Understanding Critical Thinking: Generalist and Specifist Views

The Generalist View of Critical Thinking

A major proponent of the generalist view, Robert Ennis (1989), describes it as an approach that ‘attempts to teach critical thinking abilities and dispositions separately from the presentation of the content of existing subjectmatter offerings’ (p. 4). For a comprehensive list of abilities and dispositions,

Ennis (1987). The specifist view, by contrast, is that critical thinking is disciplinespecific. It can only be correctly taught from a disciplinary vantage point and by using the language of the disciplines. According to a major proponent of the specifist view, John McPeck (1981), ‘Thinking, by definition, is always thinking about something, and that something can never be “everything in general” but must be something in particular’

Moore’s (2011a) evidence for critical thinking not being a universal category is data from interviews with ‘about six’ academics from each of the following disciplines: Philosophy, History and Literary/Cultural Studies (p. 264). Such a small sample size hardly constitutes compelling data as Moore himself admits (p. 263) but, leaving this aside,

What does the data demonstrate? In the samples cited, academics surveyed seem to think that critical thinking is differently constituted in their respective disciplines. He provides a number of examples:

In explaining what being critical is, I say to my students ‘if someone is talking to you and they’re saying this is my argument. And what they give you is not an argument, you should be able to pull them up and say that was not an argument. What you’ve given doesn’t support the conclusion’.

[Being critical in History] is concerned … with the sources and the way in which you use them. It’s building on the sources, or organising them in a particular way to construct a particular … picture of the past.

We are less obviously critical about the texts we study. In selecting them for a course, we have in a sense given them the benefit of the doubt. I’m never totally  uncritical, but if I’m teaching a Shakespearean play, we’re not going to say ‘Shakespeare was a deficient playwright, wasn’t he’. Instead the questions we ask [are]: why do such texts have value as literature, and how does this value come through? (Literary studies informant#2)

Does this Wittgensteinian-style conclusion follow from Moore’s examples? This is hard to establish as Moore does not make his argument explicit enough to easily criticise. Instead, Moore uses suggestive discipline-based examples and relies on the reader to be convinced by the general position. But, let us try to reconstruct the argument and look at a parallel example for comparison. The argument appears to be this:

(1) Instances of critical thinking in the disciplines (logico-semantic, creative, exploratory) are hard to define, have different levels of complexity and don’t transfer easily from one context to another (without loss of discipline-specific modes of thought).
(2) This raises doubts about what the generic term ‘critical thinking’ refers to and how much commonality there is in how critical thinking is used in the disciplines.
(3) Therefore, critical thinking is not a universal, abstract concept.
(4) Therefore, critical thinking is a discipline-specific concept. An argument with an identical form – another technique beloved of generalists – brings out the logical move:

(1) Printer fonts in documents (helvetica, roman, gothic) are hard to define, have different levels of complexity and don’t transfer easily from one document to another (without loss of formatting).
(2) This raises doubts about what the generic term ‘fonts’ refers to and how much commonality there is in how fonts are used in documents.
(3) Therefore ‘font’ is not a universal, abstract concept.
(4) Therefore ‘font’ is a document-specific concept.

However, it is fallacious to move from lexical premises to theoretical conclusions. Compare:

P1: People in the United States talk about human rights in one way (lexical).
P2: People in China talk about them in another way (lexical).
P4: People in Saudia Arabia talk about them in another way (lexical).
IC: Therefore, the idea of universal/generic human rights is mistaken (theoretical).

Therefore, the generic conception of ‘human rights’ should not be privileged (normative).