Intellectual Courage, Independence, and Modesty

In my last post I talked about how critical thinking is as much about personal dispositions or intellectual virtues as it is about the process of thinking itself. The first of these attitudes I mentioned was valuing truth--critical thinking ability is useless or even harmful if you don't care what's true. Now I want to discuss a couple of other crucial dispositions.

Courage and Independence

Critical thinking requires intellectual courage, which is closely related to intellectual independence. Real thinking can be a lonely pursuit. While it’s good to consider the opinions of others, you can’t let others do your reasoning for you. If you do, then you’re not reasoning at all. You may cogitating hard hard in order to rationalize beliefs you borrowed from others, but you won’t actually be reasoning, because reasoning is about deciding for yourself what conclusions to draw.

And here's the hard part: if you do draw your own conclusions, chances are some of them will differ from what you want to believe, and what your friends and peers believe. Neither of those things is comfortable or easy, and that’s why they take courage. It takes courage to choose your beliefs based on evidence and reason instead of desire and comfort. It also takes courage to disagree with your peers, especially if they’re deeply invested in a particular ideology, because they aren’t going to like it if you question that ideology. For example, if you and your friends are all pro-choice, try telling them--just as an experiment--that you agree with pro-lifers about something. If you’re pro-life, try doing the opposite. Just fasten your seatbelt first.

Intellectual Modesty

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

- Bertrand Russell

Smug people aren’t good thinkers, and good thinkers aren’t smug. You can’t do any real reasoning if you’re already sure you’re right. As the philosopher Anthony Weston said, "True thinking is an open-ended process. The whole point is that you don’t know when you start where you’ll find yourself in the end."

Good thinkers also can’t be too impressed with their own knowledge. None of us knows everything, and most of us are downright ignorant about a lot of things. Take me, for example. I’ve got a decent understanding of science, and I try to stay up on politics, but I know diddly-squat about international monetary policy. Ditto for accounting, poker, and silkworm husbandry. I know next to nothing about these things, and until I learn more, I don’t have any business pontificating about them.

Interestingly (and depressingly) the people who know the least, and therefore have the lowest chance of being right, are commonly the most smug about their beliefs. This is a recently-discovered cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Generally speaking, the less competent and knowledgeable people are, the more competent and knowledgeable they think they are. One of the things they don’t know is how much there is to know, and thus how little of it they do know. People with a lot of knowledge, on the other hand, have a better idea of the vastness of human knowledge, and therefore the vastness of their own ignorance. The ignorant are ignorant of their own ignorance, which is why so many of them think they have everything figured out.