What Does Critical Thinking Mean To You?

Again, this is your "default position" - your assumption\opinion\belief - based on your worldview, and not necessarily anyone else's default position.For instance a person that knows absolutely nothing about climate change doesn't necessarily need to believe that it is not happening when he has not seen any evidence of change that would convince them ...Edited by RAZD, : i

Well, critical thought - whether atheistic or not - is based on evidence. Any thinking not based on evidence is automatically more likely to be delusional.

I thought I did: You're at a fork in the road; the bridge might be out on one fork but you have no evidence one way or the other. You can't just park in the middle of the road forever. You have to make a decision. I'd say that critical thinking requires looking for evidence. You don't necessarily have to find any.

The topic is about what critical thinking means to me.

But in what way should you reserve your judgement? Should you say, until you've seen every corner of the planet --- which you can't --- that the existence of unicorns is 50:50?I think not. Suppose you were required to bet your life on the question of whether or not there are unicorns (with your inquisitor being some sort of omniscient daemon who actually knew the answer). Would you toss a coin to decide how to answer? Or would you say "There are no unicorns?"So how exactly do we go about reserving judgement?

Something I wrote a while ago so as to understand it better, you can, I think, substitute the idea of critical thinking for thinking rationality..... The Antecedent Probability Principle, the Proportional Principle & Carl SaganIf you tell me that there is a statue in a church of the Virgin Mary it is rational of me to accept your assertion because my life experience tells me that that is quite possible - statues often hang out in churches. If you have no history of lying to me randomly about everyday events and there is no other reason to suspect that you could be mistaken there is no logical reason to doubt you.This is the Antecedent Probability Principle. I accept what you tell me because it lies within what I know to be probable.If, however, you also say "and it's hovering 6 feet off the floor" I then have cause to doubt. I know from experience that statues don't hover and that there is a greater likely hood of your assertion being false - for whatever reason. If I am to behave rationally I must assume you are mistaken.In order for me to believe you I then need far more evidence than normal. What is happening here is that I proportion my belief in what you have told me in relation to the net evidence for it. The more rationally unlikely the event, the more unlikely it is to be true and the more evidence is therefore needed for it. This is the philosopher’s version of Carl Sagan’s argument that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.If someone chooses to accept weak evidence for extraordinary events above their known experience of the physical world they are therefore thinking irrationally.

It fits with your worldview. It doesn't fit with your worldview. Or one could take a scottish verdict position ...To reject evidence just because it is weak is not critical thinking imho.

By not committing to an answer.Are there mountain lions in Illinois?If you don't know then that is the answer.

Silly me I thought it was started to put Phat in the fire ...

So ... if asked whether unicorns exist, you consider that you should and would answer "I don't know"?

No, I know that unicorns don't exist. We've looked everywhere they could possibly live and they just aren't out there. We have evidence of their absence.

Oh, I'm sure we haven't looked everywhere. People do, after all, keep finding new species, which suggests that they haven't looked everywhere yet.And I took that to be what you were saying yourself in post #176.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I was saying that we have looked everywhere for unicorns, and they aren't anywhere, so we can conclude that they don't exist. As opposed to concluding that they don't exist based on an absence of evidence of their existence.

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Being critical of your thoughts would make you realize that being unable to find evidence for unicorns shouldn't make you conclude that they don't exist and that you should reserve your judgement until you can find actual evidence of absence.

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Like, every corner of the planet was observed to contain no unicorns, so therefore they must not be here. Not, welp, I took a glance and didn't see any so they must not exist.

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So, you know there isn't an elephant in the room, not just because of the lack of evidence for it, but also because you can see to the other side of the room unimpeded by the presence of an elephant. You have positive evidence of a room with no elephant in it, you don't just have an absence of evidence for an elephant.

Well, we haven't.

We've looked everywhere they could be.Horse-like mammals can't survive in the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the heart of the Amazon, nor the middle of Antarctica.Besides, the original claims of it existing come from small section of the world, and its been shown to be clear of unicorns. They wouldn't have been able to observe some amazonian creature.