Beyond Feelings

CHAPTER 2 What Is Critical Thinking?
than through a conscious mental act. We don’t have to employ our minds
to feel angry when we are insulted, afraid when we are threatened, or
compassionate when we see a picture of a starving child. The feelings
arise automatically.
Feeling is useful in directing our attention to matters we should think
about; it also can provide the enthusiasm and commitment necessary to
complete arduous mental tasks. However, feeling is never a good substitute
for thinking because it is notoriously unreliable. Some feelings are
beneficial, honorable, even noble; others are not, as everyday experience
demonstrates. We often feel like doing things that will harm us—for
example, smoking, sunbathing without sunscreen, telling off our professor
or employer, or spending the rent money on lottery tickets.
Zinedine Zidane was one of the greatest soccer players of his generation,
and many experts believed that in his final season (2006) he would
lead France to the pinnacle of soccer success—winning the coveted World
Cup. But then, toward the end of the championship game against Italy, he
viciously head-butted an Italian player in full view of hundreds of millions
of people. The referee banished him from the field, France lost the
match, and a single surrender to feeling forever stained the brilliant
career Zidane had dedicated his life to building.
In contrast to feeling, thinking is a conscious mental process performed
to solve a problem, make a decision, or gain understanding.*
Whereas feeling has no purpose beyond expressing itself, thinking aims
beyond itself to knowledge or action. This is not to say that thinking is
infallible; in fact, a good part of this book is devoted to exposing errors in
thinking and showing you how to avoid them. Yet for all its shortcomings,
thinking is the most reliable guide to action we humans possess. To
sum up the relationship between feeling and thinking, feelings need to be
tested before being trusted, and thinking is the most reasonable and reliable
way to test them.
There are three broad categories of thinking: reflective, creative, and
critical. The focus of this book is on critical thinking. The essence of critical
thinking is evaluation. Critical thinking, therefore, may be defined as
the process by which we test claims and arguments and determine which
have merit and which do not. In other words, critical thinking is a search
for answers, a quest. Not surprisingly, one of the most important techniques
used in critical thinking is asking probing questions. Where the uncritical
accept their first thoughts and other people’s statements at face
value, critical thinkers challenge all ideas in this manner:
*Some informal definitions of thinking include daydreaming. It is excluded from this definition
because daydreaming is a passive mental state over which we exercise little or no control.
It is therefore of little use in evaluating ideas.
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