Department of Education Office of Educational Research and Instruction. The Penn State study findings, published in 1994, confirmed the expert consensus described in this paper.

2011 update

Page 5

purpose of the passage?

What about graphically organizing this essay, in your own way, knowing that its purpose is to give a preliminary idea about what critical thinking means?

The experts define evaluation as meaning “to assess the credibility of statements or other representations which are accounts or descriptions of a person’s perception, experience, situation, judgment, belief, or opinion; and to assess the logical strength of the actual or intended inferential relationships among statements, descriptions, questions or other forms of representation.” Your examples? How about judging an author’s or speaker’s credibility, comparing the strengths and weaknesses of alternative interpretations, determining the credibility of a source of information, judging if two statements contradict each other, or judging if the evidence at hand supports the conclusion being drawn?

Among the examples the experts propose are these: “recognizing the factors which make a person a credible witness regarding a given event or a credible authority with regard to a given topic,” “judging if an argument’s conclusion follows either with certainty or with a high level of confidence from its premises,” “judging the logical strength of arguments based on hypothetical situations,” “judging if a given argument is relevant or applicable or has implications for the situation at hand.”

Do the people you regard as strong critical thinkers have the three cognitive skills described so far? Are they good at interpretation, analysis, and evaluation?

What about the next three? And your examples of weak critical thinkers, are they lacking in these cognitive skills? All, or just some?

To the experts inference means “to identify and secure elements needed to draw reasonable conclusions; to form conjectures and hypotheses; to consider relevant information and to educe the consequences flowing from data, Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

statements, principles, evidence, judgments, beliefs, opinions, concepts, descriptions, questions, or other forms of representation.” As sub-skills of inference the experts list querying evidence, conjecturing alternatives, and drawing conclusions.

Can you think of some examples of inference? You might suggest things like seeing the implications of the position someone is advocating, or drawing out or constructing meaning from the elements in a reading. You may suggest that predicting what will happen next based what is known about the forces at work in a given situation, or formulating a synthesis of related ideas into a coherent perspective.

How about this: after judging that it would be useful to you to resolve a given uncertainty, developing a workable plan to gather that information? Or, when faced with a problem, developing a set of options for addressing it. What about, conducting a controlled experiment scientifically and applying the proper statistical methods to attempt to confirm or disconfirm an empirical hypothesis?

Beyond being able to interpret, analyze, evaluate and infer, strong critical thinkers can do two more things. They can explain what they think and how they arrived at that judgment. And, they can apply their powers of critical thinking to themselves and improve on their previous opinions.

These two skills are called “explanation” and “self-regulation.”

The experts define explanation as being able to present in a cogent and coherent way the results of one’s reasoning.

This means to be able to give someone a full look at the big picture: both “to state and to justify that reasoning in terms of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, and contextual considerations upon which one’s results were based; and to present one’s reasoning in the form of cogent arguments.” The sub-skills under explanation are describing methods and results, justifying procedures, proposing and defending with good reasons one’s causal 2011 update

Page 6

and conceptual explanations of events or points of view, and presenting full and wellreasoned, arguments in the context of seeking the best understandings possible.

Your examples first, please... Here are some more: to construct a chart which organizes one’s findings, to write down for future reference your current thinking on some important and complex matter, to cite the standards and contextual factors used to judge the quality of an interpretation of a text, to state research results and describe the methods and criteria used to achieve those results, to appeal to established criteria as a way of showing the reasonableness of a given judgment, to design a graphic display which accurately represents the subordinate and superordinate relationship among concepts or ideas, to cite the evidence that led you to accept or reject an author’s position on an issue, to list the factors that were considered in assigning a final course grade.

Maybe the most remarkable cognitive skill of all, however, is this next one. This one is remarkable because it allows strong critical thinkers to improve their own thinking. In a sense this is critical thinking applied to itself. Because of that some people want to call this “metacognition,” meaning it raises thinking to another level. But “another level” really does not fully capture it, because at that next level up what self-regulation does is look back at all the dimensions of critical thinking and double check itself.

Selfregulation is like a recursive function in mathematical terms, which means it can apply to everything, including itself. You can monitor and correct an interpretation you offered. You can examine and correct an inference you have drawn. You can review and reformulate one of your own explanations. You can even examine and correct your ability to examine and correct yourself! How? It is as simple as stepping back and saying to yourself, “How am I doing? Have I missed anything important?

Let me double check before I go further.”

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

The experts define self-regulation to mean “self-consciously to monitor one’s cognitive activities, the elements used in those activities, and the results educed, particularly by applying skills in analysis, and evaluation to one’s own inferential judgments with a view toward questioning, confirming, validating, or correcting either one’s reasoning or one’s results.” The two sub-skills here are self-examination and self-correction. Examples? Easy — to examine your views on a controversial issue with sensitivity to the possible influences of your personal biases or self-interest, to check yourself when listening to a speaker in order to be sure you are understanding what the person is really saying without introducing your own ideas, to monitor how well you seem to be understanding or comprehending what you are reading or experiencing, to remind yourself to separate your personal opinions and assumptions from those of the author of a passage or text, to double check yourself by recalculating the figures, to vary your reading speed and method mindful of the type of material and your purpose for reading, to reconsider your interpretation or judgment in view of further analysis of the facts of the case, to revise your answers in view of the errors you discovered in your work, to change your conclusion in view of the realization that you had misjudged the importance of certain factors when coming to your earlier decision. 4

4

The California Critical Thinking Skills Test, and the Test of Everyday Reasoning, the Health Science Reasoning Test, the Military and Defense Reasoning Profile, The Business Critical Thinking Skills Test, and the Legal Studies Reasoning Profile along with other testing instruments authored by Dr. Facione and his research team for people in K-12, college, and graduate / professional work target the core critical thinking skills identified here. These instruments are published in English and several authorized translations exclusively by Insight Assessment.

2011 update

Page 7

The Delphi Research Method The panel of experts we keep referring to included forty-six men and women from throughout the United States and Canada.

They represented many different scholarly disciplines in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and education. They participated in a research project that lasted two years and was conducted on behalf of the American Philosophical Association. Their work was

Facione, PA, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Countsâ&#x20AC;?

published under the title Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction.

(The California Academic Press, Millbrae, CA, 1990). You may download the executive summary of that report free. Visit http://www.insightassessment.com You might be wondering how such a large group of people could collaborate on

2011 update

Page 8

this project over that long a period of time and at those distances and still come to consensus. Good question. Remember we’re talking the days before e-mail.

Not only did the group have to rely on snail mail during their two-year collaboration; they also relied on a method of interaction, known as the Delphi Method, which was developed precisely to enable experts to think effectively about something over large spans of distance and time. In the Delphi Method a central investigator organizes the group and feeds them an initial question. [In this case it had to do with how college level critical thinking should be defined so that people teaching at that level would know which skills and dispositions to cultivate in their students.]

The central investigator receives all responses, summarizes them, and transmits them back to all the panelists for reactions, replies, and additional questions.

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

Wait a minute! These are all wellknown experts, so what do you do if people disagree? And what about the possible influence of a big name person? Good points. First, the central investigator takes precautions to remove names so that the panelists are not told who said what. They know who is on the panel, of course. But that is as far as it goes. After that each experts’ argument has to stand on its own merits. Second, an expert is only as good as the arguments she or he gives. So, the central investigator summarizes the arguments and lets the panelists decide if they accept them or not. When consensus appears to be at hand, the central investigator proposes this and asks if people agree.

If not, then points of disagreement among the experts are registered. We want to share with you one important example of each of these. First we will describe the expert consensus view of the dispositions which are absolutely vital to strong critical thinking. Then we will note a point of separation among the experts.

2011 update

Page 9

The Disposition Thinking

Toward

Critical

What kind of a person would be apt to use their critical thinking skills? The experts poetically describe such a person as having “a critical spirit.” Having a critical spirit does not mean that the person is always negative and hypercritical of everyone and everything.

The experts use the metaphorical phrase critical spirit in a positive sense. By it they mean “a probing inquisitiveness, a keenness of mind, a zealous dedication to reason, and a hunger or eagerness for reliable information.”

Almost sounds like Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor or Sherlock Holmes The kind of person being described here is the kind that always wants to ask “Why?” or “How?” or “What happens if?”.

The one key difference, however, is that in fiction Sherlock always solves the mystery, while in the real world there is no guarantee.

Critical thinking is about how you approach problems, questions, issues. It is the best way we know of to get to the truth. But! There still are no guarantees — no answers in the back of the book of real life. Does this characterization, that strong critical thinkers possess a “critical spirit, a probing inquisitiveness, a keenness of mind...” fit with your examples of people you would call strong critical thinkers?

But, you might say, I know people who have skills but do not use them. We cannot call someone a strong critical thinker just because she or he has these cognitive skills, however important they might be, because what if they just do not bother to apply them?

One response is to say that it is hard to imagine an accomplished dancer who never dances. After working to develop those skills it seems such a shame to let

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

them grow weak with lack of practice. But dancers get tired. And they surrender to the stiffness of age or the fear of injury. In the case of critical thinking skills, we might argue that not using them once you have them is hard to imagine. It’s hard to imagine a person deciding not to think.

Considered as a form of thoughtful judgment or reflective decision-making, in a very real sense critical thinking is pervasive. There is hardly a time or a place where it would not seem to be of potential value. As long as people have purposes in mind and wish to judge how to accomplish them, as long as people wonder what is true and what is not, what to believe and what to reject, strong critical thinking is going to be necessary.

And yet weird things happen, so it is probably true that some people might let their thinking skills grow dull. It is easier to imagine times when people are just too tired, too lax, or too frightened. But imagine it you can, Young Skywalker, so there has

to be more to critical thinking than just the list of cognitive skills. Human beings are more than thinking machines. And this brings us back to those all-important attitudes which the experts called “dispositions.”

The experts were persuaded that critical thinking is a pervasive and purposeful human phenomenon. The ideal critical thinker can be characterized not merely by her or his cognitive skills but also by how she or he approaches life and living in general. This is a bold claim. Critical 2011 update

Page 10

thinking goes way beyond the classroom.

In fact, many of the experts fear that some of the things people experience in school are actually harmful to the development and cultivation of strong critical thinking. Critical thinking came before schooling was ever invented, it lies at the very roots of civilization. It is a corner stone in the journey human kind is taking from beastly savagery to global sensitivity. Consider what life would be like without the things on this list and we think you will understand.

The approaches to life and living which characterize critical thinking include: * * * * * * * * * * * *

inquisitiveness with regard to a wide range of issues, concern to become and remain well-informed, alertness to opportunities to use critical thinking, trust in the processes of reasoned inquiry, self-confidence in one’s own abilities to reason, open-mindedness regarding divergent world views, flexibility in considering alternatives and opinions understanding of the opinions of other people, fair-mindedness in appraising reasoning, honesty in facing one’s own biases, prejudices, stereotypes, or egocentric tendencies, prudence in suspending, making or altering judgments, willingness to reconsider and revise views where honest reflection suggests that change is warranted.

What would someone be like who lacked those dispositions?

It might be someone who does not care about much of anything, is not interested in the facts, prefers not to think, mistrusts reasoning as a way of finding things out or solving problems, holds his or her own reasoning abilities in low esteem, is close-minded, inflexible, insensitive, cannot understand what others think, is unfair when it comes to judging the quality of arguments, denies his or her own biases, jumps to conclusions or delays too long in making judgments, and never is willing to reconsider an opinion.

Not someone

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

prudent people would want to ask to manage their investments!

The experts went beyond approaches to life and living in general to emphasize that strong critical thinkers can also be described in terms of how they approach specific issues, questions, or problems. The experts said you would find these sorts of characteristics: * * * * * * *

clarity in stating the question or concern, orderliness in working with complexity, diligence in seeking relevant information, reasonableness in selecting and applying criteria, care in focusing attention on the concern at hand, persistence though difficulties are encountered, precision to the degree permitted by the subject and the circumstances.

So, how would a weak critical thinker approach specific problems or issues?

Obviously, by being muddle-headed about what he or she is doing, disorganized and overly simplistic, spotty about getting the facts, apt to apply unreasonable criteria, easily distracted, ready to give up at the least hint of difficulty, intent on a solution that is more detailed than is possible, or being satisfied with an overly generalized and uselessly vague response. Remind you of anyone you know?

Someone positively disposed toward using critical thinking would probably agree with statements like these: “I hate talk shows where people shout their opinions but never give any reasons at all.”

“Figuring out what people really mean by what they say is important to me."

“I always do better in jobs where I'm expected to think things out for myself.”

“I hold off making decisions until I have thought through my options.”

“Rather than relying on someone else's notes, I prefer to read the material myself.”

