Asking the Right Questions Chapter 1

1. Asking the Right QuestionsChapter 1 UI100 62 & 78

2. Asking the Right Questions • We are constantly bombarded with information • What do you do with it? • How do you process it?

3. Asking the Right Questions • If you hear something on the news or read something in a magazine, do you • always believe it? • think about it skeptically? • never believe anything you hear on the news?

4. Asking the Right Questions • What can help us to make sound decisions? • Critical thinking

5. Asking the Right Questions • Critical Thinking: • Consists of an awareness of a set of interrelated critical questions, plus the ability and willingness to ask and answer them at appropriate times

6. Asking the Right Questions • Two different thinking styles • Sponge Approach • Most commonly used thinking style • Encourages “absorbing” as much information as you are able • Does not require strenuous mental effort • Provides no method for deciding which information to believe and which to reject

7. Asking the Right Questions • Panning-for-Gold Approach • Requires you to ask frequent questions • Reflect on the answers • Requires active participation • Requires a question-asking attitude

8. Asking the Right Questions • Turn to page 4 in your textbook • We will read the gun-control argument

9. Asking the Right Questions • If you apply the sponge approach, what would you learn? • If you apply the panning-for-gold approach, what would you learn? • What does author mean by “overwhelming majority” or by “typical murderer?” • Were statistics provided accurate?

10. Asking the Right Questions • What possible benefits of gun control are not mentioned? • Have important studies that disagree with the author’s position been omitted? • Is it legitimate to assume that because some famous people own guns, then owning guns is desirable? • How many people are killed each year by handguns who would not have been killed were such guns not available?

11. Asking the Right Questions • Meet the Press video clip

12. Asking the Right Questions • The “Right Answer” • With human behavior is there always a right answer? • Do you think that a right answer for me may be a right answer for you? • Why? • Why not?

13. Asking the Right Questions • Most of you already have opinions about personal and social issues. • Abortion • Gun control • Welfare • You bring these initial opinions with you to what you hear and read

14. Asking the Right Questions • You need to use your critical thinking skills to • defend or • evaluate and revise your initial beliefs

15. Asking the Right Questions • Weak-sense critical thinking: • When you approach critical thinking as a method for defending your initial beliefs. • You use weak-sense critical thinking if you are unconcerned with moving toward truth or virtue.

16. Asking the Right Questions • Strong-sense critical thinking: • Requires us to apply the critical questions to all claims, including our own. • Does not force you to give up initial beliefs. • Can provide a basis for strengthening those beliefs.

17. Asking the Right Questions • The skills you will learn as a critical thinking will greatly improve your writing and speaking. • Critical thinking will enhance your understanding of other people’s expectations. • You must practice these skills!!

18. Asking the Right Questions “Skill depends on practice, for it is only with practice that one becomes good at anything” ~Eleanor Roosevelt