Beyond Critical Thinking

Critical thinking has so thoroughly colonized our idea of education that we tend to think it’s the only kind of thinking. Tests try to measure it, and ritzy private schools all claim to teach it. Critical thinking–analysis, not mere acceptance–is a skill we can all learn. And we’ve learned it too well. We’ve learned only critical thinking skills, and not the equally challenging skills of prudent acceptance: We don’t even realize that we need to learn when to say yes, and to what.

We teach students to find the undefended premises of an argument, or the contradictions in a claim. This is really easy. Every single argument has a premise for which it doesn’t and can’t argue, and every even mildly interesting worldview is built on conflict and internal tension. Not every contradiction is a reason to reject a worldview! Internal contradiction can reflect the fact that human life is not reducible to rationalistic syllogism; it can disguise a deeper harmony or a fruitful paradox; it can arise from an attempt to craft guidelines for prudent decisionmaking in a world of unique cases. You won’t find any of those pathways through a contradiction if you just walk away from the argument as soon as you’ve identified a contradiction.

If we allow any alternative to critical thinking, it’s creative thinking. We fetishize self-expression and novel or counterintuitive approaches to problems. This is why #slatepitches is a thing; #slatepitches is, among other things, a recognition of the limits of creative thinking, a satire on its aggressive hunt for the new angle.

What we don’t teach, and don’t even consider as something worth teaching, is the art of acceptance. The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well. We don’t teach how to tell when you’re sure enough, when you really should take the leap of faith, when you should say, “Yes, my understanding is totally inadequate, but I believe.”

Nobody can live by critical thinking alone. And so we wait, and we keep our options endlessly open, hoping that some lightning-strike revelation will take the decision out of our hands. “When I met your mother I just knew…” “And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven….” We hope that we will be transported over doubt to a place of secure faith. It turns out that this does happen sometimes–just enough to tantalize the many people who long for the moment of undeniable, irrefutable knowledge and never receive it.

I don’t actually have a positive response, beyond the stuff I said here; I don’t have a curriculum for the class on acceptance and trust. That’s what the comments box is for, people! I hope that admitting you have a problem is the first step.

And maybe a couple of next steps would be acknowledging the universality of regret, and recognizing how much personal growth flows from keeping our commitments rather than forestalling them.

Time keeps moving forward whether you like it or not; “if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice” and all that. The endless unreadiness of emerging adulthood, where no self is ever good enough to wear forever, isn’t a sustainable life either. If we had more models of repentance and forgiveness, which could show us how to live with bad choices and/or how to find our way back from them, maybe the leap of faith would not seem so paralyzingly impossible.

And I’ve written before about the American tendency to view commitment as the end of personal growth and change rather than the beginning (or, more accurately, one possible pathway to growth and change). We think freedom provokes personal growth and human bonds limit that freedom. I’m not sure it’s right to say that this worldview is exactly backwards… but it sure is not frontwards, I can tell you that much.

I realize that this post covers way too many different things. Knuckling under to a church, for example, isn’t actually that much like getting married, and neither one of them is much like exploring a philosophical stance or living within an uncomfortable tradition. But I’m going to assume that you guys can run the counterarguments and spot the exceptions to my points yourselves–with your well-honed critical thinking skills.

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30 Responses to Beyond Critical Thinking

As long as our educational system is in the hands of clueless, soulless clowns like Bill Gates and Arne Duncan who think that teaching is a science that can be quantified and regimented, the only thing we will be teaching our students is how fill in the correct bubble on a standardized test.

Getting to your broader point, in many ways the art of acceptance runs counter to the American creed (“high apple pie in the sky hopes”). We constantly tell ourselves that we can fix anything as long as we continue to doggedly pursue happiness.

Some of the best lessons I have gotten in the art of acceptance were in yoga class.

I’m not sure ‘belief’ per se is a helpful concept anymore. We live in the modern world; we can find out stuff, observe it, measure it, invent it. The need for naked ‘belief’ is questionable. Certainly, there are areas where we have incomplete information, and we must make a decision for a direction that seems most plausible. But even then, it’s usually based on some level of data; otherwise it’s just a wild guess. I think the rational and critical assembly of the database helps us in making the best committment.

there is a component of critical reasoning which we do not teach anymore and to my mind it is essential – the ability to assess the credibility of a source of information. The nonsense that people happily believe demonstrates to me that this is a skill lacking in our society and the consequences are not helpful for a democratice society.