“I try to see the merit in another’s opinion, even if I reject it later.”

“Even if a problem is tougher than I expected, I will keep working on it.”

“Making intelligent decisions is more important than winning arguments.”

2011 update

Page 11

A person disposed to be averse or hostile toward using critical thinking would probably disagree with the statements above but be likely to agree with these: “I prefer jobs where the supervisor says exactly what to do and exactly how to do it."

“No matter how complex the problem, you can bet there will be a simple solution.”

"I don't waste time looking things up."

“I hate when teachers discuss problems instead of just giving the answers.”

“If my belief is truly sincere, evidence to the contrary is irrelevant."

“Selling an idea is like selling cars, you say whatever works."

We used the expression “strong critical thinker” to contrast with the expression “weak critical thinker.” But you will find people who drop the adjective “strong” (or “good”) and just say that someone is a “critical thinker” or not. It is like saying that a soccer (European “football”) player is a “defender” or “not a defender”, instead of saying the player’s skills at playing defense are strong or weak.

People use the word “defender” in place of the phrase “is good at playing defense.”

Similarly, people use “critical thinker” in Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

place of “is a strong critical thinker” or “has strong critical thinking skills.” This is not only a helpful conversational shortcut, it suggests that to many people “critical thinker” has a laudatory sense. The word can be used to praise someone at the same time that it identifies the person, as in “Look at that play. That’s what I call a defender!”

“If we were compelled to make a choice between these personal attributes and knowledge about the principles of logical reasoning together with some degree of technical skill in manipulating special logical processes, we should decide for the former.”

John Dewey, How We Think, 1909. Republished as How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educational Process. D. C. Heath Publishing. Lexington, MA. 1933.

We said the experts did not come to full agreement on something. That thing has to do with the concept of a “strong critical thinker.” This time the emphasis is on the word “good” because of a crucial

2011 update

Page 12

ambiguity it contains. A person can be good at critical thinking, meaning that the person can have the appropriate dispositions and be adept at the cognitive processes, while still not being a good (in the moral sense) critical thinker.

For example, a person can be adept at developing arguments and then, unethically, use this skill to mislead and exploit a gullible person, perpetrate a fraud, or deliberately confuse and confound, and frustrate a project.

would prefer to think that critical thinking, by its very nature, is inconsistent with the kinds of unethical and deliberately counterproductive examples given. They find it hard to imagine a person who was good at critical thinking not also being good in the broader personal and social sense.

In other words, if a person were “really” a “strong critical thinker” in the procedural sense and if the person had all the appropriate dispositions, then the person simply would not do those kinds of exploitive and aggravating things.

The experts were faced with an interesting problem.

Some, a minority,

This self-rating form also appears in Chapter 3 of Think Critically, Pearson Education, 2011. For a fuller and more robust measure of critical thinking dispositions see the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI) by Facione and Facione, published in 1992, by Insight Assessment.

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

2011 update

Page 13

The large majority, however, hold the opposite judgment. They are firm in the view that strong critical thinking has nothing to do with any given set of cultural beliefs, religious tenants, ethical values, social mores, political orientations, or orthodoxies of any kind. Rather, the commitment one makes as a strong critical thinker is to always seek the truth with objectivity, integrity, and fair-mindedness. The majority of experts maintain that critical thinking conceived of as we have described it above, is, regrettably, not inconsistent with abusing one’s knowledge, skills, or power. There have been people with superior thinking skills and strong habits of mind who, unfortunately, have used their talents for ruthless, horrific, and immoral purposes.

Would that it were not so! Would that experience, knowledge, mental horsepower, and ethical virtue were all one and the same. But from the time of Socrates, if not thousands of years before that, humans have known that many of us have one or more of these without having the full set.

Any tool, any approach to situations, can go either way, ethically speaking, depending on the character, integrity, and principles of the persons who possess them. So, in the final analysis the majority of experts maintained that we cannot say a person is not thinking critically simply because we disapprove ethically of what the person is doing. The majority concluded that, “what ‘critical thinking’ means, why it is of value, and the ethics of its use are best regarded as three distinct concerns.”

Perhaps this realization forms part of the basis for why people these days are demanding a broader range of learning outcomes from our schools and colleges.

“Knowledge and skills,” the staples of the educational philosophy of the mid-twentieth century, are not sufficient. We must look to a broader set of outcomes including habits of mind and dispositions, such as civic engagement, concern for the common good, and social responsibility.

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

“Thinking” in Popular Culture We have said so many good things about critical thinking that you might have the impression that “critical thinking” and “good thinking” mean the same thing. But that is not what the experts said. They see critical thinking as making up part of what we mean by good thinking, but not as being the only kind of good thinking. For example, they would have included creative thinking as part of good thinking.

Creative or innovative thinking is the kind of thinking that leads to new insights, novel approaches, fresh perspectives, whole new ways of understanding and conceiving of things.

The products of creative thought include some obvious things like music, poetry, dance, dramatic literature, inventions, and technical innovations. But there are some not so obvious examples as well, such as ways of putting a question that expand the horizons of possible solutions, or ways of conceiving of relationships which challenge presuppositions and lead one to see the world in imaginative and different ways.

The experts working on the concept of critical thinking wisely left open the entire question of what the other forms good thinking might take. Creative thinking is only one example. There is a kind of purposive, kinetic thinking that instantly coordinates movement and intention as, for example, when an athlete dribbles a soccer ball down the field during a match. There is a kind of meditative thinking which may lead to a sense of inner peace or to profound insights about human existence.

In contrast, there is a kind of hyper-alert, instinctive thinking needed by soldiers in battle. In the context of popular culture one finds people proposing all kinds of thinking or this-kind of intelligence or that-kind of intelligence. Some times it is hard to sort out the science from the pseudo-science – the kernel of enduring truth from the latest cocktail party banter.

2011 update

Page 14

“Thinking” in Cognitive Science Theories emerging from more scientific studies of human thinking and decisionmaking in recent years propose that thinking is more integrated and less dualistic than the notions in popular culture suggest. We should be cautious about proposals suggesting oversimplified ways of understanding how humans think. We should avoid harsh, rigid dichotomies such as “reason vs. emotion,” “intuitive vs. linear,” “creativity vs. criticality,” “right brained vs. left brained,” “as on Mars vs. as on Venus.”

There is often a kernel of wisdom in popular beliefs, and perhaps that gem this time is the realization that some times we decide things very quickly almost as spontaneous, intuitive, reactions to the situation at hand. Many accidents on the freeways of this nation are avoided Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

precisely because drivers are able to see and react to dangerous situations so quickly. Many good decisions which feel intuitive are really the fruit of expertise.

Decisions good drivers make in those moments of crisis, just like the decisions which practiced athletes make in the flow of a game or the decisions that a gifted teacher makes as she or he interacts with students, are borne of expertise, training, and practice.

At the same time that we are immersed in the world around us and in our daily lives, constantly making decisions unreflectively, we may also be thinking quite reflectively about something. Perhaps we’re worried about a decision which we have to make about an important project at work, or about a personal relationship, or about a legal matter, whatever. We gather information, consider our options, explore 2011 update

Page 15

possibilities, formulate some thoughts about what we propose to do and why this choice is the right one. In other words, we make a purposeful, reflective judgment about what to believe or what to do – precisely the kind of judgment which is the focus of critical thinking.

Recent integrative models of human decision-making propose that the thinking processes of our species is not best described as a conflictive duality as in “intuitive vs. reflective” but rather an integrative functioning of two mutually supportive systems “intuitive and reflective.”

These two systems of thinking are present in all of us and can act in parallel to process cognitively the matters over which we are deciding.

One system is more intuitive, reactive, quick and holistic. So as not to confuse things with the notions of thinking in popular culture, cognitive scientists often name this system, “System 1.” The other (yes, you can guess its name) is more deliberative, reflective, computational and rule governed. You are right, it is called “System 2.”

In System 1 thinking, one relies heavily on a number of heuristics (cognitive maneuvers), key situational characteristics, readily associated ideas, and vivid memories to arrive quickly and confidently at a judgment. System 1 thinking is particularly helpful in familiar situations when time is short and immediate action is required.

While System 1 is functioning, another powerful system is also at work, that is, unless we shut it down by abusing alcohol or drugs, or with fear or indifference.

Called “System 2,” this is our more reflective thinking system. It is useful for making judgments when you find yourself in unfamiliar situations and have more time to figure things out. It allows us to process abstract concepts, to deliberate, to plan ahead, to consider options carefully, to Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

review and revise our work in the light of relevant guidelines or standards or rules of procedure. While System 2 decisions are also influenced by the correct or incorrect application of heuristic maneuvers, this is the system which relies on well articulated reasons and more fully developed evidence.

It is reasoning based on what we have learned through careful analysis, evaluation, explanation, and self-correction. This is the system which values intellectual honesty, analytically anticipating what happens next, maturity of judgment, fair-mindedness, elimination of biases, and truth-seeking.

This is the system which we rely on to think carefully trough complex, novel, highstakes, and highly integrative problems.5 Educators urge us to improve critical thinking skills and to reinforce disposition to use those skills because is perhaps the best way to develop refine our System 2 reasoning.

our our that and

System 1 and System 2 are both believed to be vital decision-making tools when stakes are high and when uncertainty is an issue. Each of these two cognitive systems are believed to be capable of functioning to monitor and potentially override the other. This is one of the ways our species reduces the chance of making foolish, sub-optimal or even dangerous errors in judgment. Human thinking is far from perfect. Even a good thinker makes both System 1 and 2 errors. At times we misinterpret things, or we get our facts wrong, and we make mistakes as a result.

5

Chapters 9 and 10 of Think Critically, Pearson Education, 2011, locate critical thinking within this integrative model of thinking. The cognitive heuristics, which will be described next, and the human capacity to derive sustained confidence decisions (right or wrong),-- known as “dominance structuring,” – are presented there too. There are lots of useful exercises and examples in that book. You may also wish to consult the references listed at the end of this essay.

The material presented in this section is derived from these books and related publications by many of these same authors and others working to scientifically explain how humans actually make decisions.

2011 update

Page 16

But often our errors are directly related to the influences and misapplications of cognitive heuristics. Because we share the propensity to use these heuristics as we make decisions, let’s examine how some of them influence us.

Cognitive heuristics are thinking maneuvers which, at times, appear to be almost hardwired into our species. They influence both systems of thinking, the intuitive thinking of System 1 and the reflective reasoning of System 2. Five heuristics often seem to be more frequently operating in our System 1 reasoning are known as availability, affect, association, simulation, and similarity.

Availability, the coming to mind of a story or vivid memory of something that happened to you or to someone close to you, inclines a person make inaccurate estimates of the likelihood of that thing’s happening again. People tell stories of things that happened to themselves or their friends all the time as a way of explaining their own decisions. The stories may not be scientifically representative, the events may be mistaken, misunderstood, or misinterpreted. But all that aside, the power of the story is to guide, often in a good way, the decision toward one choice rather than another.

The Affect heuristic operates when you have an immediate positive or an Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

negative reaction to some idea, proposal, person, object, whatever. Sometimes called a “gut reaction” this affective response sets up an initial orientation in us, positive or negative, toward the object. It takes a lot of System 2 reasoning to overcome a powerful affective response to an idea, but it can be done. And at times it should be, because there is no guarantee that your gut reaction is always right.

The Association heuristic is operating when one word or idea reminds us of something else. For example, some people associate the word “cancer” with “death.” Some associate “sunshine” with “happiness.” These kinds of associational reasoning responses can be helpful at times, as for example if associating cancer with death leads you not to smoke and to go in for regular checkups. At other times the same association may influence a person to make an unwise decision, as for example if associating “cancer” with “death” were to lead you to be so fearful and pessimistic that you do not seek diagnosis and treatment of a worrisome cancer symptom until it was really too late to do anything.

The Simulation heuristic is working when you are imagining how various scenarios will unfold. People often imagine how a conversation will go, or how they will be treated by someone else when they meet the person, or what their friends or boss or lover will say and do when they have to address some difficult issue. These simulations, like movies in our heads, help us prepare and do a better job when the difficult moment arrives. But they can also lead us to have mistaken expectations.

People may not respond as we imagined, things may go much differently.

Our preparations may fail us because the ease of our simulation misled us into thinking that things would have to go as we had imagined them. And they did not.

The Similarity heuristic operates when we notice some way in which we are like someone else and infer that what 2011 update

Page 17

happened to that person is therefore more likely to happen to us.

The similarity heuristic functions much like an analogical argument or metaphorical model.

