Critical Thinking - Episode 1 - What is Critical Thinking?

[Music] hey guys welcome to critical thinking uh this is of course humanities 115 and i'm going to be providing you guys with some videos that you guys are going to be able to follow along with the powerpoints and the material for the semester and today i just want to give you guys a little bit of an overview as to what the class is going to be about how we're going to handle it basically go through the topics that we're going to cover in the course of the semester and i'm also going to do just an

introductory lecture on you know what is critical thinking so if you have never taken an online class before sometimes it's a little bit more difficult than taking a class that's in person which is why i wanted to go ahead and give you the video so that you guys get to know me a little bit and have me talk through the material so that i could explain certain things as we go and it's going to be you know somewhat informal you know these these videos aren't scripted or anything like that so i'm going to try to

teach it pretty close to the way i would teach it in person um i probably should introduce myself in case you have not had a class with me before my name is alan ditonato i've been teaching at the college for close to 20 years now mainly in philosophy and humanities i've done a number of semesters in a course in philosophy known as introduction to logic and i want to try to incorporate a lot of that material into a critical thinking class because the two courses have a lot of overlap if you've never taken a logic

course or a critical thinking course you might not understand the relationship between the two but logic is one element that is going to be really really important to become a good critical thinker so we're going to spend some of the semester going through that as well what i want to do right now is oh the other classes that i they teach at the college in humanities mainly actually philosophy courses in ethics humanities myth and human culture ancient medieval humanities which we call humanities one cultural studies often lead terms abroad i've done a number of semesters

where we've taken students over to italy greece turkey spain france a number of places like that which really awesome so if i have a trip coming up i will try to let you guys know but as far as this course goes we want to dive in today and take a look at critical thinking so what i'm going to do is bring up the semester schedule and just walk you through the topics before we get into anything else if you look at the topics this is from your semester schedule i've kind of zoomed in just on

the middle column so you don't need to worry about the assignments and the dates and stuff on the periphery there but we're talking today introduction right so we're going to be talking about you know what is it that we're studying cognitive bias we're going to be talking about persuasion and rhetoric we're going to spend a little bit of time doing those as we move down the semester schedule we're going to get into advertising a little bit because that is an area where persuasion is really really useful and i want to look at some different tactics

used in advertising whether it's advertising in the media or just the way you know stores sometimes set up the layout of their or their of their building so that they can really take advantage of different predispositions we have when we go into a shopping environment anyways i'm not going to you know elaborate on that today we're going to spend some time after that getting into just the basics of you know logic argument truth and we're going to start with the informal logic after that where we're going to be looking at fallacies we'll talk a little

bit about you know critical analysis of arguments and then spend a lot of time on what we call informal fallacies which i'm going to break down into a few different categories if you don't know what all these things are right now that is absolutely expected but we'll be talking about fallacies grouped and there are lots of different ways we can group informal fallacies but one way is by talking about fallacies of ambiguity fallacies of relevance and then fallacies of what we'll call presumption so i'm breaking it down into three subcategories there after that we're going

to be moving into induction inductive reasoning a little bit about certainty and probability and then move on to scientific method experimental method historical science causal reasoning things like that and then we're going to take a turn and move to the deductive part of the semester where we're going to be looking at deductive logic which is actually one of my favorite areas of logic and it might be one of the more difficult areas really depends on you i like to use the analogy of comparing sort of deductive logic to math and study of inductive logic maybe

to something like literature and that's actually a pretty bad analogy if you really want to analyze analogies but you know some people are just more equipped to pick up math more easily it's not that other people aren't capable of doing really well in math but it comes easier to sum than others and same thing when it comes to literature people talk about you know the right brain versus left brain we talk about you know those that are more analytical and more creative but if you want to think about deductive logic as something more akin to

math that's not necessarily a bad thing because it's about form it's about structure it's about relationships and math is a type of deductive enterprise so if you're really good at math you may pick up deductive logic really really quickly if you are somebody that's not too good in math i still think you can pick it up but you might need to put a little bit more effort in there to let you know a little bit about my background i've always been pretty good in math it's been about 30 years since i've really done any math

