Critical Thinking Once More

Critical Thinking Once More

Last evening I attended the first session of the Critical Thinking for Technical Communicators course. The class takes place at UCSD Extension's La Jolla Campus and Bonni Graham is the instructor.

I think I will enjoy the class. Last night Bonni explained how an argument is not necessarily intended for persuasion, and how persuasion is not necessarily argumentation. Advertisements, for example, are persuasive yet do not make use of the claims, premises and conclusions of argumentation.

Her example, "Our president is a blithering idiot," illustrated how non-factual claims work. Facts are data about which two (or more) impartial observers agree.

Another point, also brought up in our eponymous textbook, was that although "all people are entitled to their opinions," not all opinions are equal. I think Bill Maher summed this up better on Real Time last year when he said "You don't have to present both sides of an argument if one of the sides is pure crap!" (That's a paraphrase, but you get the idea).

Cable News, as Bill Moyers has decried, consists mainly of talking heads who offer both sides of an issue, often falsely leading the viewer to the notion that both sides have equal merit. News degenerates into a kind of high school debate team formalism. Even worse, Bill O'Reilly frequently states that a guest, like Cindy Sheehan, is "entitled to her opinion," then cuts off her microphone and attacks her personally.

Disturbingly, I'm not even sure why a class like Critical Thinking is part of the curriculum at the University Extension level. As I looked around the crowded classroom last night, I noticed a range of people near my own age--a few in their twenties, many in their thirties and forties. They are of an age where they would have been in the Freshman composition classes I used to teach at the very same university. Have they forgotten what they once learned?

Or, more broadly, perhaps critical thinking should be required of anyone who wishes to exercise their right to vote in this country. The state of our political affairs would seem to warrant such an exigency.