1. What is Critical Thinking?

This page provides an overview of the Critical Thinking course taught by Allan Di Donato, a philosophy professor at Central Piedmont Community College, with nearly 20 years of experience.

 

Summary

This opening session introduces the instructor, lays out the roadmap for the course, and gives a first working definition of critical thinking together with the basic vocabulary the course will rely on.

Instructor and course style

The course is taught by Alan Di Donato, who has taught philosophy and humanities at the college for close to 20 years, including a recurring Introduction to Logic course. Logic and critical thinking overlap heavily, so a good part of the semester is devoted to logic. The lectures are deliberately informal and unscripted, meant to feel like an in-person class so that online students can follow the reasoning rather than just read slides.

Roadmap of the semester

Di Donato walks through the topics in order:

• Cognitive bias, persuasion and rhetoric, including advertising tactics (how media and even store layouts exploit our predispositions).
• The basics of logic, argument and truth, followed by informal logic and fallacies, grouped into fallacies of ambiguity, relevance, and presumption.
• Inductive reasoning: certainty and probability, scientific and experimental method, historical science, and causal reasoning.
• Deductive logic: categorical logic, the square of opposition, categorical syllogisms, and basic propositional logic (only the essentials, no formal proofs or modal logic).
• Philosophy of science, leading into a case study on Darwinism versus Intelligent Design as a chance to apply the whole semester's toolkit: spotting arguments, fallacies, rhetoric and bias, and distinguishing science from pseudoscience.

He uses an analogy: deductive logic is a bit like math (form, structure, relationships), while inductive reasoning is closer to literature. People with a math aptitude may find the deductive part easier, but everyone can learn it with effort.

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is more than being a careful problem-solver. Di Donato defines it as the careful application of reason to determine whether a claim is true, and crucially it also involves thinking about how we think.

The skills the course aims to build include:

• Distinguishing rational claims from emotional ones, and fact from opinion.
• Spotting deception, logical flaws, contradictions, and ambiguous or inadequate information.
• Constructing cogent, evidence-based arguments rather than relying on mere opinion.
• Avoiding overstated conclusions and irrelevant detail, and knowing when a conclusion is merely probable versus certain.
• Weighing alternatives and using evidence to defend a position coherently.

Core vocabulary

• Belief / opinion / judgment are treated as interchangeable: an idea someone holds about a subject.
• A claim (statement or proposition) is how we express a belief. To count as a claim, it must have a truth value, i.e. be either true or false. A question, for example, is not a claim.
• Objective claims are true or false independent of personal opinion; subjective claims depend on personal taste.
• He warns against the loose "fact versus opinion" framing: it wrongly implies opinions are never factual. In reality there are objective opinions and subjective opinions. "Factual" simply means objective, not necessarily true.

Truth and knowledge

• Truth is explained via the correspondence view (going back to Aristotle): a claim is true when it corresponds to something in reality.
• Knowledge uses the standard Justified True Belief (JTB) account: you must (1) believe that X, (2) X must actually be true, and (3) you must have justification for the belief. He notes both definitions are debated (e.g. the Gettier problem), and stresses that most of what we hold are beliefs, not knowledge.

Issues, arguments, and types of inference

• An issue is a point of discussion with a question attached, typically phrased with "whether…". It differs from a mere topic of conversation: an issue arises only when a claim is actually questioned as true or false.
• An argument supports a claim (the conclusion) by giving reasons (the premises); the conclusion follows from the premises.
• Arguments should not be confused with explanations (which show why or how something happens) or with persuasion (a good argument can persuade, but most persuasion, such as advertising, uses no argument at all).
• Deductive arguments aim at conclusions that follow necessarily, yielding certainty and validity. Inductive arguments yield at best high probability.

Objective vs. subjective issues, and value judgments

Two tests help decide whether an issue is factual (objective):

1. If two people disagree and at least one must be wrong, the issue is likely factual.
2. If established methods or criteria exist to settle it, it is factual.

Worked examples illustrate how hard this can be in practice: Mac vs. PC for design, which continent has the most animal species (clearly objective in principle), Wilt Chamberlain vs. Michael Jordan (criteria exist but are hard to apply fairly across eras), and the morality of the death penalty.

This leads to value judgments: claims evaluating something as good/bad, beautiful/ugly, etc. Moral value judgments ascribe moral qualities. Di Donato distinguishes:

• Subjectivism – moral judgments are purely personal opinion, all equally valid (applied to individuals).
• Relativism – moral judgments vary by culture, with each culture "right" on its own terms.

He considers both views confused about what "right" and "factual" really mean, and sees critical thinking as the way to avoid these "potholes."

Key takeaway

The central message: think carefully and precisely, and clear up ambiguity first, because unclear ideas cannot be reasoned about well. Like math, the course builds on its foundations, so mastering the early concepts pays off later. Critical thinking is most valuable precisely in the hard cases, where agreed-upon criteria are missing and judgment is difficult.