While I strongly believe that some critical thinking subjects are more important to different disciplines than others, there are some foundational critical thinking skills that transcend every subject, as well all aspects of life.
I call these basic critical thinking skills “building blocks,” and while Critical Voter podcasts may not address each of them specifically, an understanding of them is implied when we talk about higher-level subjects such as logic and persuasion.
But just so you’ll have some of these basics at your fingertips, I’m planning to periodically include blog posts on specific building block concepts. So today, we’ll take a quick look at the issue of fact vs. opinion.
In a sense, identifying one vs. the other should be easy since “fact” is something you can check out and verify (such as names, dates and documented quotes), while opinion would be something clearly identified by a speaker or writer as their own personal beliefs.
But life is rarely this simple. For example, we’ve already seen campaign spots built around a “gaffe” one or the other Presidential candidate allegedly said (whether it’s Mitt Romney saying he’s “not concerned about the very poor” or President Obama who said “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that—somebody else made that happen”). And if you check out the original sources, you will find that President Obama and Mitt Romney did indeed say the specific words attributed to them.
But if you look at the speeches in which these quotes were taken in their entirety, it’s clear that these quotes can be understood in multiple ways. Which means people attributing a specific meaning to those quotes (like makers of campaign ads) are mixing both fact (the original quote) and opinion (what you’re being told the quote actually means) into the same commercial.
The New York Times has published an online quiz with some test questions covering building block skills, including identifying face vs. opinion. Check it out, and start performing a similar breakdown of the next news story or political speech you hear.
Like most building block concepts (indeed, like most critical thinking skills in general), learning them is easy. But internalizing them so that they can actually be of use takes practice, practice, practice.