The similarity we focus on might be fundamental and relevant, which would make the inference more warranted. For example, the boss fired your coworker for missing sales targets and you draw the reasonable conclusion that if you miss your sales targets you’ll be fired too. Or the similarity that comes to mind might be superficial or not connected with the outcome, which would make the inference unwarranted. For example you see a TV commercial showing trim-figured young people enjoying fattening fast foods and infer that because you’re young too you can indulge your cravings for fast foods without gaining a lot of excess unsightly poundage.

Heuristics and biases often appearing to be somewhat more associated with System 2 thinking include: satisficing, risk/loss aversion, anchoring with adjustment, and the illusion of control.

Satisficing occurs as we consider our alternatives. When we come to one which is good enough to fulfill our objectives we often regard ourselves as having completed our deliberations.

We have satisficed. And why not? The choice is, after all, good enough. It may not be perfect, it may not be optimal, it may not even be the best among the options available. But it is good enough. Time to decide and move forward.

The running mate of satisficing is temporizing. Temporizing is deciding that the option which we have come to is “good enough for now.” We often move through life satisficing and temporizing. At times we look back on our situations and wonder why it is that we have settled for far less than we might have. If we had only studied harder, worked out a little more, taken better care of ourselves and our relationships, perhaps we would not be living as we are now. But, at

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

the time each of the decisions along the way was “good enough for the time being.”

We are by nature a species that is averse to risk and loss. Often we make decisions on the basis of what we are too worried about losing, rather than on the basis of what we might gain. This works out to be a rather serviceable approach in many circumstances. People do not want to lose control, they do not want to lose their freedom, they do not want to lose their lives, their families, their jobs, their possessions.

High stakes gambling is best left to those who can afford to lose the money. Las Vegas didn’t build all those multi-million dollar casino hotels because vacationers are winning all the time! And so, in real life, we take precautions.

We avoid unnecessary risks. The odds may not be stacked against us, but the consequences of losing at times are so great that we would prefer to forego the possibilities of gain in order not to lose what we have. And yet, on occasion this can be a most unfortunate decision too. History has shown time and time again that businesses which avoid risks often are unable to compete successfully with those willing to move more boldly into new markets or into new product lines.

Any heuristic is only a maneuver, perhaps a shortcut or impulse to think or act in one way rather than another, but certainly not a failsafe rule. It may work out well much of the time to rely on the heuristic, but it will not work out for the best all of the time.

For example, people with something to lose tend toward conservative choices politically as well as economically. Nothing wrong with that necessarily.

Just an observation about the influence of Loss Aversion heuristic on actual decision making. We are more apt to endure the status quo, even as it slowly deteriorates, than we are to call for “radical” change.

Regrettably, however, when the call for change comes, it often requires a far 2011 update

Page 18

greater upheaval to make the necessary transformations, or, on occasion, the situation has deteriorated beyond the point of no return. In those situations we find ourselves wondering why we waited so long before doing something.

The heuristic known as Anchoring with Adjustment is operative when we find ourselves making evaluative judgments.

The natural thing for us to do is to locate or anchor our evaluation at some point along whatever scale we are using. For example, a professor says that the student’s paper is a C+. Then, as other information comes our way, we may adjust that judgment. The professor, for example, may decide that the paper is as good as some others that were given a B-, and so adjust the grade upward.

The interesting thing about this heuristic, is that we do not normally start over with a fresh evaluation. We have dropped anchor and we may drag it upward or downward a bit, but we do not pull it off the bottom of the sea to relocate our evaluation.

First impressions, as the saying goes, cannot be undone. The good thing about this heuristic is that it permits us to move on. We have done the evaluation; there are other papers to grade, other projects to do, other things in life that need attention. We could not long endure if we had to constantly re-evaluate every thing anew. The unfortunate thing about this heuristic is that we sometimes drop anchor in the wrong place; we have a hard time giving people a second chance at making a good first impression.

The heuristic known as Illusion of Control is evident in many situations. Many of us over-estimate our abilities to control what will happen. We make plans for how we are going to do this or that, say this or that, manipulate the situation this way or that way, share or not share this information or that possibility, all the time thinking that some how our petty plans will enable us to control what happens. We act as if others are dancing on the ends of the strings that we are pulling, when in actuality the influences our words or actions have on Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

future events may be quite negligible. At times we do have some measure of control.

For example we may exercise, not smoke, and watch our diet in order to be more fit and healthy. We are careful not to drink if we are planning to drive so that we reduce the risks of being involved in a traffic accident.

But at times we simply are mistaken about our ability to actually exercise full control over a situation. Sadly we might become ill even if we do work hard to take good care of ourselves. Or we may be involved in an accident even if we are sober. Our business may fail even if we work very hard to make it a success. We may not do as well on an exam as we might hope even if we study hard.

Related to the Illusion of Control heuristic is the tendency to misconstrue our personal influence or responsibility for past events. This is called Hindsight Bias. We may over-estimate the influence our actions have had on events when things go right, or we may underestimate our responsibility or culpability when things go wrong. We have all heard people bragging about how they did this and how they did that and, as a result, such and such wonderful things happened. We made these great plans and look how well our business did financially.

Which may be true when the economy is strong; but not when the economy is failing.

It is not clear how much of that success came from the planning and how much came from the general business environment. Or, we have all been in the room when it was time to own up for some thing that went wrong and thought to ourselves, hey, I may have had some part in this, but it was not entirely my fault. “It wasn’t my fault the children were late for school, hey I was dressed and ready to go at the regular time.” As if seeing that the family was running late I had no responsibility to take some initiative and help out.

2011 update

Page 19

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome.”

Albert Einstein Research on our shared heuristic patterns of decision-making does not aim to evaluate these patterns as necessarily good or bad patterns of thinking. I fear that my wording of them above may not have been as entirely neutral and descriptive as perhaps it should have been. In truth, reliance on heuristics can be an efficient ways of deciding things, given how very complicated our lives are.

We cannot devote maximal cognitive resources to every single decision we make.

Those of us who study these heuristic thinking phenomena are simply trying to document how we humans do think. There are many useful purposes for doing this. For example, if we find that people repeatedly make a given kind of mistake when thinking about a commonly experienced problem, then we might find ways to intervene and to help ourselves not repeat that error over and over again.

This research on the actual patterns of thinking used by individuals and by groups might prove particularly valuable to those who seek interventions which could improve how we make our own heath care decisions, how we make business decisions, how we lead teams of people to work more effectively in collaborative settings, and the like.

Popular culture offers one other myth about decision-making which is worth questioning. And that is the belief that when we make reflective decisions we carefully weigh each of our options, giving due consideration to all of them in turn, before deciding which we will adopt. Although perhaps it should be, research on human decision-making shows that this simply is

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

not what happens.6 When seeking to explain how people decide on an option with such conviction that they stick to their decision over time and with such confidence that they act on that decision, the concept that what we do is build a Dominance Structure has been put forth. In a nutshell this theory suggests that when we settle on a particular option which is good enough we tend to elevate its merits and diminish its flaws relative to the other options. We raise it up in our minds until it becomes for us the dominant option.

In this way, as our decision takes shape, we gain confidence in our choice and we feel justified in dismissing the other options, even though the objective distance between any of them and our dominant option may not be very great at all. But we become invested in our dominant option to the extent that we are able to put the other possibilities aside and act on the basis of our choice. In fact, it comes to dominate the other options in our minds so much that we are able to sustain our decision to act over a period of time, rather than going back to re-evaluate or reconsider constantly. Understanding the natural phenomenon of dominance structuring can help us appreciate why it can be so difficult for us to get others to change their minds, or why it seems that our reasons for our decisions are so much better than any of the objections which others might make to our decisions. This is not to say that we are right or wrong.

Rather, this is only to observe that human beings are capable of unconsciously building up defenses around their choices which can result in the warranted or unwarranted confidence to act on the basis of those choices.

6

Henry Montgomery, “From cognition to action: The search for dominance in decision making.” In Process and Structure in Human Decision-Making, Montgomery H, Svenson O (Eds). John Wiley & Sons: Chichester, UK, 1989. For a more accessible description along with reflective exercises on how to avoid becoming “locked in” to a poor decision prematurely, see chapter 10 of Think Critically.

2011 update

Page 20

Realizing the power of dominance structuring, one can only be more committed to the importance of education and critical thinking. We should do all that we can to inform ourselves fully and to reflect carefully on our choices before we make them, because we are, after all, human and we are as likely as the next person to believe that we are right and they are wrong once the dominance structure begins to be erected. Breaking through that to fix bad decisions, which is possible, can be much harder than getting things right in the first place.

There are more heuristics than only those mentioned above. There is more to learn about dominance structuring as it occurs in groups as well as in individuals, and how to mitigate the problems which may arise by prematurely settling on a “good enough” option, or about how to craft educational programs or interventions which help people be more effective in their System 1 and System 2 thinking. There is much to learn about human thinking and how to optimize it in individuals of different ages; how to optimize the thinking of groups of peers and groups where organizational hierarchies influence interpersonal dynamics. And, happily, there is a lot we know today about human thinking and decision-making that we did not know a few years ago.

Why critical thinking?

Let us start with you first. Why would critical thinking be of value to you to have the cognitive skills of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation?

Apart from, or maybe in light of, what we said at the beginning of this essay about the utility of positive critical thinking and about the problems that failures of critical thinking contribute to, why would it be of value to you to learn to approach life and to approach specific concerns with the critical thinking dispositions listed above? Would Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

you have greater success in your work?

Would you get better grades?

Actually the answer to the grades question, scientifically speaking, is very possibly, Yes! A study of over 1100 college students shows that scores on a college level critical thinking skills test significantly correlated with college GPA.7 It has also been shown that critical thinking skills can be learned, which suggests that as one learns them one’s GPA might well improve.

In further support of this hypothesis is the significant correlation between critical thinking and reading comprehension.

Improvements in the one are paralleled by improvements in the other. Now if you can read better and think better, might you not do better in your classes, learn more, and get better grades. It is, to say the least, very plausible.

Learning, Critical Thinking, and Our Nation’s Future “The future now belongs to societies that organize themselves for learning... nations that want high incomes and full employment must develop policies that emphasize the acquisition of knowledge and skills by everyone, not just a select few.”

Ray Marshall & Marc Tucker, Thinking For A Living: Education And The Wealth of Nations, Basic Books. New York. 1992.

But what a limited benefit — better grades. Who really cares in the long run?

Two years after college, five years out, what does GPA really mean? Right now college 7

Findings regarding the effectiveness of critical thinking instruction, and correlations with GPA and reading ability are reported in “Technical Report #1, Experimental Validation and Content Validity” (ERIC ED 327 549), “Technical Report #2, Factors Predictive of CT Skills” (ERIC ED 327 550), and “Gender, Ethnicity, Major, CT Self-Esteem, and the California Critical Thinking Skills Test” (ERIC ED 326 584). These findings remain consistent in research using the tools in the California Critical Thinking Skills Test family of instruments published by Insight Assessment.

2011 update

Page 21

level technical and professional programs have a half-life of about four years, which means that the technical content is expanding so fast and changing so much that in about four years after graduation your professional training will be in serious need of renewal. So, if the only thing a college is good for is to get the entry level training and the credential needed for some job, then college would be a time-limited value.

The APA Delphi Report, Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction 1990 ERIC Doc. NO.: ED 315 423

Is that the whole story? A job is a good thing, but is that what a college education is all about, getting started in a good job? Maybe some cannot see its further value, but many do.

A main purpose, if not the main purpose, of the collegiate experience, at either the two-year or the four-year level, is to achieve what people have called a “liberal education.”

Not liberal in the sense of a smattering of this and that for no particular purpose except to fulfill the unit requirement. But liberal in the sense of “liberating.” And who is being liberated? You! Liberated from a kind of slavery. But from whom?

From professors.

Actually from dependence on professors so that they no longer stand as infallible authorities delivering opinions beyond our capacity to

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

challenge, question, and dissent. In fact, this is exactly what the professors want.

They want their students to excel on their own, to go beyond what is currently known, to make their own contributions to knowledge and to society.

[Being a professor is a curious job — the more effective you are as a teacher, less your students require your aid in learning.]

Liberal education is about learning to learn, which means learning to think for yourself on your own and in collaboration with others.

Liberal education leads us away from naive acceptance of authority, above self-defeating relativism, and beyond ambiguous contextualism. It culminates in principled reflective judgment.

Learning critical thinking, cultivating the critical spirit, is not just a means to this end, it is part of the goal itself. People who are weak critical thinkers, who lack the dispositions and skills described, cannot be said to be liberally educated, regardless of the academic degrees they may hold.

