Publish at January 20 2015 Updated May 29 2024
The need for critical thinking is nothing new in itself: our perception and personal experience can mislead us.
In 1999, the invisible gorilla experiment belied the received wisdom that we perceive everything in our visual field. Concentrating on a precise task, the majority of people failed to notice an unusual event occurring simultaneously before their eyes: a gorilla wandering around in the background of the screen.
Today, we're constantly confronted with words, figures and images that require careful reading. The sheer volume of information to which we are exposed almost legitimizes the term "self-defense". Information: something we need to learn to defend ourselves against?
Intellectual self-defense is a protective mechanism that provides us with appropriate defense instruments for any type of information. Noam Chomsky 's work is a good starting point: "If we had a real education system, we'd have courses in intellectual self-defense".
N. Baillargeon, author of "Petit cours d'autodéfense intellectuelle" (illustrated by Charb), gives us the toolbox of every critical thinker: language, logic, rhetoric, numbers, probability and statistics. In particular, he talks about "citizen mathematics" and shows us how simple mathematical calculations can refute many of the prevailing views.
If you want to ensure your intellectual self-defense, you need to learn to spot the sophisms that surround you. A sophism is an argument that doesn't hold water and leads us to believe in something that is false. There's an important nuance behind this definition: a sophism aims to mislead. This is where the term "self-defense" comes into its own.
Some examples of common traps to avoid? The false dilemma (you ask a question but imply that there is no alternative), the hasty generalization ("everyone says that...."). Or the bof effect: giving the same probability to the existence or non-existence of something, when it would be more logical to say: "Actually, I don't know".
The Laboratoire de zététique (from the Greek zêtêin = to seek) speaks of the "ars of doubt", of a provisional scepticism, where "doubt is a means, not an end". And we are shown several approaches to logical reasoning: "a scenario is not a law", "possible is not always possible", "the bizarre is probable", etc.
CorteX (COllectif de Recherche Transdisciplinaire Esprit Critique & Sciences) is a collective of people from different disciplines (teachers, researchers, students, etc.) working on critical thinking. The collective's website offers a wealth of inspiring teaching resources.
Take, for example, the exercise in deconstructing a political interview: a political interview is broken down, sentence by sentence, in search of all its hidden traps. On a topical subject like the economic crisis, for example, we find ourselves trying to outwit a doormat effect in the word "crisis" (several possible meanings of the term crisis); a false dilemma and a catch-all notion in the word "capitalism" (the implication is that there is no possible alternative to capitalism. But is there really only one form of capitalism? ). Very instructive.
Videos also illustrate how easily a graph can mislead us: how, for example, a different choice of unit on the y-axis changes an increase from slight to exponential. There's also a selection of comic strips to use as "critical thinking resources".
On her blog, teacher Sophie Mazet talks about her experience with intellectual self-defense workshops in her high school. She tells us about the origins of the project, the reticence, how her pupils invent their own conspiracy theories and how serious subjects can be tackled in a totally playful way.
For those who want to know more, Richard Monvoisin's thesis deals in depth with all these subjects, and also offers a series of teaching sheets, such as No. 9: "The game of the 20 traps, or how to avoid arguments of authority?". It begins like this: "Copain vous raconte qu'un Ami lui lui a dit avoir lu dans Moisi que le célèbre Duschmoll, professeur à l'Institut...". We'll leave you to guess the pitfalls.
What certainly emerges from all these resources is that criticism sometimes rhymes with irreverence. This seems particularly topical to us, in this month of January 2015.
Photo credit: jrduboc / Foter / CC BY
1. A selection of N. Chomsky's texts, in French, is available at http://www.chomsky.fr/ (accessed January 15, 2015).
2. N. Baillargeon. Petit cours d'autodéfense intellectuelle (2005). Lux Éditeur. Buy on Decitre
Online: radio interview Petit cours d'autodéfense intellectuelle. March 26, 2014. http://www.franceinter.fr/emission-la-bas-si-jy-suis-petit-cours-dautodefense-intellectuelle
3. R. Monvoisin. Le culbuto, l'effet bof et autres ni-ni. Tools for intellectual self-defense.
https://cortecs.org/la-zetetique/outillage-le-culbuto-leffet-bof-et-autres-ni-ni/.
4. H. Broch. Facets & Effects of Zetetics. http://webs.unice.fr/site/broch/enseignement.html#FACETTES (accessed January 15, 2015).
5. Le CorteX. Political interview - husking corrected.December 18, 2014. http://cortecs.org/activites/entrevue-politique-corrige-de-decorticage/
6. Le CorteX. Comics and critical thinking. May 2, 2014. http://cortecs.org/bibliotex/bandes-dessinees-et-esprit-critique/
7. S. Mazet. Blog Cours d'autodéfense intellectuelle au Lycée Auguste Blanqui http://autodefenseintellectuelleblanqui.over-blog.com/(accessed January 15, 2015).
Radio interview Ils changent le monde. Sophie Mazet. July 14, 2014. http://www.franceinter.fr/emission-ils-changent-le-monde-sophie-mazet-0 .
8. R. Monvoisin. Pour une didactique de l'esprit critique - Zététique et utilisation des interstices pseudoscientifiques dans les médias. 2007. Downloadable from the HAL open archives website: https: //tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00207746/fr/
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