Critical Thinking, Reason, and Logic.

In my ongoing exploration of people's brains I have recently become interested in the differences between the three ways of thinking in the title, Critical Thinking, Reason and Logic, and the problems that confusing them cause. I'll start with giving them my own definitions, and then the problems caused by the confusion between them. I hope to end by looking up the actual definitions to see if perhaps the problem is my own perception.

Reason is a type of thinking. It isn't the only type of thinking but it is the type of thinking that people usually consider to be thinking. Reason is answering questions by using a systematic approach, looking for cause and effect, working out probabilities, weighing evidence. An example of reason would be if your car stops running, you think of the probabilities and make an assumption that the most likely thing is that the car has a mechanical failure. You then think of what you wish to happen to give you the greatest gratification, decide that this would be to have the car fixed. You then from experience work out roughly how much money it costs to fix cars. You find a mechanic, because they know how to fix cars, and you will tend to choose a mechanic with a good reputation if you can find one, and so on.

As I have said before, we hugely exaggerate how much we use this type of thinking. Most of the time a situation occurs and we feel emotionally about it in some way and then react to that emotion. Reason comes in later to explain to ourselves that it the decision was sensible.

Critical thinking is a portion of reason, it is the portion whereby we examine what our thoughts, or the thoughts of others, are and subject them to analysis to see if these thoughts are in fact reasonable. We can examine the path with the broken car and see whether having a functional car did actually make us happy, whether mechanics actually can fix cars, whether the reputation of the mechanic actually has anything to do with how happy the process makes you. it is an evidence weighing process, assigning value to pieces of evidence and comparing different thoughts or concepts through the value of that evidence.

Logic is also a part of reason, but it is an abstract part of reason. In logic all the terms in a position must be completely defined, the definition of those terms means that certain conclusions must, and I repeat that must, be true or false.

The problem comes when these different processes become intermixed without it being known. A great example of this for me is Lewis' trilemma about Jesus.

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

So, here we have an attempt to prove Jesus was the Son of God through logic. You can tell that it is an attempt at a logical proof because it uses the word, "must" so often. It means that the conclusion must follow from the assumptions in the premise by the nature of those assumptions. Well, let us take what the assumptions are,

1. What is reported that Jesus said, he said.
2. There are only three sort of people who could have said what Jesus said, a lunatic, a devil, or the Son of God.
3. From what he said he cannot be a lunatic or a devil.

This leaves you with the logical proof that since only the Son of God could have said what Jesus said he must be the Son of God. I hope you can see that as a logical proof this leaves a lot to be desired. That is that the assumption is the conclusion, a tautology. If we accept the assumption that only the Son of God could have said what Jesus said we must conclude that he is the Son of God since he said what he said.

What actually is going on here is reasoning in the guise of a logical proof. What is actually happening is that the assumptions are not iron clad facts, but rather they are good guesses. There is a determination that there is a high chance that what Jesus is purported to say he actually said. You can make your own determination on the probability that this is true. For the sake of argument I will set all these probabilities to 90%. Then let us go to the next step, let us say that there is a 90% chance that there are only three sorts of people who could say such stuff. let us say that from those three there's a 90% chance a lunatic wouldn't say what Jesus said, and the same with a devil.

Once you have assigned probabilities you can make the calculation as to what is the probability that Jesus was the Son of God. 90%x90%x90%x90%=about 66%.

This leaves us with two different positions. On the one hand the assertion that you must, 100%, say that Jesus is the Son of God, and on the other is a two thirds chance that it is so. The difference between certainty and probability is at the root of many of our problems. Barak Hussein Obama having a foreign name, and him being a Democrat, therefore he must be a Muslim being a wonderful example. Another is that you get ahead by working hard and trusting in Jesus therefore anyone on the dole is a lazy heretic. Another is that because someone is a conservative, believes in the superiority of the free market and has been elected that they must be operating for their billionaire cronies rather than trying to make the world a better place for everyone.

The trilemma of Lewis' is still one of the most widely used "proofs" used to convince people that Jesus was the Son of God. I have repeatedly seen the faults in the proof demonstrated clearly to others and still have them accept it as a good proof. I have seen the three examples above given, and then seen them resist any movement based on the explanation of other evidence or the idea of probabilities. Why do people confuse reason and logic?

The reason why logic and reason are confused is a three part process. The first is that all of us do logical thinking by feel most of the time. Given three girls of different relative heights we can all put them in the right order as in the classic word problem, but I think most of us would have extreme difficulty in explaining in a clear way how we know the answer must be true, but we know it must be true.

Anne, is taller than Jill. Mary is taller than Jill. Mary is shorter than Anne. Who is the tallest? How do you know that? I bet the first answer that comes to your head is that it just must be. It takes a little while before you start talking about the assumed characteristics of the relationships defined as "taller" or "shorter" that are unspoken in your logical proof. Over time we became adept enough with logic that we do it largely by autopilot.

The second portion is that in order for us to think through enough steps our brains cannot manage to keep multiple possibilities going at the same time. So we say, "for the sake of argument let us assume that X is true" and then we solve the problem logically. We are putting aside complications in order to get at what the consequences of something might be. However, often this simplification is simply forgotten in order to get a useful answer, and this is quite sensible because in real life you need to act as if the thing that is most likely is going to happen most of the time.

The third part is that people don't critically think about their conclusions. People run the information through the assumptions they have, and through the reasoning process they use (usually unconsciously) and arrive at a "right" answer. What scientists do at this point is then let everyone else try to show that their answer is wrong. What most people do is defend their opinions to the point of anger, frustration and contempt. Clearly the scientific method comes up with better right answers. However, the protection of one's idea comes up with higher self-esteem, a better social ranking, and a comfort with ones own place in the world.

So, people make giant errors about how things are while simultaneously being sure they are correct. They do this by confusing the assumptions in a logical argument for real fact (a lunatic cannot give good moral advice), they then unconsciously come to conclusions based on these assumptions which to them feels like how they do logic, and then they do not put those conclusions through a process to look for errors (quite the reverse).

This is why so often you come across people who think they know something for a fact because it's clearly logically true when actually it is idiocy. These people will get very angry at you if you try to point out the errors, usually calling you an idiot.

Lewis' trilemma is so effective because at each step it seems reasonable. It seems reasonable to think that Jesus pretty much said what we have recorded. It seems reasonable that what he said was largely great moral teachings. It seems reasonable to think that calling yourself God is the act of a lunatic (just don't tell any Hindus that). it seems reasonable to think that Jesus wasn't lying. It seems reasonable that lunatics don't provide a lot of great moral truth (although I think this to be far less true than most). Given enough reasonable assumptions it is easy to see that a conclusion from these would be thought to be reasonable. But the error margins of reasonable add up and multiply with each other, which in the real world makes a certain conclusion very difficult to make from a set of reasonable assumptions.

Looking up definitions. I have confused the term logic with a portion of logic known as deductive reasoning. Logicians have had a very difficult time in defining the term logic, to the extent that my definition of reason and the various definitions of logic come quite close. My definition of critical thinking, that of criticizing thinking by passing judgment on the merits of that thinking, is actually now just a very small portion of the dictionary definition of critical thinking.

It would seem to me that the consequences of the confusion of these three types of thinking have reached the stage where the meaning of the very words themselves are confused. While these are three types of thinking, in general parlance logic, reasoning and critical thinking are synonyms. No wonder the confusion.