While you can’t help but sympathize with what Eve Tushnet mourns here—at base, the loss of faith in marriage—I also can’t help but feel that her desired remedy is in fact only more of what the problem is in the first place: I.e., an over-romanticization of the thing.

Seems to me to a much larger extent than today marriage used to be viewed to a goodly degree at least as also being an economic agreement: Even without children it’s just cheaper for two to live than one. But with growing affluence and the diminution of that felt aspect more and more all that’s left is the gauzier aspect of it. Until, as we see today with the ridiculous money spent on the things and the magazines and stores and jewelry and cakes and settings and etc. devoted to them, it’s hard to think of any further physical gauze to even drape over the emotionally gauzy things they’ve become.

So what does Eve advocate here? In effect nothing less that a celebration of more gauziness: Just embrace faith and commitment and it’ll work!

I’m dubious. The problem is that there’s nothing to hang that faith and commitment *on* in so many cases. Faith … in *what* precisely? That … what is going to result? Already in damn near every divorce what we hear is utter surprise by both parties that the other party turned out the way they did. All the mere faith in the world that same isn’t going to happen isn’t going to affect that. And commitment? To what? To the impossible idea that the parties aren’t going to change? Once again in damn near every divorce both parties will say that they thought they *had* lived up to their commitment but that the other party had broken theirs in at least some unfair way.

For whatever reason I think it’s a failure of parenting, and maybe there’s a negative reinforcing dynamic going on with the failure of so many marriages and the rise of children of divorce.

For me that is it’s perhaps one of the supreme responsibilities of a parent to not only try to raise their children to be good spouses, but to advise them of the realities of marriage too. Of how the person you are marrying is going to change most certainly, and of how that should be at least thought through and accepted before they go saying “I do.”

But then you have that phenomenon of so many children of divorce getting to marriage age, and in the first place what do *they* so desperately want that it clouds their judgment? Well of course the opposite of what they saw their parents have. And of course they can’t imagine themselves ever becoming their parents or being in their situations.

And what do their parents want? The same thing! Their kids in wonderful marriages not going through what they did, and so they can get even more ecstatic than their kids in thinking about their kids getting hitched.

My God the money I’ve seen laid out by divorced spouses especially paying for their kids’ marriages. It’s like … second mortgage the house, baby, of *course* we’ll pay for the Ritz! And of *course* the kids deserve to go to Hawaii at least for their honeymoon, and no *way* are they gonna start out in any dingy apartment!

How did you come to the belief that we don’t have beliefs anymore? That seems like an uncritically accepted prejudice to me!

@Eve

Amen, sister!

I’m currently teaching a class in Critical Thinking at a mid-level college (not a tech school but most students have tech majors like Criminal Justice and Nursing). I see a lot of false sophistication in the analysis papers I get back. In their analysis, they’ll criticize a study reported on a news site for having “only” 10,000 participants but then turn around and accept different factoids because they don’t have the content background to know what’s actually the case. For example, in a paper I was grading yesterday, a student was looking at an article comparing 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, but the student was confused about the facts of when and how WWII started and what it’s relation to the Korean War was.

On thing I try to emphasize in the way I teach the course is that the root of Critical Thinking is a moral commitment to Truth. So many books about Critical Thinking just take that for granted! However, it really is an irreplaceable sine qua non for everything that follows. If you just want to look sophisticated or win a debate, there are techniques to do that, but to find the truth requires a fearless moral commitment.

Another problem that I’ve found, especially when I teach intro to ethics, is that students use relativism as a cheap method for getting out of debates. They’re still very judgmental about people they perceive as being too judgmental, of course, but when faced with a controversial issue, they can’t resist ending their papers with “you have to decide for yourself whether abortion/euthanasia/capital punishment is right or wrong.” It drives me crazy! What I see happening is that the students are very good at criticizing different beliefs, but they don’t have practice at actually picking a side based on reasons and sticking with it. Instead they pick a side based on emotions, but justify it by non-commitally claiming that this is just what’s right for them and not what’s right for anyone else. It drives me nuts!

There is no contradiction if one is committed to both the Truth and wisdom. The truth you may or may not discover, easily or with difficulty. 2+2=4, but did Mary really appear to some children in Medjigorie? Wisdom is more important than truth, but requires at the base Humility, which is not self-deprecation, but the recognition of the truth about yourself. That you don’t and can’t know everything. That you are strong in some areas but weak in others. That sometimes the right thing results in pain and the wrong thing in pleasure.

