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Won't relying on direct experience as a basis for critical thinking lead to all kinds of problems due to faulty perception and cognitive biases that we all shar
by technothrasher 5y ago
Won't relying on direct experience as a basis for critical thinking lead to all kinds of problems due to faulty perception and cognitive biases that we all share? Additionally, how are we to evaluate situations were are not likely to have any experience with? None of us have any experience with, say, the big bang or anything close to what the universe was like then, but can't we still come to many likely conclusions about it without any even indirect experience?
So doesn't critical thinking in fact have to have a baseline in something other than one's own direct experience? Rationality, possibly?
- javert 5y agoRationality is a process, but it has to have data to work with. That data comes from perception of the world (sight, hearing, etc.). There is no such thing as "pure" rationality without sense data to work with. Evidence for the big bang ultimately comes from sense data. You have to integrate a lot of sense data into scientific theories, which then are integrated with other scientific theories, and so on. Science has gotten so far - but it all started out with simple experiments, eventually microscopes and weak telescopes, etc. and built from there. Critical thinking allows you to overcome cognitive biases. Faulty perception is pretty easy to detect. A stick in a glass of water will look bent, but it's easy to figure out that it actually isn't bent.