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A Brief History of the Idea of Critical Thinking

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Philosophical issues in critical thinking.

Juho Ritola Juho Ritola University of Turku
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1480
Published online: 26 May 2021

Critical thinking in itself and the educational ideal are closely connected to the idea that we ought to be rational. But why exactly? This profound question seems to contain the elements needed for its solution. To ask why is to ask either for an explanation or for reasons for accepting a claim. Concentrating on the latter, we notice that such a question presupposes that the acceptability of a claim depends on the quality of the reasons that can be given for it: asking this question grants us the claim that we ought to be rational, that is, to make our beliefs fit what we have reason to believe. In the center of this fit are the concepts of knowledge and justified belief. A critical thinker wants to know and strives to achieve the state of knowledge by mentally examining reasons and the relation those reasons bear to candidate beliefs. Both these aspects include fascinating philosophical problems. How does this mental examination bring about knowledge? What is the relation my belief must have to a putative reason for my belief to qualify as knowledge?

The appreciation of reason has been a key theme in the writings of the key figures of philosophy of education, but the ideal of individual justifying reasoning is not the sole value that guides educational theory and practice. It is therefore important to discuss tensions this ideal has with other important concepts and values, such as autonomy, liberty, and political justification. For example, given that we take critical thinking to be essential for the liberty and autonomy of an individual, how far can we try to inculcate a student with this ideal when the student rejects it? These issues underline important practical choices an educator has to make.

critical thinking
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Science and the Spectrum of Critical Thinking

First Online: 02 January 2023

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critical thinking according to philosophers

Jeffrey Scheuer 3

Part of the book series: Integrated Science ((IS,volume 12))

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Since the nineteenth century, the scientific method has crystallized as the embodiment of scientific inquiry. But this paradigm of rigor is not confined to the natural sciences, and it has contributed to a sense of scientific “exceptionalism,” which obscures the deep connections between scientific and other kinds of thought. The scientific method has also indirectly given rise to the complex and contested idea of “critical thinking.” Both the scientific method and critical thinking are applications of logic and related forms of rationality that date to the Ancient Greeks. The full spectrum of critical/rational thinking includes logic, informal logic, and systemic or analytic thinking. This common core is shared by the natural sciences and other domains of inquiry share, and it is based on following rules, reasons, and intellectual best practices.

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The spectrum of critical thinking.

The term ‘critical thinking ’ is a bit like the Euro: a form of currency that not long ago many were eager to adopt but that has proven troublesome to maintain. And in both cases, the Greeks bear an outsized portion of the blame. Peter Wood [ 1 ]

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Scheuer, J. (2023). Science and the Spectrum of Critical Thinking. In: Rezaei, N. (eds) Brain, Decision Making and Mental Health. Integrated Science, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15959-6_3

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6.12: Immanuel Kant’s Critical Philosophy

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Kant: Synthetic A Priori Judgments

Home the critical philosophy.

Next we turn to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant , a watershed figure who forever altered the course of philosophical thinking in the Western tradition. Long after his thorough indoctrination into the quasi-scholastic German appreciation of the metaphysical systems of Leibniz and Wolff , Kant said, it was a careful reading of David Hume that “interrupted my dogmatic slumbers and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction.” Having appreciated the full force of such skeptical arguments, Kant supposed that the only adequate response would be a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy, a recognition that the appearance of the external world depends in some measure upon the position and movement of its observers. This central idea became the basis for his life-long project of developing a critical philosophy that could withstand them.

Kant’s aim was to move beyond the traditional dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism. The rationalists had tried to show that we can understand the world by careful use of reason; this guarantees the indubitability of our knowledge but leaves serious questions about its practical content. The empiricists , on the other hand, had argued that all of our knowledge must be firmly grounded in experience; practical content is thus secured, but it turns out that we can be certain of very little. Both approaches have failed, Kant supposed, because both are premised on the same mistaken assumption.

Progress in philosophy, according to Kant, requires that we frame the epistemological problem in an entirely different way. The crucial question is not how we can bring ourselves to understand the world, but how the world comes to be understood by us. Instead of trying, by reason or experience, to make our concepts match the nature of objects, Kant held, we must allow the structure of our concepts shape our experience of objects. This is the purpose of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787): to show how reason determines the conditions under which experience and knowledge are possible.

Home Varieties of Judgment

In the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic (1783) Kant presented the central themes of the first Critique in a somewhat different manner, starting from instances in which we do appear to have achieved knowledge and asking under what conditions each case becomes possible. So he began by carefully drawing a pair of crucial distinctions among the judgments we do actually make.

The first distinction separates a priori from a posteriori judgments by reference to the origin of our knowledge of them. A priori judgments are based upon reason alone, independently of all sensory experience, and therefore apply with strict universality. A posteriori judgments, on the other hand, must be grounded upon experience and are consequently limited and uncertain in their application to specific cases. Thus, this distinction also marks the difference traditionally noted in logic between necessary and contingent truths.

But Kant also made a less familiar distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, according to the information conveyed as their content. Analytic judgments are those whose predicates are wholly contained in their subjects; since they add nothing to our concept of the subject, such judgments are purely explicative and can be deduced from the principle of non-contradiction. Synthetic judgments, on the other hand, are those whose predicates are wholly distinct from their subjects, to which they must be shown to relate because of some real connection external to the concepts themselves. Hence, synthetic judgments are genuinely informative but require justification by reference to some outside principle.

Kant supposed that previous philosophers had failed to differentiate properly between these two distinctions. Both Leibniz and Hume had made just one distinction, between matters of fact based on sensory experience and the uninformative truths of pure reason. In fact, Kant held, the two distinctions are not entirely coextensive; we need at least to consider all four of their logically possible combinations:

Analytic a posteriori judgments cannot arise, since there is never any need to appeal to experience in support of a purely explicative assertion.
Synthetic a posteriori judgments are the relatively uncontroversial matters of fact we come to know by means of our sensory experience (though Wolff had tried to derive even these from the principle of contradiction).
Analytic a priori judgments, everyone agrees, include all merely logical truths and straightforward matters of definition; they are necessarily true.
Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.

Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed ( pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics—if it turns out to be possible at all—must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable. But how are synthetic a priori judgments possible at all? This is the central question Kant sought to answer.

Home Mathematics

Consider, for example, our knowledge that two plus three is equal to five and that the interior angles of any triangle add up to a straight line. These (and similar) truths of mathematics are synthetic judgments, Kant held, since they contribute significantly to our knowledge of the world; the sum of the interior angles is not contained in the concept of a triangle. Yet, clearly, such truths are known a priori , since they apply with strict and universal necessity to all of the objects of our experience, without having been derived from that experience itself. In these instances, Kant supposed, no one will ask whether or not we have synthetic a priori knowledge; plainly, we do. The question is, how do we come to have such knowledge? If experience does not supply the required connection between the concepts involved, what does?

Kant’s answer is that we do it ourselves. Conformity with the truths of mathematics is a precondition that we impose upon every possible object of our experience. Just as Descartes had noted in the Fifth Meditation, the essence of bodies is manifested to us in Euclidean solid geometry, which determines a priori the structure of the spatial world we experience. In order to be perceived by us, any object must be regarded as being uniquely located in space and time, so it is the spatio-temporal framework itself that provides the missing connection between the concept of the triangle and that of the sum of its angles. Space and time, Kant argued in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the first Critique , are the “pure forms of sensible intuition” under which we perceive what we do.

Understanding mathematics in this way makes it possible to rise above an old controversy between rationalists and empiricists regarding the very nature of space and time. Leibniz had maintained that space and time are not intrinsic features of the world itself, but merely a product of our minds. Newton , on the other hand, had insisted that space and time are absolute, not merely a set of spatial and temporal relations. Kant now declares that both of them were correct! Space and time are absolute, and they do derive from our minds. As synthetic a priori judgments, the truths of mathematics are both informative and necessary.

This is our first instance of a transcendental argument , Kant’s method of reasoning from the fact that we have knowledge of a particular sort to the conclusion that all of the logical presuppositions of such knowledge must be satisfied. We will see additional examples in later lessons, and can defer our assessment of them until then. But notice that there is a price to be paid for the certainty we achieve in this manner. Since mathematics derives from our own sensible intuition, we can be absolutely sure that it must apply to everything we perceive, but for the same reason we can have no assurance that it has anything to do with the way things are apart from our perception of them. Next time, we’ll look at Kant’s very similar treatment of the synthetic a priori principles upon which our knowledge of natural science depends.

Home Preconditions for Natural Science

In natural science no less than in mathematics, Kant held, synthetic a priori judgments provide the necessary foundations for human knowledge. The most general laws of nature, like the truths of mathematics, cannot be justified by experience, yet must apply to it universally. In this case, the negative portion of Hume’s analysis—his demonstration that matters of fact rest upon an unjustifiable belief that there is a necessary connection between causes and their effects—was entirely correct. But of course Kant’s more constructive approach is to offer a transcendental argument from the fact that we do have knowledge of the natural world to the truth of synthetic a priori propositions about the structure of our experience of it.

As we saw last time, applying the concepts of space and time as forms of sensible intuition is necessary condition for any perception. But the possibility of scientific knowledge requires that our experience of the world be not only perceivable but thinkable as well, and Kant held that the general intelligibility of experience entails the satisfaction of two further conditions:

First, it must be possible in principle to arrange and organize the chaos of our many individual sensory images by tracing the connections that hold among them. This Kant called the synthetic unity of the sensory manifold.

Second, it must be possible in principle for a single subject to perform this organization by discovering the connections among perceived images. This is satisfied by what Kant called the transcendental unity of apperception. Experiential knowledge is thinkable only if there is some regularity in what is known and there is some knower in whom that regularity can be represented. Since we do actually have knowledge of the world as we experience it, Kant held, both of these conditions must in fact obtain.

Home Deduction of the Categories

Since (as Hume had noted) individual images are perfectly separable as they occur within the sensory manifold, connections between them can be drawn only by the knowing subject, in which the principles of connection are to be found. As in mathematics, so in science the synthetic a priori judgments must derive from the structure of the understanding itself.

