Either an Introduction or a Section of my Coursebook on Critical Thinking

Supplement: Thinking About Reason and Meaning

Introduction: The Culture of Critical Thinking Today

At many universities today, the dominant view of reason and knowledge reflects a form of positivism: that is, a belief that only what can be scientifically tested, measured, or proven is truly real and thus can be known. If something cannot be verified in a lab or described in mathematical or physical terms, it is often dismissed as merely "subjective," meaning a product of individual psychology, social conditioning, or cultural bias. Science – rightly in its own sphere – imagines reality as a closed system: a world made up of brute facts, governed by natural laws, in which meaning, value, and inner experience are not part of reality but merely projections. In this view, reason is neutral and impersonal, and everything else – beauty, morality, love, and even consciousness – is seen as cut off from the world, needing to be explained from within the closed system of nature. We with our inner lives are like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, mistaking shadows for truth. Science is supposed to get us out of the Cave.

     The kind of rationality behind modern critical thinking is often modeled after scientific reason. Science, for all its power, operates within a closed system. A system is a set of rules, assumptions, and variables. A closed system is one that defines in advance what counts as evidence and what questions can be asked. In such a system, nothing “outside” can affect its logic. Science assumes that the universe is governed by physical laws and that all phenomena are ultimately measurable and observable.

     But the world of meaning is not a closed system in which everything can be quantified. To interpret a novel, to forgive a friend, to grieve a loss, to judge a policy, or to ponder one’s purpose – these are not activities governed by the closed logic of physics. They open outward. They are perspectival, meaning they are always shaped by the position of the person asking the question. And a perspective implies limitation. If we saw everything, we would not need a perspective. But because we are finite, we must interpret. And interpretation always implies the possibility of truth – not as correspondence with a detached, neutral reality, but as a deeper alignment with what shows itself from within experience.

   This means that meaning depends on reality being bigger than the closed system of science. It must be capable of showing itself in new ways to different people, at different times, under different conditions. And this openness is not chaotic; it’s what makes shared understanding, moral insight, and personal growth possible. To deny this openness is to treat all experience as an illusion, imagining that our deepest responses are shadows cast by a hidden, indifferent “real” world we can never touch.

    In such a climate, "critical thinking" is often reduced to a method for deconstructing claims without ever questioning the framework in which those methods make sense. It is seen as a set of tools that anyone can use. The tools have no philosophical attachments. They do not touch the “autonomous self” that uses them. This is a view I challenge.

 

Two Kinds of Reason

     When we talk about "critical thinking," many students assume we're talking about the kind of reasoning used in science or mathematics. That form of reason aims for objectivity: it wants to describe things as they are independent of personal feeling or network of beliefs. It's the kind of thinking used to determine the boiling point of water, the distance from Earth to the Moon, or the cause of a chemical reaction. In these cases, if we follow the methods carefully, anyone who repeats the experiment should get the same results.

But not all of life is like that.

   There are areas of our experience where this kind of neutrality isn't possible and can even be misleading. Think about love, grief, beauty, shame, hope, or remorse; think about how such responses to reality are part of politics, art, history, pedagogy, morals, and religion. These aren't just personal feelings though they are that too. They are also responses to something. Grief is a response to the death of a beloved person. Remorse is the pained recognition of having wronged a human being (or indeed an animal). Awe and reverence are responses to something wonderful – a heroic deed or a clear night sky. And in these cases, how we understand what we're experiencing depends on who we are, what kind of life we've lived, and what kind of world we believe we live in. Reason about such aspects of reality – disclosed within the realm of meaning –  is not about detaching from life. It's about going deeper into it. You can't stand outside of love and "test" it like you would a chemical. You can't run a physics experiment to determine the meaning of grief. And yet, these experiences matter. They reveal something about the world and about ourselves.

 

The Circle of Understanding

    When we try to make sense of these meaningful experiences, we begin with what we already know (or think we know), and then we allow new experiences to challenge or deepen that understanding. We don't come to them as blank slates. For example, if you've never experienced the death of someone close to you, your understanding of grief will be limited, maybe even theoretical. But when you lose someone, your understanding isn't just increased; it's transformed. The experience itself changes what the word "grief" means to you. You have learned. Your understanding of the world – not just your psychology – has expanded.