Critical thinking is a search for the truth.

Creative thinking can also be a search for the truth which lies outside the box, but can also just be a search for something new or different.

Commitment is not the end if one commits to grow and change for the better.

While it’s true that the Enlightenment didn’t quite live up to its promise of universal understanding based in reason, that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned entirely in favor of romanticism. Why, that would be like eschewing a belief system because one has spotted a contradiction. I’m very much in favor of critical thinking, but I disagree vehemently with the notion that acceptance is no longer practiced in our society. Look at what people accept; , “The nonsense that people happily believe,” as Cecelia put it, also demonstrates that naked acceptance is still practiced quite regularly. We have to adopt working hypotheses, and we also have to stay open to new evidence, and be willing to change our views if our views become untenable. It seems to me that “damn the evidence, full speed ahead” is what gets us into so much trouble. Trust, but verify.

I don’t see how it is mutually exclusive. After you think critically about an issue, you can accept the rejection of that idea. The more I think critically of something, the more I am convinced otherwise. You can be as sure of your answer resulting from deductive reasoning as the answer you get from inductive reasoning.

Thx for this, is “Beyond” is perhaps an awkward prepositional premise? Using “excellent” to describe your exploration of the inherent weaknesses in our uncritical acceptance of an unexamined epistemology of “empiricism” (‘empiricism, who’s empiricism?’ to paraphrase McIntyre). “To excel” (as to think “beyond”) begs the question: subject to what object?

What if human contingencies are such that we’ll never naturally know if a perfect set of conditions — that could waylay our existential anxieties — has been reached? Kind of like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle from particle physics applied to encounters within the soul: to measure two characteristics (location, mass or time) we’d've lost the moment in time needed to measure the other.
Is commitment not simply an acknowledgement of this truism of human reality? We can “know” an experience at t = past/present moment, but we miss the chance to “know” any development at t=future since we’d have to move away from location=certaintyofhere to location=uncertaintyofnext.
Romantic?
Yes, in a ‘once upon a time’ kinda way but why is that a bad thing? Wisdom comes by discerning “creative” developments from “decrepit” ones that have potential to harm our capacity for future flourishing. Losing our way along the meandering “yellow brick road” of life, like Dorothy we need encounters with a Scarecrow, a Tin Woodman, and a Cowardly Lion to experience how pitiful life can be absent access to intellect, empathy and will.

Are not capacity and ability often confused in this ‘meritocratic’ age? Having raw ability is a poor predictor of one’s desire or will in exercising it. Elementary-school virtue is living beyond “could do better” into “most likely to succeed” but to apply the McIntyre dialectic again: ‘succeed, whose success?’

This is about so much more than romance and marriages. Many contemporary social arrangement (HOAs, pension funds and other mutual-participatory commitments such as health insurance) depend to a precarious degree on commitments that can fall apart suddenly and drastically if agents responsible for stewardship and flourishing of the asset under management fail in their duties. Love and responsibility, grammar and rhetoric, must always be weighed in the balance of the logic of critical thinking…

… absent a proper object, we subjects can be defrauded out of our very existence by cunningly deceptive fiduciary practices of those who have moved “beyond” critical thinking into the dictatorship of ideology. Commitment and duty have lost their currency: honoring subjective value.

I choose to lend my trust to an institution, the Roman Catholic Church, basing my evaluation on the subjective evaluations of the 2,000-yr membership, a pretty reassuring body of evidence IMHO. I also choose to lend my trust in the full, faith and credit of a political jurisdiction (my husband’s native land) an edifice that grew out of a Northern European heritage I call my own. Will my heirs enjoy such common-good surities?

I’m really not so sure. Commitment amongst my peers is weakening (evidenced by a falling birth rate and a declining faith practice). Civic and ecclesiastic stewards have both been found wanting. And yet even after serious lapses my commitment is unwavering to both my cradle faith and my adopted country: the contingencies of belonging to something “beyond” myself merits something greater than the sum of the parts. My discrete “commitment” strengthens the identity of something that cannot be so easily found in such well-developed form elsewhere, flourishing human excellence.