Consider, then, the sorts of judgments distinguished by logicians (in Kant ‘s day): each of them has some quantity (applying to all things, some, or only one); some quality (affirmative, negative, or complementary); some relation (absolute, conditional, or alternative); and some modality ( problematic, assertoric, or apodeictic ). Kant supposed that any intelligible thought can be expressed in judgments of these sorts. But then it follows that any thinkable experience must be understood in these ways, and we are justified in projecting this entire way of thinking outside ourselves, as the inevitable structure of any possible experience.

The result of this “Transcendental Logic” is the schematized table of categories, Kant’s summary of the central concepts we employ in thinking about the world, each of which is discussed in a separate section of the Critique :

Our most fundamental convictions about the natural world derive from these concepts, according to Kant. The most general principles of natural science are not empirical generalizations from what we have experienced, but synthetic a priori judgments about what we could experience, in which these concepts provide the crucial connectives.

The Philosophy Pages. Authored by : Garth Kemerling. Located at : http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5f.htm . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Critical Thinking: What is it to be a Critical Thinker?

Author: Carolina Flores Categories: Logic and Reasoning , Philosophy of Education , Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge Word count: 997

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We often urge others to think critically. What does that really mean? How can we think critically?

This essay presents a general account of what it is to be a critical thinker and outlines both traditional and more recent approaches to critical thinking.

Know the Facts: A WPA (Works Progress Administration, part of the New Deal) poster, imploring the public to develop critical thinking skills. Circa late 1930-early 1940s.

1. What is Critical Thinking?

Speaking generally, critical thinking consists of reasoning and inquiring in careful ways, so as to form and update one’s beliefs based on good reasons . [1] A critical thinker is someone who typically reasons and inquires in these ways, having mastered relevant skills and developed the disposition to apply them. [2]

2. Traditional Components: Logic and Fallacies

Traditional views of critical thinking focus on deductive arguments. Arguments are sets of reasons given for a conclusion. Deductive arguments are arguments where the reasons given are supposed to be logically conclusive, that is, to guarantee the conclusion. E.g., the following is a deductive argument:

Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Arriving at new beliefs through deductive arguments is a way of forming beliefs based on good reasons. Accordingly, critical thinking traditionally focusses on these skills: [3]

distinguishing arguments (instances where you are offered reasons for a conclusion) from mere assertions, rhetorical questions, and attempts at manipulation through irrelevant considerations;
identifying conclusions of arguments (what the person offering the argument wants to persuade you to believe), and the reasons or premises for that conclusion;
reconstructing streamlined, complete statements of arguments in standard form (as a numbered list of premises with the conclusion at the end), or using diagrams; [4]
assessing the logical structure of deductive arguments: answering ‘Is there any way for the premises to be true while the conclusion is false?’
understanding arguments’ claims: e.g., defining unclear terms;
determining whether premises are true or likely;
imagining, proposing, and charitably responding to objections, i.e, reasons given to doubt or deny arguments’ logic, premise(s), or conclusion. [5]

To develop these skills, traditional critical thinking courses typically include propositional logic and the study of common good argument forms. [6]

They also often teach how to identify fallacies —faulty patterns of reasoning that deceptively appear to be good arguments. [7] These include:

affirming the consequent (“If Kat had won the prize, she would have had an A; Kat had an A; therefore, Kat won the prize”);
the ad hominem fallacy—where people attack the person making an argument instead of considering their argument;
begging the question —offering reasons for a conclusion that assume the conclusion, and many others. [8]

3. Additional Formal Tools: Evidence and Statistics

We often form beliefs based on observations that, unlike deductive arguments, do not provide conclusive reasons for a belief: e.g., you might conclude that your sibling is angry at you from their facial expressions or come to believe you have a cold because you have a runny nose. Here, these observations or evidence might support the belief formed but do not guarantee the truth of your belief.

Critical thinkers know how to adjust their beliefs appropriately in light of their evidence. [9] So critical thinking requires developing abilities to:

assess evidence without being unduly swayed by what one already believes;
recognize when a claim counts as evidence for (or against) a conclusion;
identify when evidence is strong (or weak);
determine the extent to which people’s views should change, given their evidence.

To develop these abilities, drawing on knowledge of probability can be helpful: e.g., basic probability offers a recipe for determining when an observation counts as evidence for a belief: when that observation is more likely if the belief is true than if it is not . It also teaches us that updating your beliefs when you get new evidence requires taking into account both (a) how confident you were on that belief beforehand and (b) how strongly the evidence supports that (new) belief. [10]

For these reasons, recent approaches to critical thinking often include instruction in probability. [11] And, because we often get evidence in the form of statistics, often presented through diagrams and graphs, such approaches tend to highlight the importance of basic statistical concepts, [12] and the ability to interpret diagrams and graphs. [13]

4. Applied Skills as Part of Being a Critical Thinker

Being a critical thinker requires more than having technical tools (such as the tools of logic or probability) stored away. It requires consistently applying them in the real world .

In recent discussions of what it is to be a critical thinker, there has been increased emphasis on navigating our informational environments in savvy ways. This requires avoiding false, misleading, manipulative, or distracting claims online, as well as making sure that one gathers information from a wide variety of reliable sources. [14] It also requires calibrating one’s trust well: one should remain open to hearing those who disagree and not let prejudice and implicit bias affect whom one trusts. [15] , [16]

Applying the tools of critical thinking throughout one’s life requires overcoming cognitive biases: [17] e.g.:

not always accepting answers that come to mind first;
resisting confirmation bias (the tendency to gather and interpret evidence in ways that confirm our beliefs), [18] and;
avoiding motivated reasoning (the tendency to reason in ways that help us believe what we wish were true, and not what is true). [19]

More generally, becoming a critical thinker requires shifting from a defensive mindset to a truth-seeking one and developing intellectual virtues such as intellectual humility and open-minded curiosity. [20] , [21] Without those, the tools of critical thinking may end up being deployed to entrench false or unreasonable beliefs.

5. Conclusion

Critical thinking is about reasoning and inquiring so as to form and update one’s beliefs based on good reasons. Because critical thinking skills are valuable in a world that emphasizes the ability to navigate information, becoming a critical thinker is practically useful to us as individuals.

It is also of crucial social and political value: e.g., a well-functioning democracy requires citizens who think critically about the world. [22] And critical thinking has liberatory potential: it provides us with tools to criticize oppressive social structures and envisage a more just, fair society. [23]

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Teaching Philosophy Facebook Group for literature recommendations. Thanks to Chelsea Haramia, Sabrina Huwang, Izilda Jorge, Thomas Metcalf, Nathan Nobis, Elise Woodard, and anonymous referees for feedback.

[1] This definition is similar to Ennis’s (1991) definition: critical thinking, in his view, is “reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do” (Ennis 1991, p. 6). See Hitchcock 2010 for an overview of definitions of critical thinking.

[2] While I define critical thinking in a general way here, there is disagreement about whether there are any general tools for critical thinking, as opposed to merely topic-specific ones.

There are also closely related debates about the extent to which specific critical thinking skills transfer to new domains and tasks, and about whether we should teach critical thinking on its own or, instead, in the context of specific disciplines, with discipline-internal standards made clear and an emphasis on content acquisition. See Willingham 2019 for discussion, including references to relevant empirical research.

People who have mastered critical thinking skills in a domain or subject area tend to be experts in those areas. See Expertise: What is an Expert? by Jamie Carlin Watson

[3] See this Khan Academy/Wi Phi Philosophy course for an overview.

[4] An example of an argument in standard form is: 1. Socrates is a man; 2. All men are mortal; 3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. For other examples of arguments in standard form, see Anderson’s “Putting an Argument in Standard Form.” For examples of argument diagrams, as well as a useful program to construct such diagrams, see Cullen’s “Philosophy Mapped” website .

[5] Charitably responding involves responding to the strongest version of the objection.

[6] Propositional logic is the simplest branch of logic, i.e. the formal study of arguments and reasoning. See Tom Metcalf’s Formal Logic: Symbolizing Arguments in Sentential Logic by for an introduction.

[7] Wikipedia has extensive lists of good argument forms and of common fallacies . See Boardman et al. 2017, Howard-Snyder 2020, Lau 2011 , Vaughn 2018 for examples of critical thinking textbooks that take the traditional approach.

[8] To see why these are fallacies, note that, for all that is said, Kat could have had an A without winning the prize; perhaps she simply had high exam scores. And note that morally bad people can give good arguments.

[9] Philosophers also use the term ‘evidence’ in more technical senses than ‘relevant observations’. See Kelly 2016 for discussion of these different senses.

[10] Indeed, we can capture this insight into a domain-general formula for how to update beliefs: Bayes’ theorem. Bayes’ theorem tells us how to weigh our previous confidence and the strength of evidence. For a short explanation of Bayes’ Theorem, see Better Explained, “A Short and Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem” . For more detailed discussion of Bayesianism, see Joyce 2019.

[11] Manley 2019.

[12] See Gigerenzer et al. 2007 for discussion of the practical importance of these concepts. An especially important statistical concept is that of base rate . The base rate of a feature in a population is what fraction of the population have that feature. Neglecting the base rate leads to the base rate fallacy , where one ends up adjusting one’s beliefs incorrectly in response to evidence (for example, taking a fallible positive test for a rare disease to indicate that one is extremely likely to have that disease, where, given the rarity of the disease, that remains unlikely).

[13] Battersby 2016.

[14] See Bergstorm and West’s “Calling Bullshit” syllabus for a range of helpful tools for avoiding such claims, and The News Literacy Project for resources on developing a healthy news diet.

[15] See Nguyen’s “Escape the Echo Chamber.” for helpful discussion of common issues with trust calibration and with information gathering.

[16] Implicit bias involves believing and acting “on basis of prejudice and stereotypes without intending to do so”: see Brownstein 2019.

When one discredits members of marginalized groups due to (conscious or unconscious) prejudice, one commits an epistemic injustice: see Fricker 2007. For an introduction to epistemic injustice, see Huzeyfe Demitras’s Epistemic Injustice .

[17] Cognitive biases are systematic deviations from how we should reason. See Kahneman 2011 for an accessible overview of research on cognitive biases.

[18] Nickerson 1998 .

[19] Kunda 1990.

[20] An intellectual virtue is a personality trait or disposition that is helpful in reasoning well and acquiring knowledge. Some examples are intellectual humility, open-mindedness, curiosity, and perseverance. See Zagzebski 1996.

