Thinking Skills

We oftentimes tend to focus on the latest technologies and Gizmos but all too often the person behind the technology - you - is overlooked. It seems that while the education system is reasonably good at telling you about the world around you, it is not terribly effective about teaching you about yourself and what happens in your brain/mind/body/nervous system. Therefore, I believe that a study of thinking skills should form part of each PKM practitioner's personal growth plan.

I have taught thinking skills to a variety of audiences over the years ranging from school children to engineers and boards of directors in listed companies through our thoughtformz thinking skills project - the course outline includes:

  • Module 1: Perception What’s really going on? Insights from biology and the nature of its relationship to information. What do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt? Can it survive analysis? How to evaluate the data:story ratio in your knowledge. Differences between analytical and analogical thinking.

  • Module 2: Language, Reality and Culture Words, meaning, personal narratives, metaphors and mythologies. Power relationships and culture. Leadership as storytelling. Narrative Medicine.
  • Module 3: The biology of thought Analogical & Analytical thinking and your nervous system. How thinking processes and consciousness are impacted by foodstuffs and substances. Smart, conscious nutrition.
  • Module 4: Learning, Forgetting and Change New insights into memory, learning and change. Management of change. Holding on and letting go. Rituals and rites of passage and transformation.
  • Module 5: Your thinking skills toolbox Useful metaphors, thinking skills, uncommon awareness, models, tools, narratives and software necessary to navigate the future. Ideas you can take and immediately implement in your own context.

One of the exercises that we provide is to get participants to become deliberate about writing their own lifestories according to the lifeline exercise attached. Storytelling or the oral tradition is very much associated with Africa and here we adopt the view that a human being is the creation of his or her own story. Reminding people of their own authority is empowering to people. See what happens when you become deliberate about your story. The attached exercise has been created specially for teachers from the Gauteng Department of Education as part of a lifeskills programme we have developed.

Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric

The following details some of the more common fallacies of logic and rhetoric. It is an important thinking skill to be able to recognise when one or more of the following are being used:

  • Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.

  • Argument from “authority” or "appealing to a higher power"
  • Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an “unfavourable” decision).
  • Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
  • Special pleading (typically referring to god’s will).
  • Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).
  • Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).
  • Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).
  • Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)
  • Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not “proved”).
  • Non sequitur - “it does not follow” - the logic falls down.
  • Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - “it happened after so it was caused by” - confusion of cause and effect.
  • Meaningless question (“what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).
  • The Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the “other side” look worse than it really is). This is normally used when someone speaks about an Either / Or alternative
    • Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle (“why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?”).

    • Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).
  • Confusion of correlation and causation.
  • Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack..
  • Suppressed evidence or half-truths.
  • Euphemisms and reframing such as “police action” to get around limitations on Presidential powers.

Thinking Skills - Carl Sagan’s 'baloney detection kit'

Based on the book 'The Demon Haunted World' by Carl Sagan, the following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:

  • Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts

  • Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
  • Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no “authorities”).
  • Spin more than one hypothesis - don’t simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
  • Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.
  • Quantify, wherever possible.
  • If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.
  • “Occam’s razor” - if there are two hypothesis that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.
  • Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?

Additional issues include

  • Conduct control experiments - especially “double blind” experiments where the person taking measurements is not aware of the test and control subjects.

  • Check for confounding factors - separate the variables.