Critical Thinking: Thinking to Some Purpose.

A British scholar by the name of Susan Stebbing (1952) once wrote a book on the importance of purpose in thinking. In it she said: "to think logically is to think relevantly to the purpose that initiated the thinking: all effective thinking is directed to an end. " We agree. All thinking pursues a purpose. We do not think unless we have something we are trying to accomplish, some aim in view, or something we want. In other words, when humans think about the world we do not do so randomly but rather in line with our goals, desires, needs, and values. Our thinking is an integral part of a patterned way of acting in the world, and we act, even in simple matters, with some set of ends in view. To understand someone's thinking-including our own-we must understand the functions it serves, what it is about, the direction it is moving, the ends that make sense of it. In a word, we must understand that person's purpose. Of course, much of what we are after in our thinking is not obvious to us. Raising human goals and desires to the level of conscious realization is an important part of critical thinking. In other words, though we always have a purpose in thinking, we are not always fully aware of that purpose. We may have some vague idea of it. Perhaps we have not clearly come to terms with our purpose. For example, everyone's thinking is a product of many influences, most of which we have never thought about. Consider some of the major influences that shaped your thinking (and ours): You were born into a culture (European, American, African, Asian). You were born at some point in time (in some century in some year). You were born in some place (in the country, in the city, in the North or South, East or West). You were raised by parents with particular beliefs (about the family, about personal relationships, about marriage, about childhood, about obedience, about religion, about politics, about schooling, etc.). You formed various associations, largely based on who was around you, associations with people with a viewpoint, values, and taboos. Change any one of these influences and your goals and purposes would be different. Consider this, suppose you had been born in the Middle Ages as a serf in the fields in France. Can you see that if you had, virtually all of your beliefs would be altered? See if you can perform similar reflective experiments of your own. For example, imagine other changes in these influences, and then imaginatively compare some of the beliefs you likely would have with the beliefs you actually do have. You will begin to appreciate how much you, and every other human, are a product of influences over which you, and they, had little or no control. Neither you nor we directed these influences upon us. Their effects, clearly, were both good and bad. If, for example, we assume that many of these influences engendered in us beliefs that are false, it follows that in our minds right now there are false beliefs, and we are acting on them. Yet, we must realize that the mind has no mechanism for screening out false beliefs. In other words, we all carry around in our minds prejudices from our culture, prejudices from where we were born and raised, prejudices from our parents, and prejudices from our friends and associates. Finding ways to locate those flawed beliefs and replace them with more reasonable ones is part of the agenda of critical thinking. One problem with human thinking is that we sometimes pursue contradictory ends. We might want to become educated but also want to avoid doing any intellectual work. We might want others to love us but not behave in loving ways toward them. We might want people to trust us but behave in ways that undermine trust. The purpose we might explicitly state may be simply what we would like to believe of ourselves, and our real purpose might be one that we would be ashamed to admit. We might think we want to get into medical school to help and care for people when our actual purpose may be to make a lot of money, gain prestige and status, and be admired by others. …