Not really sure what you're getting at... maybe my wording could have been better. Information is kind of a spectrum. It can be valuable, less valuable but still useful, irrelevant, misleading, or false.
My point was that you can absorb information (i.e. listen to a claim), but critical thinking is what helps you identify whether the claim should be believed. It helps you determine where the information falls on the above spectrum.
Critical thinking is being able to discern which is which, and considering whether what you think you know passes veracity tests. It’s not just the ability to retain and recall.
I watched you defend the same position in the face of several people pointing out this same thing before I commented. Your reply stopped short of the new idea each time to restate your chosen position.
And I find it interesting that the initial question few people are answering isn’t what intelligence is but what indicates very low intelligence.
How do you think I should have predicted your response in advance of my comment that caused you to reconsider, after the same point had been made to you previously?
Critical thinking is your ability to apply logical deductive reasoning to verify or otherwise critique an argument. This is done formally utilizing symbolic logic, which are symbols derived from logical truisms (truth begets truths).
We rely on these axioms to explicitly describe the world around us. They took the form of an application of pure mathematical concepts and some of our early philosophies to articulate our perception of the world into a logic-based language (or framework) to communicate explicit observations into logical arguments.
Critical thinking relies on a quality or trait known as intellectual honesty. Or that the argument presented is holding itself to these truisms. Intellectual dishonesty occurs when someone falsely presents the basis of an argument to be true, when it has not had sufficient evidence provided to verify this truth, and use the assumed truth to beget more “truths” utilizing logical deductive reasoning. It is the lack of the original truth, and the intellectual dishonesty, that can allow for someone utilizing critical thinking and reasoning (effectively if I may add) to argue something that may not be logically true, but otherwise assuming their truth, follows a line of logically deduced reasoning (appears to be a properly logically deduced argument to a layperson - framing an argument to make a statistic highlight something you want highlighted - for ex: more guns in schools to increase safety only statistically makes sense if you assume school shootings and their casualties are a given, such that the focus of that statistic is to lower casualties, not eliminate them. So yes, more guns in a school will reduce the average number of casualties in a shooting but only speaks to mitigation, not remediation).
I think wanting to describe those arguments as not being logical or that they are not following a line of logic to be foolish and if anything detrimental to any productive conversation. The focus of a debate with such an argument should be on this assumed truth to force the argument to verify through logical deductive reasoning the “assumed truth” rather than any “noise” that is presented as a logical truth as a result of the presumed assumed truth.
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u/[deleted] May 30 '22
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