I hope we get to hear your idea some time. I’m very intrigued :-) Because I think this idea of truth-seeking is really important, but it IS hard to figure out a non-silly way to reward for it, isn’t it? Because you can go into a project with an awesome disposition towards truth seeking and still not end up showing any major outward signs of changing your mind (though I would imagine that your *thinking* should still change even if the stance you take doesn’t).

And I entirely agree that our culture and our media’s treatment of political discourse is entirely related to this – I started to head down that road but stopped because it’s a whole post of its own. But we seem to be in a place where refining one’s position based on new information is often treated as a sign of moral weakness – it’s enough to make me feel really pessimistic.

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Hi John! Thanks for commenting. I’m so glad you brought up Kuhn because that’s a really important distinction. I’m actually kind of a geek about how strongly I feel about the importance of normal science, and the overuse of the term “paradigm shift.” I absolutely agree that paradigms shift slowly and more than that I think they *should* – but that’s not inconsistent with a belief that our students (and our culture) needs to be more open to letting new information influence their positions and beliefs. Scientists have a toolkit in their minds that they can use to evaluate and consider new information and even though this very toolkit might keep them from considering the truly revolutionary, it’s very useful in considering the non-revolutionary but still new. Using that toolkit requires you to actually look at the claims being made, the method and the conclusions — that’s very different than throwing out “well the truth about this is actually X” when you haven’t even read the article that says it’s Y.

I think most of us can point to more than one experience in college where we read something or heard something that really pushed us to change the way we looked at the world – those experiences are part of why we all ended up staying in college long after the B.A. or B.S., right? Some of my students don’t have the skill set or the disposition to have those experiences and that means, I think, that they’re missing a lot of what learning is about.

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Julie – we could wear matching t-shirts! That would be very entertaining! Great blog, btw – I didn’t know you were out there but now I’ll be reading. I’m interested to hear about your thesis, Wharton is a favorite of mine but I’m a total dilettante.

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Hi Kevin – OMG between my high school and my grad school experiences I know what you mean on *both* sides of that. I have to tell you about one of my most memorable grad school experiences – it was such a caricature of a discussion. One historiography class with a bunch of historians claiming that theory didn’t matter and that they weren’t affected by it (right). And a group of – I think lit crit people? Anyway, they were all Marxists. Like real Das Kapital-thumpers.

(Seriously, this same group ran the alternative newspaper at the school I was at, and over the course of the year their numbers got smaller and smaller as people were squeezed out for not being doctrinaire enough. First the Trotskyists left, then the Leninists. We used to joke that at the end of the year the only ones left standing would be the Stalinists.

I think there’s still evidence somewhere on the web of the time this group chose to devote an ENTIRE issue of the paper to arguing against something Shaun said about anarchism.)

The class was an education in itself and gave me a lot of chances to really refine my thinking about why theory mattered – but I just got so frustrated when we couldn’t take the discussion about new ideas to new places because we kept getting dragged back to Marx. It came to a head one day when this one woman wouldn’t let us talk about E.P. Thompson – and that’s a guy with some Marxist street cred, right? She just kept saying “But what Thompson isn’t considering is this thing Marx said about religion.” Finally someone (not me) exploded with “OMG Thompson *considered* it and rejected it. There’s a difference. ” So yeah, absolutely fundamentalisms are a huge part of what we’re struggling against.

There’s a lot of cynicism out there about the idea that evidence can be used to form the basis of one’s beliefs. That cynicism so permeates our political system and the way it’s examined in the press that it has made it hard to believe truth is out there, or that it matters when the winner is the one who is the best manipulator. The analysis of a political debate often focuses exclusively on presentation, which valorizes argumentation totally over evidence. Nobody ever says “Candidate Kafka’s statistics on poverty totally blew the competition out of the water.” It’s “Candidate Kafka appeared angry, while the opposition candidate really bonded with the audience.”

Gee shucks, folks. Don’t want to make you uncomfortable or nothing.

That’s what we’re up against. Which I take more metaphorically, having known my fair share of doctrinaire fellow lefties. “Well, according to Marx….”

Great post.

There is an affect aspect of critical thinking. You have to care enough about an issue to spend the time and effort to critically evaluate what other people have written about that subject. One of the most powerful motivators for critical thinking is an intuition that what is written is wrong, or the cognitive dissonance when what is written conflicts with what one believes based on previous reading and analysis.

Scientists know this. The good ones get very emotional about publications that challenge the conventional dogma of their fields. The scientific system depends on the challenges of peers to validate assertions made in the literature, as well as replication of experimental results. The problem, as Kuhn points out, is that the leaders of a paradigm frequently never accept a revolutionary finding.

So I at least appreciate the person who is reluctant to accept newly advanced views that conflict with their existing views, and who follow their (often inarticultate) intuition in driving their critical thinking.

Seriously …. you’ve given me an interesting idea….. hmmm….

Meanwhile, just fyi – the Facione link doesn’t seem to work today.