Asking the Right Questions

July 13, 2000

Asking the Right Questions, A Guide to Critical Thinking should be required reading for all High School Freshman. This books covers all the bases. It starts off by explaining how to determine what the issue at hand is, what is the conclusion, and what is their argument to support this conclusion. This first step sounds like it would be easy enough, but the book points out some common mistakes. It also helps you focus on the important material, so you don't waste time analyzing unnecessary bulk. From there, the book goes on with how to analyze arguments and conclusions.

We are then guided, chapter by chapter, on how to look for ambiguous words and phrases, as well as assumptions of values and description. These chapters help us find assumptions that the author holds that we may disagree with or find untrue. Such as, if everyone is doing it, it must be good.

The last chapters are the real meat of the book. They deal with critiquing the evidence. Common reasoning errors, judging the sources, (Intuition, Authorities, Testimonials, Personal Observation, Case and Research Studies, and Analogies) as well as finding rival causes. We are giving tools for judging if the statistics used are deceptive and shown how to detect if significant information was omited.

Overall this book deserves an A due to its completeness and quality. Fortunately, this book is used as a textbook in many college classrooms. Unfortunately, the ability to judge what is thrown at us (or even the fact that we should judge it) is not taught as a basic necessity in school. Which makes me wonder; Do people not use critical judgement because they are ignorant how, or is it because they are too lazy, and they would rather let someone else do their thinking for them. For the sake of us all, I hope it is not the latter!

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