uh formally calculus was probably the last math class i took when i was an undergraduate but i never enjoyed it i was never somebody that loved doing math i was good at it but i'm not a fan logic on the other hand i really enjoyed when i got into logic i found it to be a great deal of fun and more importantly i found it to be incredibly useful i saw it really revolutionize the way i was able to do other things such as write papers read research make cases and arguments which is really what

logic is all about it's about argumentation and knowing a good argument from a bad argument or finding fallacies or actually when it comes to deductive logic what we would call formal fallacies and problems of invalidity and arguments but we're going to get into all that a little bit later so kind of gone off on a tangent there but we'll look at basically categorical logic square of opposition median inference categorical syllogisms and so on then we're going to move on after that to propositional logic we'll talk about a little bit about a symbolization of arguments we'll

talk about types of propositional arguments such as hypothetical disjunctive syllogisms dilemmas and a few things beyond that but i'm not going to get into the more complicated things we're not going to be doing deductive proofs we're not going to be doing uh quantificational logic and definitely nothing like modal logic so just the basics after that we're going to move back towards the realm of inductive logic or inductive reasoning and we'll talk a little bit about philosophy of science i wanted to spend a few lectures talk talking about some of the philosophical questions that come up

when it when it comes to science and i think this is one of the more interesting parts of the semester as well and it's actually going to be the last thing we're going to do before we're going to get into kind of one of our case studies for the semester and i picked something that's a little bit controversial at least in certain circles but something i also thought of as a great deal of fun we're going to be taking a look at darwinism versus intelligent design since we're going to be talking about different issues throughout

the semester i wanted to talk about that particular one if you've heard anything about either one of those you may have come across this issue of you know evolution versus intelligent design in a conversation perhaps in a biology class and it might not be appropriate to actually talk about the differences between the two views in something like a biology class but i think it's really appropriate to do it in a critical thinking class matter of fact i think it's one of the best places to do something like that and don't really care personally where you

come down on the issue i just think it's a fun thing to look at actually the case that each side is making and there are a number of reasons i think it's going to be really good for us to take a look at something like that kind of as a case study is because it's going to allow us to really employ the skills that we've been developing over the course of the semester and there are a number of areas that the debate between those two sides is going to take us not only regarding science but

also issues involving education it's going to bring in philosophy it's going to bring in politics it's going to be dealing with religious perspectives cultural studies not that we're going to be talking about all of these things we're not going to do you know a whole lot via these lectures as far as discussion goes but you'll have a forum and stuff like that on the website so that you guys can engage each other you're going to be analyzing both sides as well so some of the things that you guys are going to be picking up over

the semester that are going to really be employed here hopefully is going to be your ability to pick out logical arguments right find fallacies recognize rhetoric as well as being able to notice cognitive biases rational presuppositions that lie behind the case for each side and really be able to distinguish science from pseudoscience and all that kind of stuff is what we're going to be dealing with so this is a really great test case and what i'm going to try to do is just give you proponents of each side to present their own case i'm not

really i'm going to give you maybe an overview of some of these things but i'm also providing for you guys some video links so that you guys can watch some of the better proponents of each side so that you can listen to what they actually have to say and then analyze it yourself and come to your own conclusion really at the end not that you even have to do that i just want you to be able to analyze what they're saying and see are they making sense is it a good argument you know there's a

fallacy you know be able to pick those kinds of things out so that's what we're going to be able to do at the end of the semester what i want to do now is really switch over and talk about what is critical thinking a lot of people have different ideas gone into meetings and had people talk about you know well critical thinking is what we do in the sciences you know in biology the hard sciences chemistry things like that and most of the time what people are talking about when they talk about being a critical

thinker is in in those types of contexts is being just maybe a careful thinker maybe somebody that approaches problems in a particular way and is able to analyze different scenario situation and evaluate information but critical thinking is actually a little bit more than that because it is going to involve thinking not only about problems issues and things like that but it's going to be about thinking about how we think so here's just a basic description it's the careful application of reason and the determination of whether or not a claim is true so off the bat

we're going to need to talk about what we mean by claim and we're going to go over some other basic vocabulary as well let's talk a little bit further about the types of abilities that we're going to get the skills that i want you guys to build up over the course of the semester so we can think about critical thinking as the ability to distinguish between rational claims and emotional ones and no i still haven't defined what a claim is but rational versus emotional is one way that we can distinguish claims separate fact from opinion