“Beyond” isn’t static however, its kinda like tacking on a sailboat, we need to constantly adjust to the conditions, encouraging excellence is under threat. Vapid mediocrity has become fashionable: in a deficit-based economy, articles merely have to be copyrighted and carry extortionate price tags to drive an illusion of prosperity (we are being disinherited of our gift-based culture meanwhile, see excellent Mother Jones feature on heirloom apples Amy Welborn tweeted recently). Commitment to excellence is measured in decades, ie whole lifetimes (indeed sometimes multiple lifetimes or centuries). Renewing reverence for such devotion would perhaps be one way to approach a reform of the malady? Appreciating beauty, goodness and truth as gifts themselves, not reduced to a metrical “outcome” in a transaction, exchanging the concrete for an abstract token. Intangible goods have as much or more value than tangible goods (and sadly the gummint has cottoned on:http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-21/us-gdp-will-be-revised-higher-500-billion-following-addition-intangibles-economy
cornering the market in commitment ceremonies, authorities will seek to corner the market in commitment fecundity too if we don’t — as first principle — “commit” to defending it for ourselves as our birthright as humans, not a pittance endowed by our “beyond” betters.

To teach acceptance and critical thinking together, maybe teach literature the way they did it in the olden days? I never took a single literature class in college, so I’m just going by what people say, but the idea was that if you thought there was something wrong with some canonical book, the fault was probably yours, not the book’s. The idea being to accept the book as a part of the truth, and to study it critically to find the truth.

This works in a secular environment, and it doesn’t even matter what the canon is. Toni Morrison works as well as Homer. All that matters is the way it’s taught.

From the review in 1999 by Robert Grant of The New Patricians: An Essay on Values and Consciousness by R. W. K. Paterson:

“Despising whatever is base, cynical, reductionist, calculating and materialistic, Paterson champions the virtues and values of ‘nobility’: idealism; sincerity; heroism; generosity; disinterestedness; the fine, reckless impromptu gesture; the contempt for one’s personal safety; the good, the beautiful and the true; everything, in short, that contemporary so-called ‘Theory’ purports, in its ugliness, knowingness and self-congratulatory stupidity, to ‘subvert’, ‘decentre’ or otherwise ‘interrogate’ (as if to question something were automatically to refute it). ‘It has almost become a cultural reflex’, Paterson says, ‘to make a ritual declaration of our irremediable estrangement from any stable centre of meaning.’”

There is a tendency among many conservative culture warrior pundits to complain about the moral failings of America and blame secularism or, in this case, some aspect of our education system. Rod Dreher is another who does this with regularity. All these arguments strike me as wrong (or at least incomplete) because they give short shrift to the economic imperatives that drive behavior in a modern capitalist society where “creative destruction” and efficiency create a ruthless and competitive society.

To survive in America, we are forced to check our ethics at the front door to our workplace every day. It doesn’t matter what we believe about religion when our economic lives depend on ignoring it.

Ms. Tushnet: “We don’t teach how to tell when you’re sure enough, when you really should take the leap of faith, when you should say, ‘Yes, my understanding is totally inadequate, but I believe.’”

I’ve taught “critical thinking” and I agree that “the leap of faith” was not in the curriculum, at least not by that name; but I did teach how to decide when enough (data-mining, evidence-sifting and authority-seeking) was enough, and when one has to go with the best information one has on a given topic. I emphasized that conclusions may be tentative but that nevertheless conclusions must be reached and acted upon. I also discussed the need for “trust”–we can’t question everything–and how we decide who and what to trust.

The need for “commitment” will vary from person to person and situation to situation; I wouldn’t expect someone’s conclusions about Obamacare to be etched in stone, but I also wouldn’t expect people to revise their views about God on a daily basis. “Critical thinking” properly includes discernment about “the things that matter most” and which therefore call for a stronger level of commitment; but those things are not the same for everyone.

You write “Nobody can live by critical thinking alone,” which is absolutely true and well said. But critical thinking is taught, and necessarily so, precisely because it comes less naturally to (most) people, especially young people; people more commonly take much on faith, accept unproven assertions as fact, and too often fail to question authority. Critical thinking is a counterweight to the constant barrage of conflicting claims–political, economic, religious, etc.–with which we are all faced and with which we must somehow cope. The saying “look before you leap” applies here: critical thinking is the “look” we ought to take before making any “leap” of faith.

Ahh, that *messy thing* – Life.
Lots of loose ends, lots of thoughts by “carping critics” – as opposed to “critical thinkers”, lots of ignorance -Life.
Alas, the solution is apparently not a simple return to the Trivium, nor any other prescription-based solution.
Perhaps we should recall the true purpose of a Liberal Education (as opposed to a *liberalizing education*). And, what the heck was its purpose, anyway?
So long as hyper-individualism and *churn* are the religion of a culture, no hope for a humanism of the very old school (think More and Ersamus here) to make a comeback.
If one were to begin practicing virtue in daily life, there is at least the possibility of influencing someone else to try doing it also.

