We have already seen, in the clusters that students have generated, concise examples of how the act of writing helps thinkers to think better. “To learn to write,” Robert Frost said, “is to learn to have ideas.” But how does one “learn to have ideas”? Often we discover ideas while talking with others. A friend says X about some issue, and we — who have never really thought much about the matter — say,

Or maybe we say,

Mere chance — a friend’s comment — has led us to an idea that we didn’t know we had. This sort of discovery may seem like the one we make when reaching under the couch to retrieve the dog’s ball and finding a ten-dollar bill instead: “How it got there, I’ll never know, but I’m sure glad I found it.”

In fact, learning to have ideas is not largely a matter of chance. Or if chance is involved, well, as Louis Pasteur put it, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” This means that lurking in the mind are bits of information or hints or hunches that in the unexpected circumstance — when talking, when listening to a lecture or a classroom discussion, or especially when reading — are triggered and lead to useful thoughts. This is a sort of seat-of-the-pants knowledge that, when brought to the surface in the right circumstances, produces good results.

Consider the famous example of Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician who discovered a method to determine the volume of an irregularly shaped object. The problem: A king gave a goldsmith a specific weight of gold with which to make a crown in the shape of laurel leaves. When the job was finished, the king weighed the crown and found that it matched the weight of the gold he had provided, but he nevertheless suspected that the goldsmith might have substituted some silver for some of the gold. How could the king find out (without melting or otherwise damaging the crown) if the crown was pure gold? For Archimedes, meditating on this problem produced no ideas, but when he entered a bathtub he noticed that the water level rose as he immersed his body. He suddenly realized that he could thus determine the volume of the crown — by measuring the amount of displaced water. Since silver is less dense than gold, it takes a greater volume of silver to equal a given weight of gold. That is, a given weight of gold will displace less water than the same weight of silver. Archimedes then immersed the given weight of gold, measured the water it displaced, and found that indeed the crown displaced more water than the gold did. In his excitement at confirming his idea, Archimedes is said to have leaped out of the tub and run naked through the street, shouting “Eureka!” (Greek for “I have found [it]!”).

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Why do we tell this story? Partly because we like it, but chiefly because the word eureka comes from the same Greek word that has given our language the word heuristic (pronounced hyoo-RIS-tik), which refers to a method or process of discovering ideas — in short, of thinking. In this method, one thought triggers another. (Note: In computer science, heuristic has a more specialized meaning.) Of course, one of the best ways of generating ideas is to hear what’s going on around you — and that is talk, both in and out of the classroom, as well as in the world of books. You’ll find, as we said early in this discussion, that your response may be, “Well, yes, I see what you’re saying, but come to think of it, I don’t see it quite that way. I see it differently — not as X but as Y.” As we’ve said, argument is an instrument of learning as well as of persuasion. For instance:

Yes, solar power is a way of conserving energy, but do we need to despoil the Mojave Desert and endanger desert life with — literally — fifty thousand solar mirrors so that folks in Los Angeles can heat their pools? Doesn’t it make sense to reduce our use of energy, rather than develop sources of renewable energy that violate the environment? Some sites should be off-limits.

Maybe your response to the proposal (now at least fifteen years old) that wind turbines be placed in the waters off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, would go like this:

Given our need for wind power, how can a reasonable person object to the proposal that we put 130 wind turbines in the waters off Cape Cod, Massachusetts? Yes, the view will be changed, but in fact the turbines are quite attractive. No one thinks that windmills in Holland spoil the landscape. So the view will be changed, but not spoiled; and furthermore, the verdict is still out on whether or not wind turbines pose a significant risk to birds or aquatic life.

When you’re asked to write about something you’ve read in this book, if your first response is that you have no ideas, remember the responses that we have mentioned — “No, I don’t see it that way” or “Yes, but” or “Yes, and moreover” — and see if one of them helps you respond to the work — helps you, in short, to develop ideas.

CONFRONTING UNFAMILIAR ISSUES

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Generating ideas can be a challenge when you, as a student, are asked to read about and respond to an unfamiliar issue. Sometimes, students wonder why they have to engage in particular topics and generate ideas about them. “I want to be a speech pathologist,” you might say, “so why do I need to read essays and formulate ideas about capital punishment?”

One answer is that a college curriculum should spur students to think about pressing issues facing our society, so learning about capital punishment is important to all students. But this isn’t the only answer. One could never study “all” the important social problems we face (anyway, many of them change very rapidly). Instead, colleges seek to equip students with tools, methods, and habits of mind that enable them to confront arguments about any potential issue or problem (including those within the field of speech pathology!). The primary goal of a college education (and of this book) is to help students develop an intellectual apparatus — a toolkit that can be applied to any subject matter, any issue.

The techniques presented in this book offer a practical framework for approaching issues, thinking about them carefully, asking good questions, identifying problems, and offering reasonable solutions — not necessarily because we want you to form opinions about the issues we have selected (though we hope you do), but because we want you to practice critical thinking, reading, and writing in ways that transfer to other aspects of your education as well as to your personal, professional, and civic life.

The playwright Edward Albee once said, “Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.” Rather than thinking that you must “agree or disagree” with the authors whose works you’ll read in this book, imagine that you’ll be practicing how to discover your unique point of view by finding pathways into debates, negotiating different positions, and generating new ideas. So when you confront an unfamiliar issue in this book (or elsewhere), consider the strategies discussed below as practical methods for generating new ideas. That is what critical thinking (and writing) is all about.

TOPICS

One way of generating ideas, practiced by the ancient Greeks and Romans and still regarded as among the best ways, is to consider what the ancients called topics — from the Greek topos, meaning “place,” as in our word topography (a description or representation of a place). For the ancients, certain topics, when formulated as questions, were places where they went to find ideas. Among the classical topics were definition, comparison, relationship, and testimony. By prompting oneself with questions about these topics, one moves toward answers.

If you’re at a loss for ideas when confronted with an issue (and an assignment to write about it), you might discover ideas by turning to the relevant classical topics and jotting down your responses. (In classical terminology, this means engaging in the process of invention, from the Latin invenire, “to come upon, to find.”) Seeing your ideas on paper — even in the briefest form — will help bring other ideas to mind and will also help you evaluate them. For instance, after jotting down ideas as they come and your responses to them, you might do the following:

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You probably won’t know where you stand until you’ve gone through such a process. It would be nice to be able to make a quick decision, immediately justify it with three excellent reasons, and then give three further reasons showing why the opposing view is inadequate. In fact, however, people almost never can reach a reasoned decision without a good deal of preliminary thinking.

Consider the following brief essay about the Food and Drug Administration’s approval, in 2015, of a genetically engineered salmon. Although GMO (genetically modified organisms) foods and medicines are common in the United States, this salmon will soon be the first genetically modified animal approved for food consumption in the United States. After you read the essay, refer to Thinking Critically: Generating Topics, which asks you to begin jotting down ideas on a sheet of paper along the lines of the classical topics. As an example of how to respond to the questions, we’ve included columns related to the Kim Davis and Stephen Cavanaugh cases. As you attempt to formulate ideas related to the essay about genetically engineered salmon, answer the questions related to the classical topics. There’s no need to limit yourself to one answer per item as we did.