[21] See Galef’s TED talk “Why you think you’re right – even if you’re wrong” for discussion of the importance of these traits.

[22] Dewey 1923.

[23] Freire 1968/2018, hooks 2010.

Anderson, Jeremy. “Putting an Argument in Standard Form.”

Battersby, Mark. 2016. Is That a Fact?: A Field Guide to Statistical and Scientific Information . Broadview Press.

Bergstrom, Carl T. and West, Jevin. 2019. “Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World.” (website)

Better Explained. 2020. “A Short and Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem.” (website)

Boardman, Frank, Cavender, Nancy M, and Kahane, Howard . 2017. Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life. Cengage Learning.

Brownstein, Michael, “Implicit Bias”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Cullen, Simon. “Philosophy Mapped: Open Resources for Philosophy Visualization.”

Demirtas, Huzeyfe. 2020. “Epistemic Injustice.” 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology .

Dewey, John. 1923. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. Macmillan.

Ennis, Robert. 1991. “Critical Thinking: A Streamlined Conception.” Teaching Philosophy , 14(1):5-24.

Frankfurt, Harry G. 1986. On Bullshit . Princeton University Press.

Freire, Paulo. 2018 [1968]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed . Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing . Oxford University Press.

Galef, Julia. 2016. “Why You Think You’re Right – Even If You’re Wrong.” TED Talk.

Gigerenzer, Gerd, Gaissmaier, Wolfgang, Kurz-Milcke, Elke, Schwartz, Lisa M and Woloshin, Steven. 2007. “Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest , 8(2):53-96.

bell hooks. 2010. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom . New York and London: Routledge.

Hitchcock, David. 2020. “ Critical Thinking ” , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Howard-Snyder, Frances, Howard-Snyder, Daniel, and Wasserman, Ryan. 2020. The Power of Logic . McGraw-Hill.

Joyce, James, “ Bayes’ Theorem ” , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow . Macmillan.

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Expertise by Jamie Carlin Watson

Epistemic Justification: What is Rational Belief? by Todd R. Long

Is it Wrong to Believe Without Sufficient Evidence? W.K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” by Spencer Case

Indoctrination: What is it to Indoctrinate Someone? by Chris Ranalli

Epistemic Injust ice by Huzeyfe Demitras

Formal Logic: Symbolizing Arguments in Sentential Logic by Thomas Metcalf

Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge by Thomas Metcalf

Bayesianism by Thomas Metcalf

Conspiracy Theories by Jared Millson

Philosophical Inquiry in Childhood by Jana Mohr Lone

Translation

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About the Author

Carolina Flores is a post-doctoral fellow at UC Irvine and will be an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz starting in 2023. She earned her Ph.D. at Rutgers University, New Jersey. She specializes in philosophy of mind and social epistemology. She is especially interested in why it is so hard to change people’s minds, and in what that tells us about the mind and about human relationships and political persuasion. CarolinaFlores.org

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Introduction

Chapter outline.

You have likely heard the term “critical thinking” and have probably been instructed to become a “good critical thinker.” Unfortunately, you are probably also unclear what exactly this means because the term is poorly defined and infrequently taught. “But I know how to think,” you might say, and that is certainly true. Critical thinking , however, is a specific skill. This chapter is an informal and practical guide to critical thinking and will also guide you in how to conduct research, reading, and writing for philosophy classes.

Critical thinking is set of skills, habits, and attitudes that promote reflective, clear reasoning. Studying philosophy can be particularly helpful for developing good critical thinking skills, but often the connection between the two is not made clear. This chapter will approach critical thinking from a practical standpoint, with the goal of helping you become more aware of some of the pitfalls of everyday thinking and making you a better philosophy student.

While you may have learned research, reading, and writing skills in other classes—for instance, in a typical English composition course—the intellectual demands in a philosophy class are different. Here you will find useful advice about how to approach research, reading, and writing in philosophy.

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Book title: Introduction to Philosophy
Publication date: Jun 15, 2022
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Critical Thinking

I. definition.

Critical thinking is the ability to reflect on (and so improve ) your thoughts, beliefs, and expectations. It’s a combination of several skills and habits such as:

Curiosity : the desire for knowledge and understanding

Curious people are never content with their current understanding of the world, but are driven to raise questions and pursue the answers. Curiosity is endless — the better you understand a given topic, the more you realize how much more there is to learn!

Humility : or the recognition that your own understanding is limited

This is closely connected to curiosity — if you’re arrogant and think you know everything already, then you have no reason to be curious. But a humble person always recognizes the limitations and gaps in their knowledge . This makes them more receptive to information, better listeners and learners.

Skepticism : a suspicious attitude toward what other people say

Skepticism means you always demand evidence and don’t simply accept what others tell you. At the same time, skepticism has to be inwardly focused as well! You have to be equally skeptical of your own beliefs and instincts as you are of others’.

Rationality or logic: The formal skills of logic are indispensable for critical thinkers

Skepticism keeps you on the lookout for bad arguments, and rationality helps you figure out exactly why they’re bad. But rationality also allows you to identify good arguments when you see them, and then to move beyond them and understand their further implications.

Creativity: or the ability to come up with new combinations of ideas

It’s not enough to just be skeptical and knock the holes in every argument that you hear. Sooner or later you have to come up with your own ideas, your own solutions, and your own visions. That requires a creative and independent mind, but one that is also capable of listening and learning.

Empathy : the ability to see things from another person’s perspective

Too often, people talk about critical thinkers as though they’re solitary explorers, forging their own path through the jungle of ideas without help from others. But this isn’t true at all. Real critical thinking means you constantly engage with other people, listen to what they have to say, and try to imagine how they see the world. By seeing things from someone else’s perspective, you can generate far more new ideas than you could by relying on your own knowledge alone.

II. Examples

Although video games are sometimes simply a passive way to enjoy yourself, they sometimes rely on critical thinking skills. This is particularly true of puzzle games and role playing games (RPGs) that present your character with puzzles at critical moments. For example, at one stage in the classic RPG Neverwinter Nights , your character has the option to serve as a juror on another character’s trial. In order to save the innocent man, you have to talk to people throughout the town and, using a combination of empathy and skepticism, figure out what really happened.

In one episode of South Park , Cartman becomes obsessed with conspiracy theories and sings a song about needing to think for himself and find out the truth. The show is poking fun at conspiracy theorists, who often think that they are exercising critical thinking when in fact they are simply exercising too much skepticism towards common sense and popular beliefs, and not enough skepticism towards new, unnecessarily complicated explanations.

III. Critical Thinking vs. Traditional Thinking

Critical thinking, in the history of modern Western thought, is strongly associated with the Enlightenment, the period when European and American philosophers decided to approach the world with a rational eye, rejecting blind faith and questioning traditional authority. It was this moment in history that gave us modern medicine, democracy , and the early forms of industrial technology.

At the same time, the Enlightenment also came with many downsides, particularly the fact that it was so hostile to tradition. This hostility is understandable given the state of Europe at the time — ripped apart by bloody conflict between different religions, and oppressed by traditional monarchs who rooted their power in that of the Church. Enlightenment thinkers understandably rejected traditional thinking, holding it responsible for all this violence and injustice. But still, the Enlightenment sometimes went too far in the opposite direction. After all, rejecting tradition just for the sake of rejecting it is not really any better than accepting tradition just for the sake of accepting it! Traditions provide valuable resources for critical thinking, and without them it would be impossible. Think about this: the English language is a tradition, and without it you wouldn’t be sitting there reading these (hopefully useful) words about critical thinking!

So critical thinking absolutely depends on traditions. There’s no question that critical thinking means something more than just accepting traditions; but it doesn’t mean you necessarily reject them, either. It just means that you’re not blindly following tradition for its own sake ; rather, your relationship to your tradition is based on humility, creativity, skepticism, and all the other attributes of critical thinking.

IV. Quotes about Critical Thinking

“If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” (Isaac Newton)

Until Einstein, no physicist was ever more influential than Isaac Newton. Through curiosity and probable skepticism, he not only worked out the basic rules for matter and energy in the universe — he also realized that the force causing objects to fall was the same as the force causing celestial objects to orbit around each other (thus discovering the modern theory of gravity). He was also known for having a big ego and being a little arrogant with those he considered beneath his intellect — but even Newton had enough humility to recognize that he wasn’t doing it alone. He was deeply indebted to the whole tradition of scientists that had come before him — Europeans, Greeks, Arabs, Indians, and all the rest.

“It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses… and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.” (Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism )

In this quote, Carl Sagan offers a sensitive analysis of a tension within the idea of critical thinking. He points out that skepticism is extremely important to critical thinking, but at the same time it can go too far and become an obstacle. Notice, too, that you could replace the word “new” with “old” in this quote and it would still make sense. Critical thinkers need to be both open to new ideas and skeptical of them; similarly, they need to have a balanced attitude toward old and traditional ideas as well.

V. The History and Importance of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking has emerged as a cultural value in various times and places, from the Islamic scholars of medieval Central Asia to the secular philosophers of 18th-century America or the scientists and engineers of 21st-century Japan. In each case, critical thinking has taken a slightly different form, sometimes emphasizing skepticism above the other dimensions (as occurred in the European Enlightenment), sometimes emphasizing other dimensions such as creativity or rationality.

Today, many leaders in science, education, and business worry that we are seeing a decline in critical thinking. Education around the world has turned increasingly toward standardized testing and the mechanical memorization of facts, an approach that doesn’t leave time for critical thinking or creative arts. Some politicians view critical and creative education as a waste of time, believing that education should only focus on job skills and nothing else — an attitude which clearly overlooks the fact that critical thinking is an important job skill for everyone from auto mechanics to cognitive scientists.

a. Creativity

b. Skepticism

d. These are all dimensions of critical thinking

a. They are opposites

b. They are synonyms

c. They are in tension, but not incompatible

d. None of the above

a. The Enlightenment

b. The Renaissance

c. The current era

d. All of the above

a. Being constantly skeptical

b. Not being skeptical

c. Having a balance between too much skepticism and too little

d. No relation to skepticism

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Philosophy Behind Critical Thinking: A Concise Overview

The philosophy behind critical thinking delves into the deeper understanding of what it means to think critically and to develop the ability to reason, analyze, and evaluate information in a structured and systematic manner. Critical thinking has intricate connections with philosophy, mainly because it originated from ancient philosophical teachings. At its core, the concept of critical thinking is rooted in the Socratic method of questioning, which emphasizes the importance of inquiry and rational thinking as a means to achieve knowledge.