and again we're gonna have to really clarify what we mean by fact as well spot deception holes in the argument that others present to us present an analysis of the data or information that we have recognize logical flaws in arguments attend to contradictory inadequate or ambiguous information construct cogent arguments rooted in data rather than mere opinion not that opinion is bad but sometimes you know we want more than just mere opinion it's also going to involve avoiding overstated conclusions we need to know you know when our conclusion is probable when a conclusion is certain you

know when we've stated things a little bit too strongly where the evidence actually doesn't support it it's also going to be the ability to i don't have this coming up the way i thought i did identify holes in the evidence that suggests additional information needs to be collected propose other options weigh them in making decisions articulate an argument in the context that that argument falls within correctly precisely use evidence to defend arguments logically and coherently organize an argument avoid extraneous elements in the development of argument sometimes we want to get to just what's relevant to

the argument and avoid all the other stuff that we could put in that is not relevant and present evidence in order to contribute to the persuasive aspect of an argument and there are lots of other things that we could throw in there so those are the types of abilities i want you guys really to get over the course of the semester so critical thinking is going to be a process where we're assessing what we can call opinions so let's deal with a little bit of vocabulary the word belief is interchangeable with the word opinion all

right so we can talk about beliefs opinions or judgments these three terms all mean the same thing it's an idea that somebody holds about any particular matter or subject you generally understand what i mean when i say you know do you believe this right it means do you give some kind of mental assent to a statement that i've presented to you you know you could say well i believe in doing the best i believe in telling the truth i believe in a particular religious doctrine whatever it is you you use the term and you basically

have an understanding now we take these beliefs and we express them in a certain way we express them through we call claims so what is a claim a claim is a statement or a proposition and again we can use these terms interchangeably and sometimes i'm going to use other words like maybe a sentence now specifically or technically a sentence is not the same thing as a claim but we're not being really really precise sometimes we can get away with that so i'm probably going to give you more precise definitions and distinguish how a claim is

different from a sentence but for now let's just say that these things are what convey information and for something to be a claim a statement or proposition it needs to have what we call a truth value which means it should be either true or false if there's something that is not true or false then it it's not a claim right there are lots of sentences that are not claims one example right now would be something like a question if i was to ask you what time is it you could test to see whether or not

it's a claim by asking is it true okay it doesn't really make a lot of sense to say if i say what time is it and you go false that's nonsense okay that's one very sure way to know whether you're dealing with a claim or not two types of claims that we could look at are going to be objective claims and of course subjective claims so what is the difference between an objective and a subjective claim i know you've heard these words as well but sometimes this is where it gets a little bit more confusing

for some people so an objective claim that would be any statement that's either true or false in dependent of personal opinion what we might call matters of truth subjective claim we could still say is true or false but the difference is this one depends on your personal opinion or your personal belief we can call this maybe a matter of taste i'll give you more examples of this later on and let's just get these terms out there and then we can unpack them later today in the in this lecture or even in further lectures i'm sure

i'm going to come back to some of this stuff some people automatically think okay that's you know this fact versus opinion type of language and i want to make you aware or wary of how we often incorrectly use these terms right because fact versus opinion implies something that's not necessarily true it implies that opinions are non-factual right is that a fact or is that just your opinion meaning your opinion has nothing to do with facts okay that's actually not the case and you want to be really careful about this because we have different types of

opinions we have claims which we just talked about which could be objective or subjective and since claims are expressions of our beliefs opinions or judgments then those claims or opinions and judgments rather could fall into those categories as well i've got objective opinions i've got subjective opinions all right so fact versus opinion that's kind of dangerous language so just the idea here is opinions are not necessarily subjective some opinions are objective and their truth value or false you know truth or falsity is independent of the person holding that particular belief right i've got lots of

beliefs that i would call factual beliefs such as that i live on the planet earth i could be wrong about that but whether or not i actually live on earth is not up to my belief about it there's something extra that makes that true or false okay so fact versus opinion is not the same thing as objective versus subject long story short a factual opinion or claim is the same thing as an objective opinion or claim take a look at truth and knowledge what do we mean by these terms since we're dealing with claims that

