Scientific Thinking is not Critical Thinking

“What’s a strong woman? Is it a human being that displays a unique characteristic determined by sex or is it a woman displaying a human virtue?” For several semesters now, I’ve asked my students this question around the middle point of the semester. The course inquires into the foundations of American political thought. They’ve yet to answer me. Why is this the case? Is the question so profound that they are not capable of comprehending it? Of course not. Is the question so insidious that it would be blasphemy to answer it? Possibly (I’ve written about this here) Or is it something else entirely? Could it be that we’ve lost the ability to consider an idea from multiple perspectives, evaluate the contribution of a single perspective, and then return to the initial inquiry with a better understanding of the possible answers. This process inherently transforms the way in which we think about answering questions. Is this not what a university education is to provide us — the capacity to think critically? Somehow this notion of thinking critically has become synonymous with thinking scientifically. These two things are not the same thing; they certainly are related, but they are not equivalent.

Critical thinking is the capacity to evaluate multiple claims which are defensible and decide which is more defensible. Scientific thinking is the capacity to evaluate the weight of evidence in favor or against a given idea. Science is not interested in equally defensible assertions. The scientific enterprise is aimed at producing an explanation of natural phenomenon, supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence which gives an account of what exists and how it functions. When science has more than one position which is equally defensible with the available data, the inquiry is ruled inconclusive; the causal mechanism has not been adequately identified. Or, the other possibility is that, as Popper noted, science is undergoing a paradigm shift and, therefore, the answers produced are actually being drawn from differing sets of epistemological assumptions. It is here that we see the most clear delination between scientific and critical thinking — the former is undermined by conflicting epistemological/ontological/theoretical assumptions whereas the latter is holistically predicated upon those conflicting assumptions.

Critical thinking requires that multiple assertions are possible and that the purpose of the inquiry is to establish which is the most defensible. Critical thinking is, fundamentally, an act of interpretation; scientific thinking is an act of evaluation. Both of them engage in questions of judgment but they cannot be collapsed into one another. This, of course, has not stopped us from doing this in our pedagogy, in our curriculum, and in our academic culture.

What is lost in so doing, however, is the capacity to answer questions that are of profound significance: what is the best way to live? what is the best form of politics with which human beings engage? what are good and evil? should human beings have limits to what they think, speak, and do? Critical thinking is essential for engaging in those kinds of inquiries; scientific thinking, as so modeled in modern social science, either abdicates the inquiry altogether or reduces it to sentimentality, relativism, or historicism. The fundamental cleave here can be drawn to David Hume’s distinction between facts and values, but such a distinction is not actually useful for the purpose of critical thought. What it allows one to do is limit the capacity for scientific inquiry and critical inquiry to speak to one another through the relationship between facts and values. Such a cloistering of inquiries means, for the modern mind, the inquiry into values is one that is relegated to the subjective and the inquiry into facts is objective. Thus, critical thinking is either relegated to personal experience and choice or is subsumed within the inquiry into natural philosophy. This has allowed the modern mind to create technological, medical, and engineering marvels that are near wizardry for a mind not born into our age. But as the world democratizes, particularly as we enter into the Third Industrial Revolution, the collapsing of critical thinking and scientific thinking is becoming more and more problematic as we attempt to forge an intellectual path for our culture and society in the coming decades.

Socrates talks, in Plato’s Phaedo, of his second sailing. What he is speaking of is his turn from natural philosophy (scientific thinking) and toward political philosophy (critical thinking). Within Plato’s dialogues, and with the character of Socrates, natural philosophy is never holistically dismissed but it is not fetishized. Instead, what Plato’s Socrates illuminates is that scientific inquiry has it’s limitations; it’s useful up to the point it can explain but that limitation stands at the cusp of the critical questions for a human being. These human questions, as Cicero put it, which were “brought down from the heavens and introduced into the life of the city” do not have clearly delineated empirical edges. Instead, they are the kinds of questions which today are called ‘normative.’ This word, which is often used in lieu of the more intellectually honest term ‘subjective,’ is frequently dismissed out of hand as not being worthy of scientific inquiry where, in actuality, scientific thinking is incapable of addressing such questions. They require the capacity to evaluate truth claims on a standard that is beyond the data, beyond empirics, and beyond the scientific method. This is frequently why literature (also television and films, to greater or lesser extents) is more useful for illuminating the human condition.