Understanding critical thinking necessitates exploring the various philosophical groundings, which delves into epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge, truth, and belief. Epistemological theories help elucidate different approaches to critical thinking, such as the psychological approach, focusing on cognitive processes, and the cultural and social context approach, emphasizing the importance of context in shaping critical thought. In the realm of education, the role of critical thinking cannot be understated, as it is a vital component of teaching and learning, shaping the way individuals process and interpret information and develop intellectually.

Key Takeaways

Critical thinking is deeply rooted in ancient philosophical teachings, particularly the Socratic method of questioning.
Different philosophical groundings provide varying approaches to critical thinking, such as psychological and cultural/social context approaches.
The importance of critical thinking in education is paramount, as it shapes how individuals process, interpret, and develop intellectually.

Understanding Critical Thinking

Definition and Process

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. It involves engaging in reflective and independent thinking . To understand the logical connections between ideas, one needs to identify, construct, and evaluate arguments.

Logic, Reason, Rationality

Logic, reason, and rationality are essential components of critical thinking. Logic refers to the systematic approach to reasoning and validating claims through principles and rules. Reasoning, on the other hand, is the process of drawing conclusions based on logic, evidence, and assumptions. Rationality encompasses the use of logic and reason to make well-informed decisions, judgments, and evaluations.

Strategies and Patterns

To develop critical thinking skills, individuals must employ various strategies and recognize patterns in their thinking. Some common strategies include:

Analysis : Breaking down complex problems, data, or texts into simpler parts to understand what they mean and explain the implications to others.
Interpretation : Making sense of information and grasping its relevance in a given context.
Inference : Drawing reasonable conclusions based on available evidence and logic.
Evaluation : Assessing the credibility and validity of claims, arguments, or sources of information.

Recognizing patterns in thinking involves identifying common errors, biases, and other factors that might hinder critical thinking and refining one’s thought process accordingly.

Justification and Argumentation

Justification and argumentation play a crucial role in critical thinking. Justification refers to providing reasons or evidence in support of a claim, while argumentation involves constructing and evaluating arguments . Both justification and argumentation require logical reasoning, analysis of evidence, and clear communication of ideas.

Clarity and Reflection

Clarity is essential for effective critical thinking. This entails expressing ideas and arguments in a clear, concise, and organized manner. Furthermore, critical thinkers must also engage in reflection — the process of examining their own thought processes, assumptions, and biases. Reflecting on one’s beliefs and values helps individuals refine their thinking and develop a more nuanced understanding of the world around them.

In conclusion, understanding critical thinking involves exploring its definition, process, and key components, such as logic, reason, rationality, strategies, patterns, justification, argumentation, clarity, and reflection. By cultivating a strong foundation in these areas, individuals can develop their ability to think critically and make well-informed decisions in various aspects of life.

Psychological Approach to Critical Thinking

Cognition and Pattern Recognition

The psychological approach to critical thinking emphasizes the role of cognition and pattern recognition in the process. Cognitive psychologists recognize that our minds have a natural ability to identify patterns and relationships in the information we encounter. This involves categorizing, comparing, and evaluating various pieces of information. By developing cognitive skills, individuals can more effectively analyze and evaluate complex arguments, ultimately fostering their critical thinking abilities.

Bias and Judgments

Another aspect of the psychological approach to critical thinking is the examination of biases and judgments. Bias refers to the systematic errors or distortions in human reasoning that can arise from emotions, beliefs, or external factors. When individuals possess a strong bias, it can impede their ability to think critically and accurately evaluate information. By being aware of these biases and actively seeking to minimize their influence, one can improve their critical thinking skills and make more accurate judgments.

Problem-Solving and Decision-Making

Finally, the psychological approach to critical thinking also emphasizes the importance of problem-solving and decision-making abilities. Effective problem-solving is accomplished by identifying the problem, gathering and evaluating relevant information, and formulating potential solutions. Strong decision-making skills involve comparing potential solutions and selecting the most effective one based on logical reasoning and evidence.

In conclusion, the psychological approach to critical thinking focuses on fostering cognitive skills, identifying and minimizing biases, and developing strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities. By enhancing these aspects, individuals can become more effective critical thinkers and make well-informed decisions throughout their lives.

Philosophical Groundings

Roots of critical thought.

The roots of critical thought can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy, particularly the ideas developed by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In their teachings, these philosophers emphasized the importance of questioning and examining beliefs, seeking evidence, and evaluating arguments logically. Through these pursuits, they laid a strong foundation for the development of critical thinking in modern times.

Major Philosophers and Approaches

Several major philosophers and their approaches have significantly contributed to the evolution of critical thinking. Among them, Socrates’ method of inquiry, known as the Socratic Method, involves continuous questioning and probing for deeper understanding. Plato, a student of Socrates, focused on the power of dialectical reasoning, urging individuals to engage in dialogue and debate to examine their own beliefs and the beliefs of others.

Aristotle contributed to critical thinking by emphasizing the importance of logic and coherent reasoning to gain knowledge. He also explored rhetoric, expounding on its role in persuasive argumentation. In more recent times, figures such as John Dewey and Karl Marx have provided insights into the role of critical thinking in education and social transformation.

Informal Logic and its Importance

Informal logic plays a crucial role in critical thinking as it concerns the principles and methods used to analyze everyday arguments and reasoning beyond the scope of formal logic. It complements formal logic, which deals strictly with logical systems and symbols. Informal logic helps individuals assess the validity, soundness, and context of arguments encountered in daily life. By honing their skills in informal logic, individuals can become better critical thinkers and more adept at navigating complex situations and decision-making processes.

Through the teachings of philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, as well as the application of informal logic and logical reasoning, the concept of critical thinking has evolved into an essential aspect of learning and decision-making in modern society. Embracing these foundational elements can empower individuals to develop the skills necessary to think critically and effectively in various aspects of life.

Critical Thinking in Cultural and Social Context

Race and gender perspectives.

Critical thinking is a universal skill that transcends cultural and social boundaries. However, it is essential to consider the impact of race and gender on the development and exercise of critical thinking skills. People from marginalized groups may experience unique challenges and perspectives that influence their critical thinking abilities. For example, in a cross-cultural study examining critical thinking among nurse scholars in Thailand and the United States, distinctive perspectives on critical thinking were observed due to cultural differences. Understanding the intersections of race, gender, and critical thinking can help create more inclusive education and workplace environments that foster critical thinking for everyone.

Critical Thinking in a Democratic Society

In a democratic society, critical thinking plays a crucial role in informed decision-making, civic engagement, and open discussion. The healthy functioning of a democracy relies on the citizens’ capacity to discern reliable information, assess arguments, and make rational choices. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , critical thinking includes abilities and dispositions that lead individuals to think critically when appropriate. Developing these skills allows members of democratic societies to engage in productive debates, evaluate policies, and hold leaders accountable.

Culture, Society, and Critical Thinking

Cultural backgrounds and societal norms can significantly impact how individuals approach critical thinking. Different cultures may emphasize various ways of thinking, problem-solving, and expressing ideas. As a result, critical thinking can manifest differently across cultures, often influenced by aspects such as language, traditions, and values. A study discussing critical thinking in its historical and social contexts highlights the importance of considering cultural influences when evaluating and teaching critical thinking.

In summary, critical thinking is an essential skill across various cultural, racial, gender, and social contexts. By acknowledging these differences and understanding the significance of critical thinking in democratic societies, educators and societies can promote a more inclusive environment for cultivating critical thinking skills.

Role of Critical Thinking in Education

Aims of education.

The primary aim of education is to foster the development of individuals’ cognitive capabilities, empowering them to grow into confident, knowledgeable and discerning adults. Critical thinking plays a significant role in education as it helps students acquire and apply knowledge more effectively, by analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information from diverse sources in a systematic manner, leading to more accurate and informed decisions.

In addition, critical thinking allows students to question existing knowledge and challenge conventional wisdom, thus avoiding indoctrination and promoting intellectual independence. This helps in nurturing open-minded and critical citizens who can contribute positively to society.

Skills Development

Critical thinking involves a variety of skills and abilities that are essential for students’ personal and professional success. These include problem-solving, decision making, logical reasoning, and effective communication, among others. By teaching these skills in the classroom, educators enable learners to confront complex issues and dilemmas with confidence and clarity, fostering their cognitive, social, and emotional growth.

Classroom activities focused on critical thinking are essential to help students develop a systematic approach to problem-solving and sharpen their analytical skills. Practical tasks, like debates, group discussions, case studies, or role plays, can be employed to engage students in active learning, thus enhancing their critical thought processes.

Standardized Tests vs. Critical Thought

While standardized tests have dominated the contemporary education system, there is growing concern regarding their effectiveness in promoting critical thinking. Some argue that standardized tests prioritize the acquisition of specific knowledge over the development of essential skills and abilities, leading to an education that is more focused on rote memorization than meaningful learning.

However, introducing critical thinking elements in the curriculum or classroom activities does not require a complete removal of standardized tests. Educators can strike a balance between knowledge acquisition and skill development by incorporating critical thinking exercises in conjunction with traditional assessments. In doing so, students can better prepare for life beyond the classroom, developing a mindset that values continuous learning, reflection, and intellectual curiosity.

Importance of Open-Mindedness and Skepticism

Being skeptical vs. being cynical.

It is essential to understand the difference between being skeptical and being cynical. Skepticism in critical thinking involves questioning assertions and assumptions, seeking evidence, and evaluating arguments from a neutral, objective viewpoint. On the other hand, cynicism is a distrustful attitude, where one assumes negative intentions or outcomes.

A critical thinker should strive to be skeptical rather than cynical. Approaching situations with skepticism allows for the exploration of different viewpoints and the willingness to change one’s mind based on new evidence, while cynicism can lead to the dismissal of valid arguments due to preconceived negative beliefs.

