Thinking critically about argument

Page contents:

  • The believing—and the doubting—game

  • Pertinent questions

  • Information gathering

Critical thinking is essentially the process by which you make sense of all the information around you. It is a crucial component of argument, for it guides you in recognizing, formulating, and examining all the arguments you encounter—including the arguments you yourself are making.

Several elements of critical thinking are especially important.

The believing—and the doubting—game

Critical thinkers are able to shift stances as they take in an argument, allowing them to gain different perspectives. One good way to begin is to play the believing game: that is, put yourself in the position of the person creating the argument, see the topic from that person’s point of view as much as possible, and think carefully about how and why that person arrived at the claim(s). Once you have given the argument your sympathetic attention, listening carefully to its point of view, play the doubting game: revisit the argument, looking skeptically at each claim and examining each piece of evidence to see how well, or if, it supports the claim. Eventually, this process of believing and doubting will become natural.

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Pertinent questions

Concentrate on getting to the heart of the matter. Whether you are thinking about others’ ideas or about your own, you will want to ask the following kinds of questions:

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Information gathering

To help you decide whether to accept an argument, often you will need to find more information on the topic as well as other perspectives by doing formal or informal research. No information that comes to us in language or visuals is neutral; all of it has a perspective—a spin. Your job as a critical thinker is to identify the perspective and to assess it, examining its sources and finding out what you can about its context. Asking pertinent questions will help you examine the interpretations and conclusions drawn by others.

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