    This is how our understanding works in much of life: we begin somewhere, are challenged, and grow. Our responses are shaped by our past, but they can also surprise us, change us. We see more – a not less – when we bring our full selves to the experience, which is there anyway whether we are aware of it or not. This isn't a flaw in our reasoning. It's a sign that we're reasoning in a domain where life itself is the evidence.

    This same process applies when we interpret works of art, literature, or even history. When you read a novel, your understanding of its characters, themes, and message depends not only on the words on the page but also on your own background, imagination, and life experience. Two people can read the same story and come away with very different, yet still valid, though limited interpretations. The novel is like reality: it exceeds any particular reading of it – which doesn’t mean that some readings don’t reveal deep aspects of the novel, others not. Our readings reflect our strengths and limits. But we can go on deepening our readings over the course of a lifetime – or over generations. This is what I mean when I say the very idea of a “perspective” and “the realm of meaning” implies a conception of reality that transcends our limited ability to uncover it. It is like Humboldt said of the translations of a work: the meaning is all the possible (good) translations and readings of it. That is what meaning reveals reality to be like, unless we want to call meaning an illusion and reduce it to some category within a closed system that is pure non-meaning (power, evolution, class conflict, patriarchy, etc. – all of which are indeed part of reality).

     The same goes for history. Historical interpretation involves facts, of course—but which facts are emphasized, how they are connected, and what they are said to mean will vary depending on the interpreter's perspective. This doesn't mean that anything goes, or that all interpretations are equally good. It means that understanding in these areas is always a dialogue between the evidence and the person engaging with it.

 

Emotions, the Inner Life (“subjectivity”) and the Discovery of the World

    In science, emotion or mood is considered something "extra."

• It might motivate a scientist to pursue a certain line of research.
• It might get in the way and introduce bias.
• But it doesn't tell you whether your results are accurate.

But in the realm of meaning – in love, art, or moral life – emotion is part of the discovery itself. Emotions can be “cognitive.” They can be (like thoughts) more or less in tune or out of tune with reality itself (not obviously reality as science imagines it for methodological reasons, as closed system, but as we experience it whether we want to or not).

• Grief can reveal the value of a lost life.
• Remorse can show you the reality of a wrong.
• Awe can reveal something sublime or sacred.

These aren't just moods we happen to feel; they are responses to something real. And in these cases, emotion doesn't cloud reason; it is reason, working at a different depth. (Unless we choose to see, or have been conditioned to see, all emotions as subjective and cut off from reality because reality is imagined as a closed system that excludes meaning.)

Examples

• The freezing point of water is 0°C. You can test this in a lab. It doesn’t matter who you are.
• Your friend dies. You feel grief. It teaches you something about love, loss, and the value of a human life. That insight could never be obtained by watching an experiment.
• A character in a novel commits a terrible betrayal. You feel a mixture of anger and sorrow. This emotional response is not a distraction; it's what tells you that a wrong has occurred.
• You hear a piece of music that moves you to tears. Another person hears the same piece and feels nothing. That doesn't make your experience invalid; at worst your experience is sentiment, in which case it truly is “subjective.” But it may show that have the background the other lacks – not only to understand the musical idiom but the sufferings to understand what it is communicating.
• A historian interprets the fall of the Roman Empire as a result of moral decay. Another sees it as a failure of military infrastructure. Both rely on evidence, but their interpretations are shaped by the frameworks they bring to the material. Understanding history requires more than facts; it requires perspective, understandings about what history really is.

 

    The key is not to eliminate yourself from the process (as neutral reason tries to do) but to become more aware of how your perspective shapes your understanding and to allow that understanding to grow through deeper engagement. To lay your preconceptions out on the table, so to speak. Your preconceptions are analogous to scientific theories which the “data” of life experience tests. Of course, to be willing to do this requires some courage, some humility, and loving truth more than being right. We can call this set of virtues being objective.