Traits of an Open-Minded Thinker

Open-mindedness is an essential trait for critical thinkers. Some key characteristics of an open-minded thinker include:

Cognitive flexibility : Adapting to and considering new information or perspectives.
Tolerance for ambiguity : Accepting the possibility that there may be multiple valid solutions or interpretations.
Willingness to change : Being open to revising beliefs and opinions when presented with strong evidence or arguments.

Being open-minded allows critical thinkers to explore various perspectives and ideas and to evaluate them fairly. This inclination towards cognitive flexibility helps in avoiding rigidity in thinking, enabling better decision-making and problem-solving.

Role of Curiosity and Empathy in Critical Thinking

Curiosity and empathy play crucial roles in effective critical thinking. A curious individual seeks knowledge and understanding, thus asking relevant questions and engaging in Socratic questioning. Socratic questioning is a method of probing and analyzing through questions to encourage self-reflection and deeper understanding. This technique fosters critical thinking by challenging assumptions and providing opportunities to explore diverse viewpoints.

Empathy, on the other hand, permits critical thinkers to comprehend and appreciate different perspectives by placing themselves in others’ shoes. An empathetic approach contributes to open-mindedness and cultivates a sense of humility, recognizing that individuals may hold contrasting opinions based on personal experiences or beliefs. The combination of curiosity and empathy enhances critical thinking by promoting a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of complex issues and scenarios.

In the realm of philosophy, critical thinking holds a prominent position. It is a process that revolves around using and assessing reasons to evaluate statements, assumptions, and arguments in ordinary situations. The ultimate goal of critical thinking is to foster good beliefs, aligning them with goals such as truth, usefulness, and rationality 1 .

John Dewey played a crucial role in shaping the concept of critical thinking by introducing it as an educational goal 2 . He connected it with a scientific attitude of mind, highlighting the importance of reflective thought in the process of critical thinking. This approach enhances one’s ability to understand and analyze situations, leading to informed and rational decisions.

Critical thinking equips individuals with the tools necessary to think carefully with clarity, depth, precision, accuracy, and logic 3 . It has applications across various domains, such as science, where great scientists like Albert Einstein have benefited from critical thinking skills to discover groundbreaking concepts.

In conclusion, the philosophy behind critical thinking emphasizes the importance of cultivating a rational and reflective mindset. As an essential skill for problem-solving and decision-making, critical thinking plays a vital role in developing well-rounded individuals ready to navigate the complexities of the world.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ↩
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ↩
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Philosophical Issues in Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is active, good-quality thinking. This kind of thinking is initiated by an agent’s desire to decide what to believe, it satisfies relevant norms, and the decision on the matter at hand is reached through the use of available reasons under the control of the thinking agent. In the educational context, critical thinking refers to an educational aim that includes certain skills and abilities to think according to relevant standards and corresponding attitudes, habits, and dispositions to apply those skills to problems the agent wants to solve. The basis of this ideal is the conviction that we ought to be rational. This rationality is manifested through the proper use of reasons that a cognizing agent is able to appreciate. From the philosophical perspective, this fascinating ability to appreciate reasons leads into interesting philosophical problems in epistemology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. Critical thinking in itself and the educational ideal are closely connected to the idea that we ought to be rational. But why exactly? This profound question seems to contain the elements needed for its solution. To ask why is to ask either for an explanation or for reasons for accepting a claim. Concentrating on the latter, we notice that such a question presupposes that the acceptability of a claim depends on the quality of the reasons that can be given for it: asking this question grants us the claim that we ought to be rational, that is, to make our beliefs fit what we have reason to believe. In the center of this fit are the concepts of knowledge and justified belief. A critical thinker wants to know and strives to achieve the state of knowledge by mentally examining reasons and the relation those reasons bear to candidate beliefs. Both these aspects include fascinating philosophical problems. How does this mental examination bring about knowledge? What is the relation my belief must have to a putative reason for my belief to qualify as knowledge? The appreciation of reason has been a key theme in the writings of the key figures of philosophy of education, but the ideal of individual justifying reasoning is not the sole value that guides educational theory and practice. It is therefore important to discuss tensions this ideal has with other important concepts and values, such as autonomy, liberty, and political justification. For example, given that we take critical thinking to be essential for the liberty and autonomy of an individual, how far can we try to inculcate a student with this ideal when the student rejects it? These issues underline important practical choices an educator has to make.

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This chapter offers a reply to Stefaan Cuypers’ explication and critique of the views of rationality and critical thinking laid out in the previous chapters and in earlier work (see his “Critical Thinking, Autonomy and Practical Reason,” 2004). While Cuypers’ discussion is praiseworthy in several respects, it (1) mistakenly attributes to those views a Humean conception of (practical) reason, and (2) unsuccessfully argues that the positions articulated and defended in those earlier chapters lack the resources required to defend the basic claim that critical thinking is a fundamental educational ideal. Cuypers’ analysis also raises deep issues about the motivational character of reasons; I briefly address this matter as well.

Cultivating Reason

The Western philosophical tradition has historically valorized the cultivation of reason as a fundamental intellectual ideal. This ideal continues to be defended by many as educationally basic. However, recent philosophical work has challenged it on several fronts, including worries stemming from relativistic tendencies in the philosophy of science, the apparent ubiquity of epistemic dependence in social epistemology, and broad critiques of objectionable hegemony launched from feminist and postmodernist perspectives. This chapter briefly reviews the historical record, connects the cultivation of reason to the educational ideal of critical thinking, spells out the latter ideal, and evaluates these challenges. It ends by sketching a general, “transcendental” reply to all such critiques of reason.

Rhetoric, Commonplacing, and Poetics

Chapter 4 examines a variety of treatises and debates about rhetoric and its value, and whether the art of persuasion could be a dangerous tool in the hands of the unscrupulous or even whether it was a skill that risked corrupting the user, dangers that were identified by Quintilian, whose Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education) shaped so much rhetorical theory and practice in the Renaissance. The chapter explores the practice of commonplacing, noting down particular maxims which could then serve as the basis of explorations of issues, a practice that, like rhetoric, generated anxiety about truth, falsehood, and lying. Particular attention is paid to Erasmus’s Colloquies and Lingua; William Baldwin’s A Treatise of Moral Philosophy, the most popular work of philosophy in sixteenth-century England; the use of commonplaces in Montaigne’s Essays; George Puttenham’s use of proverbs and figures in his Arte of English Poesie (1589); and Sir Philip Sidney’s understanding of poetry as lying in The Defence of Poetry.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6

This is the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. The papers were drawn from the fourth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held November 2–4, 2017. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to agency and responsibility: the threat of neuroscience to free will; the relevance of resentment and guilt to responsibility; how control and self-control pertain to moral agency, oppression, and poverty; responsibility for joint agency; the role and conditions of shame in theories of attributability; how one might take responsibility without blameworthy quality of will; what it means to have standing to blame others; the relevance of moral testimony to moral responsibility; how to build a theory of attributabiity that captures all the relevant cases; and how thinking about blame better enables us to dissolve a dispute in moral philosophy between actualists and possibilists.

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Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self

Even though Kant himself held that his view of the mind and consciousness were inessential to his main purpose, some of the ideas central to his point of view came to have an enormous influence on his successors. Some of his ideas are now central to cognitive science, for example. Other ideas equally central to his point of view had little influence on subsequent work. In this article, first we survey Kant’s model as a whole and the claims in it that have been influential. Then we examine his claims about consciousness of self specifically. Many of his ideas that have not been influential are ideas about the consciousness of self. Indeed, even though he achieved remarkable insights into consciousness of self, many of these insights next appeared only about 200 years later, in the 1960s and 1970s.

1. A Sketch of Kant’s View of the Mind

2.1 transcendental aesthetic, 2.2 metaphysical deduction, 2.3 transcendental deduction, 1 st edition, 2.4 attack on the paralogisms, 1 st edition.

2.5 Two Discussions of the mind in the 2 nd -edition TD and Other Discussions

3.2.1 Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition

3.2.2 synthesis of reproduction in imagination, 3.2.3 synthesis of recognition in a concept, 3.3 synthesis: a 90° turn, 3.4 unity of consciousness, 4.1 thesis 1: two kinds of consciousness of self.

4.2 Thesis 2: Representational Base of Consciousness of Self
4.3 Thesis 3: Conscious Only of How One Appears to Oneself

4.4 Thesis 4: Referential Machinery of Consciousness of Self

4.5 thesis 5: no manifold in consciousness of self, 4.6 thesis 6: consciousness of self is not knowledge of self, 4.7 thesis 7: conscious of self as single, common subject of experience, 5. knowledge of the mind, 6. where kant has and has not influenced contemporary cognitive research, other internet resources, related entries.

In this article, we will focus on Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) work on the mind and consciousness of self and related issues.

Some commentators believe that Kant’s views on the mind are dependent on his idealism (he called it transcendental idealism). For the most part, that is not so. At worst, most of what he said about the mind and consciousness can be detached from his idealism. Though often viewed as a quintessentially German philosopher, Kant is said to have been one-quarter Scottish. Some philosophers (often Scottish) hold that ‘Kant’ is a Germanization of the Scottish name ‘Candt’, though many scholars now reject the idea. It is noteworthy, however, that his work on epistemology, which led him to his ideas about the mind, was a response to Hume as much as to any other philosopher.

In general structure, Kant’s model of the mind was the dominant model in the empirical psychology that flowed from his work and then again, after a hiatus during which behaviourism reigned supreme (roughly 1910 to 1965), toward the end of the 20 th century, especially in cognitive science. Central elements of the models of the mind of thinkers otherwise as different as Sigmund Freud and Jerry Fodor are broadly Kantian, for example.

Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant’s model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.

The mind is a complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)
The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.

These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant’s most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.

To study the mind, infer the conditions necessary for experience. Arguments having this structure are called transcendental arguments .

Translated into contemporary terms, the core of this method is inference to the best explanation, the method of postulating unobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observed behaviour.