Yes, there is much more to a liberal education, than critical thinking. There is an understanding of the methods, principles, theories and ways of achieving knowledge which are proper to the different intellectual realms. There is an encounter with the cultural, artistic and spiritual dimensions of life. There is the evolution of one’s decision making to the level of principled integrity and concern for the common good and social justice. There is the realization of the ways all our lives are shaped by global as well as local political, social, psychological, economic, environmental, and physical forces. There is the growth that comes from the interaction with cultures, languages, ethnic groups, religions, nationalities, and social classes other than one’s own. There is the refinement of one’s humane sensibilities through reflection on the recurring questions of human existence, meaning, love, life and death. There is the sensitivity, appreciation and critical 2011 update

Page 22

appraisal of all that is good and all that is bad in the human condition. As the mind awakens and matures, and the proper nurturing and educational nourishment is provided, these others central parts of a liberal education develop as well. Critical thinking plays an essential role in achieving these purposes.

Any thing else? What about going beyond the individual to the community?

scale economic disaster would become extremely likely. So, given a society that does not value and cultivate critical thinking, we might reasonably expect that in time the judicial system and the economic system would collapse. And, in such a society, one that does not liberate its citizens by teaching them to think critically for themselves, it would be madness to advocate democratic forms of government.

The experts say critical thinking is fundamental to, if not essential for, “a rational and democratic society.” What might the experts mean by this?

Well, how wise would democracy be if people abandoned critical thinking?

Imagine an electorate that cared not for the facts, that did not wish to consider the pros and cons of the issues, or if they did, had not the brain power to do so. Imagine your life and the lives of your friends and family placed in the hands of juries and judges who let their biases and stereotypes govern their decisions, who do not attend to the evidence, who are not interested in reasoned inquiry, who do not know how to draw an inference or evaluate one. Without critical thinking people would be more easily exploited not only politically but economically. The impact of abandoning critical thinking would not be confined to the micro-economics of the household checking account. Suppose the people involved in international commerce were lacking in critical thinking skills, they would be unable to analyze and interpret the market trends, evaluate the implications of interest fluctuations, or explain the potential impact of those factors which influence large scale production and distribution of goods and materials. Suppose these people were unable to draw the proper inferences from the economic facts, or unable to properly evaluate the claims made by the unscrupulous and misinformed. In such a situation serious economic mistakes would be made. Whole sectors of the economy would become unpredictable and large Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

Is it any wonder that business and civic leaders are maybe even more interested in critical thinking than educators? Critical thinking employed by an informed citizenry is a necessary condition for the success of democratic institutions and for competitive free-market economic enterprise. These values are so important that it is in the national interest that we should try to educate all citizens so that they can learn to think critically. Not just for their personal good, but for the good of the rest of us too.

Generalizing, imagine a society, say, for example, the millions of people living in the Los Angeles basin, or in New York and along the east coast, or in Chicago, or Mexico City, Cairo, Rome, Tokyo, Baghdad, Moscow, Beijing, or Hong Kong. They are, de facto, entirely dependent upon one another, and on hundreds of thousands of other people as well for their external supplies of food and water, for their survival.

Now imagine that these millions permitted their schools and colleges to stop teaching people how to think critically and effectively.

2011 update

Page 23

Imagine that because of war, or AIDS, or famine, or religious conviction, parents could not or would not teach their children how to think critically. Imagine the social and political strife, the falling apart of fundamental systems of public safety and public health, the loss of any scientific understanding of disease control or agricultural productivity, the emergence of paramilitary gangs, strong men, and petty warlords seeking to protect themselves and their own by acquiring control over what food and resources they can and destroying those who stand in their path.

Look at what has happened around the world in places devastated by economic embargoes, one-sided warfare, or the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Or, consider the problem of global climate change, and how important it is for all of us to cooperate with efforts to curtail our uses of fossil fuels in order to reduce emissions of harmful greenhouse gases.

Consider the “cultural revolutions” undertaken by totalitarian rulers. Notice how in virtually every case absolutist and dictatorial despots seek ever more severe limitations on free expression. They label “liberal” intellectuals “dangers to society” and expel “radical” professors from teaching posts because they might “corrupt the youth.”

Some use the power of their governmental or religious authority to crush not only their opposition but the moderates as well -- all in the name of maintaining the purity of their movement. They intimidate journalists and those media outlets which dare to comment “negatively” on their political and cultural goals or their heavy handed methods.

The historical evidence is there for us to see what happens when schools are closed or converted from places of education to places for indoctrination. We know what happens when children are no longer being taught truth-seeking, the skills of good reasoning, or the lessons of human history and basic science: Cultures disintegrate; communities collapse; the machinery of civilization fails; massive numbers of people die; and sooner or later social and political chaos ensues.

Or, imagine a media, a religious or political hegemony which cultivated, instead of critical thinking, all the opposite dispositions? Or consider if that hegemony reinforced uncritical, impulsive decision making and the “ready-shoot-aim” approach to executive action. Imagine governmental structures, administrators, and community leaders who, instead of encouraging critical thinking, were content to make knowingly irrational, illogical, prejudicial, unreflective, short-sighted, and unreasonable decisions.

How long might it take for the people in this society which does not value critical thinking to be at serious risk of foolishly harming themselves and each other?

The news too often reports about hate groups, wanton shooting, terrorists and

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

2011 update

Page 24

violently extreme religious zealots.

Education which includes a good measure of critical thinking skills and dispositions like truth-seeking and open-mindedness, is a problem for terrorists and extremists of every stripe because terrorists and extremists want to control of what people think. They are ideologists of the worst kind.

Their methods include indoctrination, intimidation, and the strictest authoritarian orthodoxy. In the “black-and-white” world of “us vs. them” a good education would mean that the people might begin to think for themselves. And that is something these extremists do not want.

intellectuals, or regulations aimed at suppressing research and frustrating the fair-minded, evidence-based, and unfettered pursuit of knowledge, can happen wherever and whenever people are not vigilant defenders of open, objective, and independent inquiry.

History shows that assaults on learning, whether by book burning, exile of

Maybe. But, really, should we have to?

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

Does this mean that society should place a very high value on critical thinking?

Absolutely!

Does this mean society has the right to force someone to learn to think critically?

2011 update

Page 25

EXPERT CONSENSUS STATEMENT REGARDING CRITICAL THINKING AND THE IDEAL CRITICAL THINKER “We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. CT is essential as a tool of inquiry. As such, CT is a liberating force in education and a powerful resource in one’s personal and civic life. While not synonymous with good thinking, CT is a pervasive and self-rectifying human phenomenon. The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, wellinformed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit. Thus, educating strong critical thinkers means working toward this ideal. It combines developing CT skills with nurturing those dispositions which consistently yield useful insights and which are the basis of a rational and democratic society.”

READINGS and REFERENCES American Philosophical Association, Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction. "The Delphi Report," Committee on Pre-College Philosophy. (ERIC Doc. No. ED 315 423). 1990 Brookfield, Stephen D.: Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting. JoseyBass Publishers. San-Francisco, CA. 1987.

Browne, M. Neil, and Keeley, Stuart M.: Asking the Right Questions. Prentice-Hall Publishers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. 2003.

Costa, Arthur L., & Lowery, l Lawrence F.: Techniques for Teaching Thinking. Critical Thinking Press and Software. Pacific Grove, CA. 1989.

Facione, Noreen C, and Facione Peter A.: Critical Thinking and Clinical Judgment in the Health Sciences - An International Teaching Anthology. The California Academic Press, Millbrae CA. 2008.

Facione, Noreen C. and Facione, Peter A. : Critical Thinking Assessment and Nursing Education Programs: An Aggregate Data Analysis. The California Academic Press. Millbrae, CA 1997.

Facione, Noreen. C., and Facione, Peter A., Analyzing Explanations for Seemingly Irrational Choices, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 15 No. 2 (2001) 267-86.

Facione, Peter A and Noreen C,: Thinking and Reasoning in Human Decision Making. The California Academic Press. Millbrae CA, 2007 Facione, Peter A, Think Critically, Pearson Education: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 2011.

Facione, P.A., Facione, N.C., Talking Critical Thinking, Change: The Magazine of Higher Education, March-April, 2007.

Facione, P.A., Facione N. C., and Giancarlo, C: The Disposition Toward Critical Thinking: Its Character, Measurement, and Relationship to Critical Thinking Skills, Journal of Informal Logic, Vol. 20 No. 1 (2000) 61-84.

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

2011 update

Page 26

Gilovich, Thomas; Griffin, Dale; and Kahneman, Daniel: Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Cambridge University Press. 2002.

Goldstein, William, and Hogarth, Robin M. (Eds.): Research on Judgment and Decision Making. Cambridge University Press. 1997.

Esterle, John, and Clurman, Dan: Conversations with Critical Thinkers. The Whitman Institute. San Francisco, CA. 1993.

Janis, I.L. and Mann, L: Decision-Making. The Free Press, New York. 1977.

Kahneman, Daniel; Slovic, Paul; and Tversky, Amos: Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press. 1982.

Kahneman Daniel: Knetsch, J.L.; and Thaler, R.H.: The endowment effect, loss aversion, and status quo bias. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 1991, 5;193-206.

King, Patricia M. & Kitchener, Karen Strohm: Developing Reflective Judgment. Josey-Bass Publishers. San Francisco, CA. 1994 Kurfiss, Joanne G., Critical Thinking: Theory, Research, Practice and Possibilities, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report # 2, Washington DC, 1988.

Marshall, Ray, and Tucker, Marc, Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations, Basic Books. New York, NY. 1992.

Resnick, L. W., Education and Learning to Think, National Academy Press, 1987.

Rubenfeld, M. Gaie, & Scheffer, Barbara K., Critical Thinking in Nursing: An Interactive Approach. J. B. Lippincott Company.

Philadelphia PA, 1995.

Siegel, Harvey: Educating Reason: Rationality, CT and Education. Routledge Publishing. New York. 1989.

Sternberg, Robert J.: Critical Thinking: Its Nature, Measurement, and Improvement. National Institute of Education, Washington DC, 1986.

Toulmin, Stephen: The Uses of Argument. Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Wade, Carole, and Tavris, Carol: Critical & Creative Thinking: The Case of Love and War. Harper Collins College Publisher. New York. NY 1993.

GOVERNMENT REPORTS U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) Documents National Assessment of College Student Learning: Getting Started, A Summary of Beginning Activities. NCES 93-116.

National Assessment of College Student Learning: Identification of the Skills to Be Taught, Learned, and Assessed, A Report on the Proceedings of the Second Design Workshop, November 1992. NCES 94-286.

National Assessment of College Student Learning: Identifying College Graduates' Essential Skills in Writing, Speech and Listening, and Critical Thinking. NCES 95-001.

About the Author Dr. Peter A. Facione and his co-investigators have been engaged in research and teaching about reasoning, decision-making, and effective individual and group thinking processes since 1967. Over the years they developed instruments to measure the core skills and habits of mind of effective thinking, these instruments are now in use in many different languages throughout the world. Since 1992 Dr. Facione has presented hundreds of workshops about effective teaching for thinking and about leadership, decision-making, leadership development, planning and budgeting, and learning outcomes assessment at national and international professional association meetings and on college and university throughout the nation. Dr. Facione, is a principal of the research and consulting firm, Measured Reasons, and a Senior Researcher with Insight Assessment. He earned his Ph.D. at Michigan State in 1971, and in subsequent years chaired the Department of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, served as Dean of the School of Human Development and Community Service at California State University Fullerton, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Santa Clara University, and Provost of Loyola University Chicago. In 1999-2000 Dr. Facione was Chair of the American Conference of Academic Deans. He has been on many boards and panels, including the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and the ACE Presidents’ Task Force on Education. He Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

2011 update

Page 27

has contributed articles to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Change - The Magazine of Higher Education, and Liberal Education. With Dr. Noreen Facione he co-authored Thinking and Reasoning in Human Decision Making (2007) and Critical Thinking and Clinical Judgment in the Health Sciences (2008). From 1988 through 1990 Dr. Facione was the principal investigator for the American Philosophical Association research project which culminated in the Delphi Report – An Expert Consensus Conceptualization of Critical Thinking. The executive summary of that report is available free of charge from Insight Assessment. His email is pfacione@measuredreasons.com Visit his website www.measuredreasons.com and the Insight Assessment website, www.insightassessment.com

Facione, PA, “Critical Thinking: What It is and Why it Counts”

2011 update

Page 28

Attachment C Statutory Interpretation

Page 94 of 105

A GUIDE TO READING, INTERPRETING AND APPLYING STATUTES 1

By Katharine Clark and Matthew Connolly, Senior Writing Fellows, April 2006 © 2006 The Writing Center at GULC. All Rights Reserved.