are either true or false it's good to understand what we mean when we say a claim is true or false so truth in a very basic way what we call the correspondence view it's one of the oldest definitions of truth in existence goes all the way back to the ancient greeks aristotle gave us a wonderful definition of truth when he says you know saying of what is that it is uh and he elaborated a little bit more than that but that's pretty much what we mean by truth it means when our claims or our beliefs

correspond to something in reality that's why it's called correspondence now there are other theories about what truth is and it gets a little bit more complicated you know we talk about metaphorical truth and different types of truth but i think if we have just a basic idea of correspondence at the back of our mind we should be good for what we're going to be dealing with here and i still think it's really a very good definition for truth even though you could get into philosophical discussions about it the second word and this might actually be

more difficult is the term knowledge and we're just going to use a pretty standard view which is called the jtb version of truth sorry knowledge which is basically a justified true belief also highly criticized within the you know epistemological crowd but knowledge is when one can claim to know that something is true based on three factors that's why it's called the jtb theory one you have to have a belief that x whatever x stands for is the case secondly it has to be true that x is the case and then you have to have a

justification for it right an argument beyond a reasonable doubt for the belief and if you have those three things we tend to think you have knowledge and there's definitely a difference between opinion and knowledge as a matter of fact most of the things we believe are just that beliefs very little in fact is actual knowledge this is you know what i said epistemological crowd if you're familiar with philosophical terms in philosophy there are different branches of philosophy in one particular area of philosophy or philosophical study is the field of epistemology which has to do with

the nature of knowledge belief what counts as knowledge what counts as justification can one know all those types of questions are dealt with in epistemology so knowledge is a little bit tricky the gettier problem actually has brought the whole question as to whether the jtb theory is a good definition of knowledge but i think most people still hold to some version of that with some modifications and we're just going to use that for the time being as well so you have to believe something is the case it actually has to be the case and then

you have to have a justification for that belief moving back to claims i also want to bring in this idea of issues so a claim is a statement that's either true or false that much we've said before and an issue is any point of discussion that has a question attached to it right as to whether or not it's true so an issue is nothing more than a question some assertion that has to be decided upon an issue can usually be stated so that they begin with the the word weather that might be a good way

to test whether or not it's an issue whether you should buy this car whether you should buy any car whether you should go to the mall whether you should get up at 8 o'clock tomorrow morning those are all issues that need to be decided on not necessarily very compelling issues but again issues because they involve whether or not something is true or false a claim can't rightly become an issue unless the claim is actually questioned as to whether it's true or false and then maybe some of the examples i gave you aren't really issues in

the strict way that i'm using the term here an issue is not as broad as something like a topic of conversation we could talk about you know different things like a movie you might get together with your friends you go out for dinner you know talk about the movie that you just went to see you know you could talk about it for hours you could have really interesting conversations about it you can analyze it you could do all kinds of things and the topic you know the conversation can go on and on and on but

you might not be dealing with what we call an issue of course an issue can come up in the midst of the conversation whether you know you thought the movie was a good movie and you might be talking with your friends and saying you know i think the movie was a great film because of this this this this reason and the person may come back and say i think the movie was a terrible movie because of these other reasons and now you've got an issue on the table you know is it true that the movie

was good or is it false right so that's what we mean by an issue it could be questioned and hopefully an answer not that the answers can always be easily obtained right we have lots of issues that we wrestle with but that's the difference between just a topic of conversation and an issue and of course when you're arguing about whether or not something is true the issue itself then you're already in the realm of dealing with claims now when we talk about arguments we're going to talk about using claims to support other claims so what

is an argument it is an attempt to support a claim by giving reasons that you should believe that claim the claim being argued for is what we call the conclusion of an argument and the claims given in support are going to be what we call premises so in an argument there are basically two parts you've got the premises which lead you to the conclusion and therefore since they lead you to the conclusion we say that the conclusion follows from the premises there's a relationship between the two not getting into the different types of arguments but

that's a basic truth about all types of arguments you need to give reasons for a conclusion or premises for a conclusion confusion comes when people think of arguments as explanations so briefly an argument tries to show that some sentence is true but an exclamation explanation tries to show why something happens or how something happens and that's a little bit different arguments also are going to be involved with this issue of persuasion but i don't want you to confuse them with persuasion itself right so it's true that a good argument can persuade you as a matter