 

Certainties

    Some of the convictions that shape our perspective – such as the belief that other people matter, or that truth (learning) is worth seeking – function as starting points in our thinking. You might call them axioms or deep certainties. They are not proven in the same way scientific hypotheses are because they must be assumed to “prove” – to make sense of anything else at all in the realm of meaning.  But even these deep convictions are tested in life. For example, the belief that love is more than a chemical reaction may not be proven in a lab, but it is tested in experience through fidelity, suffering, sacrifice, and joy. These convictions can be confirmed, challenged, or even transformed over time. The test is not just logical but existential: how well do they illuminate reality, hold up under pressure, or help us live truthfully?

   This calls for a key distinction: a perspective is not the same as subjectivism or relativism. A perspective is by definition limited. A limited perspective implies a whole of reality that is beyond our limited perspective. We cannot apprehend the whole of reality (being mortal and not divine) so we project our limited perspective onto the whole of reality. This, in turn, conditions our concrete experience. But a perspective (of the whole or a particular part) can be tested. It can be deepened or corrected by experience. It aims at truth. Some things we cannot doubt – e.g. other people matter – but not because such things cannot be logically or scientifically doubted. That means we must acknowledge that all understanding in the realm of meaning has an existential dimension. The existential dimension refers to how we understand meaning depends on who we are, how we live, and what we care about. It’s not something you can fully grasp from the outside or by looking at data. (The most ‘intelligent’ android would be like a dog watching TV when it comes to understanding, say, history – your biography, for example.) You have to live it, feel it, and respond to it as a person. So, unlike logical or scientific knowledge, which is meant to be objective and the same for everyone regardless of their situation, existential understanding is personal, situated, and tied to our experience of being human. And yet it is not “subjective” in the sense of being arbitrary or purely individual. It still aims at truth, but a truth that can only be seen from within life.

   But skepticism about meaning (e.g. radical subjectivism, relativism) claims – absolutely! – that there is, as a matter of fact, no truth, only opinion, different tastes about which we cannot reason. To reduce the realm of meaning to a matter of taste – whether the taste of an individual or a group – is an absolute claim about reality as a whole (a closed system). It refutes itself by excluding itself from its knowledge-claim about reality as a whole: ‘All claims about meaning are subjective tastes – except mine.’ Any radical skepticism about the realm of meaning necessarily contradicts itself (unless, I suppose, it acknowledges that it has an existential dimension, that it is a perspective).

 

Intellectual Virtue

   In the realm of meaning, as in science, understanding depends not just on intelligence but on certain virtues: honesty, humility, openness, attentiveness, the courage to change, loving truth more than being right. In fact, the kind of learning that matters most often depends on moral and intellectual virtues. These include patience – to listen before responding, to sit with complexity before jumping to conclusions; intellectual honesty – to acknowledge what we do not know or where we may have been mistaken; courage – to allow our preconceptions to be challenged by truth or experience; and love of truth over being right – to care more about discovering what is real than defending our ego. At the root of these is humility, the recognition that our perspective is always limited and that genuine learning requires openness to what transcends us. [Obviously, pathological narcissists like Trump and people like most of his followers whose “identity” depends on maintaining “their truth” in the face of all and any evidence that challenges it will not be good thinkers or learners. We all might be in a larger or smaller bubble, epistemologically speaking, but we don’t have to remain in an echo chamber that discredits everything outside of the bubble.]

     How do you acquire these virtues? By practicing them. You become honest by repeatedly telling the truth, even when it is hard. Etc. This is of the utmost importance if you want to be a good thinker.

    These virtues do not guarantee that we will always be right, but without them, we are unlikely to grow in understanding at all. Scientific understanding can sometimes proceed without some (not all!) of these virtues but genuine human understanding cannot. No scientist worth their salt can be as a scientist dishonest, inattentive, closed-minded, etc. But outside the lab, I suppose, they can be all of this and still be a good scientist. Not so in the realm of meaning. What we see depends, in large part, on who we are.

