GEN/200 Week 5
John Butler
•Questions?
Learning Objectives
• Examine ethics issues.
• Identify personal bias and emotion.
• Determine the relationship between
higher education and professional
competence.
Ethics Issues
• Questions based on the Ethical Lens
Assessment?
• Topics we wish to further discuss?
• Other examples?
Identify Personal Bias and Emotion.
• Personal Bias – REMEMBER not everyone
sees things the way you see things.
– Your life experiences have made you who you are,
and shaped the way you see things.
• Emotion –
– What steps do you take when you get emotionally
attached to an idea others don’t like?
– How do you step back. Do you have a key to let you
step back?
– When is it OK to step forward?
Determine the Relationship
Between Higher Education and
Professional Competence.
End of Week 5 Objectives….
•Questions?
Critical Thinking
• …In my opinion : The key to success in
business, education and life…
The Book says:
• LOGIC IS A branch of philosophy that seeks to
• distinguish between effective and ineffective
reasoning. Students of logic look for valid steps
in an argument, or a series of statements.
• The opening statements of the argument are
the premises, and the final statement is the
conclusion. Effective reasoning is not just an
idle pastime for unemployed philosophers.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 15. Sliding a Slippery Slope.
• The fallacy of sliding a slippery slope implies
that if one undesired event occurs, then other,
far more serious events will follow:
• If we restrict our right to own guns, then all of
our rights will soon be taken away.
• I notice that more independent bookstores are
closing; it’s just a matter of time before people
stop reading.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 14. Distracting from the REAL Issue.
• The most recent recession was caused
by people who borrowed too much
money and bankers who loaned too
much money. Therefore, you should
never borrow money to go to school.
This argument ignores the fact that a
primary source of the recession was
loans to finance housing—not loans to
finance education.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 13. Appealing to “the people.”
• Consider this statement: Millions of people use
Wikipedia as their main source of factual
information.
• Wikipedia must be the best reference work in
the world.
• This is a perfect example of the ad populum
fallacy. (In Latin, that phrase means “to the
people.”) The essential error is assuming that
popularity, quality, and accuracy are the same.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 12. Appealing to Tradition
• Arguments based on an appeal to tradition take
a classic form: Our current beliefs and
behaviors have a long history; therefore, they
are correct. This argument has been used to
justify the divine right of kings, feudalism, witch
burnings, slavery, child labor, and a host of
other traditions that are now rejected in most
parts of the world. Appeals to tradition ignore
the fact that unsound ideas can survive for
centuries before human beings realize that they
are being fooled.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 11. Creating a Red Herring
• When hunters want to throw a dog off a trail,
they can drag a smoked red herring (or some
other food with a strong odor) over the ground
in the opposite direction. This distracts the dog,
who is fooled into following a false trail.
Likewise, people can send our thinking on false
trails by raising irrelevant issues.
• I call this the SHINY…… What did you say?
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 10. Confusing Fact and Opinion
• Facts are statements verified by direct
observation or compelling evidence that creates
widespread agreement. In recent years, some
politicians argued for tax cuts on the grounds
that the American economy needed to create
more jobs. However, it’s not a fact that tax cuts
automatically create more jobs. This statement
is almost impossible to verify by direct
observation, and there’s actually evidence
against it.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 10….
• If you don't learn the difference
between fact and fiction, you'll
get stuck reading and watching
things that only reinforce beliefs
and assumptions you already
own. And that is the opposite of
learning!
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 10….
• Try to determine whether each statement
sounds like a fact or an opinion
–
–
–
–
My mom is the best mom on earth.
My dad is taller than your dad.
My telephone number is difficult to memorize.
The deepest part of the ocean is 35,813 feet deep.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 10….
• Try to determine whether each statement
sounds like a fact or an opinion
–
–
–
–
–
My mom is the best mom on earth.
My dad is taller than your dad.
My telephone number is difficult to memorize.
The deepest part of the ocean is 35,813 feet deep.
Dogs make better pets than turtles.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 10….
• Try to determine whether each statement
sounds like a fact or an opinion
– Smoking is bad for your health.
– Eighty-five percent of all cases of lung cancer in the
U.S. are caused by smoking.
– If you flatten and stretch out a Slinky toy it will be 87
feet long.
– Slinky toys are fun.
– One out of every hundred American citizens is color
blind.
– Two out of ten American citizens are boring.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 9. Begging the Question.
• Speakers and writers beg the question when
their colorful language glosses over an idea that
is unclear or unproven. Consider this statement:
Support the American tradition of individual
liberty and oppose mandatory seat belt laws!
