http://www.bakeru.edu/crit/

Baker University's Center for Critical Thinking
provides in-service faculty development programs and
seminars, posts selected papers on critical thinking
(especially the approach adopted at Baker), is
engaged in on-going research and
assessment of critical thinking
methodologies, maintains a large
bibliography on critical thinking articles, texts and
books, and provides links to other critical thinking
web sites and resources.

http://www.criticalthinking.org/

Web site is a little old skool.

The concept is excellent:


We cannot deal with incessant and accelerating change and complexity
without revolutionizing our thinking. Traditionally our thinking has
been designed for routine, for habit, for automation and fixed
procedure. We learned how to do our job once, and then we used what we
learned over and over.  But the problems we now
face, and will increasingly face, require a radically different form of
thinking, thinking that is more complex, more adaptable, more sensitive
to divergent points of view.  The world in which
we now live requires that we continually relearn, that we routinely
rethink our decisions, that we regularly reevaluate the way we work and
live.  In short, there is a new world facing us,
one in which the power of the mind to command itself, to regularly
engage in self-analysis, will increasingly determine the quality of our
work, the quality of our lives, and perhaps even, our very survival.

http://ailact.mcmaster.ca/

Founded in 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical
Thinking (AILACT) is a non-profit scholarly association which aims to
promote research into, teaching of, and testing of informal logic and
critical thinking. It sponsors programs in conjunction with the annual
meetings of the Eastern, Pacific and Central divisions of the American
Philosophical Association, and has in the past sponsored programs in
conjunction with the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical
Association.

My bad.

There IS a discipline that talks about how social primates developed cultural structures which relate them in larger groups.  It is called "An- thro - pol - o - gee."

Have I ever heard of it before?

Guess I have.

Thanks for reminding be about it Scott Atran.  And for giving some serious prods to the swagger of the New Atheists on Point of Inquiry.

Remember atheists: magic is NOT the same as religion or the sacred.

Will have to check this out.  and this too.

"Thoughtless Disbelief"

Not rational, but living in the freedom to disbelieve.

http://uottawa.academia.edu/AdamGoodwin/Papers/898462/Faith_In_Control_Militant_Atheism_Epistemological_Bigotry_and_State_Violence

The author presents Dennet, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens constitute a "hegemony" which somehow shores up the "neo-liberal secular capitalist order."

Instead of millitant atheism there are "traditionalist perspectives" that foreground "intersubjectivity" instead of an authoritarian epistemology.

A somewhat vulgar response:  the honest questions of "do you really believe that B.S. you are preaching?" or "why on earth should I accept your ideas?" are questions to ask of clerics, leaders, evangelists, and apologists.  One could bring up Bakhtin and his praise of the insolent, snotty, disrespectful treatment that festival participants or folkloric discourses turn on institutionalized pieties.

And what is a leftist doing privileging traditionalist perspectives.  Traditions are maintained by institutions and dominant figures -- institutions are to be left unquestioned?

Of greatest value in the paper is Goodwin's insistence that the athiests' dislike of religious praxis clashes with their preoccupation with epistemology.  This is a very telling critique.  Now, some like Paul Kurtz have always been concerned with practice over epistemology.  As a student of Dewey, Kurtz is a pragmatist and his secular humanism is based on creating a desired future through discussion, co-operation and experiment -- in short, practice.  But integral to that pragmatism is the notion of experiment and testing.  And, consequently, all our propositions and sentiments will come into question, whether it is the demotic "what kind of B.S. are you selling?," philosophic tests of pragmatic relevance, or a very loose application of the kind of hypothesis testing often acquainted with experimental science but not restricted to it.  Asking yourself "is raw fish tasty enough to become part of my snack repetoire," figuring out the best vendours to try, then trying them, is hypothesis testing.  Going with uninvestigated tradition -- "raw fish is great, says Mom" or ""raw fish, that sounds weird, don't eat it" -- won't resolve the question.

He accuses the horsemen of determinism where they take an evolutionary approach, which means chance, probability, emergent structure are what is happening, not simple cause and effect.  But evolutionary or game theoretical approaches have not spread as far as they could have.  Pierce opened the door to a philosophic and practical approach to understanding what it means to live in a universe of chance and evolutionary change but few social theorists have been willing to follow him. (Goodwin recasts the Horsemens' evolutionary thinking in traditional sociological distinctions between agency and structure)

And turning to Noam Chomsky to justify an ethical critique of the 4 Horsemen?  That is a fumble which costs you the game.  Chomsky's linguistic investigations are based on a thoroughgoing rejection of social-constructivism.  He regards language as an organ, like the liver.  Remember the snarky motto that the M.I.T. linguists are supposed to have had printed on their pencils: "context sucks"?

