Critical Thinking and Informal Logic: Neuropsychological Perspectives

• Main Author: Paul Thagard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2011-09-01
• Series: Informal Logic
• Subjects: Argument; critical thinking; emotion; fear-driven inference; inference; logic
• Online Access: https://informallogic.ca/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/3398

This article challenges the common view that improvements in critical thinking are best pursued by investigations in informal logic. From the perspective of research in psychology and neuroscience, hu-man inference is a process that is multimodal, parallel, and often emo-tional, which makes it unlike the linguistic, serial, and narrowly cog-nitive structure of arguments. At-tempts to improve inferential prac-tice need to consider psychological error tendencies, which are patterns of thinking that are natural for peo-ple but frequently lead to mistakes in judgment. This article discusses two important but neglected error ten-dencies: motivated inference and fear-driven inference.