of fact if you're rational a good argument should persuade you but not all arguments are made for the purpose of persuading and definitely without a doubt all attempts to persuade are not arguments there are lots of attempts to persuade people that don't involve argumentation at all and that's one of the reasons we're going to study things like advertising because most of the time when somebody wants you to buy a product they're going to appeal to you in a certain way and it's usually not through giving you reasons or arguments as to why you should buy

this car over that car or this computer over that computer you might be able to give a reason and an argument but very often in advertising you don't have time to do that kind of stuff so we rely on other ways to persuade all right so we'll take a look at that now as far as the types of arguments you can look at two basic types you've got deductive argument like i said we'll be doing deductive logic a little bit later but in brief the way you distinguish deductive from inductive which is the second type

getting a little ahead of myself is that the conclusion is going to follow in a different way so in a deductive argument the conclusion is going to follow necessarily from the premises and therefore we're going to be able to achieve what we can call certainty right a good deductive argument is also valid and we could say it actually proves its conclusion in an inductive argument you don't get any of that you never achieve certainty you have at best high probability and you can have a good inductive argument but it's not a valid inductive argument that

wouldn't make sense strictly speaking and it will serve to support your conclusion but it might not be a proof very specific way we use these terms the quickest way i want you guys to kind of think about them is that a deductive argument produces a necessary or certain conclusion and an inductive argument gets you to a probable conclusion all right there are other ways you could look at those and we'll break those down later this semester now objective matters versus subjective matters i've already talked about objective versus subjective so some of this is going to

be a little bit of an overlap already but kind of necessary to do the goal is to differentiate between subjective and non-subjective matters or issues right so reviewing here let's talk about objective as factual i think i already used fact opinion earlier and said not to confuse the two okay or to make a distinction between the two that is an illegitimate distinction but objective and factual can be interchangeable all right if i say is that you know objectively true is that factually true those would be basically the same thing whereas subjective would be what we

call a non-factual type of a claim subjective claim it's a non-factual claim factual has to do when something's truth value is independent remember of a person holding the opinion so factual issues are about factual claims and a factual claim doesn't have to be true for it to be a factual claim all right so don't get confused if i say is that a factual claim i'm not saying is it true i'm just merely saying is it the type of claim that could be true if it is true we call it a fact so factual just means

it's got the characteristic of being either true or false if it's a fact then we say it has the characteristic of being true and not false a little bit confusing but again you know that's just what we have to deal with we want to be here's here's the biggest thing i want you guys to take away from the course think carefully about things think precisely about things try to i mean we were talking about that this semester getting past ambiguity i mean it's one of the earliest things we're going to be dealing with you know

clarifying things so that you can think about them clearly because if things aren't clear then it's going to be very difficult to think about them carefully and to come to proper judgments in the long term so the terms matter wrestle with these things in the beginning grasp the concepts as quickly as you can and i think you're going to do a lot better as we build on this stuff so you know not wanting to use the math analogy too many times but you can't get to you know long division until you've already learned addition subtraction

things like that so same thing in this class we're going to have our building blocks and we're going to build on them so some examples of claims beyond pluto there's another planet that's a factual claim even if we never find out whether or not it's true the word eggplant is funnier than the word broccoli that type of claim we'd say is a non-factual claim tends to be more based on the person holding the opinion right if i say eggplant is funnier than the word broccoli you know maybe to me it's funnier maybe to you you

might think broccoli is funnier maybe you don't even have an opinion as to whether or not either word is funny but that's exactly how you would determine whether something is non-factual versus factual right we don't have any external criteria that we could appeal to necessarily to determine which word is funnier so methods for judging before discussing an issue you need to determine if it's a factual one if we're going to make a judgment about something we need to first understand what it is we're judging so the first method is if two people disagree and at

least one of them has to be wrong then you're probably dealing with a factual issue right so the eggplant example that i just gave you that doesn't quite cut it right we're not going to sit down and have an argument but i'm going to try to persuade you that eggplant is funnier than broccoli and you're not going to come out of that argument at the end or the discussion at the end and think you know i was wrong really you know you're right the other word is much funnier i was mistaken that that just seems

like nonsense method two is if established methods actually exist for settling the question then it's also a factual question for instance when we get to that question that i just gave you the the example of the claim about there being a planet beyond pluto you know astronomers have definitions for what counts as a planet they have different criteria for trying to identify those types of things and pick them out it might be difficult to do but there are these objective standards that are in place so whether or not there is a planet is a factual