Purpose Whether you are working in a law firm, a government agency, or a public interest organization, there is a strong chance that you will be required to analyze and interpret statutes for your clients. For example, your client may want you to determine whether a particular statute will provide the client with a cause of action given a particular set of circumstances. Or perhaps your client is a corporation trying to determine how a recently enacted statute would affect its long term business plans. Understanding the tools and techniques of statutory interpretation will help you to understand the possible implications a statute may have on your client’s interests. Although the task of statutory interpretation can be quite nuanced and complicated, this handout will provide you with a few handy tools that will help you to discern the meaning of a statute, even when the terms of the statute seem unclear or ambiguous.

This handout will address what to do before you begin interpreting a statute (page 1), tools for analyzing a statute (page 2), additional helpful interpretive suggestions (page 10), and theories of statutory interpretation (page 13).

Before You Begin 1. “Read the Statute, Read the Statute, Read the Statute!” 2 The language of the text of the statute should serve as the starting point for any inquiry into its meaning. 3 To properly understand and interpret a statute, you must read

1

To prepare this handout, we consulted William N. Eskridge, Jr., Philip P. Frickey, & Elizabeth Garrett, CASES AND MATERIALS ON LEGISLATION: STATUTES AND THE CREATION OF PUBLIC POLICY (3d. ed. 2001).

2 Quote widely attributed to Professor Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School. Cf. Felix Frankfurter, SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE READING OF STATUTES, 47 Colum. L. Rev. 527 (1947).

3 Eskridge, supra note 1, at 819.

1

the text closely, keeping in mind that your initial understanding of the text may not be the only plausible interpretation of the statute or even the correct one. 4 2. Understand Your Client’s Goals Make sure that you have a firm grasp of your client’s goals and the underlying facts of your client’s legal problem so that you will be able to determine which statutes are relevant to your case.

3. Shepardize (or KeyCite) the Statute As time passes, lawmakers sometimes revise and rewrite the text of a statute in response to changing legal or political realities. When undertaking an assignment or research project that requires you to analyze a statute, be sure to Shepardize (or KeyCite) the statute to determine: (a) whether the statute parts of the statute have been repealed or otherwise invalidated; (b) whether the statute has been amended; and (c) whether there are any court decisions that can guide your analysis of the statute.

Tools for Analyzing a Statute Although some statutes appear simple and straightforward at first glance, you may find, upon further examination, that the terms of the statute do not directly address your legal issue. Statutory terms may be ambiguous because the enacting legislature did not consider the exact factual situation that you are analyzing when the statute was being drafted and debated. Additionally changing circumstances might require that an old statute be applied to new issues that the enacting legislature did not expect or could not have foreseen. 5 There are several tools that can help you to determine the meaning of an ambiguous statute, or to choose between multiple plausible interpretations of the same statute.

4

Christopher G. Wren and Jill Robinson Wren, THE LEGAL RESEARCH MANUAL: A GAME PLAN FOR LEGAL RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS (2d. ed. 1986) (hereinafter “Wren & Wren”).

5 Changed circumstances might also make a statute more relevant than it at first glance appears because the statute might seem to address an issue directly that the enacting legislature could not have possibly have foreseen. For example, old statutes may apply to new technologies that developed after the statute was enacted.

2

1. Plain Meaning 6 Courts generally assume that the words of a statute mean what an “ordinary” or “reasonable” person would understand them to mean. 7 Moreover, some courts adhere to the principle that if the words of a statute are clear and unambiguous, the court need not inquire any further into the meaning of the statute. 8 While you should always begin with your own experience and understanding of language and grammar, it is a good idea to consult other sources of authority to determine the meaning of an ambiguous word or phrase, or to determine whether a particular word or phrase has a specific meaning. We suggest beginning with “primary sources” (i.e., the statute itself, case law, administrative regulations) before looking beyond to “secondary sources” (i.e., dictionaries, legal encyclopedias). These are among the least contentious places to look for aid in interpreting a statutory word or phrase.

A. Primary Sources “Primary sources” such as statutory definitions, case law, and administrative regulations often contain specific instructions on how the terms and provisions of a statute should be interpreted and applied. Once you have determined which statutory terms and provisions are relevant to your legal problem, you may find it helpful to consult one or more of the following sources of authority as you construct your own interpretation of the statute.

Statutory Definitions Many statutes contain a “definitions” section that sets forth and defines the key terms used in the statute. You might find these definitions either in the section of the statute you are analyzing, or more likely, in one of the first sections of the act. Sometimes these specific terms are codified as definitions for a chapter or title of the relevant statute, meaning that they are intended to apply to the entire chapter or title (unless otherwise specified). These definitions are important because they suggest that Congress intended for a term to have a specific meaning that might differ in important ways from its common usage.

Case Law Oftentimes you will find that the statute you are analyzing has already been analyzed and interpreted by a court. Additionally, court decisions may also discuss what alternative interpretations of the statute were plausible (or at least considered) and why the court either approved or rejected those alternatives. You can find references to case law in the case annotations of an annotated statute, by Shepardizing the relevant section 6

Plain meaning should not be confused with the “literal meaning” of a statute or the “strict construction” of a statute both of which imply a “narrow” understanding of the words used as opposed to their common, everyday meaning. Eskridge, supra note 1, at 820.

7 Eskridge, supra note 1, at 819.

8 Desert Palace, Inc. v. Costa, 539 U.S. 90, 99 (2003).

3

of the statute, or through Computer Aided Legal Research (i.e., through Lexis and Westlaw). Moreover, the court opinions themselves may be able to point you to legislative history and other helpful sources of authority that will help you decide how the statute applies to your legal problem.

Administrative Regulations or Decisions Sometimes the agency in charge of administering the statute has issued regulations to clarify how that statute should be interpreted and applied. Administrative regulations can be found in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and can be helpful in determining both the meaning of a particular term or phrase and sometimes, the policy concerns that underlie the statute. The regulations are often cross-referenced in annotated statutes as well.

B. Secondary Sources Sometimes primary source materials are insufficient, and you must look to other sources of authority to discern the meaning of a statute. Secondary sources such as dictionaries, legal encyclopedias, and legislative history documents can provide you with additional guidance on how to interpret a statute.

Dictionaries Suppose you are analyzing this statute governing the Federal Communication Commission’s authority to determine the tariff reporting requirements of common carriers: (2) The Commission may, in its discretion and for good cause shown, modify any requirement made by or under the authority of this section either in particular instances or by general order applicable to special circumstances or conditions except that the Commission may not require the notice period specified in paragraph (1) to be more than one hundred and twenty days. 9

If you want to determine the scope of the FCC’s authority over the requirements set forth in this section, you might want to know the meaning of the word “modify.” If you are unable to track down an authoritative interpretation of the word using primary source materials, then a dictionary or an encyclopedia may prove useful. 10 For example, the American Heritage Dictionary defines the word “modify” as: 9

47 U.S.C. § 203 (emphasis added).

It might also be helpful to compare and contrast definitions from multiple dictionaries to obtain a broader consensus on the meaning of words. Analyzing interpretations from multiple sources will help you to reduce the risk of choosing an interpretation that may have been approved by one source but rejected by many others. See MCI Telecommunications Corp. v. AT&T Co., 512 U.S. 218, 224-26. If you are asked 10

4

“1. To change or become changed; alter” and “2. To make or become less extreme, severe, or strong.” 11 On the basis of this definition, you might conclude that although the presence of the word “modify” in subsection (2) allows the FCC to make minor changes to a common carrier’s reporting requirements (listed elsewhere in the statute), subsection (2) does not allow the FCC to completely eliminate a reporting requirement.

Be aware however, that if a statute deals with a technical or specialized subject (e.g., ERISA, tax, telecommunications, etc.), the words in the statute may have meanings that differ from their ordinary usage. In such circumstances, courts have been known to interpret the words in a statute dealing with a technical or specialized subject in a way that is consistent with the way those words are used in the relevant industry or community.

Legislative History Legislative history (i.e., committee reports and hearings, floor statements from Congressmen, proposed amendments, etc.) can provide useful guidance for determining the meaning of an ambiguous. Despite the deep disagreement among judges and scholars about whether legislative history ought to guide one’s interpretation of a statute, a lawyer does her client a serious disservice by not consulting legislative history to see what a statute’s history might suggest about the meaning of a word or phrase. Because there is a hierarchy of legislative materials and a number of places where these documents can be found, you should review the “Legislative History Research Guide" available through the Williams’s Library or online at: http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/guides/legislative_history.cfm.

Legislative history is discussed further in the second section of this handout.

C. The Whole Act Rule The whole act rule is an approach to statutory interpretation that assumes that when a certain term or phrase is used multiple times throughout a statute, that term or phrase should be interpreted in a consistent manner. This rule assumes that the legislatures draft statutes in a way that is “internally consistent in its use of language and in the way its provisions work together.” 12 Below are several tools you might use to preserve consistency and coherence in your interpretation of a statute.

to interpret a statute that was enacted a long time ago, you might consider digging up dictionary definitions (as well as other sources such as encyclopedias) from the era in which the statute was enacted. This might help to determine what that particular legislature might have intended the words of the statute to mean.

Eskridge, supra note 1, at 820.

11 AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY 545 (4th ed. 2001).

12 Eskridge, supra note 1, at 830.

5

Preambles and Purpose Clauses Many statutes begin with a preamble or a purpose clause. For example, section 1 of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act begins with the following: 29 U.S.C. § 621. Congressional statement of findings and purpose (b) It is therefore the purpose of this Act [29 U.S.C. §§ 621 et seq.;] to promote employment of older persons based on their ability rather than age; to prohibit arbitrary age discrimination in employment; to help employers and workers find ways of meeting problems arising from the impact of age on employment. 13

Preambles and purpose clauses can be helpful in discerning the intent of the legislature with respect to ambiguous terms of the statute. 14 Thus, when choosing between multiple plausible interpretations, you might refer to the statute’s purpose in deciding which interpretation is superior.

However, be aware that if a court determines that the terms of the statute are clearly expressed in the part of the statute you are analyzing, the preamble or purpose clauses may not persuade a court to adopt a contrary interpretation. 15 Rule to Avoid Surplusage This rule is based on the principle that each word or phrase in the statute is meaningful and useful, and thus, an interpretation that would render a word or phrase redundant or meaningless should be rejected. 16 For example, the Securities Act of 1933 defines the term “prospectus” as “any prospectus, notice, circular, advertisement, letter, or communication, written or by radio or television, which offers any security for sale or confirms the sale of any security.” If the term “communication” was interpreted to include any type of written communication, the words “notice, circular, advertisement, letter” would serve no independent purpose in the statute. 17 However, if “communication” were interpreted to include oral statements made through radio or television, then all the words in this section of the statute would contribute something to it’s meaning, and none would considered “surplusage.”

Presumption of Consistent Usage (and Meaningful Variation) The presumption of consistent usage means that the legal reader should assume that “the same meaning is implied by the use of the same expression in every part of the 13

29 U.S.C. § 621 (2005) (emphasis added).

Eskridge, supra note 1, at 832.

15 Id. 16 Id. at 833.

17 Gustafson v. Alloyd Co., 513 U.S. 561, 577-78 (1995).

14

6

act.” 18 For example, the provisions in section 77j of the Securities Act require that certain information be included in a “prospectus” and that certain information can be omitted from a “prospectus.” The presumption of consistent usage suggests that each time the word “prospectus” is used in the above provisions, it should be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the way the term is interpreted in other parts of the statute. 19 2. Context The following tools of statutory construction require the reader to use contextual clues to interpret the meaning or scope of a particular word or phrase. Although there are several ways of using context, a few of the most common tools are listed below.

A. Noscitur a Sociis (“it is known from its associates”) This doctrine of statutory construction suggests that you can determine the meaning of an ambiguous term by reference to the words associated with it. 20 This doctrine is useful when the term you are trying to interpret is grouped together with two or more terms that have similar meanings. These terms may provide clues on how broadly or narrowly a term should reasonably be interpreted. 21 For example, suppose you are trying to determine the scope of the term “any election” in the statute below: 48 U.S.C. § 1422 (2005) 22 The executive power of Guam shall be vested in an executive officer whose official title shall be the “Governor of Guam”. The Governor of Guam, together with the Lieutenant Governor, shall be elected by a majority of the votes cast by the people who are qualified to vote for the members of the Legislature of Guam. The Governor and Lieutenant Governor shall be chosen jointly, by the casting by each voter of a single vote applicable to both offices. If no candidates receive a majority of the votes cast in any election, on the fourteenth day thereafter a runoff election shall be held between the candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor receiving the highest and second highest number of votes cast. The first election for Governor and Lieutenant Governor shall be held on November 3, 1970.

