Learning out loud from an unconventional life
As a brown girl from India working in technology living in France, I am living quite an unconventional life from my cousins and peers I grew up with.
Thinking critically and asking a lot of questions about the expectations the world had for me helped.
Critical thinking is the skill of the century. I believe it’s essential to keep asking whose path you are on. Structures defined by society fulfill a purpose but is it your purpose? Your foundations are often based off of opinions fed, rather than opinions formed.
How does one develop this skill?
Here are a few things you can do to become a better critical thinker:
Learn some basic logic. Having the basics of logic under your belt will help you to better recognize, reconstruct, and evaluate arguments of various forms when you come across them in the wild. There are various sources from which you can learn logic online, and plenty of textbooks available to purchase, too. Here is a free text on formal logic; I like to use Lewis Vaughn's The Power of Critical Thinking for introductory logic and critical thinking classes, and thus can recommend that text.
Learn a bit about the elements and standards of reasoning. The elements of reasoning include the question at issue, purpose, assumptions, concepts, information, alternatives, context, point of view, and so on; and the standards of reasoning include accuracy, precision, relevance, clarity, and the like. Gerald Nosich's book Learning to Think Things Through is a good resource here.
Familiarize yourself with human psychology and the various biases that inevitably plague our imperfect human reasoning. Practice being mindfully aware of the presence of these biases in your own life, and correct them. Again, there are various sources from which you can learn about the cognitive biases online. A book very much worth reading on these matters is Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Familiarize yourself with the many logical fallacies, both formal and informal (but be careful not to overemphasize their importance, especially with regard to the informal fallacies). As with the previous suggestions, there are plenty of relevant resources online.
Develop a habit of close reading. Here is a brief article explaining one method of close reading in the context of philosophy; many of the techniques discussed can be carried over fruitfully to other disciplines.
Develop a habit of responsive writing. By "responsive writing," I mean something like the following: After you've read a text about which you want to think critically, open a new document (or grab a pen and some paper) and begin by (1) summarizing the view or the argument presented in the text. State the view as clearly as possible and, if you'd like, consider some possible implications of that view. Then, reconstruct the argument as charitably and in as strong a form as you can. After you've done this, (2) offer a critical response. How might you object to one (or more) of the premises? Can you provide your own arguments in support of the objections you've made? What justifications has the author offered for her premises, and are they any good? What assumptions is the author making? Are there any terms or concepts that are unclear to you? Can you determine their probable meanings from what the author has written? And so on.
Cultivate the intellectual virtues. These include intellectual humility, or the awareness of the limits of one's knowledge and understanding, including a special sensitivity to those circumstances in which our biases and prejudices are likely to function self-deceptively; intellectual empathy, or the recognized need to imaginatively put oneself in the place of others so as to acquire a genuine understanding of their beliefs, ideas, reasoning, and points of view; intellectual integrity, or the awareness of the need to hold oneself to the same standards that one holds others to, and to honestly admit inconsistencies in one's thought and action; and intellectual perseverance, or the willingness to embrace intellectual challenge and the disposition to work through intellectual complexities despite the frustration and uncertainty inherent in the task. Related virtues include open-mindedness, curiosity, fair-mindedness, and intellectual courage.
Practice all the above by reading difficult texts that interest you and applying the relevant tools; spending time with people who are smarter than you and are willing and able to point out when (and in what way) your thinking is going awry; getting feedback on your written work from informed peers and professors; and doing the exercises in the logic textbook(s) you acquire or classes you take.
That should serve as good start. Happy thinking! (sourced from reddit)
May you ask ‘why’ in plentiful!
If you have an unconventional story to tell, let’s talk!