I experience this everyday as a high school English teacher. Students can think critically, but they have difficulty accepting tentative truths that are worth accepting. Some may say these are superficial comments, but it’s what I have: 1) The internet has made it easy for them to question mainstream ideas, but has also made it difficult for them to identify validity. The result is that they are skeptical of things they should not be, but fail to actually question things that should be questioned. 2) They think too much in short phrases and they value too highly factual information. They equate “knowledge” with facts that can be accessed on wikipedia…I “knowledgeable” person knows the factual question they have about some random event in history, but they do not respect someone who can provide intelligent commentary and analysis, because they view long-winded commentary and analysis as someone’s “opinion” and they skeptical to the point of not believing in interpretation, but only in facts. The problem (I teach in Texas) is that some people not want us even teaching critical thinking, so I don’t see how we could begin to teach them what to accept. Interesting topic…thanks.

Jack Shifflett nails something above. In many things there comes a time to decide to go ahead based with your best understanding of the facts and the options at the time.

This reminds me of Those Who Will Not Decide. One of my pet peeves is people who must always have more information, more analysis, and will never ever have enough to actually be comfortable making a decision even if that is what they are paid and/or elected to do.

The fact that they may be hounded later by back seat drivers and second guessers – my other pet peeve – is part of what holds them back. However if you show me somebody who has never made a mistake, I will show you somebody who has never done anything at all.

This ‘fear of commitment’ might not be what the author intended to point out, but it is real and pernicious nonetheless.

On the idea that a disciplined commitment to a particular regimen implying renunciation of competing pleasures is commonly thought to be a killjoy halt to personal growth, see how the editors of MANAS, a neo-Platonist, Indophile anarchist-elitist weekly, put it in 1977, in “No Novel Solution”:

“Saccharin, we are now informed, may cause or contribute to cancer. But if you give up saccharin, you will eat more sugar than is good for you, and perhaps develop diabetes—obviously a problem with no solution.

“Yet the commonsense remedy is no more than intelligent self-denial—you give up both.

“Advising people to practice self-denial is prohibited for both politicians and economic analysts. It would practically abolish both professions. What is in fact the only solution for a long list of ills is never mentioned in the public prints, which also survive by refusing to notice certain realities.

“If it won’t work why talk about it? It doesn’t matter that self-control has been the remedy for the ills of excess adopted by intelligent people since the dawn of history. Our politics and marketing procedures rack up gains only when the practice of intelligence is studiously avoided.

“It is a bore, of course, to listen to lectures on self-denial. But there are those who know how to make interesting discoveries out of seeing how it works. The reach of the artist’s capacities, for example, is often a function of self-denial or self-control. And you don’t think of this as ‘puritanical’ because of the wonderful things an artist does with his time.”

An analogous ill?
Is society’s pronounced preference for derivative permanence over direct impermanent experience, possibly tangentially related to commitmentphobia? As Peter Hall recounts manning-up the courage to stake out his Platonic convictions “This is the only place for our Dream. No form nor interpretation is for ever.” in staging Shakespeare in Japan http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/apr/15/peter-brook-midsummer-nights-dream (citation from memoir The Quality of Mercy).

Relational tangent?

An objective solid good life coheres in as much as it respects subjective perishable intangibles.

Is not the comfort-seeking straightjacket of futarchy (so bemoaned by Mencius Moldbug) perhaps rather that loathesomeness we perceive as ‘commitment’ : duty to allegiances forged not on evidence of the past but predictions for a putative future? Present trends would appear to be obligating our personal liberty and development to far uglier, more dystopian outcomes, absent a scintilla of free will somewhere along Hayek’s road to serfdom.
Ironic no?
Civilization’s development arrested at an ‘enlightened’ stage of OCD critical-thinking results in a self-mutilating aversion to any and all unpredicability of native anthropological ADHD?

