INTRODUCTION TO ACADEMIC INQUIRY AND CRITICAL THINKING

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1 INTRODUCTION TO ACADEMIC INQUIRY AND CRITICAL THINKING K. P. Mohanan and Tara Mohanan TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. What is inquiry? 2. What is academic inquiry? What is research? 3. Questions to inquire into 4. Ways of looking for answers 5. Grounds and reasoning 6. Assumptions 7. Sound justification 8. Critical thinking 1. What is inquiry? If we don t know the answer to a question, we could ask someone who does know the answer, or consult a document (a textbook, an encyclopedia, an article, or a web-site) that contains the answer. This is the strategy we are likely to use if we don t know the answer to the following questions: What is the molecular structure of methane? Is it safe to give Phenergan (a drowsiness inducing medication) to a three-month old infant? Was William Shakespeare a contemporary of Francis Bacon? Inquiry requires that we go beyond this strategy to look for an answer on our own, and not rely merely on a person or document to provide an answer. Consider the following questions: What would happen if we dig a big hole extending from one side of the moon to the other through the centre, and drop a coin into the hole? If you were asked, Will you die before 2576? your answer would no doubt be, Yes, of course. How do you know this? What reasons do you have to believe so? What proportion of undergraduate students believe in God? It is unlikely that we will find answers to such questions documented in textbooks, encyclopedias, research journals, or the web. Looking for answers to such questions call for inquiry. We may think of inquiry as the conscious and systematic search for conclusions that serve as answers to our questions, crucially relying on our own initiative. This involves the methodology of arriving at tentative conclusions, critically evaluating the conclusions, methodology and justification, and, if we are satisfied, offering justification to convince others of merit of the conclusions. INQUIRY critical thinking answers conclusions methodology justification figure 1 questions

2 In a large number of cases, the conclusions that we arrive at have to do with judgments on the truth of a proposition. Other types of conclusions include those on the moral goodness of an action or practice, the usefulness of an action, practice, or thing, the aesthetic merit of a product or performance, and so on. To illustrate, consider the following examples of conclusions: It is true that it takes more than eight minutes for light to travel from the sun to the earth. It is not true that the moon is bigger than the stars. Physical punishment for school children for not studying hard is immoral. Offering five dollars as reward for not engaging in adultery is ineffective Ian Fleming is a far superior novelist than Sir Walter Scott. proposition judgment on truth proposition judgment on truth practice judgment on moral goodness proposal judgment on usefulness human products judgment aesthetic merit Of these, the first type is relevant for our understanding of the concept of knowledge, one of two themes we are concerned with in this exploration. To understand the connection, we need to begin with the concept of belief. Beliefs are propositions that we regard as true. There are three broad categories of beliefs, namely, knowledge, opinions, and faith. We take the statement that men are taller than women as part of our knowledge, but the statement that Coleridge s poems are superior to Wordsworth s poems a an opinion. When cross-examining a doctor as an expert witness, lawyers are generally careful in distinguishing between medical knowledge and medical opinion. We may say that knowledge is a body of interconnected propositions that we regard as true beyond reasonable doubt. Opinions fall short of the degree of certainty that knowledge has. Unlike the case in knowledge, we also acknowledge the legitimacy of different people holding mutually incompatible opinions. 1 Both knowledge and opinions can be viewed as conclusions. And as conclusions, they are subject to the requirement that they be accompanied by rational justification. In contrast, faith is body of beliefs which cannot be either proved or disproved. They are starting points that guide our inquiry or action, not conclusions justifiable on independent grounds. The scientist s belief that the world is governed by a small set of logically consistent simple principles is an example of secular faith, while the Christian belief that the Holy Bible is the word of God is an example of religious belief. 2 1 Opinions can also be about actions, human products, or humans themselves. (e.g., the opinion that eating meat is immoral, Aldous Huxley s opinion that the Taj Mahal is an ugly building, Tolstoy s opinion that Shakespeare was not a great playwright, and so on. 2 Many people think of religious faith when they hear the word faith (or even the word belief.) In the sense we use the term, faith may be religious or secular, tentative or absolutely certain, and open to doubting and questioning or closed to doubting and questioning. Faith, in other words, could be blind faith or rational faith. 2