matter right it's not based again on my opinion right of the of the topic an issue is either subjective or non-subjective the same way claim is either subjective or non-subjective i'm just using those as opposed to factual or non-factual right factual is objective non-factual is subjective determining which of these it is can be extremely important because an argument about each kind of issue requires a different tactic also different expectations most basically an issue is non-subjective where there are generally accreted upon criteria and on the other hand there are no agreed upon criteria then it might

be a subjective issue or it might be the type of issue that we need to come up with some objective criteria or evaluative criteria so it's helpful to remember that when two people are on opposite sides of a non-subjective issue it's impossible for them both to be correct so let's do a little bit of practice i want you to look at these claims and decide whether they're subjective or not subjective i'm going to walk you through this and say you're not if actually responding to me right now is it subjective number one all right here's

the there's a claim whether pcs or macs are the better kind of computer for graphic design application all right so is that subjective or is it non-subjective is that a factual matter or is it a non-factual matter right is it objective or non-objective what do you think well some things we can consider are are there generally agreed upon criteria that's going to be number one thing that we want to consider for all these right again if the answer is no it's a subjective issue if the answer is yes it's a non-subjective issue so what do

you think max pcs are there criteria well i think there probably are for instance if we agree that the standard for deciding should be what type of computer is most used by professionals in the field of graphic design then it might be a non-subjective issue if we could point to different capabilities that each computer has where one collection of capabilities is going to be better you know that really might be a factual matter and of course we're not going to settle that right now i mean it's the eternal debate right pc or mac i don't

know how many you guys are mac people i'm actually operating on a pc now hopefully that doesn't mean you're going to lose interest in this course but let's take a look at another one okay number two whether africa contains the greatest number of different species of animals versus something like maybe south america again consider are there criteria the thing that shows up in the red on the powerpoints can be the same for all of these just remember how you're going to test it okay and this one this seems to i think be very clearly a

non-subjective issue right it's a factual matter all right it's logically possible to actually observe and count all the species on each continent though that might be impossible in practice it's logically possible so we may want to clarify the difference between those two if i say it's practically impossible but logically possible i mean in theory you could do it but in practice it could be beyond our capabilities to actually go and identify each little thing just the fact that it's logically possible makes the question a factual matter okay we could we could possibly in theory test

it okay what about this one whether wilt chamberlain was a better basketball player than michael jordan uh i kind of like that one not that i'm a huge basketball fan but here you're taking some of the greatest basketball players of all time but from very different generations and comparing them we you know this is one of those things that people love to do but how do you test it right are there criteria for settling the issue it's possible there are some criteria that are generally used to measure the skill of a basketball player right average

points per game average rebounds and so on however even experts can argue about how to apply those criteria to people from different eras they've played different positions different teams you had different technology and doesn't sound like technology is you know a huge part of basketball but actually it is the footwear is going to be different from you know what wilt chamberlain was wearing back in the 70s versus what michael jordan was wearing um and if you don't think you know footwear has an impact on your ability to jump run things like that then you'd be

a little bit mistaken so can you actually apply these criteria in a fair way right maybe it is a subjective issue right if it comes down to you know who you prefer who you're a bigger fan of then it really is a purely subjective issue but again it's not always easy to tell whether an issue is subjective or objective which is why i threw that one in and i kind of like that one last one is a a moral question right whether the death penalty is morally acceptable now i've taught moral philosophy and ethics for

a number of years and in my ethics class we always get into the issue of moral subjectivism and relativism and we look at different terms matter of fact i'm going to give you a couple slides on those just so you know what we're talking about there but for some reason people tend to think or at least open to the idea that when we talk about moral claims we're in the realm of subjectivity yet when it comes to things like the death penalty people will get into heated debates about those types of things because that really

is an issue that we think we can settle right the people that are opposed to the death penalty are vehemently opposed to and they think that the people for the death penalty are wrong and sometimes the opposite is true right that could be a different an interesting case as well right so it appears it's a subjective issue since we disagree but you know even across our country we don't agree on maybe all of the criteria for evaluating it but we generally agree on a certain set of standard rules and certain principles both sides actually have