“Of all that he had written I admired most the terrible story called The Heart of Darkness, in which a rather weak idealist is driven mad by horror of the tropical forest and loneliness among savages. This story expresses, I think, most completely his philosophy of life. I felt, though I do not know whether he would have accepted such an image, that he thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths. He was very conscious of the various forms of passionate madness to which men are prone, and it was this that gave him such a profound belief in the importance of discipline. His point of view, one might perhaps say, was the antithesis of Rousseau’s: ‘Man is born in chains, but he can become free.’ He becomes free, so I believe Conrad would have said, not by letting loose his impulses, not by being casual and uncontrolled, but by subduing wayward impulse to a dominant purpose…

“Except for love of England and hatred of Russia, politics did not much concern him. What interested him was the individual human soul faced with the indifference of nature, and often with the hostility of man, and subject to inner struggles with passions both good and bad that led toward destruction…

“Conrad’s point of view was far from modern. In the modern world there are two philosophies: the one, which stems from Rousseau, and sweeps aside discipline as unnecessary; the other, which finds its fullest expression in totalitarianism, which thinks of discipline as essentially imposed from without. Conrad adhered to the older tradition, that discipline should come from within. He despised indiscipline, and hated discipline that was merely external.

“In all this I found myself closely in agreement with him…

“I had some charming letters from him, especially one about my book on China…

‘…after reading your extremely interesting view of the Chinese Problem I take a gloomy view of the future of their country.’ He went on to say that my views of the future of China ‘strike a chill into one’s soul,’ the more so, he said, as I pinned my hopes on international socialism–‘The sort of thing,’ he commented, ‘to which I cannot attach any sort of definite meaning. I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything convincing enough to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world.’ He went on to say that although man has taken to flying, ‘He doesn’t fly like an eagle, he flies like a beetle. And you must have noticed how ugly, ridiculous and fatuous is the flight of a beetle.’ In these pessimistic remarks, I felt that he was showing a deeper wisdom than I had shown in my somewhat artificial hopes for a happy issue in China. It must be said that so far events have proved him right…

“Conrad, I suppose, is in process of being forgotten. But his intense and passionate nobility shines in my memory like a star seen from the bottom of a well. I wish I could make his light shine for others as it shone for me.”

Loved this comment: One word I often use with students, instead of “critical,” is “reflective.”

To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan’s observation on our challenge in the age of electronic information: “Today’s child is growing up absurd because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up – that is our new work and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.”

Our fetishizing of “Freedom” is a way of remaining immature. We go on and on about what we wish to be free from (rules, regulations, governance, fear, etc) but never ask what we wish to be free for. And so often if our “freedom” has an object it is an ill-defined “happiness” or “prosperity” without having thought deeply, if at all, about what those are other than an emotive “gut feeling.”

One of my favorite examples of this is the notion “The important thing is to be a good person” in which “good person” is undefined, a feel-good concept that has no boundaries, no clear meaning.

Critical thinking, I’d hope, would start with considering these things, teaching kids how to define what we assume we know all about but never actually consider, rather than the mechanics of how to deconstruct a statement or proposition.

Ms. Tushnet need not worry. As education is progressively underfunded, and ever more focussed on regurgitation of facts, critical thinking is already hanging by a thread. Soon it may be dead, and she will have the empire of superstition she’s pining for.

Once upon a time, there was a great and powerful emperor, who hired a pair of tailors to weave for him the greatest suit of clothes ever made, and… you know what happens next.

After the child pointed out the emperor’s nudity before the entire court, the emperor’s courtiers took him aside, and told him, ” Don’t be too quick to use facile critical thinking in your claim that the emperor is naked. You base that claim on a shallow, materialistic worldview, in which mere contradiction is sufficient to disprove any claim. Instead, you must embrace the transcendent nature of the emperor’s splendor, and accept the majesty of his new clothes in a humble spirit of humility. Why not accept the emperor’s new clothes as a tentative truth?”

The child pondered their words well into adulthood, and came to realize that the courtiers were cowards and liars, and their words masks for their weakness and hypocrisy. Eventually, he put on a red beret, became a revolutionary, and led an army that annihilated the emperor and his court.

I want to let you know about a recent book by epistemologist Linda Zagzebski: Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. I have not read it yet (it’s on my reading list for this summer), but I have read her earlier book on virtue epistemology, which makes a formidable, sustained case for an epistemology modeled on a kind of virtue ethics. She is a great philosopher as well as a joy to read.

Zagzebski is Roman Catholic, and my understanding is that in her new book, she argues that belief from epistemic authority is consistent with certain minimal commitments about the self, commitments that most philosophers would accept. Zagzebski tries to make a distinction between epistemic autonomy (which should accept the possibility of belief from authority, including religious authority) and epistemic self-reliance, which is incoherent.