3 A. Government offices, air-ports, hospitals and shopping malls have an inquiry counter near the entrance, offering information to strangers. Does the activity in these places count as inquiry in the sense described above? If your answer is yes, explain how. If your answer is no, explain why not. B. Do the conclusions that (i) imprisonment and death as forms of punishment are immoral (ii) imprisonment and death as forms of punishment are not effective deterrents come under knowledge, opinions, or faith? Is the atheistic position that there is no God an instance of knowledge, opinion, or faith? 2. What is academic inquiry? What is research? Given the concept of inquiry outlined in the previous section, we may say that academic inquiry is the conscious and systematic process of arriving at, justifying, and critically evaluating conclusions employing the strategies that are characteristic of the inquiry of the academic community, namely, research. This statement naturally triggers the question, What is research? Research is inquiry whose results are expected to make a contribution to academia or the public. The expected outcome of academic research is a contribution to the collective body of conclusions (on questions or truth, effectiveness, efficiency, moral goodness, etc.). In contrast, the expected outcome Research and Development (R&D) type of research in industries or businesses is a product or a design that has a practical value to the general public. For instance, the research that results in the design of an ergonometric chair would not be considered academic. Likewise, the outcome of a great deal of the investigative research done by journalists (as in the investigation of a prominent politician accepting bribes) may be only of topical interest. This won t count as academic research either. In what follows, our focus would be on academic research. Given what we have said about its expected outcomes, it follows that there are at least two conditions that an academic research question must satisfy: The question, and the answer should be of interest to the academic community. I can engage in inquiry to investigate the question whether I am a moral person, or the truth of my belief that I am not adopted by my parents. Though these might be important questions for my personal inquiry, they cannot be research questions, because they are not of interest to the academic community. In contrast, the question whether Mona Lisa is actually a beautiful painting is of interest to the academic community. The answer should be one that is not already available in the collective pool. How far the moon is from the earth might be a good inquiry question in a classroom, but it is not a research question, as the answer is already available in the body of scientific knowledge. A. Consider the question, What is the evidence to believe that Darwin s s theory of evolution is correct? Describe a way of looking for an answer to this question that doesn t count as inquiry. B. Consider the question, Is there adequate evidence to believe that Darwin s theory of evolution is correct? Describe a way of looking for an answer to this question that counts as inquiry but not as research. 3

4 3. Questions to inquire into Many questions that researchers frequently ask are of the form, Is statement X true? Is the statement that atheism is on the rise true? Is the statement that arranged marriages have a greater probability of resulting in happy marriages true? Is the statement that the author of Iliad was not a single person called Homer true? In mathematics, a statement whose truth is being investigated is called a conjecture. Once a conjecture has been established to be true (by producing a proof), it is called a theorem. As an example, take the following sets of numbers resulting from the addition of two consecutive numbers. 1+2 = = = = = = = 229 We find that in every case that we examine, including those given above (3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 35, 229), has the property that it cannot be divided by 2 without fractions and without remainders. Given this finding, it would be natural to think of generalizing it and suggesting that perhaps for all natural numbers, the sum of two consecutive numbers is not divisible by two. Can you prove this conjecture? The counterpart of the mathematician s conjecture in experimental science is called a hypothesis. Given below are examples of hypotheses whose truth we can investigate: Holy basil is an effective cure for the common cold. There is a strong correlation between IQ scores and student performance in school examinations. The investigation of these specific examples calls for the use of quantitative data (numbers) to test the hypothesis, but not every hypothesis calls for quantitative inquiry. The hypothesis that in developing his ideas of transcendental reality and immortality of the soul, Plato was influenced by ancient Indian philosophy is a hypothesis that one can investigate in the history of philosophy. This inquiry does not require the use of quantitative data. Another favourite type of question that researchers tend to ask is that of the mechanism. What, for instance, is the mechanism by which blood circulates through the body? How does the brain receive information from the sense organs and transmit information to the body? How do birds know when to migrate? What is the mechanism by which the information contained in the genes shape the development of an embryo into an organism? These are all questions about mechanisms. We will refer to questions about mechanisms as how-questions (even though they can be formulated without using the word how.) Yet another type of questions calls for explanations. Such questions are a characteristic of scientific inquiry. How do we explain the elliptical orbit of the planets? Why do people yawn when they see other people yawn? What is the explanation for the fact that egg white solidifies when heated? What is the explanation for why there are no human languages in which an object pronoun can refer to the subject of the same clause? We may refer to this category of questions as why-questions. Finally, there are the what-questions about abstractions that philosophers, for instance, are fond of asking: What is knowledge? What is truth? What is justice? What is democracy? Some of the deep questions in disciplines other than philosophy are also what-questions: What is energy? (physics) What is a species? (biology) What is language (linguistics) What is identity? (sociology). The categories of questions given above (conjectures, how-questions, why-questions and whatquestions) are not meant to be exhaustive. There might be questions that do not fit any of the categories given above (e.g., the question How old is the universe? is not about a mechanism even though it begins with how, and the question What is the distance between the earth and the 4

