4.5 Critical Reasoning

Born in 1909, Max Black was a philosopher who studied language, math, science and art. He wrote a resource, Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method, that is still used by educators today. Recall the four categories for skill sets required of a health care professional. You can deduce from this that using an integral approach of critical thinking and the scientific method can enhance not only a health science student’s cognitive skills but also interpersonal, communication and behavioural.

Good Reasoning 

You know the answers to many of the questions you care about, but you merely have opinions about many others. What is the difference between knowledge and opinion? Why is it that you now know, for example, that your teacher is highly competent, even though, at one time, this was only your opinion? The answer has partly to do with your level of confidence; although once you believed it tentatively, you now believe it with assurance. But there is a more profound difference: you now have better reasons for believing it. You have read her student evaluations, talked to many of her former students, and maybe even taken a class from her yourself. There might still be some remote chance that she will disappoint you. (If it does turn out that you have been misled, you will conclude that it was merely an opinion all along—that you thought you knew that she was highly competent, but you never really knew it.) But, from where you now sit, your reasons are so good that you do justifiably claim it as knowledge and not as mere opinion.

So, an essential difference between knowledge and mere opinion is the quality of your reasons. Your reasons are what you depend on in support of what you believe—regardless of whether you consider what you believe to be knowledge or mere opinion.

Good reasoning is the thinking most likely to result in your having good reasons for your answers—and, thus, the sort of thinking most likely to give you knowledge rather than mere opinion.

While reasoning is the process of thinking logically about something to form a conclusion or judgment, an argument is a conclusion (a claim) backed up by one or more reasons. An argument is a series of statements in which at least one of the statements is offered as a reason to believe another.

“Chapter One: Good Reasoning” from A Guide to Good Reasoning: Cultivating Intellectual Virtues Copyright © 2020 by David Carl Wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.—Modifications: Used section 1.1 Good Reasoning, edited; Added introduction and concluding paragraphs.