Based on the repeated references to the “Governor of Guam” and “Lieutenant Governor” the Supreme Court concluded that the phrase “any election” referred only to gubernatorial elections (an election specifically for a Governor and Lieutenant Governor) 18

Eskridge, supra note 1, at 833.

Gustafson 513 U.S. at 567-69. The presumption of meaningful variation, the counter part to “the presumption of consistent usage,” suggests that when the legislature has departed from the consistent usage of a particular term, the legislature intended for that particular term to have a different meaning. Eskridge at 834.

20 Eskridge, supra note 1, at 823.

21 Id. 22 “Governor and Lieutenant Governor; term of office; qualifications; powers and duties; annual report to Congress.”

19

7

and not to general elections in which voters cast ballots for a slate of candidates. 23 Thus, the words surrounding the term “any election” played a key role in determining the scope of a term whose plain meaning could suggest a broader meaning.

B. Ejusdem Generis (“of the same kind, class, or nature”) This doctrine is useful when a statute has explicitly set forth a series of terms to which the statute applies, and you are trying to determine whether the statute also applies to other people, things or situations not explicitly mentioned in the statute. According to this doctrine of statutory construction “general words [that] follow specific words in a [statute] are construed to embrace only objects similar in nature to those objects enumerate by the preceding specific words.” 24 In other words, you should use the specific objects or things explicitly set forth in the statute to determine what other objects or things the legislature intended to include.

For example, in Heathman v. Giles the Supreme Court of Utah used this doctrine to interpret the following statute: Utah Code Ann. § 78-11-10 25 Before any action may be filed against any sheriff, constable, peace officer, state road officer, or any other person charged with the duty of enforcement of the criminal laws of this state […] the proposed plaintiff, as a condition precedent thereto, shall prepare and file with, and at the time of filing the complaint in any such action, a written undertaking with at least two sufficient sureties in an amount to be fixed by the court…

To determine whether Congress intended to include prosecuting attorneys in the phrase “other person charged with the duty of enforcement of…criminal laws,” the court looked at the preceding words (“any sheriff, constable, peace officer, state road officer”). The court concluded that Congress did not intend to include prosecuting attorneys under this statute because prosecuting attorneys were not of the “class” of officers who “are in the front line of law enforcement [and] in immediate contact with the public.” 26 C. Expressio unius (“inclusion of one thing implies the exclusion of the other”) Where certain terms have been explicitly set forth in a statute, that statute may be interpreted not to apply to terms that have been excluded from the statute. For example, one could argue that a statute that prohibits “any horse, mule, cattle, hog, sheep, or

23

Gutierrez v. Ada, 528 U.S. 250, 254-55 (2000).

Eskridge, supra note 1, at 823.

25 “Actions against officers -- Costs and attorneys’ fees.”

26 Heathman v. Giles, 374 P.2d 839, 840 (Utah 1962).

24

8

goat” from running upon lands enclosed by a fence does not apply to turkeys because the statute does not explicitly proscribe turkeys.27 Be aware however, that this doctrine assumes that the enacting legislature thought through the statutory language “carefully, considering every possible variation.” 28 In real world however, legislatures often omit terms from a statute because (a) the lawmakers do not have sufficient time to consider every specific application of a bill during the rush to pass legislation, or (b) legislatures expect the courts to “fill in the gaps” and to adapt the statute to new and unforeseen situations. 29 In such cases, you might look to other statutory interpretation tools to extend the statute to cover terms not explicitly provided for in the statute.

3. Canons of Construction Certain techniques of statutory construction have been used so often that they have become “formalized” into “canons.” Unlike the tools provided in this handout, the canons are not particularly useful for discerning the meaning of a statute. However, many courts still find them persuasive, and you may use these canons to justify and provide support for a particular interpretation of a statute.

A few of the many recognized canons are set forth below. 30 You will notice that some of the canons are similar to other tools that are presented in this handout. 31 Additionally, be aware that that for each canon that supports your interpretation (“rule”), there is often an “opposite” canon that can be used to defeat your interpretation or to support an alternative interpretation of the statute in question (“counter rule”). 32

Rule

Counter-rule

¾ IF the language of a statute is plain and unambiguous it must be given effect

¾ UNLESS a literal interpretation would lead to absurd or mischievous consequences or thwart the manifest purpose

¾ IF the terms of the statute have received judicial construction before enactment the terms should be understood according to that construction

¾ UNLESS the statute clearly requires them to have a different meaning

27

Tate v. Ogg, 195 S.E. 496, 499-500 (Va. 1938).

Eskridge, supra note 1, at 824.

29 Id. 30 Id. at 909-12.

31 Wren & Wren, supra note 4, at 88.

32 A few of these canons, such as the “rule of lenity” or “avoidance of constitutional issues” appear quite frequently in judicial decisions. See generally Eskridge, supra note 1, at 909-915.

28

9

¾ Every word and clause must be given effect

¾ UNLESS inadvertently inserted into the statute or if repugnant to the rest of the statute, certain words may be rejected as “surplussage”

¾ Words are to be interpreted according to the proper grammatical effect of their arrangement within the statute

¾ UNLESS strict adherent to the rules of grammar would defeat the purpose of the statute

¾ A statute cannot go beyond its text

¾ To effect the purpose of the statute, the statute may be implemented beyond its text

Helpful Suggestions 1. Look for Cross-references When reading complex statutes, be aware of references to other statutes. These references may lead you to other statutes that will effect the meaning and function of the statute you are trying to analyze. For example, such references might also help you to determine the meaning of ambiguous terms in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act: 29 U.S.C. § 623 (1) It shall not be a violation of subsection (a), (b), (c), or (e) solely because-(A) an employee pension benefit plan (as defined in section 3(2) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (29 U.S.C. 1002(2))) provides for the attainment of a minimum age as a condition of eligibility for normal or early retirement benefits; 33

When you look at the corresponding section in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), you are provided with a precise definition of the term “employee pension benefit plan.”

33

Emphasis added.

10

2. Be Mindful of Commonly Used Terms Below are a few important terms that are commonly found in statutes.

AND v. OR The words “and” and “or” are important for discerning the scope and function of a statute. 34 For example, consider this federal criminal statute: 18 U.S.C. § 2114 (2005). 35 (a) Assault. A person who assaults any person having lawful charge, control, or custody of any mail matter or of any money or other property of the United States, with intent to rob, steal, or purloin such mail matter, money, or other property of the United States, or robs or attempts to rob any such person of mail matter, or of any money, or other property of the United States, shall, for the first offense, be imprisoned not more than ten years; and if in effecting or attempting to effect such robbery he wounds the person having custody of such mail, money, or other property of the United States, or puts his life in jeopardy by the use of a dangerous weapon, or for a subsequent offense, shall be imprisoned not more than twenty-five years.

The repeated use of the term “or” in this section of the criminal statute appears to provide multiple grounds for a criminal violation. By separating the terms “mail matter,” “money,” or “other property of the United States” with the disjunctive “or” the legislature probably intended to criminalize each of the three activities, even though the original purpose of the statute might have been primarily to prevent the robbery of mail carriers. 36 MAY v. SHALL Generally, the word “shall” signifies that certain behavior is mandated by the statute, while the word “may” grants the agent some discretion. 37 Consider the following Federal Rule of Civil Procedure: Rule 11. 38 (a) Signature. Every pleading, written motion, and other paper shall be signed by at least one attorney of record in the attorney's individual name, 34

The word “and” is a conjunctive connector and the word “or” is a disjunctive connector. Eskridge, supra note 1, at 827.

35 “Mail, money, or other property of United States.”

36 The term “and” can also mean “joint” or “several” while the term “or” can mean “only A or B” but not both, or it can mean “A or B or both.”

37 If you look back at the other statutes we have excerpted in this handout, you will notice that the words “may” or “shall” appear quite often in statutory language.

38 “Signing of Pleadings, Motions, and Other Papers; Representations to Court; Sanctions.”

11

or, if the party is not represented by an attorney, shall be signed by the party. Each paper shall state the signer's address and telephone number, if any. Except when otherwise specifically provided by rule or statute, pleadings need not be verified or accompanied by affidavit. An unsigned paper shall be stricken unless omission of the signature is corrected promptly after being called to the attention of attorney or party. […] (c) Sanctions. If, after notice and a reasonable opportunity to respond, the court determines that subdivision (b) has been violated, the court may, subject to the conditions stated below, impose an appropriate sanction upon the attorneys, law firms, or parties that have violated subdivision (b) or are responsible for the violation.

Among other things, subsection (a) of Rule 11 mandates that the party or the party’s attorney must sign every pleading and written motion in a civil action. In contrast, subsection (c) of Rule 11 provides a federal court with the discretion to decide whether or not to impose a sanction upon “attorneys, law firms, or parties” who have made false representations to the court.

Additionally the following terms are often used purposefully to change the scope and function of the statute:

Term Unless Except Subject to…

Within the meaning of

Function These terms usually signify an exception to the statute These terms may limit the scope of the statute, or may indicate that a certain part of the statute is controlled or limited by anther section or statute

For the purposes of If…then…

Upon

Generally, these terms indicate that for one part of a statute to take effect, a precondition or requirement must be satisfied

Before/After Provided that…

Notwithstanding

Literally, “In spite of,” this term usually signifies that a certain term or provision is not controlled or limited by other parts of the statute, or by other statutes

Each/Only

These terms commonly limit the class of objects that are either included in or excluded from the statute

Every/Any/All

12

Theories of Statutory Interpretation Why Learn About the History and the Theories of Statutory Interpretation? In an academic or employment setting, your professor or supervisor may require you to explain why you think a statute means one thing as opposed to another. You may need to describe which tools of statutory interpretation you used to produce your result. Some readers are more persuaded by certain tools of statutory interpretation over others, so knowledge of interpretive theories can help you anticipate your reader's reaction to your use of a particular tool for finding the meaning of statutes.

A Caveat: Legal scholars and other very smart people have written hundreds of pages about the theories of statutory interpretation; this handout merely skims the surface of these works. If you want to learn more about statutory interpretation, we suggest you begin by consulting a legislation textbook or by talking with a Georgetown Law legislation professor.

Objectives of this Portion of the Handout • • •

To describe and demonstrate theories of statutory interpretation that can help students justify their use of any of the statutory interpretation tools we mentioned above To provide a bit of extra historical background for students who want to know how others have found the meaning of statutes in the past To show you that statutory interpretation is a dynamic process, and that reasonable people can differ over the meaning of a particular statute

The Theories I.

Textualism:

A.

WHAT IT IS: Textualism focuses on the words and phrases of the statute and deemphasizes the role of the reader (usually, the judge) in creating meaning.

Tools: Textualists believe that reading statutes according to their plain meaning will produce an interpretation that is neither lenient nor strict, but which should "contain all that [the statute] fairly means." 39 Textualists generally oppose the use of legislative history as a tool of statutory interpretation. Textualists employ a variety of strategies to determine the plain meaning of terms in a statute, and not all textualists agree about which sources of plain meaning to consider. Even a textualist like Justice Scalia, who advocates the use of dictionary definitions to determine plain meaning, could arrive at different meanings of a word depending on which dictionary he used.

39

Antonin Scalia, A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION 23 (Amy Gutmann, ed., 1997) cited in Eskridge, supra note 1, 756.

13

B.

INTELLECTUAL AND HISTORICAL ROOTS -- Associated Historical Movement(s) in Legal Analysis: Formalism

Textualism traces its intellectual roots back to formalism, which arose in the late nineteenth century and remained popular through the 1940s. Formalists aim for vertical coherence 40 as they interpret statutes. That is, they try to keep their interpretations consistent with "authoritative sources situated in the past: the original intent of the enacting legislature, previous administrative or judicial precedents interpreting the statute, and traditional or customary norms." 41 Because formalists value the doctrine of stare decisis, which holds that courts should treat prior decisions as "presumptively correct," they would find case law interpretations of previous statutory terms persuasive. 42 Like the formalism of the early twentieth century, today's textualism assumes the existence of a determinate plain meaning of a statute's text. Textualists like Justice Scalia believe that judges should use only the plain meaning of the statute's text in their process of interpretation and should not use legislative history to interpret statutes.43 However, unlike formalists, textualists are more willing to adopt a plain meaning interpretation of a statutory term or phrase even if a plain meaning interpretation does not comport with how that term or phrase has been interpreted in case law.

C.

MANIFESTATIONS IN TODAY'S SOCIETY 1.

Common Practical Consequences:

Textualists often maintain that they can produce an “objective” and apolitical interpretation of statutes by limiting their analysis to an investigation of plain meaning.

2.

