Dialogue as Medium (and Message) for Training Critical Thinking

Standard internalist approaches to critical thinking insist that critical thinkers maintain conscious, deliberate access to the reasons for their beliefs and actions. A more useful approach is externalist, focusing on the reliability of different types of processes for generating beliefs and decisions under different circumstances. We describe an externalist approach to critical thinking based on dialogue. According to the theory, critical thinking is asking and answering questions about alternative possibilities in order to achieve some objective. Three perspectives are coordinated (by different individuals or inside a single head): a proponent, an opponent, and a referee. By asking and answering questions, the defender and challenger introduce new possibilities (mental models), understand them more completely, and learn one another’s beliefs and preferences. The referee, who represents an external perspective, regulates the dialogue so that it reliably achieves the participants’ objectives within the available time. "Critical Thinking through Dialogue" training takes trainees through four phases of a critical dialogue (identifying a disagreement, deciding how to resolve it, challenging and defending positions, and resolution), and presents principles associated with each phase. Tactical decision game scenarios were used prior to training, for practice, and for a post-training test. The training led participants to surface information not previously shared and to make effective use of it. They were more likely to recognize and deal with disagreements, to ask for and give reasons for positions, listen more carefully, and seek creative solutions rather than premature compromises. Current work is extending the theory and training to leadership skills. Dialogue and Critical Thinking 3 Approaches To Critical Thinking Definitions of critical thinking vary, but most share a common theme. Siegel (1997, p.14), for example, says that ...being a critical thinker requires basing one’s beliefs and actions on reasons... the beliefs and actions of the critical thinker, at least ideally, are justified by reasons for them which she has properly evaluated [italics in original]. Paul (1993) defines critical thinking as “a unique kind of purposeful thinking in which the thinker systematically and habitually imposes criteria and intellectual standards upon the thinking....” Implicit or explicit in many definitions (Johnson, 1996, chpt. 12) is that critical thinking involves the deliberate application of a proper evaluative criterion directly to beliefs and decisions and the reasons for arriving at them. These definitions (and many others; see Cohen, Salas, & Riedel, 2002, for a review) reflect a particular paradigm. Critical thinking has traditionally been conceptualized from an internalist point of view, which (as the name suggests) packs everything relevant to the evaluation of an intellectual product into the consciousness of an individual (Feldman & Conee, 2000; Plantinga, 1993a, pp. 3-29). From this perspective, it is inappropriate to credit a person for a correct judgment or decision if she cannot justify it by an explicit reason. If she cannot say why she judged or decided in the way she did, then she got it right by accident (P. Klein, 2000). Expert physicians who are unable to explain a diagnosis (Patel, Arocha, & Kaufman, 1999, p. 82) are irrational, or at the very least cannot be good critical thinkers. By the same token, there is a set of rules for proper reasoning that applies to all situations at all times; if adoption of a belief fits those rules, it cannot be faulted, no matter else is going on. For example, it is unfair to fault a judgment or decision by reference to information of Dialogue and Critical Thinking 4 which the person was unaware, even if readily available, or based on other rules, which are not intuitively compelling to that person. The purpose of this evaluation is “fairness” rather than effectiveness. As a consequence, critical thinking is supposed to evaluate a static, self-contained set of mental contents, in the light of universally compelling standards (e.g., logical, probabilistic, or decision theoretic) that specify how conclusions should be supported by reasons. Sosa (1991, p. 195) dubbed this view the “intellectualist model of justification.” A problem with internalism is that only a small subset of the reasons for a decision can ever be made explicit in critical thinking (Cherniak, 1986). As a result, the required absolute evaluative criteria do not exist. To varying degrees, everyone is in the same boat as the inarticulate expert physicians. Another problem is that, if applied “systematically and habitually” (e.g., as urged by Paul; also, Siegel, 1997: p. 16), the habit of asking for reasons leads to an infinite regress; to be a critical thinker is to be on a never-ending treadmill. Questions arise about the potential usefulness of training such skills for use in real-world