While watching the private talk with Thomas Land about critical thinking a few things stood out. He began his presentation talking about what it means to think critically and benefits of doing so. His first point was a broad definition, that critical thinking is determined when we do and don’t have good reasoning to believe claims. This sets up the rest of his talk being that it gives us a stance to refer to. As for the why, he brings up that beliefs based on good reasoning are more likely to be true, which makes sense. An example of this could be that you wouldn’t believe the sky to be red if every day you see it as blue. Your good reasoning here is that you see it to be true every day. Another example is how believing an expert is good reasoning for a belief as opposed to someone uneducated.

Thomas land also had many slides about questioning even these reliable sources of information. To talk about how our senses can be unreliable in many cases which can lead us to believing untrue things. An example of this is, if you were to walk in the woods at night you may begin to feel uneasy and trees may start to look like figures. This comes from the same pattern recognition that is so helpful for other aspects of deriving information. When going into environments with expectations we tend to manifest results even when they may not be there. It is good to use critical thinking to ask ourselves if our perception is being influenced. It is also good to recognize that our personal experience may not give truly good reasons for beliefs in all cases.

I want to also touch on one of his later points which was on reasoning. To put it very simply, if you’re presented with two options, one of them being false, then logically the other must be true. This in and of itself is quite sound reasoning, but this only works if all that’s being stated are true. To diverge from what Thomas presented I want to talk briefly on how this can be weaponized in debate or conversation. The black and white fallacy is when someone forcefully puts you in dilemma reasoning but without all factors being fully true. They will condense a multifaceted topic down to just a simple question with the goal of deceiving and disguising it as being black and white, yes or no, 1 or 2. This is powerful in dismantling the other party if not caught. it can make something as complicated as a political debate seem one sided. For instance, if there were a debate about abortion and the party against said something in the vein of “are you pro-life or pro-murder”. This completely throws away credit of the opposing party and makes it seem cut and dry even when it’s not the case. over all I think that using our critical thinking is essential in finding out what is true.