Example of a Textualist Analysis of a Statute:

Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) explains when the Department of Homeland Security can deport an alien (someone who is not a U.S. citizen or national 44 ). Section 237(a)(2)(B)(i) of the INA states that: Any alien who at any time after admission has been convicted of a violation of (or conspiracy or attempt to violate) any law or regulation of a State, the United States, or a foreign country relating to a controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act

40

Eskridge, supra note 1, at 599 (I have used citations at the beginning of some sections to indicate that all or substantially all of the material in that section came from the cited source. I have provided citations to particular pages of the sources used when I use direct quotations).

41 Id. at 599.

42 Id. at 600.

43 Scalia, supra note 39, at 755-58.

44 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(3) (2006).

14

(21 U.S.C. 802)), other than a single offense involving possession for one's own use of thirty grams or less of marijuana, is deportable.

Suppose an alien has been convicted of possessing five pounds of marijuana. It is clear that his conviction is a conviction under a U.S. law that relates to a controlled substance and that the conviction involves more than thirty grams of marijuana. One question would remain: did that conviction occur after the alien's admission? 45 A textualist would not ask when the legislature intended for controlled substances offenses to provoke deportation or when deportation for controlled substances offenses would be good public policy. Instead, a textualist would focus on the meaning of the word "admission," because that word comes from within the text of the statute itself. A textualist would not ask what the legislature intended the word "admission" to mean or whether a particular definition of "admission" would produce good public policy.

Instead, a textualist would look for the plain meaning of "admission."

A cautious textualist would consider the possibility that the word "admission" could have a specific, technical meaning in the immigration context. Therefore, he or she would turn to the definitions section of the INA Section 101(a)(13), which states that: (A) The terms "admission" and "admitted" mean, with respect to an alien, any lawful entry of the alien into the United States after inspection and authorization by an immigration officer.

Based on this definition of â&#x20AC;&#x153;admission,â&#x20AC;? a textualist probably would conclude that an alien who had never entered the United States lawfully, but who committed a controlled substance offense after unlawful entry into the U.S., could not be deported under Section 237(a)(2)(B)(i) of the INA, because the word "lawful" plainly means "legal," not "illegal." A textualist would not make an exception even if he or she thought that Congress intended Section 237(a)(2)(B)(i) to apply to illegal as well as legal entrants into the United States. Nor would a textualist interpret Section 237(a)(2)(B)(i) to apply to illegal entrants because the textualist thought that such application would produce good public policy. 46 This textualist interpretation also makes use of three of the canons of construction (see above, Tool #3): 1.

If the language of a statute is plain and unambiguous it must be given effect: The statute clearly addresses the meaning of "admission."

45

The alien probably could be removed under another section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, but this textualist analysis merely asks whether he could be removed under the quoted section.

46 In this statute and fact scenario, a textualist interpretation produces relatively predictable results: the statute does not apply. However, textualism is not always so predictive. Textualism gives the interpreter a narrower set of rhetorical tools to use. Supposedly, this narrowing will make statutory interpretation more predictable, but not all scholars of statutory interpretation agree that the narrowing strategy actually produces more predictable results.

15

Additionally, the word "lawful" in the definition of "admission" clearly excludes its opposite (unlawful entrants).

2.

Every word and clause must be given effect: A textualist would not find a reason to avoid giving effect to the phrase "any time after admission" in Section 237(a)(2)(B)(i) or to the word "lawful" in Section 101(a)(13).

3.

A statute cannot go beyond its text: A textualist would not look to the dictionary for another definition of "admission" when the text of the statute itself provides a definition.

II.

Intentionalism: 47

A.

WHAT IT IS: Intentionalism focuses on the meaning that the legislature intended to give the statute. This strategy emphasizes plain meaning and judicial interpretation only insofar as these tools are helpful for determining the will or intent of the enacting legislature. However, intentionalism is like textualism in that it assumes that it is possible to find an objectively correct meaning for a particular statute.

1.

Commonly Used Tools for Reading Statutes: Legislative history

If the interpreter has evidence of the specific intent of the enacting legislature "about what the statute should mean in the context under consideration, the interpreter should, of course, follow it." 48 Intentionalists disagree about whether to consider the general intent of the legislature as well by asking what problem the statute was originally intended to remedy and extrapolating from that intent to an imagined legislative intent for the problem the judge now faces. The extrapolation process is called "the imaginative reconstruction of legislative intent." 49 This process requires the interpreter to put himself or herself "in the position of the enacting legislature and, like a historian, examine the available historical evidence against a background of assumptions about the legislature ... that are commonplace to our legal system, but can be rebutted by evidence that this enacting legislature had a different view." 50 2.

Disfavored Tools:

Intentionalists may use any of the tools mentioned above to find the meaning of the statute. A tool can help a reader find the statute's meaning if that tool provides evidence of the legislature's intent. For example, an intentionalist reader might use the tool of 47

There is a related approach, Purposivism, which focuses on the purpose of a statute as a guide to its interpretation.

48 Eskridge, supra note 1, at 684.

49 Id. 50 Id.

16

Noscitur a Sociis (see Tool #2A, above) in the following way: if a legislature placed one word near another, the second word should be read in light of the first word because this word placement indicates the legislature's intent for readers to interpret those words together (not merely because plain meaning favored this interpretation of the statute).

B.

INTELLECTUAL AND HISTORICAL ROOTS -- Associated Historical Movement(s) in Legal Analysis: Process Theory 51

Process theorists generally hold that law is not easily transparent, but it does have a purpose. Process theorists believe that legal analysts should read statutes to conform to the purposes or policies the legislature had in mind when it enacted the statutes.

According to most process theorists, interpreters of statutes can produce justice by interpreting statutes to enhance fair legal procedures and promote respect for the institutions in which those procedures operate. 52 Process theory urges legal analysts to read statutes to mean what the groups affected by those statutes and the majority of the public would want the statutes to mean. 53 Process theorists also urge legal analysts to consider the recommendations of experts and critics in finding the meaning of statutes. 54 Process theorists may believe that a statute's meaning has changed if that statute has lost the support of the majority of the public. 55

C.

MANIFESTATIONS IN TODAY'S SOCIETY 1.

Common Practical Consequences:

Intentionalist interpretations allow readers to find meaning in statutes that do not appear obvious from the statutory text, if those meanings are supported by the legislative history that shows what social purposes the statutes were designed to serve.

2.

Example of an Intentionalist Analysis of a Statute:

In 1959, the Attorney General interpreted the then-current version of the statute that made aliens deportable for controlled substances offenses. In 1959, that statute was Section 241(a)(11) of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which required the deportation of any alien

51

Process theory really supports Purposivism more closely than Intentionalism, because it looks at the general purpose of the statute and asks whether a given interpretation would help fulfill that general goal, rather than looking at the specific problem the statute originally addressed.

52 Henry M. Hart, Jr., & Albert M. Sacks, THE LEGAL PROCESS: BASIC PROBLEMS IN THE MAKING AND APPLICATION OF LAW (William Eskridge, Jr. and Philip Frickey, eds., 1994) (1958 Tentative Edition).

53 Id. at 694-95.

54 Id. 55 Id.

17

"who has been convicted of a violation of ... any law ... controlling the ... sale ... of ... marihuana."

The Attorney General had to decide whether an expunged conviction counted as a conviction for purposes of this section of the INA. The Attorney General noted that neither the Congress nor the statute itself defined the word "convicted" as it was used in Section 241(a)(11). 56 The Attorney General then went on to produce an intentionalist interpretation of the statute. This interpretation supported his conclusion that the expungement of a conviction did not prevent that conviction from serving as the basis for deportation under Section 241(a)(11).

The Attorney General considered "[t]he history of ยง 241(a)(11)" as he concluded "that Congress did not intend that aliens convicted of narcotic violations should escape deportation because, as in California, the State affords a procedure authorizing a technical erasure of the conviction." 57 The Attorney General recounted various measures Congress had taken to strengthen laws that required deportation for controlled substances offenses. 58 The Attorney General highlighted the "Congressional purpose and policy" of punishing narcotics offenses. 59 The Attorney General's interpretation fit the intentionalist mold because he did not rely on a dictionary definition of "convicted," and he did not purport to make his own policy judgments about the costs and benefits of defining an expunged conviction as a conviction for the purposes of this statute. Rather, he relied on the legislative history of narcotics-related immigration statutes, and he tried to divine the policies the Congress intended to promote by passing Section 241(a)(11). This focus on legislative intent and history over plain meaning and independent policy judgments demonstrates the intentionalist nature of the Attorney General's interpretation.

III.

Pragmatism:

A.

WHAT IT IS: Pragmatism focuses on the role of the reader in giving meaning to the statute by interpreting it. Unlike intentionalism and textualism, pragmatism assumes that there is no single, objectively correct meaning of a statute. The existence of multiple interpretations are permissible, and it is inevitable that interpreters to bring "preunderstandings" to their interpretation; some Pragmatists approve of this use of preunderstandings because they believe that the influence of the prior knowledge of the statute's reader will link his or her interpretation to tradition. 60 Other interpretations, including Eskridge's Dynamic Interpretation strategy, are not concerned with tradition.

56

Matter of A-F-, 8 I&N Dec. 429, 438 (A.G. 1959).

Id. 58 Id. 59 Id. 60 William James, Pragmatism, cited in Eskridge, supra note 1, at 803 (1907).

57

18

1.

Commonly Used Tools for Reading Statutes: Pragmatists use any of the common tools of statutory interpretation if they believe those tools can produce an results that balances factors like tradition and the public interest.

2.

Disfavored Tools: Pragmatists may be reluctant to claim that a single plain meaning exists for a statute.

B.

INTELLECTUAL AND HISTORICAL ROOTS -- Associated Movement(s) in Legal Analysis: The intellectual movements of Legal Realism61 , Critical Legal Studies 62 , and Law and Economics 63 provided critiques of the Textualist and Intentionalist interpretive methods. Intellectual notions from within these critiques helped others synthesize a positive agenda for statutory interpretation.

C.

MANIFESTATIONS IN TODAY'S SOCIETY 1.

Common Practical Consequences:

Because pragmatists hold that a text has no meaning until it is interpreted, 64 this theory, like Textualism and Intentionalism, does not always produce predictable outcomes.

Pragmatist statutory interpreters are driven by multiple motives; they all consider the demands of a democratic majority, encouraging private reliance on statutory commands, and modern policy to different degrees at different times. 65 2.

Example of a Pragmatic Analysis of a Statute:

Section 212(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act states that:

61

In the early twentieth century, Legal Realists began to challenge Formalism. These theorists saw law as the product of struggles between social forces in the legislature. See, e.g., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457, 1897. Legal Realists challenged the Formalist idea of vertical coherence. See § Theories, I.B., supra. Instead of looking for coherence between statutes over time, Legal Realists looked for horizontal coherence by comparing statutes to other statutes in effect at the same time and the policies behind those statutes. Eskridge, supra note 1, at 599.

62 In the mid-1970s, some theorists began to assert that law was “arational, subjective, and political” (Eskridge at 595). These theorists claimed that there was no such thing as a plain meaning of a term in a statute. Because any interpretation of a statute would harm some and benefit others, these theorists posited, statutes should be interpreted to increase the oppressed groups' access to the political system. Eskridge, supra note 1, at 596).

63 Also in the mid-1970s, some theorists proposes that interpreters of law should aim for efficient results when they chose between possible interpretations of statutes. Generally, interpreters should minimize the impact of laws that turned out to be "inefficient," whatever the intentions of the legislature (Eskridge at 594).

64 James, supra note 60, at 801.

65 Id. at 802.

19

Except as otherwise provided in this Act, aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States.

Section 212(a) then lists many reasons why aliens would not be admissible. Aliens who are inadmissible under Section 212(a) can be deported as well. 66 Before 1996, Section 212(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act allowed aliens to obtain a waiver of inadmissibility. This waiver prevented them from being deported.

Section 212(c) stated: Aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence who temporarily proceeded abroad voluntarily and not under an order of deportation, and who are returning to a lawful unrelinquished domicile of seven consecutive years, may be admitted in the discretion of the Attorney General.

The immigration laws were reformed in 1996, and the 212(c) waiver provision was eliminated.