domains like the Army tactical battlefield: Will critical thinking take too much time, undermine the will to fight, supplant experience and even expertise, stifle innovation, or disrupt coordination? Unfortunately, the current state of the field does not provide encouraging answers. Critical thinking textbooks tend to emphasize (i) basing judgments and decisions on formal or informal logic, probability theory, or decision theory, and (ii) the avoidance of common fallacies (Hansen & Pinto, 1995) and biases (e.g, Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). Critical thinking is still regarded implicitly as a form of inner purity. The critical thinker’s duty is to accept only beliefs seen clearly to follow from sound arguments, regardless of conditions or outcomes in the real world. There is little prescriptive research regarding pragmatic constraints on critical thinking that arise in time-sensitive domains. Dialogue and Critical Thinking 5 Our objective was to place critical thinking in a more realistic context for practitioners. To accomplish this, we sought a conceptualization that would: – Capture the idea of thinking about thinking without demanding that all (or even most) decision making be deliberative, or that all (or even most) reasons be made explicit. – Be usable in time-constrained situations. – Take account of constraints & obstacles due to social and organizational relationships. – Enhance the effectiveness of strategies actually used by proficient decision makers (e.g., recognition, story-building). – Be easy to teach, practice, and evaluate in real-world contexts. These objectives commit us to an externalist point of view (e.g., Papineau, 2003; Lipshitz & Cohen, 2003). From that perspective, evaluation is based on the reliability of the process that generated a judgment or a decision in real-world environments of the appropriate kind. Critical thinking has a different look and status in the externalist perspective: (i) Externalist evaluation is highly context-dependent, and the most effective processes or methods are often domain-specific rather than general. A judgment or decision is justified if it is generated by a process that reliably achieves objectives under relevant conditions (Goldman, 1992, chpt. 6). (ii) Reasons for a belief or decision will be spelled out to varying degrees depending on the context, and there will always be a large residual dependence on the reliability of relatively automatic perceptual and inferential processes (e.g., rapid recognition-primed decision making; Klein, 1993). (iii) Evaluation based on effectiveness (rather than “fairness”) is not limited to a person’s consciousness. Cognitive and social processes that expose views to outside challenge or actively seek information from the environment are likely to increase reliability (Goldman, 1992, chpt. 10) and may be part of critical thinking. (iv) Feasibility is built into the notion of reliability. Dialogue and Critical Thinking 6 Externalist criteria will favor strategies that are closely related to the way people already think over methods that are formally rigorous but impossible to implement (Lipshitz & Cohen, 2003). (v) No single method or process defines rationality. Critical thinking itself is not necessary for rationality, since intuitive or recognitional processes may be more reliable for achieving goals in familiar situations or when time is limited (Cohen, Freeman, & Wolf, 1996). At the other extreme, formal models might be worthwhile when their presuppositions are satisfied and an explicit computational implementation is available. Is there an externalist platform for critical thinking that realizes our objectives? Dialogue and Thought We propose an externalist perspective according to which critical thinking is, in essence, a form of dialogue. Dialogue theory studies reasoning and decision making as they actually occur in multiperson interactions rather than as a static set of logically related premises and conclusions (Hamblin, 1970; Rescher, 1977; van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1983; van Eemeren et al., 1993). It seeks to identify the different types of argumentation (that is, the dynamic exchange of reasons for and against a conclusion) that are observed in conversation and the kinds of errors to which they are subject. Walton (1995, 1998) generalized the notion of dialogue beyond argumentation, defining it as any characteristic type of multiperson exchange with associated mutual expectations about roles, constraints, and purposes (Walton, 1998; Walton & Krabbe, 1995, p. 66). Based on that definition, he developed a classification of dialogue types, including negotiation, deliberation, inquiry, information seeking, and even quarreling. Dialogue theory blends descriptive and normative concerns, beginning in bottom up fashion with real-world conversations. Researchers start with observed types of interactive exchange and then build idealized models. These models constrain how each type of transaction should be Dialogu