in common so again whether or not it's a subjective matter hard to tell again like i said it depends on your perspective regarding what we might call relativism versus objectivism or absolutism but why don't we talk a little bit about that right now by bringing up the topic of value judgments right so we already talked about a judgment which is a belief or an opinion and the claims that we say or you know use like our statements our propositions express our judgments express our opinions express our beliefs so what is a value judgment those are

claims evaluating something right so value and evaluation you could already see the relationship there hopefully so when we evaluate something as better worse beautiful ugly good bad there's lots of different evaluative terms that we can use and if we're doing that we're making a type of claim that we can call a value claim so we've got beliefs and judgments then you've got a sub-category what they call value judgments now it's a common misconception to assume that all value judgments are equally plausible that would be what we call subjectivism right so here's an example you know

the food tastes good and i always love to use food examples when we talk about subjective type claims because i love food and basically you want to make you know get right to the point but it's the best i think one of the best examples of something that really is subjective right the food tastes great that's a matter of taste right literally but i like particular things that you might not like right i enjoy sushi my wife not a fan okay so i think it tastes great she thinks it tastes bad we're not really going

to have a debate about it because it's not a matter of truth it's a subjective issue whereas if i say it's wrong to beat your children there you get a moral value judgment okay which again moral value judgment is a sub-category of value judgment we're going to get to that in a second as well but when i make that claim there seems to be something more at stake here this seems to be something if i was to disagree with my wife about that then i could see us having a heated argument because we tend to

think that there's some truth involved there it's not just up to me right well for me it's okay to beat my kids if you don't like it you know that's your business and that's where we get into this issue of relativity i tend to think that that last claim is an objective factual claim and not a subjective one so when we talk about like i said moral value judgments subcategory of a value judgment this is a type of value judgment that ascribes a moral quality goodness or badness whether we have an obligation to do something

whether we should be prohibited from doing something that type of language is applied to moral value judgments now moral subjectivism is the idea that ascribing a moral quality to something is purely subjective that right or wrong are matters of opinion and all opinions are equal right subjectivism is the view that two people can disagree about something that we might consider a factual issue and both of them would still be right and it sounds like we're already kind of being contradictory because we just said factual issues are not subjective and we're talking about subjective ism so

if subjectivism is the case then there are no such thing as factual moral value judgments relativism which is the word i've already used is basically applied to cultures or groups subjectivism generally to the individual that's one way people can break them down so we can say relativism is a type of subjectivism when it comes to cultural acceptance of things right claims that two cultures can disagree about a factual matter and they both again remain right like in this culture we believe the death penalty is you know thumbs up and that culture they believe the death

penalty is you know bad we're both right so for us we can do it for them they can't and that's all there is to it now both of those doctrines are i think at best confused about what the word right means uh what a factual issue is and so on so critical thinking hopefully is going to help you to avoid falling into any of these what we call potholes of subjectivism now like i said if this was a critical thinking not it is a critical thing in class if this was a moral philosophy class or

an ethics class i would probably spend at least four classes dealing with whether morality or ethics is subjective or relative and present arguments for and against the different views and even after i do that i usually have students that still haven't quite wrapped their mind around it or come down on any particular side so to deal with it here we don't have time okay like i said this is an introduction to what critical thinking is about and an introduction to the terms that are involved okay so for our summary as you can see from the

preceding examples although the general rules used to differentiate between subjective and non-subjective issues is quite easy to understand it's often not always easy to apply it's usual for people to disagree about the existence of criteria to use to decide an issue when we can't agree about the existence or non-existence of criteria we'll not be able to clearly decide whether we're dealing with a subjective issue or not subjective one so we're just lucky i guess when we have criteria it's in those troublesome cases where one's critical thinking ability is actually going to be the most useful

and unfortunately i think there are so many areas that we don't have hard and fast rules for criteria set up for okay as we go out you know through the rest of the semester we're gonna be you know picking things apart slowly that's a broad overview hopefully it wasn't too much in one session but next class we're going to be picking up i think with biases you could check out the the schedule that i provided for you and that about wraps it up for today so again if you guys have questions for me if you

have anything else then um feel free to email me i think i provided my email hopefully in the course website if you're just watching this video for your own enjoyment or to get something out of it then again thanks for watching and come back for the next video and until then i hope you guys have a great day take care [Music]