I’ve written elsewhere about my dislike of the traditional critical thinking literature, and thus I’m not convinced that it has much to contribute trying to contruct a rational thinking curriculum. However, psychology’s own empirical literature does offer a number of areas that can offer a start. At the end of his book ‘What is Intelligence ?’, that offers an explanation of the strange phenomena of ever-increasing IQ scores, the brilliant Jim Flynn proposes a list of ten concepts that might result in continuation of IQ growth:
1) Market forces
2) Percentages
3) Natural Selection
4) Control Groups
5) Random Samples
6) Naturalistic fallacy
7) Charisma effect
8) Placebo
9) Falsifiability
10) Tolerance school fallacy
I would add to additional concepts of my own to Jim Flynn’s list :
11) The importance of historical context
12) Heuristics and biases
I’d suggest that you can group these items into three broad areas:
1) The scientific method (4,5,8 & 9)
2) Useful concepts (1,2,3,11 & 12)
3) The structure of logical arguments (6 & 10)
As my rational thinking course has evolved over the last five years I’ve covered many of these concepts, but given that I’ve always taught psychology students I’ve tailored the examples I’ve used towards psychology. However, I’m now thinking that it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to recast those examples to appeal to a generic student audience and the address the basic curriculum I’ve outlined above. Over the next few months I’m going to try to put together generic examples that fit into the framework I’ve detailed above. I’ll post the examples here as I progress.
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