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Tools of Critical Thinking: Metathoughts for Psychology by David A. Levy

David A. Levy believes we should reason until we get good solutions, tolerating uncertainty until we find good solutions. Tools of Critical Thinking has a nifty section on causal factors, explaining how various factors cause each other, cause other results, do not cause a result and vary in importance. For example, hot weather, bad norms, the media, unemployment and so on in various combinations can cause riots. And the riots themselves can cause even more riots and unemployment by scaring away businesses in a vicious cycle.

When looking at the relationship between depression and low-self-worth one should entertain the possibilities that depression may cause low self-worth. Low self-worth may cause depression. Depression and low self-worth may cause each other. Depression and low self-worth may have no causal relationship. Other factors may cause both depression and low self-worth

Your behavior depends on your inner resources—personality and character—and the situations you find yourself in. Psychologists note that individuals typically excuse their own bad behavior as being caused completely by circumstances, but believe others’ bad behaviors are completely caused by their characters. Of course, some individuals will or will not behave in certain ways no matter the circumstances and others are almost completely at the mercy of circumstances.

Some possible causes of self-destructive actions include: believing you cannot stop yourself, creating bad environments, failing to create better environments, believing you deserve rotten things, seeking anything to relieve anxiety and boredom, seeking power, love, friendship, self-worth, knowledge in the wrong places and in the wrong ways.

To deal with anxiety and boredom, one could passionately and

unfreakably do good things, avoid bad environments and improve the environments you should not avoid.

Tools explains how to separate issues. If you are walking at night in a bad place and you get mugged. The criminal is morally and criminally guilty of mugging, but you are morally guilty of indiscretion. Your indiscretion does not excuse one iota of the criminal’s guilt or change any punishment the criminal should receive. Your indiscretion should cause you to change your own actions though.

This book focuses on psychological fallacies. Among the fallacies they explain are the availability bias (being over-influenced by what you can easily or vividly think of), the hindsight bias (the result seemed obvious and inevitable after the fact), and the insight fallacy (knowing a thing does not always lead to action and fixing a thing).

Knowledge without action is awful. It wastes time. It may avoid some unpleasant emotions, but at the cost of more important things such as your character, integrity, self-respect, dignity, long-term affective states, and the feeling of doing what is right. It contributes to apathy, alienation, weak will and other bad habits.

Some people avoid change so much that psychologists often prescribe what I call reverse psychology and what they call paradoxical intentions and prescribing the symptom. Fighting couples, for example, are told to fight for several more hours a week.

Psychological categories, the author’s write, have their good and bad points. On the bad side they stigmatize, depersonalize, encourage self-absorption, steer individuals into potentially inaccurate categories, encourage feelings of helplessness and self-pity. They employ jargon. More important, they are unreliable and inaccurate. They shift people from moral descriptions and categories to illness categories. They turn moral beings into futile beings.

On the plus side they may improve research, treatment, communication, and organization. They may inspire some to improve.

They warn us to watch out for the abuses of Barnum statements, claims that most people think are true about themselves. These statements are popular with seducers and astrologers. Some examples:

· You love your family, but you have some ambivalent feelings.

· You find it difficult to balance autonomy and closeness.

· You are your own worst enemy.

· You are a creative and independent thinker.

· You do not like criticism, rejection or being hurt.

· You hang on to things that you should let go.

· You struggle with self-doubts.

· You wish people could understand where you are coming from.

Individuals often consider Barnum statements to be more accurate than good personality tests.

Instead of weighing arguments, when faced with two or more arguments, some individuals will decide that:

· The truth must lie in the middle.

· There is no truth.

· There is no way to decide.

· Previous intuitions are best.

· Doing nothing is best.

Individuals do this even when the arguments on one side are incredibly weak. He also points out that we should not underestimate the power of situations to change some individuals.

Among the many flaws of this work, the author’s coverage of moral values and fallacy categories is terrible. The “naturalistic fallacy”—values cannot be facts and moral conclusions are worthless because a prescriptive conclusion cannot be deductively arrived from only descriptive premises—is not a fallacy in the way that is claimed and has nothing to do with whether moral arguments can be well-reasoned. You cannot get pork chops from platinum either. That does not mean there are not ways to arrive at pork chops. The naturalistic fallacy confusion is a friend of those looking for excuses to do wrongs. Worth skimming.

—Book review article by J.T. Fournier

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