Richard Paul - The Thinkers Guide to Fallacies

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The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts & Tools, Eighth Edition

Paperback 9781538134948

eBook 9781538134955

The Thinkers Guide to Ethical Reasoning

Paperback 9780944583173

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The Thinkers Guide to Fallacies

Paperback 9780944583272

eBook 9781538133774

The Art of Asking Essential Questions

Paperback 9780944583166

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The Thinkers Guide for Conscientious Citizens on How to Detect Media Bias and Propaganda in National and World News, Fourth Edition

Paperback 9780944583203

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The Thinkers Guide to Engineering Reasoning

Paperback 9780944583333

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The Thinkers Guide to Analytic Thinking

Paperback 9780944583197

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The Thinkers Guide to Socratic Questioning

Paperback 9780944583319

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The Nature and Functions of Critical & Creative Thinking

Paperback 9780944583265

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Thinkers Guide to the Human Mind

Paperback 9780944583586

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The Thinkers Guide to Scientific Thinking

Paperback 9780985754426

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The Thinkers Guide to Clinical Reasoning

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The Aspiring Thinkers Guide to Critical Thinking

Paperback 9780944583418

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The Thinkers Guide for Students on How to Study & Learn a Discipline, Second Edition

Paperback 9781632340009

eBook 9781538133835

The International Critical Thinking Reading and Writing Test, Second Edition

Paperback 9780944583326

eBook 9781538133965

The Student Guide to Historical Thinking

Paperback 9780944583463

eBook 9781538133941

How to Read a Paragraph, second edition

Paperback 9780944583494

eBook 9781538133828

How to Write a Paragraph

Paperback 9780944583227

eBook 9781538133866

The Miniature Guide to Practical Ways for Promoting Active and Cooperative Learning, Third Edition

Paperback 9780944583135

eBook 9781538133903

A Critical Thinkers Guide to Educational Fads

Paperback 9780944583340

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A Guide for Educators to Critical Thinking Competency Standards

Paperback 9780944583302

eBook 9781538133934

How to Improve Student Learning: 30 Practical Ideas

Paperback 9780944583555

eBook 9781538133859

The Thinkers Guide to Intellectual Standards

Paperback 9780944583395

eBook 9781538133927

The human mind is a marvelous set of structures and systems. It is a center of consciousness and action. It forms a unique identity. It creates a view of the world. Rich experience emerges from its interactions with the world. It thinks. It feels. It wants. It apprehends truths and suppresses errors. It achieves insights and fabricates prejudices. Both useful truths and harmful misconceptions are its intermixed products. It can as easily believe what is false as what is true.

It can see beauty in right conduct and justify what is flagrantly unethical. It can love and hate. It can be kind and cruel. It can advance knowledge or error. It can be intellectually humble or intellectually arrogant. It can be empathic or narrow-minded. It can be open or closed. It can achieve a permanent state of expanding knowledge or a deadening state of narrowing ignorance. It both transcends the creatures of lessor ability and insults their innocence and nobility by its self-deception and cruelty.

How can humans create within their own minds such an inconsistent amalgam of the rational and the irrational? The answer is self-deception. In fact, perhaps the most accurate and useful definition of humans is that of the self-deceiving animal. Deception, duplicity, sophistry, delusion, and hypocrisy are foundational products of human nature in its natural, untutored state. Rather than reducing these tendencies, most schooling and social influences redirect them, rendering them more sophisticated, more artful, and more obscure.

To exacerbate this problem, not only are humans instinctively self-deceptive, they are naturally sociocentric as well. Every culture and society sees itself as special and as justified in all of its basic beliefs and practices, in all its values and taboos. The arbitrary nature of its folkways is known to its anthropologists (if it has any), but not to its overwhelming majority.

The over-whelming preponderance of people have not freely decided what to believe, but, rather, have been socially conditioned (indoctrinated) into their beliefs. They are unreflective thinkers. Their minds are products of social and personal forces they neither understand, control, nor concern themselves with. Their personal beliefs are often based in prejudices. Their thinking is largely comprised of stereotypes, caricatures, oversimplifications, sweeping generalizations, illusions, delusions, rationalizations, false dilemmas, and begged questions. Their motivations are often traceable to irrational fears and attachments, personal vanity and envy, intellectual arrogance and simple-mindedness. These constructs have become a part of their identity.

Such persons are focused on what immediately affects them. They see the world through ethnocentric and nationalistic eyes. They stereotype people from other cultures. When their beliefs are questioned however unjustified those beliefs may be they feel personally attacked. When they feel threatened, they typically revert to infantile thinking and emotional counter attacks.

When their prejudices are questioned, they often feel oftended and stereotype the questioner as intolerant and prejudiced. They rely on sweeping generalizations to support their beliefs. They resent being corrected, disagreed with, or criticized. They want to be re-enforced, flattered, and made to feel important. They want to be presented with a simple-minded, black-and-white, world. They have little or no understanding of nuances, fine distinctions, or subtle points.

They want to be told who is evil and who is good. They see themselves as good. They see their enemies as evil. They want all problems to admit to a simple solution and the solution to be one they are familiar with for example, punishing those who are evil by use of force and violence. Visual images are much more powerful in their minds than abstract language. They are overly impressed by authority, power, and celebrity. They are eminently ready to be directed and controlled, as long as those doing the controlling flatter them and lead them to believe that their views are correct and insightful.

The mass media are structured to appeal to such persons. Subtle and complex issues are reduced to simplistic formulas (Get tough on crime! Three strikes and youre out! Adult crime, adult time! You are either for us or against us!) Spin is everything; substance is irrelevant.

There is a much smaller group of people who are skilled in the art of manipulation and control. These people are shrewdly focused on pursuing their own interest without respect to how that pursuit affects others. Though they share many of the characteristics of uncritical thinkers, they have qualities that separate them from uncritical persons. They have greater command of the rhetoric of persuasion. They are more sophisticated, more verbal, and generally have greater status. On average, they have more schooling and achieve more success than uncritical persons. They typically acquire more power and occupy positions of authority. They are accustomed to playing the dominant role in relationships. They know how to use the established structure of power to advance their interests. Since they are fundamentally concerned, not with advancing rational values, but with getting what they want, they are careful to present themselves as sharing the values of those they manipulate.