5 star nearest to it? is not a question about an abstraction and hence is not a what-question in the sense described above.) There might also be other ways of classifying questions (e.g., factual questions, questions of interpretation, and theoretical questions). The purpose of discussing different kinds of questions at this stage is simply to provide a trigger for thinking about questions, and looking for ways of looking for answers. 4. Ways of looking for answers There are two broad ways of looking for answers through inquiry: Contemplation: thinking deeply clearly, and carefully about the question, and arriving at a conclusion on the basis of what we already know, believe, assume, feel, etc. Evidence gathering: identifying and/or collecting data, information, documents, objects, etc., on the basis of which we can look for answers to the questions. On the basis of what we already know about the moon and Newton s theories of gravity and motion, we can use the contemplative mode to figure out an answer to our earlier question about a coin falling through a hole through the center of the moon. In contrast, to answer the question about the proportion of undergraduate students who believe in God, we will need to use the evidence-gathering mode and gather the relevant information, say, through surveys or interviews. Mathematical inquiry, inquiry in theoretical science, and philosophical inquiry rely crucially on the contemplative strategy. In contrast, the evidence-gathering strategy is central to experimental science, statistical inquiry, historical inquiry, and literary interpretation. surveys interviews case studies, field work, archeology statistical inquiry experimental inquiry historical inquiry, literary interpretation evidence gathering: evidence gathering: quantitative qualitative methodologies contemplation: contemplation: contemplation: scientific mathematical philosophical theoretical science mathematics philosophical inquiry Figure 2 The literature on research methodology in various subjects tends to focus on the methodology of evidence-gathering. Textbooks on the methodologies for contemplative inquiries are quite rare, and hardly ever used in courses on research methods. In contrast to methodology, the literature on critical thinking tends to deal only with the evaluation needed in contemplative forms of inquiry, and quite often is still further restricted to the examination of reasoning. We may hope that this disconnect between ways of arriving at answers and the critical evaluation of the answers will disappear once we view these activities as part of the process of inquiry. 5