In 1997, the Immigration and Naturalization Service attempted to deport an alien because he was inadmissible under Section 212(a) based on a conviction for selling drugs. 67 The alien wanted to apply for a 212(c) waiver despite the repeal of 212(c), because he entered his guilty plea before 212(c) was repealed.68 In 2001, the Supreme Court decided that the alien was eligible for relief under Section 212(c). 69 The Court reached this conclusion in part by interpreting Section 212(c) and its repeal pragmatically. The Court opined that it might be unfair to apply the repeal of 212(c) retroactively to cases where aliens entered guilty pleas before the statute was repealed, because these aliens might have entered their plea without believing that it would prevent them from applying for relief from deportation. 70 The Court used statistical evidence to show that the vast majority of criminal convictions resulted from guilty pleas, so many of the aliens who would be deportable after the repeal of Section 212(c) would have become deportable as a result of a guilty plea. 71 To show that aliens often relied on the availability of relief under Section 212(c) when they entered their guilty pleas, the Court referred to the wisdom of those who had worked in the area of applications for relief under Section 212(c). 72

66

8 U.S.C. ยง 1227(a)(1)(A) (2006).

INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289, 293 (2001).

68 Id. 69 Id. at 326.

70 Id. at 323.

71 Id. at 324.

72 Id. 67

20

The Court considered legislative intent as well as policy in interpreting the repeal of Section 212(c). 73 The Court found no evidence that Congress intended that the repeal of Section 212(c) would apply retroactively; rather, the Court looked to other portions of the 1996 immigration reform law to show that, when Congress intended for provisions to apply retroactively, it explicitly provided for retroactivity. 74 This attempt to divine the legislature's intentions also represents an application of the Whole Act Rule (See Tool #3, above).

This interpretation is an example of pragmatism because the Supreme Court used a large variety of interpretive techniques, including explicitly policy-based and statistical reasoning, to reach its result. The Court considered the public interest and the legislature's intent, and the Court admitted that it was making judgments about fairness in reaching its decisions. The Court did not contend that any portion of the statute was unambiguous, and it did not contend that its judgments about fairness were objective.

In his dissent in St. Cyr, Justice Scalia argued against the subjectivity of the majority's fairness assessment and noted the opposition of Textualists to the majority's more pragmatic approach to statutory interpretation. Scalia opined that, "[i]t has happened before -- too frequently, alas -- that courts have distorted plain statutory text in order to produce a "more sensible" result. The unique accomplishment of today's opinion is that the result it produces is as far removed from what is sensible as its statutory construction is from the language of the text." 75 Conclusion The interpretive techniques offered in the Tools and Suggestions sections of this handout can help you get closer to the meaning of each statute. The theories presented in this section of the handout show you that some of your readers will respond better to your use of certain tools that to your use of other tools.

If your audience is more likely to be persuaded by one theory of statutory interpretation, be aware of that likelihood before you try to interpret the statute for that audience.

Choose your interpretive tools wisely.

73

Id. at 316-20.

Id. at 319-20.

75 Id. at 334.

74

21

Page 95 of 105

Advocacy Foundation Publishers The e-Advocate Quarterly Issue

Title

Quarterly

Vol. I

2015 The ComeUnity ReEngineering Project Initiative The Adolescent Law Group Landmark Cases in US Juvenile Justice (PA) The First Amendment Project

The Fundamentals

2016 The Fourth Amendment Project Landmark Cases in US Juvenile Justice (NJ) Youth Court The Economic Consequences of Legal Decision-Making

Strategic Development Q-1 2016

2017 The Sixth Amendment Project The Theological Foundations of US Law & Government The Eighth Amendment Project The EB-5 Investor Immigration Project*

Sustainability Q-1 2017

2018 Strategic Planning The Juvenile Justice Legislative Reform Initiative The Advocacy Foundation Coalition for Drug-Free Communities Landmark Cases in US Juvenile Justice (GA)

Collaboration Q-1 2018

I II III IV Vol. II V VI VII VIII Vol. III IX X XI XII Vol. IV XIII XIV XV XVI

Q-1 2015 Q-2 2015 Q-3 2015 Q-4 2015

Q-2 2016 Q-3 2016 Q-4 2016

Q-2 2017 Q-3 2017 Q-4 2017

Q-2 2018 Q-3 2018 Q-4 2018

Page 96 of 105

Issue

Title

Quarterly

Vol. V

2019

Organizational Development

XVII XVIII XIX XX

The Board of Directors The Inner Circle Staff & Management Succession Planning

Q-1 2019 Q-2 2019 Q-3 2019 Q-4 2019

XXI XXII

The Budget* Data-Driven Resource Allocation*

Bonus #1 Bonus #2

Vol. VI

2020

Missions

XXIII

Q-1 2020

XXV XXVI

Critical Thinking The Advocacy Foundation Endowments Initiative Project International Labor Relations Immigration

Vol. VII

2021

Community Engagement

XXIV

XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI Vol. VIII

The 21st Century Charter Schools Initiative The All-Sports Ministry @ ...

Lobbying for Nonprofits Advocacy Foundation Missions Domestic Advocacy Foundation Missions International 2022

Q-2 2020 Q-3 2020 Q-4 2020

Q-1 2021 Q-2 2021 Q-3 2021 Q-4 2021 Bonus ComeUnity ReEngineering

XXXV

The Creative & Fine Arts Ministry @ The Foundation The Advisory Council & Committees The Theological Origins of Contemporary Judicial Process The Second Chance Ministry @ ...

Vol. IX

2023

Legal Reformation

XXXVI

The Fifth Amendment Project The Judicial Re-Engineering Initiative The Inner-Cities Strategic Revitalization Initiative Habeas Corpus

Q-1 2023

XXXII XXXIII XXXIV

XXXVII XXXVIII XXXVIX

Q-1 2022 Q-2 2022 Q-3 2022 Q-4 2022

Q-2 2023 Q-3 2023 Q-4 2023

Page 97 of 105

Vol. X

2024

ComeUnity Development

XXXVXI XXXVXII XXXVXIII

The Inner-City Strategic Revitalization Plan The Mentoring Initiative The Violence Prevention Framework The Fatherhood Initiative

Vol. XI

2025

Public Interest

XLIX L

Public Interest Law Spiritual Resource Development Nonprofit Confidentiality In The Age of Big Data Interpreting The Facts

Q-1 2025 Q-2 2025

XXXVX

LI LII

Q-1 2024 Q-2 2024 Q-3 2024 Q-4 2024

Q-3 2025 Q-4 2025

The e-Advocate Journal of Theological Jurisprudence Vol. I – 2017 The Theological Origins of Contemporary Judicial Process Scriptural Application to The Model Criminal Code Scriptural Application for Tort Reform Scriptural Application to Juvenile Justice Reformation Vol. II – 2018 Scriptural Application for The Canons of Ethics Scriptural Application to Contracts Reform & The Uniform Commercial Code Scriptural Application to The Law of Property Scriptural Application to The Law of Evidence

Page 98 of 105

Legal Missions International Issue Vol. I I II III IV

Title

Quarterly

2015 Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s Will and The 21st Century Democratic Process The Community Engagement Strategy Foreign Policy Public Interest Law in The New Millennium

Vol. II

2016

V VI VII VIII

Ethiopia Zimbabwe Jamaica Brazil

Vol. III

2017

IX X XI XII

India Suriname The Caribbean United States/ Estados Unidos

Vol. IV

2018

XIII XIV XV XVI

Cuba Guinea Indonesia Sri Lanka

Vol. V

2019

XVII XVIII XIV XV

Russia Australia South Korea Puerto Rico

Q-1 2015 Q-2 2015 Q-3 2015 Q-4 2015

Q-1 2016 Q-2 2016 Q-3 2016 Q-4 2016

Q-1 2017 Q-2 2017 Q-3 2017 Q-4 2017

Q-1 2018 Q-2 2018 Q-3 2018 Q-4 2018

Q-1 2019 Q-2 2019 Q-3 2019 Q-4 2019

Page 99 of 105

Issue

Title

Vol. VI

2020

XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX

Trinidad & Tobago Egypt Sierra Leone South Africa Israel

Vol. VII

2021

XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV

Haiti Peru Costa Rica China Japan

Vol VIII

2022

XXVI

Chile

Quarterly Q-1 2020 Q-2 2020 Q-3 2020 Q-4 2020 Bonus

Q-1 2021 Q-2 2021 Q-3 2021 Q-4 2021 Bonus

Q-1 2022

The e-Advocate Juvenile Justice Report Vol. I – Juvenile Delinquency in The US Vol. II. – the Prison Industrial Complex Vol. III – Restorative/ Transformative Justice Vol. IV – The Sixth Amendment Right to The Effective Assistance of Counsel Vol. V – The Theological Foundations of Juvenile Justice Vol. VI – Collaborating to Eradicate Juvenile Delinquency

Page 100 of 105

The e-Advocate Newsletter 2012 - Juvenile Delinquency in the US Genesis of the Problem Family Structure Societal Influences Evidence-Based Programming Strengthening Assets v. Eliminating Deficits 2013 - Restorative Justice in the US Introduction/Ideology/Key Values Philosophy/Application & Practice Expungement & Pardons Pardons & Clemency Examples/Best Practices 2014 - The Prison Industrial Complex 25% of the World's Inmates Are In the US The Economics of Prison Enterprise The Federal Bureau of Prisons The After-Effects of Incarceration/Individual/Societal 2015 - US Constitutional Issues In The New Millennium The Fourth Amendment Project The Sixth Amendment Project The Eighth Amendment Project The Adolescent Law Group 2016 - The Theological Law Firm Academy The Theological Foundations of US Law & Government The Economic Consequences of Legal Decision-Making The Juvenile Justice Legislative Reform Initiative The EB-5 International Investors Initiative 2017 - Organizational Development The Board of Directors The Inner Circle Staff & Management Succession Planning Page 101 of 105

Bonus #1 The Budget Bonus #2 Data-Driven Resource Allocation 2018 - Sustainability The Data-Driven Resource Allocation Process The Quality Assurance Initiative The Advocacy Foundation Endowments Initiative The Community Engagement Strategy 2019 - Collaboration Critical Thinking for Transformative Justice International Labor Relations Immigration God's Will & The 21st Century Democratic Process 2020 - Community Engagement The Community Engagement Strategy The 21st Century Charter Schools Initiative Extras The NonProfit Advisors Group Newsletters The 501(c)(3) Acquisition Process The Board of Directors The Gladiator Mentality Strategic Planning Fundraising 501(c)(3) Reinstatements The Collaborative US/ International Newsletters How You Think Is Everything The Reciprocal Nature of Business Relationships Accelerate Your Professional Development The Competitive Nature of Grant Writing Assessing The Risks

Page 102 of 105

Page 103 of 105

About The Author John C (Jack) Johnson III Founder & CEO Having become disillusioned with the inner-workings of the ―Cradle-to-Prison‖ pipeline, former practicing attorney Johnson set out, in 2001, to try to help usher-in fundamental changes in the area of Juvenile and Transformative Justice.

Educated at Temple University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Rutgers Law School, in Camden, New Jersey, Jack moved to Atlanta, Georgia to pursue greater opportunities to provide Advocacy and Preventive Programmatic services for at-risk/ atpromise young persons, their families, and Justice Professionals embedded in the Juvenile Justice process.

There, along with a small group of community and faith-based professionals, ―The Advocacy Foundation, Inc." was conceived and implemented over roughly a thirteen year period, originally chartered as a Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Educational Support Services organization consisting of Mentoring, Tutoring, Counseling, Character Development, Community Change Management, Practitioner Re-Education & Training, and a host of related components.

The Foundation‘s Overarching Mission is “To help Individuals, Organizations, & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential”, by implementing a wide array of evidence-based proactive multi-disciplinary "Restorative & Transformative Justice" programs & projects throughout the northeast, southeast, and western international-waters regions, providing prevention and support services to at-risk/ at-promise youth, to young adults, to their families, and to Social Service, Justice and Mental Health professionals‖ everywhere. The Foundation has since relocated its headquarters to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and been expanded to include a three-tier mission.

In addition to his work with the Foundation, Jack also served as an Adjunct Professor of Law & Business at National-Louis University of Atlanta (where he taught Political Science, Business & Legal Ethics, Labor & Employment Relations, and Critical Thinking courses to undergraduate and graduate level students). Jack has also served as Board President for a host of wellestablished and up & coming nonprofit organizations throughout the region, including ―Visions Unlimited Community Development Systems, Inc.‖, a multi-million dollar, award-winning, Violence Prevention and Gang Intervention Social Service organization in Atlanta, as well as Vice-Chair of the Georgia/ Metropolitan Atlanta Violence Prevention Partnership, a state-wide 300 member violence prevention organization led by the Morehouse School of Medicine, Emory University and The AtlantaBased Martin Luther King Center.

Attorney Johnson‘s prior accomplishments include a wide-array of Professional Legal practice areas, including Private, Corporate and Government postings, just about all of which yielded significant professional awards & accolades, the history and chronology of which are available for review online.

www.TheAdvocacyFoundation.org

Page 104 of 105

Page 105 of 105