To be sure, Kant thought that he could get more out of his transcendental arguments than just ‘best explanations’. He thought that he could get a priori (experience independent) knowledge out of them. Kant had a tripartite doctrine of the a priori. He held that some features of the mind and its knowledge had a priori origins, i.e., must be in the mind prior to experience (because using them is necessary to have experience). That mind and knowledge have these features are a priori truths, i.e., necessary and universal (B3/4) [ 1 ] . And we can come to know these truths, or that they are a priori at any rate, only by using a priori methods, i.e., we cannot learn these things from experience (B3) (Brook 1993). Kant thought that transcendental arguments were a priori or yielded the a priori in all three ways. Nonetheless, at the heart of this method is inference to the best explanation. When introspection fell out of favour about 100 years ago, the alternative approach adopted was exactly this approach. Its nonempirical roots in Kant notwithstanding, it is now the major method used by experimental cognitive scientists.

Other topics equally central to Kant’s approach to the mind have hardly been discussed by cognitive science. These include, as we will see near the end, a kind of synthesis that for Kant was essential to minds like ours and what struck him as the most striking features of consciousness of self. Far from his model having been superseded by cognitive science, some things central to the model have not even been assimilated by it.

2. Kant’s Critical Project and How the Mind Fits Into It

The major works so far as Kant’s views on the mind are concerned are the monumental Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) and his little, late Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View , first published in 1798 only six years before his death. Since the Anthropology was worked up from notes for popular lectures, it is often superficial compared to CPR. Kant’s view of the mind arose from his general philosophical project in CPR the following way. Kant aimed among other things to,

Justify our conviction that physics, like mathematics, is a body of necessary and universal truth.
Insulate religion, including belief in immortality, and free will from the corrosive effects of this very same science.

Kant accepted without reservation that “God, freedom and immortality” (1781/7, Bxxx) exist but feared that, if science were relevant to their existence at all, it would provide reasons to doubt that they exist. As he saw it and very fortunately, science cannot touch these questions. “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge , … in order to make room for faith.” (Bxxx, his italics).

Laying the foundation for pursuit of the first aim, which as he saw it was no less than the aim of showing why physics is a science, was what led Kant to his views about how the mind works. He approached the grounding of physics by asking: What are the necessary conditions of experience (A96)? Put simply, he held that for our experience, and therefore our minds, to be as they are, the way that our experience is tied together must reflect the way that, according to physics, says objects in the world must be tied together. Seeing this connection also tells us a lot about what our minds must be like.

In pursuit of the second aim, Kant criticized some arguments of his predecessors that entailed if sound that we can know more about the mind’s consciousness of itself than Kant could allow. Mounting these criticisms led him to some extraordinarily penetrating ideas about our consciousness of ourselves.

In CPR, Kant discussed the mind only in connection with his main projects, never in its own right, so his treatment is remarkably scattered and sketchy. As he put it, “Enquiry … [into] the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests … is of great importance for my chief purpose, … [but] does not form an essential part of it” (Axvii). Indeed, Kant offers no sustained, focussed discussion of the mind anywhere in his work except the popular Anthropology, which, as we just said, is quite superficial.

In addition, the two chapters of CPR in which most of Kant’s remarks on the mind occur, the chapter on the Transcendental Deduction (TD) and the chapter on what he called Paralogisms (faulty arguments about the mind mounted by his predecessors) were the two chapters that gave him the greatest difficulty. (They contain some of the most impenetrable prose ever written.) Kant completely rewrote the main body of both chapters for the second edition (though not the introductions, interestingly).

In the two editions of CPR, there are seven main discussions of the mind. The first is in the Transcendental Aesthetic, the second is in what is usually called the Metaphysical Deduction (for this term, see below). Then there are two discussions of it in the first-edition TD, in parts 1 to 3 of Section 2 (A98 up to A110) and in the whole of Section 3 (A115-A127) [ 2 ] and two more in the second-edition TD, from B129 to B140 and from B153 to B159, the latter seemingly added as a kind of supplement. The seventh and last is found in the first edition version of Kant’s attack on the Paralogisms, in the course of which he says things of the utmost interest about consciousness of and reference to self. (What little was retained of these remarks in the second edition was moved to the completely rewritten TD.) For understanding Kant on the mind and self-knowledge, the first edition of CPR is far more valuable than the second edition. Kant’s discussion proceeds through the following stages.

Kant calls the first stage the Transcendental Aesthetic. [ 3 ] It is about what space and time must be like, and how we must handle them, if our experience is to have the spatial and temporal properties that it has. This question about the necessary conditions of experience is for Kant a ‘transcendental’ question and the strategy of proceeding by trying to find answers to such questions is, as we said, the strategy of transcendental argument.

Here Kant advances one of his most notorious views: that whatever it is that impinges on us from the mind-independent world does not come located in a spatial nor even a temporal matrix (A37=B54fn.). Rather, it is the mind that organizes this ‘manifold of raw intuition’, as he called it, spatially and temporally. The mind has two pure forms of intuition, space and time, built into it to allow it to do so. (‘Pure’ means ‘not derived from experience’.)

These claims are very problematic. For example, they invite the question, in virtue of what is the mind constrained to locate a bit of information at one spatial or temporal location rather than another? Kant seems to have had no answer to this question (Falkenstein 1995; Brook 1998). Most commentators have found Kant’s claim that space and time are only in the mind, not at all in the mind-independent world, to be implausible.

The activity of locating items in the ‘forms of intuition’, space and time, is one of the three kinds of what Kant called synthesis and discussed in the chapter on the Transcendental Deduction. It is not entirely clear how the two discussions relate.

The Aesthetic is about the conditions of experience, Kant’s official project. The chapter leading up to the Transcendental Deduction, The Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding (but generally called the Metaphysical Deduction because of a remark that Kant once made, B159) has a very different starting point.

Starting from (and, Bvii, taking for granted the adequacy of) Aristotelian logic (the syllogisms and the formal concepts that Aristotle called categories), Kant proceeds by analysis to draw out the implications of these concepts and syllogisms for the conceptual structure (the “function of thought in judgment” (A70=B95)) within which all thought and experience must take place. The result is what Kant called the Categories . That is to say, Kant tries to deduce the conceptual structure of experience from the components of Aristotelian logic.

Thus, in Kant’s thought about the mind early in CPR , there is not one central movement but two, one in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the other in the Metaphysical Deduction. The first is a move up from experience (of objects) to the necessary conditions of such experience. The second is a move down from the Aristotelian functions of judgment to the concepts that we have to use in judging, namely, the Categories. One is inference up from experience, the other deduction down from conceptual structures of the most abstract kind.

Then we get to the second chapter of the Transcendental Logic, the brilliant and baffling Transcendental Deduction (TD). Recall the two movements just discussed, the one from experience to its conditions and the one from Aristotelian functions of judgment to the concepts that we must use in all judging (the Categories). This duality led Kant to his famous question of right ( quid juris) (A84=B116): with what right do we apply the Categories, which are not acquired from experience, to the contents of experience? (A85=B117). Kant’s problem here is not as arcane as it might seem. It reflects an important question: How is it that the world as we experience it conforms to our logic? In briefest form, Kant thought that the trick to showing how it is possible for the Categories to apply to experience is to show that it is necessary that they apply (A97). [ 4 ]

TD has two sides, though Kant never treats them separately. He once called them the objective and the subjective deductions (Axvii). The objective deduction is about the conceptual and other cognitive conditions of having representations of objects. It is Kant’s answer to the quid juris question. Exactly how the objective deduction goes is highly controversial, a controversy that we will sidestep here. The subjective deduction is about what the mind, the “subjective sources” of understanding (A97), must as a consequence be like. The subjective deduction is what mainly interests us.

Kant argues as follows. Our experiences have objects, that is, they are about something. The objects of our experiences are discrete, unified particulars. To have such particulars available to it, the mind must construct them based on sensible input. To construct them, the mind must do three kinds of synthesis. It must generate temporal and spatial structure (Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition). It must associate spatio-temporally structured items with other spatio-temporally structured items (Synthesis of Reproduction in the Imagination). And it must recognize items using concepts, the Categories in particular (Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept). This threefold doctrine of synthesis is one of the cornerstones of Kant’s model of the mind. We will consider it in more detail in the next Section.

The ‘deduction of the categories’ should now be complete. Strangely enough, the chapter has only nicely got started. In the first edition version, for example, we have only reached A106, about one-third of the way through the chapter. At this point, Kant introduces the notion of transcendental apperception for the first time and the unity of such apperception, the unity of consciousness. Evidently, something is happening (something, moreover, not at all well heralded in the text). We will see what when we discuss Kant’s doctrine of synthesis below.

We can now understand in more detail why Kant said that the subjective deduction is inessential (Axvii). Since the objective deduction is about the conditions of representations having objects, a better name for it might have been ‘deduction of the object’. Similarly, a better name for the subjective deduction might have been ‘the deduction of the subject’ or ‘the deduction of the subject’s nature’. The latter enquiry was inessential to Kant’s main critical project because the main project was to defend the synthetic a priori credentials of physics in the objective deduction. From this point of view, anything uncovered about the nature and functioning of the mind was a happy accident.

The chapter on the Paralogisms, the first of the three parts of Kant’s second project, contains Kant’s most original insights into the nature of consciousness of the self. In the first edition, he seems to have achieved a stable position on self-consciousness only as late as this chapter. Certainly his position was not stable in TD. Even his famous term for consciousness of self, ‘I think’, occurs for the first time only in the introduction to the chapter on the Paralogisms. His target is claims that we know what the mind is like. Whatever the merits of Kant’s attack on these claims, in the course of mounting it, he made some very deep-running observations about consciousness and knowledge of self.

To summarize: in the first edition, TD contains most of what Kant had to say about synthesis and unity, but little on the nature of consciousness of self. The chapter on the Paralogisms contains most of what he has to say about consciousness of self.

2.5 The Two Discussions in the 2 nd -edition TD and Other Discussions

As we said, Kant rewrote both TD and the chapter on the Paralogisms for the second edition of CPR , leaving only their introductions intact. In the course of doing so, he moved the topic of consciousness of self from the chapter on the Paralogisms to the second discussion of the mind in the new TD. The new version of the Paralogisms chapter is then built around a different and, so far as theory of mind is concerned, much less interesting strategy. The relationship of the old and new versions of the chapters is complicated (Brook 1994, Ch. 9). Here we will just note that the underlying doctrine of the mind does not seem to change very much.