6 Try to answer the following questions. A. What is happiness? When thinking about this question, try to distinguish between happiness on the one hand, and pleasure, enjoyment, contentment, satisfaction, and absence of unhappiness on the other. Would you treat joy or joyfulness as the same as or related to happiness? Include as many examples/scenarios as you can when inquiring into this question. If you enjoy eating a certain kind of food, does eating it result in happiness? What kind of situations would make you say, I ve been happy for the last five years? B. The statement that one and only one straight line can be drawn through any two points is called an axiom in geometry. Given this axiom, can you prove that no two straight lines can intersect at two places? You should be able to answer these two questions without having to go out and collect the relevant evidence (data, information, documents, ) as the basis for your answer. Now consider the following question: C. A friend of yours claims that eating four or five tulasi (holy basil) leaves six times a day cures the common cold. Design an experiment to test this hypothesis. In about a page, write a research proposal outlining the project, clearly stating what kinds of experimental results would make you accept the claim, and what kinds of results would make you reject it. You should be able to design a research plan without actually gathering the relevant evidence, but to find out if it is true that eating four or fife tulasi leaves six times a day cures the common cold, you would crucially need to gather the relevant evidence D. Suppose you are given nine marbles of which one is slightly heavier than the rest, and the remaining eight are of the same weight. If you are given a balance, is it possible to identify the heavier marble without using the balance more than twice? If your answer is yes, explain how. If your answer is no, explain why not. E. Suppose you are given a barrel of marbles with different weights and colours. Suppose you are asked if it is possible to infer the weight of each marble from its colour. How will you proceed to answer the question? For each task, say whether you would use the evidence-gathering mode, the contemplative mode, or a combination. 5. Grounds and reasoning We expect academic conclusions to be accompanied by sound justification. When we are asked to provide a proof for a conjecture, to show evidence for a hypothesis, to argue in support of a theory, or substantiate or defend a position, etc., what we are expected to do is justify the conclusion under consideration. If I asked if you would be able to visit me five hundred years from now, you would say you wouldn t, be able to. If I then asked you how you know this, you would probably provide a response along the following lines. We know that no human being lives more than two hundred years, We are both human beings. Therefore it is reasonable to infer that neither of us would be alive five hundred years from now. We also know no one can do anything once (s)he is dead. For X to visit Y, both X and Y should be alive. Given that neither of us would be alive five hundred years from now, it is reasonable to infer that I won t be ale to visit you five hundred years from now. 6

7 In providing such a response, what you have done is offer a justification for the conclusion that you won t be able to visit me five hundred years from now. A justification consists of a conclusion to be defended, the grounds on the basis of which the conclusion is defended, and the reasoning from the grounds to the conclusion. conclusion Reasoning Grounds Figure 3 justification The following diagram unpacks the structure of justification for the conclusion that you will not be able to visit me five hundred years from now. (The top-to-bottom orientation is reversed so as to make it easier to read the text inside the arrow.) Grounds: (1) No human being lives more than 200 years. (2) We are both human beings. (3) For X to visit Y, both X and Y should be alive. Given (1) and (2), it is reasonable to conclude that (4) neither of us would be alive 500 years from now. Reasoning Given (3) and (4), it is reasonable to conclude that (5) I won t be able to visit you 500 years from now. Conclusion: I won t be able to visit you 500 yrs from now. We may think of the justification of a belief as a response to the question, How do you know that? Why do you believe that? or Why should I believe that? The justification of an action, practice, policy, or recommendation would then be a response to the question, Why do you do that? or Why should I do that? Consider the following questions. A. Bill s bedroom is 10 x12 and John s bedroom is 9 x15. Which bedroom has a greater area? Justify your answer. Identify the grounds you provide, and the reasoning from these grounds to your conclusion. (This may appear to be a trivial task, but separating the grounds and reasoning would be useful for further understanding.) B. Suppose you are told that (i) course DE1203 has an enrolment of a hundred students, (ii) there is at least one male student in the class, and (iii) given any two students, at least one is a female. How many female students are enrolled in DE1203? Justify your answer. Did you use the contemplative mode, the evidence-gathering mode, or a combination to answer the above question? C. Consider the claim that students from the lower socio-economic strata tend to be less successful in schools and colleges than those from the higher strata. How would you go about justifying or refuting this claim? (While the justification of a statement shows that the statement is true, the refutation of a statement shows that the statement is false.) 7

