1.2 Critical Reasoning: Thinking Carefully about the Issues

Let’s go back to the software example: You’re on a deadline and need to release an update to your product, but the update can only make the software 50 percent more efficient or 50 percent more accurate, not both. How do you proceed?

Reasoning Critically Is Reasoning Carefully

The first step in reasoning critically about problems is to understand that reasoning critically often means reasoning carefully. Careful reasoning means that we try to consider the problem from every reasonable angle while making sure that we weigh each consideration properly. Let’s take a look at how we might start to do this with the software problem.

As we take a moment to think about the possible consequences of trading off efficiency and accuracy, let’s make a list of the pros and cons of each choice. (See Table 1.1.)

Let’s examine what we’ve come up with. If we increase efficiency by 50 percent, then we know that your customers will appreciate the faster software. And now that the code itself is more efficient, it will be easier to update in the future too. Plus, if your product requires cloud computing, you may be able to save some money by interacting with the cloud servers less. But there are some disadvantages. A product whose accuracy can be improved by 50 percent may already be creating a lot of errors, and if it speeds up, you might face even more errors. And depending on the state of your support team, that could be a big problem.

Increasing accuracy will probably lead to the opposite outcomes. We know there will be fewer errors, which is going to help your customer support team. But your new changes may make the code even more complicated and may end up costing you more money on your cloud computing contract.

In this example, the pros of the efficiency choice align with the cons of the accuracy choice and vice-versa. This pattern appears often, but not always, when trying to decide between two alternatives.

Critical Reasoning Requires Organizing Information

The table of pros and cons (Table 1.1) helps us organize our projections about the consequences of each choice. Being organized is an essential part of reasoning critically and carefully. Because it isn’t possible to keep every bit of relevant information in your head at once, you need a system to do that work for you. Today, there are many methods for organizing and connecting information, including products like Microsoft Excel, Pages, Google Docs, Evernote, and others. This course won’t force you to use one method over another. The right one to use is the one that works for you. As you take notes and complete assignments during this course, watch how you work and how you like to stay organized. What methods best capture your ideas? What methods are most searchable and accessible later on? Your system for organizing information will develop over time, which will help you reason critically in more efficient ways.

But a simple table doesn’t exhaust the information we could use to make your choice. Lots of other things may be relevant to the trade-off between efficiency and accuracy, and in many cases, you’re going to receive those pieces of information in the form of arguments.