CPR contains other discussions of the mind, discussions that remained the same in both editions. The appendix on what Kant called Leibniz’ Amphiboly contains the first explicit discussion of an important general metaphysical notion, numerical identity (being one object at and over time), and contains the first argument in CPR for the proposition that sensible input is needed for knowledge. (Kant asserts this many times earlier but assertion is not argument.) In the Antinomies, the discussion of the Second Antinomy contains some interesting remarks about the simplicity of the soul and there is a discussion of free will in the Solution to the Third Antinomy. The mind also appears a few times in the Doctrine of Method, particularly in a couple of glosses of the attack mounted against the Paralogisms. (A784=B812ff is perhaps the most interesting.)

In other new material prepared for the second edition, we find a first gloss on the topic of self-consciousness as early as the Aesthetic (B68). The mind also appears in a new passage called the Refutation of Idealism, where Kant attempts to tie the possibility of one sort of consciousness of self to consciousness of permanence in something other than ourselves, in a way he thought to be inconsistent with Berkeleian idealism. This new Refutation of Idealism has often been viewed as a replacement for the argument against the Fourth Paralogism of the first edition. There are problems with this view, the most important of which is that the second edition still has a separate fourth Paralogism (B409). That said, though the new passage utilizes self-consciousness in a highly original way, it says little that is new about it.

Elsewhere in his work, the only sustained discussion of the mind and consciousness is, as we said, his little, late Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View . By ‘anthropology’ Kant meant the study of human beings from the point of view of their (psychologically-controlled) behaviour, especially their behaviour toward one another, and of the things revealed in behaviour such as character. Though Kant sometimes contrasted anthropology as a legitimate study with what he understood empirical psychology to be, namely, psychology based on introspective observation, he meant by anthropology something fairly close to what we now mean by behavioural or experimental psychology.

3. Kant’s View of the Mind

Turning now to Kant’s view of the mind, we will start with a point about method: Kant held surprisingly strong and not entirely consistent views on the empirical study of the mind. The empirical method for doing psychology that Kant discussed was introspection.

Sometimes he held such study to be hopeless. The key text on psychology is in The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science . There Kant tell us that “the empirical doctrine of the soul … must remain even further removed than chemistry from the rank of what may be called a natural science proper” (Ak. IV:471). (In Kant’s defence, there was nothing resembling a single unified theory of chemical reactions in his time.) The contents of introspection, in his terms inner sense, cannot be studied scientifically for at least five reasons.

First, having only one universal dimension and one that they are only represented to have at that, namely, distribution in time, the contents of inner sense cannot be quantified; thus no mathematical model of them is possible. Second, “the manifold of internal observation is separated only by mere thought”. That is to say, only the introspective observer distinguishes the items one from another; there are no real distinctions among the items themselves. Third, these items “cannot be kept separate” in a way that would allow us to connect them again “at will”, by which Kant presumably means, according to the dictates of our developing theory. Fourth, “another thinking subject [does not] submit to our investigations in such a way as to be conformable to our purposes” – the only thinking subject whose inner sense one can investigate is oneself. Finally and most damningly, “even the observation itself alters and distorts the state of the object observed” (1786, Ak. IV:471). Indeed, introspection can be bad for the health: it is a road to “mental illness” (‘Illuminism and Terrorism’, 1798, Ak. VII:133; see 161).

In these critical passages, it is not clear why he didn’t respect what he called anthropology more highly as an empirical study of the mind, given that he himself did it. He did so elsewhere. In the Anthropology , for example, he links ‘self-observation’ and observation of others and calls them both sources of anthropology (Ak. VII:142–3).

Whatever, no kind of empirical psychology can yield necessary truths about the mind. In the light of this limitation, how should we study the mind? Kant’s answer was: transcendental method using transcendental arguments (notions introduced earlier). If we cannot observe the connections among the denizens of inner sense to any purpose, we can study what the mind must be like and what capacities and structures (in Kant’s jargon, faculties) it must have if it is to represent things as it does. With this method we can find universally true, that is to say, ‘transcendental’ psychological propositions. We have already seen what some of them are: minds must be able to synthesize and minds must have a distinctive unity, for example. Let us turn now to these substantive claims.

3.2 Synthesis and Faculties

We have already discussed Kant’s view of the mind’s handling of space and time, so we can proceed directly to his doctrine of synthesis. As Kant put it in one of his most famous passages, “Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51=B75). Experience requires both percepts and concepts. As we might say now, to discriminate, we need information; but for information to be of any use to us, we must organize the information. This organization is provided by acts of synthesis.

By synthesis, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one knowledge [A77=B103]

If the doctrine of space and time is the first major part of his model of the mind, the doctrine of synthesis is the second. Kant claimed, as we saw earlier, that three kinds of synthesis are required to organize information, namely apprehending in intuition, reproducing in imagination, and recognizing in concepts (A97-A105). Each of the three kinds of synthesis relates to a different aspect of Kant’s fundamental duality of intuition and concept. Synthesis of apprehension concerns raw perceptual input, synthesis of recognition concerns concepts, and synthesis of reproduction in imagination allows the mind to go from the one to the other.

They also relate to three fundamental faculties of the mind. One is the province of Sensibility, one is the province of Understanding, and the one in the middle is the province of a faculty that has a far less settled position than the other two, namely, Imagination (see A120).

The first two, apprehension and reproduction, are inseparable; one cannot occur without the other (A102). The third, recognition, requires the other two but is not required by them. It seems that only the third requires the use of concepts; this problem of non-concept-using syntheses and their relationship to use of the categories becomes a substantial issue in the second edition (see B150ff.), where Kant tries to save the universality of the objective deduction by arguing that all three kinds of syntheses are required to represent objects.

Acts of synthesis are performed on that to which we are passive in experience, namely intuitions ( Anschauungen). Intuitions are quite different from sense-data as classically understood; we can become conscious of intuitions only after acts of synthesis and only by inference from these acts, not directly. Thus they are something more like theoretical entities (better, events) postulated to explain something in what we do recognize. What they explain is the non-conceptual element in representations, an element over which we have no control. Intuitions determine how our representations will serve to confirm or refute theories, aid or impede our efforts to reach various goals.

The synthesis of apprehension is somewhat more shadowy than the other two. In the second edition, the idea does not even appear until §26, i.e., late in TD. At A120, Kant tells us that apprehending impressions is taking them up into the activity of imagination, i.e., into the faculty of the mind that becomes conscious of images. He tells us that we can achieve the kind of differentiation we need to take them up only “in so far as the mind distinguishes the time in the sequence of one impression upon another” (A99). Kant uses the term ‘impression’ ( Eindrucke ) rarely; it seems to be in the same camp as ‘appearance’ ( Erscheinung ) and ‘intuition’ ( Anschauung ).

The idea behind the strange saying just quoted seems to be this. Kant seems to have believed that we can become conscious of only one new item at a time. Thus a group of simultaneous ‘impressions’ all arriving at the same time would be indistinguishable, “for each representation [ Vorstellung ], in so far as it is contained in a single moment , can never be anything but absolute unity” (A99). Kant’s use of Vorstellung , with its suggestion of synthesized, conceptualized organization, may have been unfortunate, but what I think he meant is this. Prior to synthesis and conceptual organization, a manifold of intuitions would be an undifferentiated unit, a seamless, buzzing confusion. Thus, to distinguish one impression from another, we must give them separate locations. Kant speaks only of temporal location but he may very well have had spatial location in mind, too.

The synthesis of apprehension is closely related to the Transcendental Aesthetic. Indeed, it is the doing of what the Aesthetic tells us that the mind has to be able to do with respect to locating items in time and space (time anyway).

The synthesis of reproduction in imagination has two elements, a synthesis proper and associations necessary for performing that synthesis. (Kant explicitly treats them as separate on A125: “recognition, reproduction, association, apprehension”.) Both start from the appearances, as Kant now calls them, which the synthesis of apprehension has located in time. At first glance, the synthesis of reproduction looks very much like memory ; however, it is actually quite different from memory. It is a matter of retaining earlier intuitions in such a way that certain other representations can “bring about a transition of the mind” to these earlier representations, even in the absence of any current representation of them (A100). Such transitions are the result of the setting up of associations (which, moreover, need not be conscious) and do not require memory. Likewise, no recognition of any sort need be involved; that the earlier representations have become associated with later ones is not something that we need recognize. Memory and recognition are the jobs of synthesis of recognition, yet to come.

To our ears now, it is a little strange to find Kant calling this activity of reproduction and the activity of apprehension acts of imagination . Kant describes the function he had in mind as “a blind but indispensable function of the soul” (A78=B103), so he meant something rather different from what we now mean by the term ‘imagination’ (A120 and fn.). For Kant, imagination is a connecting of elements by forming an image: “… imagination has to bring the manifold of intuitions into the form of an image” (A120). If ‘imagination’ is understood in its root sense of image-making and we see imagination not as opposed to but as part of perception, then Kant’s choice of term becomes less peculiar.

The third kind of synthesis is synthesis of recognition in a concept. To experience objects for Kant, first I have to relate the materials out of which they are constructed to one another temporally and spatially. They may not require use of concepts. Then I have to apply at least the following kinds of concepts: concepts of number, of quality, and of modality (I am experiencing something real or fictitious). These are three of the four kinds of concepts that Kant had identified as Categories. Note that we have so far not mentioned the fourth, relational concepts.

In Kant’s view, recognition requires memory; reproduction is not memory but memory does enter now. The argument goes as follows.

[A merely reproduced] manifold of representation would never … form a whole, since it would lack that unity which only consciousness can impart to it. If, in counting, I forget that the units, which now hover before me, have been added to one another in succession, I should never know that a total is being produced through this successive addition of unit to unit … [A103; see A78=B104].

In fact, as this passage tells us, synthesis into an object by an act of recognition requires two things. One is memory. The other is that something in the past representations must be recognized as related to present ones. And to recognize that earlier and later representations are both representing a single object, we must use a concept, a rule (A121, A126). In fact, we must use a number of concepts: number, quality, modality, and, of course, the specific empirical concept of the object we are recognizing.

