Flow Charts for Critical Thinking

Abstract

TS 57Those of us who approach cri tica l thi nking as a thinly vei led course in informal logic are concerned with issues such as the strength of arguments (understood in terms of truth-preserving or truth-indicati ng re lations), the adequacy of explanations, and th e truth or probable truth (correspondence to the wo rld) of statements. If our goal is to empower st udents with a set of skills that will allow them to evaluate any piece of discourse, I believe this goal can be ac hieved if students ask a series of questions. What follows is a set of flowcharts that will walk a student through this evaluation process. I believe thi s might be a useful tool in our several approaches (e.g., informal logic, rhetoric) to teaching criti cal thinking.I conside r the arrangement of the charts fai rly natural. Insofar as we are fundamentally concerned wit h the evaluation of arguments, it is reasonable to begin with questions regarding arguments. The early questions are very ge neral, fO llowed by more specific questions regardi ng deductive and inductive arguments, fOll owed by que stions regarding the truth or falsehood of the premises. Answers to some questions direct students to oth er charts. Of course, in some circumstances, students mig ht want to use some of the later charts independen tl y. For example, if one's concern is whether to accept Professor Sm ith' s testimony regarding events in the American Revolution, one might want to go directly to the questions concerning testim ony in C hart #5.A flowchart approach to critical thinking is, by its natu re, quite ri gid: it is a hi gh ly structured dec isio n-procedure. Each question is answered affirmatively or negatively. Answers lead either to evaluative conclusions or to additional questi ons. (n pri nciple thi s should result in uniform evaluations of arguments. In practice, of cou rse: not ali students will give the same answers to each of the questions. And some questions-questions regarding what constitutes a "significant number" of shortcomings in an inductive argument, for example-are questions for which there often is no obviously correct answer. So, students should be prepared to defend their answers to the questions. While the evaluative structure is rigid, in practice there is ample room for reasoned dsagreement.The flowcharts provide a structured summary of issues discussed in a critical thinking course. While I should like to say that the flowcharts account for at least some of the improvement my students exemplify by the end of the co urse, I have © biformaLLogic, 20.3 (2000) Teaching Supp/emet//#3: pp. TS 57-TS 69.