Skepticism, "Critical Thinking," and "Shibboleths"

The mighty J. Carthensis sent me this piece by Howard Gabennesch from the Skeptical Inquirer. The SI is a publication that I think of myself as having outgrown--it seems rather sophomoric to me. When I was a kid I did wonder whether psychic phenomena, crop circles and the rest were real, and SI helped me figure that stuff out...but once you've seen your way past those thing, CSICOP and the Skeptical Inquirer pretty much cease to be of any value. And when they make forays into more substantive issues, especially philosophical ones, they're as apt to get things wrong as they are to get things right. They often advocate a kind of sophomoric physicalism and dime-store atheism that does at least as much harm as good.

The Gabennesch piece contains some notable errors, but much of it's pretty good and it's probably worth a read. Coupla points of note:

1. Check out his discussion of "shibboleths" (something he uses as a semi-technical term). Roughly, a shibboleth is an issue which is used to sort "good guys" from "bad guys." They become less open to discussion and debate since one identifies oneself as a good or bad person depending on which position one takes on the issue. Welfare reform used to--and perhaps still is--such an issue for some liberals. I remember trying to discuss it with several people to no avail--their attitude was: no good person could be for welfare reform. Most of us could easily list many right-wing shibboleths.

2. Although his topic is "critical thinking" (a disaster of a category, incidentally), he ends up discussing "social constructionism" and the treatment of the nature-vs.-nurture debate in sociology textbooks. Though that issue is fairly tangential, it's interesting. As he notes, there's a tendency in sociology to cheat for the "nurture" side. He's way right about that.

That's interesting to us in part because of our discussions of bias in academia. The political left has some link to the intellectual left, and the intellectual left loves them some nurture. That is, there's a strong bias on the intellectual left in favor of the importance of nurture over nature...and this shows up on the political left, too. To argue, for example, that intelligence is largely innate (which it apparently is), will get you categorized as a conservative in many discussions. (See "shibboleths", above.)

Anyway, I think this is one reason many people think that there's bias in the academy--there are whole departments (e.g. sociology and anthropology) that are biased in favor of hypotheses that are associated with the intellectual (and, hence, the political) left.

(The whole nature-vs.-nurture debate is confused, IMHO, because it leaves out the impact of reason and freedom. Nature and nurture are not the only two factors in play. But no need to get into that here.)

3. The author notes that science education doesn't seem to improve peoples' reasoning ability much, and I'm afraid he's right about that. He holds up social science education as our best hope for improving students' reasoning skills, [note: no he doesn't: see below] but that's a depressing thought, as the social sciences (except for econ.) aren't known for their success in that respect. Philosophy's the lead contender now, though lord knows we're not very good at it. (One problem is that the current approach to teaching reasoning (or "critical thinking") goes something like this: students get one course in it, and prof.s are told: "Teach them everything they need to know about reasoning in one 3-hour course." Can't be done.)

Anyway, worth a read I think.

Correction: Professor Gabennesch has contacted me to point out--quite rightly--that he does not, in fact, "hold up social science education as our best hope for improving students' reasoning skills" as I contend. Rather, he notes that Thomas Gilovich thinks that. Professor Gabennesh disagrees, writing, noting that social scientists seem as prone to logical error as anyone else, and that it's not promising to hope for logical salvation from a discipline that's "several parts social for each part science."