Anyone who makes such a statement “begs”
(fails to answer) a key question: Are laws that
require drivers to use seat belts actually a
violation of individual liberty?
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 8. Creating a Straw Man
• A scarecrow works because it looks like
a man. Likewise, a person can attack
ideas that sound like his opponent’s
ideas but are actually absurd. For
example, some legislators attacked the
Equal Rights Amendment by describing
it as a measure to abolish separate
bathrooms for men and women. In fact,
supporters of this amendment proposed
no such thing.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 7. Using a faulty analogy.
• An analogy states a similarity between two
things or events. Some arguments rest on
analogies that hide significant differences. On
June 25, 1987, the Associated Press reported
an example: U.S. representative Tom DeLay
opposed a bill to ban chlordane, a pesticide that
causes cancer in laboratory animals.
Supporting this bill, he argued, would be like
banning cars because they kill people.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 6. Basing Argument on Emotion
• The politician who ends every campaign
speech with flag waving and slides of his
mother eating apple pie is staking his future on
appeals to emotion. So is the candidate who
paints a grim scenario of the disaster and
ruination that will transpire unless she is
elected. Get past the fluff and histrionics to see
if you can uncover any worthwhile ideas.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 5. Thinking in All or NOTHING terms.
• Consider these statements:
– Doctors are greedy.
– You can’t trust politicians.
– Students these days are in school just to get highpaying jobs; they lack idealism.
– Homeless people don’t want to work.
• These opinions imply the word all. They gloss
over individual differences, claiming that all
members of a group are exactly alike.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 4. Pointing to a False Cause
• The fact that one event follows another does
not necessarily mean that the two events have
a cause-and-effect relationship. All we can
actually say is that the events might be
correlated. For example, as children’s
vocabularies improve, they can get more
cavities. This does not mean that cavities are
the result of an improved vocabulary. Instead,
the increase in cavities is due to other factors,
such as physical maturation and changes in
diet or personal care.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 3. Appealing to Authority
• A professional athlete endorses a brand of
breakfast cereal. A famous musician features a
soft drink company’s product in a rock video.
The promotional brochure for an advertising
agency lists all of the large companies that
have used its services.
• In each case, the people involved are trying to
win your confidence—and your dollars—by
citing authorities. The underlying assumption is
usually this: Famous people and organizations
buy our product. Therefore, you should buy it
too.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 2. Attacking the Person
• The mistake of attacking the person is common
at election time. An example is the candidate
who claims that her opponent has failed to
attend church regularly during the campaign.
People who indulge in personal attacks are
attempting an intellectual sleight of hand to
divert our attention away from the truly relevant
issues.
• Instructor note: A shame this works so well.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 1. Jumping to Conclusions
• Jumping to conclusions is the only exercise that
some lazy thinkers get. This fallacy involves
drawing conclusions without sufficient evidence.
Take the bank officer who hears about a
student’s failing to pay back an education loan.
After that, the officer turns down all loan
applications from students. This person has
• formed a rigid opinion on the basis of hearsay.
Jumping to conclusions—also called hasty
generalization—is at work here.
Critical Thinking
Top 15 Mistakes
• 1. Jumping to Conclusions …. Examples
•
•
•
•
When I went to Mexico for spring break, I felt
sick the whole time. Mexican food makes
people sick.
Google’s mission is to“organize the world’s
information.” Their employees must be on a real
power trip.
During a recession,more people go to the
movies. People just want to sit in the dark and
forget about their money problems.
• Each item in the above list includes two
statements, and the second statement does not
necessarily follow from the first. More evidence
•
Critical Thinking Exercises:
Write a quick statement about what this picture means
to you. Spend 5 minutes thinking and writing.
Critical Thinking Exercises:
Did you write about, thinking outside the box,
achievement, leap of faith, animal behavior, the story
of fish, requirements for life, stress of competition,
niche, and the beat of a different drum.
Critical Thinking Exercises:
• Describe how critical thinking determines the
validity of original research.
• Discuss the ways critical thought can be used
to invalidate research found on the internet.
Socratic Questioning
• The overall purpose of Socratic questioning, is
to challenge accuracy and completeness of
thinking in a way that acts to move people
towards their ultimate goal.
Socratic Questioning
http://changingminds.org/techniques/questioning/s
ocratic_questions.htm
http://ed.fnal.gov/trc_new/tutorial/taxonomy.html
Course Wrap-up
• THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!
• Good luck to all of you, and I hope I am at your
graduation ceremony at the end of this journey.
References
• Our textbook… You tell me how this should
look.
• Paul, Richard, Critical Thinking: How to Prepare
Students for a Rapidly Changing World, 1993.