"Critical Thinking" is thinking about our own cognitions and actions, in order to reduce their error. "Cognitions" refers to all our mental activity, be it conscious or unconscious; perceptional or inferential. We can think of our minds as machines that extract information from their environments, manipulate it, store it, and recall it for more operations. Similar to a machine, our mental activities are error-prone. We use "error" is an umbrella term for all types of falsehood, bias, and deviation from reality (for cognitions) or goals (for actions). In short, critical thinking is our mind's debugging tool!
Perception
Measurment
Inference
Language
An argument map is a visual tool that helps us see the steps that take an argument from its premises or empirical observations to its conclusions. They aid critical thinking by exposing potential sources of error.
There are many ways to create argument maps and they have been implemented in many different ways for different purposes. Here we use them to understand the structure of a scientific argument. Therefore, in this document I use the term “argument map” to mean "argument map for empirical, scientific, or academic arguments".
The most important aspect of the tree structure above is that its branches end in “data” and “evidence”. This is what differentiates a scientific (empirical) argument from other types of arguments. A scientific argument relies on data and empirical evidence for its validity. Data is the ultimate arbiter. Sometimes we rely on others who have provided empirical evidence to support a claim. In such cases a claim is supported by a “reference” to other scholars. It is important to remember that a scientific argument is not valid because a scientist has said so.
Every scientific paper has a way of presenting you with the data that they collected. This is often in the form of a graph or summary statistics such as percentages or means. A lot can happen at this stage to result in erroneous inference.
The same graph or pattern of data may receive different interpretations. It is important to understand how the authors of a paper interpret their data and what are possible alternative interpretations of what they found. It is common in scientific studies to miss alternative interpretations at this stage and reach conclusions that do not necessarily follow.
Claims are propositions that the authors are committed to, so that they can conclude the main point or the main claim. Claims can provide support for each other and clarify the chain of reasoning in an argument.
There is often a main claim or a few main claims in a scientific paper. The main claim of a paper is the conclusion or culmination of its arguments. For it to be valid, are prior steps that lead to it must be valid. The process of making a scientific argument is difficult precisely because inferential errors can appear at any step that leads to the main conclusion. An argument map helps us understand the steps that lead to a main conclusion and makes tracking the sources of errors easier.
Sometimes authors do not provide data and evidence to support a particular claim but rather refer to other researchers that have done so. We can include the references in our argument map underneath the claim that they support.
Sometimes authors do not provide data and evidence to support a particular claim but rather refer to other researchers that have done so. We can include the references in our argument map underneath the claim that they support.