To further illustrate the point, which is better: Shakespeare or Tolkien, Mozart or Bernstein, Bob Dylan or Justin Bieber. If your reaction is this, “well, it depends on the metric” what you have inherently done is said that there is a metric which each of these comparisons are equal to one another. In the broadest sense of being human beings, this is correct. But it’s useless in attempting to understand anything about the inquiry. Because scientific inquiry is so completely enamored with the desire to generalize, it rapidly abandons the intrinsic value of the particular data point. Thus, in an exploration of music Dylan, Mozart, Bieber, Yoko Ono, and all the rejected candidates from the torrent of televised talent contents are of equal value as data points. Anyone who has listened to any of these artists will know the absurdity of such an assertion. Thus, in order to evaluate the way in which one artist can be better than another requires a different kind of inquiry. For the scientific thinking mind, it’s an irrelevant inquiry: it’s merely subjective to the listener. Art, culture, music, philosophy, ethics — these inquiries are merely intellectual candy. If you find this to be hollow, you are right to feel this way. Fundamentally, the human experience is not a scientific one. We use the scientific method to better understand the world we live in, the mechanisms by which we live in it, and the impact that our attempt to bend nature to our will is having on nature itself. It can guide us on how we shape the world, forge the tools of domination and extraction so essential for securing the modern condition, but it can do nothing for us in trying to understand the plight of man, the promises and problems latent within the modern democratic condition, nor the tools for living with the irreconcilable tensions of being human.

For those kinds of inquiries, we have to turn to critical thought, to interpretation, to political philosophy (and it’s intellectual kin: ethics, political theory, epistemology, psychology, sociology, and perhaps others). How can we definitively say that one artist is better than other? We have to ask what the purpose of art is and to what extent the artist is able to make manifest that purpose within their art. If one asserts that art is merely for enjoyment, it’s merely a hedonistic experience and thus, is on par with taking drugs, engaging in causal sexual relations, playing video games, etc. If this is so, there’s no reason to have a curriculum for music education in schools nor is there a reason to spend such effort for the pomp and circumstance to celebrate art like our culture does. By even considering the notion that awards can be given to artistic expression, what we are asserting is that art is more than just the sensation it provides. If this is the case, then what is such a benefit? The inquiry here is not appropriate for such an exploration into aesthetics, but suffice it to say that in order to engage in such an inquiry, scientific thinking will leave one bereft if one wishes to understand artistic experience beyond the technical skills required to construct and disseminate expression.

Perhaps it is our culture’s desire for technological marvels and scientific breakthroughs which has generated such a narrowing of inquiry, which is then dileniated into the minds of our students in their primary and secondary education, that limits their capacity to answer the question, “what is a strong woman?” But if we continue to assert that scientific thinking is the only form which can guide human civilization, we shall have cleaved ourselves from the capacity to guide our moral and ethical paths into the future. Science is essential for understanding the world and the fruits of science make life better, but asserting that the only legitimate form of intellectual inquiry is through the scientific method is why the post-modernist assault on science was not dismissed as the rubish it is. If the world is either fact or opinion, and the intellectual method of the first is the only legitimate one, when the assertion is presented that all facts are socially constructed, science cannot defend itself against the onslaught. Science becomes merely a contest of popularity of sentiments, which is interpreted as a social construct. The weapon against this post-modernist nonsense is not scientific inquiry but critical inquiry.

Critical thinking is not scientific evaluation (nor is it problem solving or other such buzzwords of ’21st century skills’). It is the capacity to take up multiple points of view, evaluate them independently of one another, then examine them in light of one another, and draw a conclusion on which perspective is the most defensible. The goal is not to provide an account of a phenomenon but to provide an interpretation leading to a moral judgment. Collapsing scientific thinking and crititcal thinking into the same metric weakens the capacity to make morally defensible claims, to provide judgment of the human world beyond empirics, and to understand that not all opinions are equally valid. It undermines the capacity for the public square to be robed in debates of morality, ethics, and principles. In lieu of this robe, we have fanaticism, nihilism, and sentimentalism all treated as equally valid perspectives because we lack the ability to discern the valid from the vapid. Crititcal thinking is essential for living in civilization and for engaging in the examined life. But if we understand it as being scientific thinking, our examination will be stunted right at the cusp of the human experience. If we are to wrestle with the question of “what is a strong woman” and not have it devolve into the soft bigotry of tolerance (I like to call this the detente of opinion), we must first understand that there is more than one path to knowledge and construct the skills necessary to judge between mutiple valid perspectives.