Roy van der Brink-Budgen - Advanced Critical Thinking Skills

Heres Ptolemy, a four-year-old boy, walking up the stairs with Celeste, his younger sister, and his father.

I wonder whos going to get to the top of the stairs first, Ptolemy says to his sister, Celeste.

You shouldnt run up the stairs, Celeste tells him.

Yes, thats right, Ptolemy, says his father. Its dangerous to race up the stairs.

But I didnt say it was a race, said Ptolemy. I just wondered who was going to get to the top of the stairs first.

Here we have a wonderful example of critical thinking in action. Both Celeste and Ptolemys father took the initial point (I wonder) to mean that there was going to be a race. Perhaps there was: perhaps this is what was meant. But it didnt have to mean this. It could indeed have been just Ptolemy wondering who would be first, with no necessary implication.

What does this account illustrate? The very important point that, in Critical Thinking, we very often need to ask the questions What does this statement mean? and What else could it mean? Indeed, to be doing critical thinking is essentially to be asking lots of questions. Critical thinking without questions is like trying to listen to someones conversation through a wall. You get bits of whats going on, but you miss important bits, such that all you get are disconnected words.

This chapter has three main purposes:

• To look at the issue of meaning and significance when considering claims;
• To examine how meaning and significance are central to what happens when inferences are drawn;
• To look at the relationship between claims and inferences drawn from them.

Well begin by looking at an evidence-claim in order to see the importance of considering meaning and significance.

The country that has won more Nobel Prizes than any other is the US.

It might seem that this is a straightforward evidence-claim, such that its significance is clear. But what is this significance?

Being top of any league table will tell us something about that which is the leader, so being top of the international league table for Nobel Prizes tells us something about the US (and about other countries too), but we might perhaps need to know more detail.

• How many prizes has the US won compared to other countries?
• Has the US won many prizes in some categories but few in others?
• Have some countries done even better when we look at population size?
• Were some of the people who won the US Nobel Prizes originally from other countries?

As you can see, asking questions about the claim can lead us to consider its significance better.

The first question is an important one. Is the US top of the league table, but followed very closely by the second-place country? If this were the case, then perhaps the significance is not as great as we might think. However, this isnt the case. The US is way ahead of all countries, having received almost three times as many awards as the country in second place. (The US had, by 2009, won 305 prizes; the UK, in second place, had won 106.)

The second question might be relevant if the US has achieved its high rank only by performing well in some categories. Nobel Prizes are awarded in the following categories: Chemistry, Physics, Medicine, Economics, Literature and Peace. The US beats every other country in all of these categories, except Literature where France comes top. (There is a category of winner which is labelled International and which includes organisations like the Red Cross and the United Nations. If we include this category then the US doesnt top the poll for the Peace Prize, being pipped 22 to 20 by this international group. We would perhaps expect this International category to be the leader of the Peace Prize, given the organisations it includes. The US remains, however, way ahead of any other country for the Peace Prize.) So the answer to the question is that they have won many prizes in all categories.

The question about population size is an interesting one. The current population of the US is 303 million. This would mean that there is an almost exact correspondence of one Nobel Prize per million of population (although this gives a somewhat artificial snapshot by comparing cumulative past performance with present population size). The current population of the UK is 60 million, which gives us an approximate figure of one Nobel Prize for every 600,000 people. The figure for a small country like Switzerland is even more striking. Its population is 7.3 million, which means its 22 awards give us an approximate figure of one per 330,000. At the other end we have China, with a population of 1,331.4 million and, so far, two prizes (both for Medicine). (But see below.)

So when we consider Nobel Prizes per head of population, then the figure for the US is not as significant as when we looked at the raw figures. If the Swiss performance had been matched by the US, they would have had 918 awards although, of course, this would not be possible since not that many have been awarded.