Chomsky is a strict positivist: he will not permit any connection to be made between his studies of language and his anarchist politics.  Occasionally, he will make comments about how egalitarian politics and our individual freedoms are rooted in the animal that we are.  But he holds out Humbolt and Kropotkin -- practicioners of the kind of Enlightenment rationalism Goodwin sees at work in the neo-atheists -- as good sources for thinking about freedom and society.  And he can come down pretty hard on the postmodernists.

But the article is a sign of things to come: those who argue forcefully against traditional beliefs will have to offer pragmatic reasons for believers to change the way they act, not batter away at what people think with their supposed superior insight.  But testing, reflecting, and discussing are PRACTICAL activities and engagement in those practices could very well endanger the religious and cultural traditions in which some people embed themselves.

Should American secularists really begin a respectful, hermeneutically open dialogue with Michelle Bachman and pastors who have helped stoke the fires of lethal homophobic prejudice in Uganda and elsewhere?  I doubt that Goodman would agree to that.

Finally turned to one of the books on my shelf that has been taunting me for over a decade:  Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

http://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html

It's magisterial, classic, seminal, provocative.

But I cannot see my way past one of the fundamental assumptions of the book.  It is one of the fundamental assumptions of a great deal of cultural history.  Robert Alun Jones puts it this way:

"The most ambitious claim of The Elementary Forms, of course, is that the most basic categories of human thought have their origin in social experience."

No. 

Sorry to be a positivist pill.  But no, they don't.  You could be a Kantian and talk about the fundamental categories of perception and thought that orient distinct persons but are universal (that old empirco-transcendental doublet).  Or you could follow the Chomsky/Pinker/Dennet angle and consider language/perception and thought/philosophical reasoning itself as products of the physical evolution of the species.  Their evolutionary and materialist perspectives are, for me, the correct ones. 

So religiosity (as distinct from magic or simple deluded thinking) may provide many of the basic categories of human thought, and this religiosity may be inseparable from social experience.  But that social experience is the experience of a hairless African primate that has evolved to have a complex social life.  And, apologies to Aristotle, the political animal that we have evolved to be is not one suited to a city or nation, but one suited to small communities where you know every member, and your relationship to all members of that community at any given moment is of immediate concern.  To talk of cities and nations and cultures is to talk of real entities.  They might be emergent from the phenotypic expression of the innate, genotypic sociality of the animal that we are, but they are emergent and require a mode of thinking that doesn't conflate the behaviours of the small-group primate with economic, military, and cultural activities involving millions of those hairless monkeys.

The trouble is that bio-evolutionary psychological perspectives will not lead one to say ANYTHING interesting about the things that interest me: particular pieces of culture that deserve examination, appreciation, and performance.  I.e., plays.  Generalities -- whether biological, linguistic, or psychological -- are not conducive for looking at particular works of art and their affiliations to each other and their cultures. Because the shifts, reversals, inversions, explosions and condensations of cultural elements that are the subject of humanistic study happen at the scale of centuries, or decades, or even between years.  These spans of time are orders of magnitude smaller than the history of the biological evolution of our gene-rooted sociality. 

I don't feel comfortable accepting the tabula rasa proposed by the sociologists.  But the natural historical approach has repeatedly led to vauge generalizations (factor X is present in work Y because of some "essential human nature") or eternalizing judgements that shut off any discussion, kill conversations, and can inculcate prejudice (factor X in work Y affirms the existence of some human -- or male, or female, or racial -- quality that has evolved in primordial time and will last for millennia).

All these complexities are arising from a question which has been perplexing me for weeks: is there a way of thinking or discussing unbelief that does not reduce the doubter to an outlier or even an essential element of religious cultures.  What does it mean to doubt if, as Durkheim suggests, the god is society symbolizing itself, and there are no categories of thought, feeling, or behaviour that are not inescapably social?

I need to practice some guitar now

The home page of Games for Change posted a groovy excerpt from a U.S. Supreme Court decision on Video Games:

“Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices and through features distinctive to the medium.”

The full text may be found here.

I am sorry to have heard about this conference only recently:

Worldviews - an innovative international conference examining the complex relationship between media and postsecondary education - will be held June 16 to 18, 2011 in Toronto. The conference is being organized by OISE/University of Toronto, the Washington-based Inside Higher Ed, the London and South-Africa-based University World News and the Ontario Confederation of University of Faculty Associations and its publication, Academic Matters.

Journalists, editors, academics, researchers, university and college media and public relations professionals from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania will encourage an interactive dialogue with participants. As well as debates, panels and practical workshops, there will be small café discussions and salons, film screenings, interviews with leading thinkers, and the opportunity for audience members to become speakers and debaters.

Networking with leading edge thinkers and colleagues in media and communications, public relations, higher education, and research from across the globe is one of the major benefits of the conference.

The papers were mostly about relating science research to the public.

This is a concern of The Center for Inquiry.

Where is there room for the humanities' role in assisting critical thinking?