 

Reductionism

   This also means that we must beware of reductionism: that is, the temptation to explain everything about a person or their views by reducing them to a single cause: class interest, unconscious bias, will-to-power, social privilege, or ideology. These frameworks are important for self-examination. They can help us become aware of influences we hadn’t noticed in ourselves. But when they are used only to discredit others without listening or engaging in good faith, they become obstacles to understanding. Good thinking means resisting the urge to close our minds with reductionist shortcuts. Instead, we should give others the benefit of the doubt, avoid fallacies like ad hominem attacks or appeals to group identity (ad populum), and focus on whether their reasoning is honest, careful, and justified. True understanding includes the humility to reflect on our own assumptions – not just the tools to critique others.

 

Dialogue and the Fruitfulness of Disagreement

    Genuine dialogue about moral or political differences can be one of the richest forms of learning. It requires more than argument; it requires curiosity, patience, and a willingness to understand what matters most to someone else. A disagreement about values is not like a math problem to be solved; it is a conversation between two different ways of making sense of the world.

     When two people hold conflicting convictions – e.g. about justice, freedom, equality, or tradition – they often bring with them different life experiences, cultural backgrounds, and emotional histories. Rather than seeing such differences as threats, we must learn to see them as opportunities. Listening deeply to another person's moral or political perspective can expand our own horizon, challenge our blind spots, or even reinforce our position with greater depth and nuance. At the very least, it teaches us how others live, think, and hope.

    The goal of such conversations is not always agreement, but mutual understanding. And understanding is itself a form of growth. But we should go beyond mutual understanding. Some exceptionally valuable conversations do more than open us to other views. They lead to a clearer vision of reality. In listening and reflecting honestly, we may come to see not just why someone believes what they do, but what in the world their belief is a response to. Sometimes, these conversations reveal that one view illuminates the world more truthfully than another, that it captures something real about human dignity, freedom, suffering, or love. To say this is not to deny the value of multiple perspectives but to affirm that the world itself calls for a response, and some responses fit it better than others. [Compare the MAGA version is history and race in America to that of Martin Luther King.]

    We can learn to recognize this fit: through experience, through reflection, and through dialogue. Fruitful disagreement doesn't just sharpen our positions; it helps us see what is there, in the world, with more depth and clarity. Understanding another’s view doesn't always mean agreeing with it. We may understand it well and still judge it to be inadequate or false. But if that judgment is made in light of honest engagement and deep attention, then it too can be a way of honoring the truth.

 

The Matrix Fallacy

      Some people argue that all of our inner experiences could be illusions—that we might be living in a simulation like in The Matrix, or being tricked by an evil demon like Descartes imagined. Maybe love is just chemicals. Maybe our sense of justice is just evolutionary conditioning. Maybe nothing really matters.

    It's true: we can't disprove those possibilities in the way we can disprove a scientific hypothesis. But these doubts come at a cost. If you want to reject everything that comes through lived experience, you have to step outside the entire human condition. But of course, there's no way to do that. There's no "view from nowhere."

     You can doubt science from within science, because it's built to test and revise its claims. But you can't doubt the meaningfulness of life from outside life. To do so is to saw off the branch you're sitting on.

 

This kind of reasoning appropriate to meaning is not opposed to science but it is different. You can only think more deeply about by ceasing to be a distant observer and seeing it from the inside. Sometimes the most important truths are those we come to not by stepping back but by stepping in.

 

Conclusion: What Critical Thinking Often Misses

    So I have argued that “critical thinking” is more than a toolbox of logical techniques – ways to identify fallacies, break down arguments, and make decisions more rationally (though it is partly like that). Such “tools” are often presented as philosophically neutral, as if they have no implications for how we understand the world, the self, or truth itself. They assume the autonomous thinker standing outside the world, applying reason like a blade. But real thinking does not, cannot work that way.

     To think well is to accept that we are inside the world, not above it. It is to see that thinking is not separate from being. Our ideas are shaped by who we are, what we love, what we fear, and how we live. This does not make them irrational. It means they are human.

    So good thinking must go deeper than “critical thinking.” It must include self-examination, intellectual courage, humility, willingness to become aware of your metaphysical commitments, and a love of truth that goes beyond being clever or correct. The opposite of a love of truth is called being self-satisfied. Good thinking cannot be separated from the intellectual virtues of the person who thinks. It is not just a skill set. It is a way of being in the world.