8 6. Assumptions What would you do if I asked you, Have you stopped beating up your wife? and demanded a yes or no as an answer? It would be unwise to succumb to this devious question and say either yes or no, because both these answers commit you to the assumptions that (a) you have a wife, and (b) until a point of time in the past, you were in the habit of beating her up. Neither of these assumptions might be true. An assumption is something that one takes for granted, with the expectation that the reader or listener will also take for granted. Here are a few additional examples of assumptions: The sentence It wasn t John who sent the book to Mary carries the assumption that someone sent the book to Mary. The statement Because he always gets 4.8 or above out of 5.0 in his student feedback scores. in response to the question Why do you think Zeno is an excellent teacher? carries the assumption that all teachers who get a score greater than 4.8 out of 5.0 in their student feedback are excellent teachers. The opening In my analysis of Galileo s poems, I assume, without argumentation, the essential correctness of Xena s theory of Quantum Dynamical Discourse Analysis (Xena (2003, 2005), Sophocles (2007). Assumes that Xena s theory of Quantum Dynamical Discourse Analysis is essentially correct. While the grounds of justification must be explicitly articulated, assumptions are typically left implicit, as in the first two examples above. In a few cases, they are overtly expressed, as in the case of our third example. Even when explicitly stated, however, the writer expects the readers to accept the assumptions without the need for critical evaluation. Why is the concept of assumptions important in the discussion of academic inquiry and critical thinking? Because both the framing of inquiry questions and the justification of a claim often carry implicit assumptions whose legitimacy a critical reader must check. Consider the following examples: This thesis seeks to investigate why women exhibit a lower aptitude for mathematics than men. Euthanasia should be legally prohibited in every country. We all agree that taking the life of a human being is immoral. Euthanasia involves taking the life of a human being, and hence should be prohibited by law. The question in the thesis example takes it for granted that women have lower aptitude for mathematics than men, an assumption that most of us would reject as unjustified. The argument in the second example takes it for granted that all immoral actions should be legally prohibited. This too, is a problematic assumption. Grounds are what a writer foregrounds places in front of the jury of readers as the basis for her justification. In contrast, assumptions remain in the background: the writer does not expect to be interrogated on her assumptions even though a skeptical jury may choose to do so. In other words, assumptions, as we said above, are propositions that are taken for granted by the writer. In light of what we have said about the structure of justification (section 3) and the assumptions that the questions and the justification are embedded in (this section), we may revise the model of inquiry in figure 1 as that in figure 4 below: 8

9 INQUIRY critical thinking answers conclusions methodology reasoning justification questions grounds figure 4 assumptions A. Identify the assumptions implicit in the following questions: Have you stopped beating your wife? Do people who make counterfeit money go to hell after they die? B. Identify the assumption implicit in speaker N s response to speaker M: Speaker M: Why do you think he is an excellent student? Speaker N: Because he got straight A s for his A-levels examinations. 7. Soundness of Justification Using the point of view of a writer who advances a claim to be accepted as a legitimate conclusion, and a jury of readers who evaluate the claim, we may say that the writer should expect the jury to raise questions about the grounds and reasoning, and to check if the assumptions are acceptable. For a jury of experts to regard the justification offered in support of a conclusion as sound, the grounds must be trustworthy the reasoning must be valid, and the assumptions must be unproblematic. The grounds offered in support of a conclusion are trustworthy if they are accurate, reliable, and credible/true, etc. The reasoning is valid if the conclusion follows from the grounds. To illustrate, let us suppose that your friend Bill claims that the practice of meditation is good for losing weight. You ask him what evidence he has in support of the claim, and he responds as follows: Well, before I started practicing meditation, I weighed eighty kilos. Two years of meditation, and my weight now is sixty kilos. Bill s justification is unsound, because his reasoning is invalid: the conclusion does not follow from the grounds. Even if we are willing to grant that Bill s meditation was the cause of his weight reduction, that meditation results in weight loss in the case of one person does not legitimize the conclusion that this is the case in the human population in general. (Bill is appealing to what is called anecdotal evidence here.) Furthermore, even in Bill s case, the weight reduction could have been from other causes, such as a change in dietary habits or 9

