In a world flooded with information, where anyone can create anything and present it with or without any credibility, the ability to think analytically has become more critical than ever. Most of the time our thinking occurs with little or no deliberate effort. In a nutshell, we could almost say we think without thinking. When offered a choice between black tea and milk tea, I can make a decision quickly and easily based on my personal preferences, without considering any other factors or engaging in critical thinking.

Critical thinking means giving a fair and unbiased opinion of something. Being critical and thinking critically are not the same thing.

If critical thinking were simply about making judgements, then anyone could do it by giving an opinion without any special training or practice. If I come across a debate, I may react impulsively based on my preconceived notions, biases and emotions without engaging in critical thinking to evaluate the information presented. This is why individuals can react so differently to the same information.

Take a hypothetical situation. If I watch a film and think it is boring, even though it has had good reviews, no one can really say that my judgement is wrong and the professional critics are right. Someone can disagree with me, but that is just another judgement, no better or worse, you might say, than mine.

In a limited sense, this is true. But a serious critical judgement is more than a statement of preference or taste. A critical judgement must have some basis, which usually requires a measure of knowledge or expertise on the part of the person making it. Just saying “I like it” or “I don’t like it” is not enough. There have to be some grounds for a judgement before we can call it critical.

That ground starts with the reasons supporting the conclusion, whether what is being offered is an argument, a claim, an assertion or a statement. Every judgement needs legitimate grounds before it counts as a sound or critical one.

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Claims, Assertions, and Arguments

Before judging any of them we need to know the difference between them.

Arguments are especially interesting because their primary purpose is to persuade or influence people in favour of some claim. The critical question therefore becomes whether the argument succeeds or fails: whether we should allow ourselves to be persuaded by it, or not.

Assertion and claim are very close in meaning. The difference is in when you use them. ‘Assertion’ is a bit stronger and more emphatic; it is more active. A claim may be asserted, but we would not naturally say that an assertion was claimed.

Claims are presented as expressions of truth, yet they are not always true. Critical thinking is a way of being as sure as possible about which claims to believe, and which to question or mistrust. Arguments, in turn, are built out of claims: reasons, conclusions, and everything in between.

Critical judgement of any situation starts with identifying its elements, especially the premises, also called reasons, and the conclusion that follows from them. These are the basic elements, and identifying them is not as easy as it sounds. Judgement can still go wrong after the elements have been correctly identified, and how well it survives that stage is what decides the level of critical thinking actually applied.

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Analyzing an Argument

Example

Top women tennis players used to grumble that their prize money was less substantial than that paid to top male players in the same competition. They argued that they were being unequally treated. But the disparity was entirely justified and should never have been abolished. Male players just have more prowess than women. They need to win three sets out of five to take the match; the women only two. They have to play harder and faster, and expend far more energy on court than the women. But most of all, if the best woman in the tournament played any of the men, there would be no contest: the man would win.

The first things to consider are the reasons and the conclusion.

The first two sentences do not function as either. They set the context for the argument. Try reading the passage without them and you will see this for yourself: the argument loses its coherence, because there is no longer anything being responded to. Sentences like these are often referred to as the target, or context, of the argument.

The purpose of the argument is to respond to the alleged claim of unfairness and inequality. Some people would call the part being responded to a counter-argument, but this is misleading. If anything, the author’s argument is the counter-argument, since the author is the one responding, not the women.

So, in standard form:

Context (or target): Top women tennis players used to complain about the inequalities of prize money.

R1 & R2 —> IC —> [C] <— R3

R1 to R3 are the reasons. IC is the intermediate conclusion drawn from them. C is the main conclusion, the actual point of the argument, supported by both the reasons and the intermediate conclusion.

R1 and R2 support the intermediate conclusion. Those three elements could stand as a separate argument on their own. R3 is an independent reason supporting the main conclusion directly, without passing through IC.

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Where This Argument Fails

Laying out the structure is only half the work. Once you can see the reasons, you can ask whether they hold.

Credible research should support the reasons presented. Is it actually true, as R1 states, that men play three sets out of five while women play two? In Grand Slam tournaments, yes. That reason is factually correct, and it is worth noticing that a true reason can still be doing very little work.

Because the conclusion does not follow from it. The reasons are about the format and physical demands of the matches. The conclusion is about what the players should be paid. Getting from one to the other requires an unstated assumption: that prize money should be proportional to sets played or energy expended, rather than to the revenue, audience, or status of the tournament. That assumption is never argued for. It is smuggled in.

R3 has a different problem. Whether the best woman would lose to a man is a claim about a match that does not happen, in a competition organised into separate categories precisely so that it does not. It is irrelevant to the conclusion even if true.

This is the more useful lesson. An argument can have true premises and still fail, because soundness depends on the reasons supporting the conclusion, not merely on the reasons being correct.

A clearer version of the same failure:

R1 –> “The weather has been really nice lately”

C –> “So, we should invest in renewable energy.”

The premise may well be true. The conclusion may well be right. Neither fact makes this an argument, because nothing connects them.

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Understanding the structure of an argument is what lets you identify its strengths and weaknesses. Breaking one into its parts lets you evaluate the reasons and check whether the conclusion actually follows. Doing this consistently is most of what critical thinking is in practice, and it is a habit rather than a talent.

The examples used here are taken from a Cambridge University book, which I would recommend to anyone wanting to go deeper. Feel free to reach out on Instagram or Facebook if you would like the details.