Psychology Degree Guide: Critical Reasoning

How do you know if someone is telling you the truth? What if there is a way to cut through the layers of an argument to find out how valid it is? This is the goal of critical reasoning. The world is full of media conveying messages that their creators claim to be true or want to convince passersby of their truth. How an individual reaches a conclusion about an argument is just as interesting a psychological notion as the conclusion itself, since the process relies on multiple facets – memory, personality, belief, and subjective interpretations to name a few – to reach its end goal.

What is Critical Reasoning and its Relevance to Psychology

Critical reasoning, or critical thinking, is the process in which a person questions a notion or idea, or a set of these, he or she encounters in the world as a means to reaching a conclusion about the world. A number or rubrics exist for the purpose of determining the level of an individual’s critical thinking ability, set to somewhat different criteria, though the individual’s treatment of the arguments and evidence presented to him or her is a major factor in determining the ability to critically reason.

In the field of psychology, critical reasoning has a major role to play. In its application to the field as a whole and as a scientific endeavor, critical thinking allows psychologists to test concepts and set up experiments which will allow them to test theories about how the human mind works.

Critical reasoning as a mental process has many implications for the various subdivisions of psychology. Within social psychology, the individual’s capacity or will to critically reason as a member of society is a defining mark of a culture regardless of its size and the failure of a member to use critical reasoning in the assessment of a situation bring about groupthink. In individual psychology, the process of critical reasoning can be studied for how an individual can shape his or her understanding of the world within the context of what he or she already knows or chooses to accept as true, bleeding over into philosophical concepts of epistemology. The field of psychological typology in personality psychology researches the reaching of conclusions and decision-making as a correlate of an individual’s disposition.

Structure of Critical Reasoning

The critical reasoning process begins with the presentation of a claim. Once presented, the subject must choose whether he or she will argue to prove or disprove the claim. However, in critical reasoning, the immediate sense which a subject has for the value of a claim is not the basis on which he or she should determine whether the claim has merit and thus should be proven or disproven. From the presented material, the subject must be able to extract meaning from the material’s components. Part of the extraction may involve clarifying ambiguities which exist within the material. Asking pointed, relevant questions is an important tool in being able to apply critical reasoning, since it will help to clear ambiguity from the material.

Once the claim has been broken down into its individual components, the subject can then begin to examine, analyze, and evaluate them. During this phase, the subject may seek to contextualize the components and find their relationship to the broader fields of ideas from which they arose. While the subject’s main focus is often the claim, the evidence provided as its support should be subject to the same treatment as the initial claim. In the investigation of the supporting evidence, the subject may find that there are biases or a lack of cogent argumentation in the evidence. If the initial claim bases its own validity on the truth value of its evidence, then it becomes difficult to affirm the claim. By determining if there are any fallacies in the logic of an argument, the subject can establish if the entirety of the argument is sound or cogent. Determining which fallacies are used and how they are used can also help a subject to pinpoint the assumptions and biases which guide the arguments and the claim.

The material can then be placed against the body of knowledge held by an individual, generally held notions, or a system of knowledge exterior to both the subject and his or her contemporary society. If the subject has found weaknesses in the argumentation toward a claim and still wishes to see the claim upheld, then it is his or her responsibility to provide functionally stronger arguments in their place. Even if the subject is in disagreement with the original claim, he or she should still attempt to construct the strongest possible argument for the claim, otherwise he or she would be guilty of committing the straw man fallacy.

If the subject’s goal is to disprove the initial claim, then the burden of proof rests on him or her. And he or she must then develop a structure of arguments and evidence which either effectively nullify the original claim or produce a better claim which subsumes the original.

Though the process of critical reasoning is often used to judge the validity of arguments presented to the subject, it is equally important that the subject applies critical reasoning to his or her own judgements and assumptions. In doing so, the subject will consistently strive towards the self-sufficiency of his or her own thinking.

Additional Resources

• Critical Reasoning: A User’s Manual – Extensive exploration on the topic of critical reasoning
• Logic Tutorial – Provides the user the opportunity to test his or her logic skills
• Introduction to Logic Home Page – Class website for a logic course at Lander University, covers many topics related to logic and reasoning
• Aligning Logical and Psychological Perspectives on Diagrammatic Reasoning – Exploring the interactions between logic and psychology

Picture Credit: PSM V26 D764 Longitudinal section through the center of the brain, Wikimedia Commons, Ineuw, 2010