10 exercise. Without ruling out such alternative explanations, the reasoning is invalid even when applied to Bill s own case. To take another example, let us suppose that the State University of Brahmasutra (SUB) proposes to use Sanskrit as the medium of instruction for science and technology. The ministry asks SUB to justify this proposal, and SUB responds as follows: Being the most precise language in the world, Sanskrit is best suited for the purposes of science and technology. For the students to excel in the subject, therefore, it is crucial that the medium of instruction be Sanskrit. It is a good exercise to unearth and make explicit the implicit premises and steps in this argument, but even without going into details, it is clear that one of the premises that the argument rests on is the statement that Sanskrit is the most precise language in the world, for which no evidence exists. If we reject this statement as the grounds, SUB s justification collapses. This is an example of unsoundness that stems from the unreliability of what ought to be critically scrutinized as the grounds for a claim. A word of clarification. We stated earlier that assumptions are what a writer takes for granted. The grounds, in contrast, are what the writer presents as the basis for the claim, expecting critical scrutiny on the part of skeptical readers. Assumptions, as we have seen are typically implicit, but they can also be explicitly articulated in careful writing that assigns high value to intellectual hygiene. Unlike assumptions, grounds are explicitly articulated in good writing. Can there be grounds that are left implicit though? That depends on whether we see it from the reader s perspective or the writer s perspective. Something that a writer takes for granted may turn out to be central to the grounds for a claim as far as the reader is concerned. The premise that Sanskrit is the most precise language in the SUB argument belongs to this category. The picture that emerges from this discussion is given below: Grounds Assumptions explicitly articulated in most cases implicit? often left implicit explicitly articulated in careful writing Don t worry unduly you can t make up your mind whether you should treat a statement as an assumption or part of the grounds. Your ability to engage in critical thinking calls for an appreciation of the concepts of what is taken for granted (assumptions) and what is advanced as the basis for a claim (grounds), as well as between what is explicitly expressed in the justification and what is left unsaid. The terminology helps only in triggering that awareness. Your critical thinking ability does not depend upon the correct use the terminology. A. Are the following examples of justification sound? i) Every monkey has six legs. Zeno is a monkey. Therefore Zeno has six legs. ii) Every monkey has six legs. Zeno is a monkey. Therefore, Zeno is a mammal. iii) Every monkey is a mammal. Zeno is a monkey. Therefore Zeno is a mammal. iv) Every monkey is a mammal. Zeno is a mammal. Therefore Zeno is a monkey. For each example you judge to be unsound, say why. (Flawed grounds or reasoning?) B. Express the reasoning in the SUB argument as explicitly as you can, spelling out all the implicit assumptions. Express the grounds, conclusion and steps of reasoning along the lines illustrated in the justification of the conclusion that you will not be able to visit me five hundred years from now (section 4.) Identify the other defects of the SUB argument. 10

11 8. Critical thinking Critical thinking is a cluster of mental processes leading to the assessment of the merit of something, based on a careful examination of the relevant considerations. A critical thinker doubts and questions the conclusions advanced by a writer (including herself), and demands adequate justification for a position before accepting it. Likewise, before rejecting a position, a critical thinker demands justification for the denial of the position. In doing so, she unearths the hidden assumptions, and subjects to doubting and questioning not only the conclusions, grounds and reasoning provided by the writer, but also the assumptions that the justification and the questions are embedded in. To understand the relation between inquiry and critical thinking, let us go back to our model of inquiry in figure 4. The elements that a critical thinker must scrutinize in her critical evaluation are indicated in the diagram below with red block arrows against them: INQUIRY critical thinking answers conclusions methodology reasoning justification questions grounds figure 4 assumptions A. Try to form your own assessment of the credibility/acceptability of each of the following statements: i) Bribery is not immoral as long as it is the standard practice in a society. ii) Taking vitamin supplements doesn t contribute to better health. iii) Excellent teachers are those who have excellent scores in the student feedback. iv) Divorce is more likely in love marriages than in arranged marriages. If you can critically evaluate a statement, state your reasons for accepting or rejecting it. If you can t, say what disallowed you from forming an assessment. B. In section 1, we characterized inquiry as the conscious and systematic search for conclusions that serve as answers to our questions, crucially relying on our own initiatives. And in section 4, we said We expect academic conclusions to be accompanied by sound justification. Critically evaluate these statements in the light of the discussion of the different categories of belief in section 1. C. Evaluate the credibility of the statement that every year since 1950, the number of American children being gunned down has doubled. What strategy (evidence gathering, contemplative, a combination) did you employ in arriving at an assessment? 11