Immediately after introducing recognition, Kant brings apperception and the unity of apperception into the discussion. The acts by which we achieve recognition under concepts are acts of apperception. By ‘apperception’, Kant means the faculty or capacity for judging in accord with a rule, for applying concepts. Apperceiving is an activity necessary for and parallel to perceiving (A120). This is one of the senses in which Leibniz used the term, too. To achieve recognition of a unified object, the mind must perform an act of judgment; it must find how various represented elements are connected to one another. This judgment is an act of apperception. Apperception is the faculty that performs syntheses of recognition (A115). Note that we are not yet dealing with transcendental apperception.

To sum up: For experiences to have objects, acts of recognition that apply concepts to spatio-temporally ordered material are required. Representation requires recognition. Moreover, objects of representation share a general structure. They are all some number of something, they all have qualities, and they all have an existence-status. (Put this way, Kant’s claim that the categories are required for knowledge looks quite plausible.)

With the synthesis of recognition, TD should be close to complete. Kant merely needs to argue that these concepts must include the categories, which he does at A111, and that should be that.

But that is not that. In fact, as we said earlier, we are only about one-third of the way through the chapter. The syntheses of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition of single objects march in a single temporal/object-generational line. Suddenly at A106 Kant makes a kind of 90 o turn. From the generation of a representation of individual objects of experience over time , he suddenly turns to a form of recognition that requires the unification and recognition of multiple objects existing at the same time. He moves from acts of recognition of individual objects to unified acts of recognition of multiple objects which “stand along side one another in one experience” (A108). This 90 o turn is a pivotal moment in TD and has received less attention than it deserves.

The move that Kant makes next is interesting. He argues that the mind could not use concepts so as to have unified objects of representation if its consciousness were not itself unified (A107–108). Why does consciousness and its unity appear here? We have been exploring what is necessary to have experience. Why would it matter if, in addition, unified consciousness were necessary? As Walker (1978, p. 77) and Guyer (1987, pp. 94–5) have shown, Kant did not need to start from anything about the mind to deduce the Categories. (A famous footnote in The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science [Ak. IV:474fn.] is Kant’s best-known comment on this issue.) So why does he suddenly introduce unified consciousness?

So far Kant has ‘deduced’ only three of the four kinds of categorical concepts, number, quality, and modality. He has said nothing about the relational categories. For Kant, this would have been a crucial gap. One of his keenest overall objectives in CPR is to show that physics is a real science. To do this, he thinks that he needs to show that we must use the concept of causality in experience. Thus, causality is likely the category that he cared more about than all the other categories put together. Yet up to A106, Kant has said nothing about the relational categories in general or causality in particular. By A111, however, Kant is talking about the use of the relational categories and by A112 causality is front and centre. So it is natural to suppose that, in Kant’s view at least, the material between A106 and A111 contains an argument for the necessity of applying the relational categories, even though he never says so.

Up to A106, Kant has talked about nothing but normal individual objects: a triangle and its three sides, a body and its shape and impenetrability. At A107, he suddenly begins to talk about tying together multiple represented objects, indeed “all possible appearances, which can stand alongside one another in one experience” (A108). The solution to the problem of showing that we have to use the category of causality must lie somewhere in this activity of tying multiple objects together.

The passage between A106 and A111 is blindingly difficult. It takes up transcendental apperception, the unity and identity of the mind, and the mind’s consciousness of itself as the subject of all its representations (A106–108). I think that this passage introduces either a new stage or even a new starting point for TD. Here many commentators (Strawson, Henrich, Guyer) would think immediately of self-consciousness. Kant did use consciousness of self as a starting point for deductions, at B130 in the B-edition for example. But that is not what appears here, not in the initial paragraphs anyway.

What Kant does say is this. Our experience is “one experience”; “all possible appearances … stand alongside one another in one experience” (A108). We have “one and the same general experience” of “all … the various perceptions” (A110), “a connected whole of human knowledge” (A121). Let us call this general experience a global representation .

Transcendental apperception (hereafter TA) now enters. It is the ability to tie ‘all appearances’ together into ‘one experience’.

This transcendental unity of apperception forms out of all possible appearances, which can stand alongside one another in one experience, a connection of all these representations according to laws. [A108]

It performs a “synthesis of all appearances according to concepts”, “whereby it subordinates all synthesis of apprehension … to a transcendental unity” (A108). This, he thought, requires unified consciousness. Unified consciousness is required for another reason, too. Representations

can [so much as] represent something to me only in so far as they belong with all others to one consciousness. Therefore, they must at least be capable of being so connected [A116].

The introduction of unified consciousness opens up an important new opportunity. Kant can now explore the necessary conditions of conscious content being unified in this way. To make a long story short, Kant now argues that conscious content could have the unity that it does only if the contents themselves are tied together causally. [ 5 ]

With this, his deduction of the relational categories is complete and his defence of the necessity of physics is under way. The notion of unified consciousness to which Kant is appealing here is interesting in its own right, so let us turn to it next. [ 6 ]

For Kant, consciousness being unified is a central feature of the mind, our kind of mind at any rate. In fact, being a single integrated group of experiences (roughly, one person’s experiences) requires two kinds of unity.

The consciousness that this subject has of represented objects and/or representations must be unified.

The first requirement may look trivial but it is not. For Hume, for example, what makes a group of experiences one person’s experiences is that they are associated with one another in an appropriate way (the so-called bundle theory), not that they have a common subject. The need for a subject arises from two straightforward considerations: representations not only represent something, they represent it to someone; and, representations are not given to us – to become a representation, sensory inputs must be processed by an integrated cognitive system. Kant may have been conscious of both these points, but beyond identifying the need, he had little to say about what the subject of experience might be like, so we will say no more about it. (We will, however, say something about what its consciousness of itself is like later.)

Kant seems to have used the terms ‘ unity of consciousness ’ (A103) and ‘unity of apperception’ (A105, A108) interchangeably. The well-known argument at the beginning of the first edition attack on the second paralogism (A352) focuses on this unity at a given time (among other things) and what can (or rather, cannot) be inferred from this about the nature of the mind (a topic to which we will return below). The attack on the third paralogism focuses on what can be inferred from unified consciousness over time. These are all from the first edition of CPR . In the second edition, Kant makes remarks about unity unlike anything in the first edition, for example, “this unity … is not the category of unity” (B131). The unity of consciousness and Kant’s views on it are complicated issues but some of the most important points include the following.

By ‘unity of consciousness’, Kant seems to have the following in mind: I am conscious not only of single experiences but of a great many experiences at the same time. The same is true of actions; I can do and be conscious of doing a number of actions at the same time. In addition to such synchronic unity, many global representations, as we called them, display temporal unity: current representation is combined with retained earlier representation. (Temporal unity is often a feature of synthesis of recognition.) Any representation that we acquire in a series of temporal steps, such as hearing a sentence, will have unity across time (A104; A352).

Kant himself did not explicate his notion of unified consciousness but here is one plausible articulation of the notion at work in his writings.

The unity of consciousness = df. (i) a single act of consciousness, which (ii) makes one conscious of a number of representations and/or objects of representation in such a way that to be conscious by having any members of this group is also to be conscious by having others in the group and of at least some of them as a group.

As this definition makes clear, consciousness being unified is more than just being one state of consciousness. Unified consciousness is not just singular, it is unified.

Kant placed great emphasis on the unity of consciousness, both positively and negatively. Positively, he held that conceptualized representation has to be unified both at and across time. Negatively, from a mind having unified consciousness, he held that nothing follows concerning its composition, its identity, especially its identity across time , nor its materiality or immateriality. He argued these points in his attacks on the second, third and fourth Paralogisms.

4. Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self

Many commentators hold that consciousness of self is central to the Critical philosophy. There is reason to question this: unified consciousness is central, but consciousness of self? That is not so clear. Whatever, the topic is intrinsically interesting and Kant achieved some remarkable insights into it. Strangely, none of his immediate successors took them up after his death and they next appeared at the earliest in Wittgenstein (1934–5) and perhaps not until Shoemaker (1968). Kant never discussed consciousness of self in its own right, only in the context of pursuing other objectives, and his remarks on the topic are extremely scattered. When we pull his various remarks together, we can see that Kant advanced at least seven major theses about consciousness of and knowledge of self . We will consider them one-by-one.

The first thesis:

There are two kinds of consciousness of self: consciousness of oneself and one’s psychological states in inner sense and consciousness of oneself and one’s states via performing acts of apperception.

Kant’s term for the former was ‘empirical self-consciousness’. A leading term for the latter was ‘transcendental apperception’ (TA). (Kant used the term ‘TA’ in two very different ways, as the name for a faculty of synthesis and as the name for what he also referred to as the ‘I think’, namely, one’s consciousness of oneself as subject.) Here is a passage from the Anthropology in which Kant distinguishes the two kinds of consciousness of self very clearly:

… the “I” of reflection contains no manifold and is always the same in every judgment … Inner experience , on the other hand, contains the matter of consciousness and a manifold of empirical inner intuition: … [1798, Ak. VII:141–2, emphases in the original].

The two kinds of consciousness of self have very different sources.

The source of empirical self-consciousness is what Kant called inner sense. He did not work out his notion of inner sense at all well. Here are just a few of the problems. Kant insists that all representational states are in inner sense, including those representing the objects of outer sense (i.e., spatially located objects):

Whatever the origins of our representations, whether they are due to the influence of outer things, or are produced through inner causes, whether they arise a priori , or being appearances have an empirical origin, they must all, as modifications of the mind, belong to inner sense. [A98–9]

However, he also says that the object of inner sense is the soul, the object of outer sense the body (including one’s own). He comes close to denying that we can be conscious of the denizens of inner sense—they do not represent inner objects and have no manifold of their own. Yet he also says that we can be conscious of them — representations can themselves be objects of representations, indeed, representations can make us conscious of themselves. In its role as a form of or means to consciousness of self, apperception ought to be part of inner sense. Yet Kant regularly contrasted apperception, a means to consciousness of oneself and one’s acts of thinking, with inner sense as a means to consciousness of—what? Presumably, particular representations: perceptions, imaginings, memories, etc. Here is another passage from the Anthropology :

§24. Inner sense is not pure apperception, consciousness of what we are doing; for this belongs to the power of thinking. It is, rather, consciousness of what we undergo as we are affected by the play of our own thoughts. This consciousness rests on inner intuition, and so on the relation of ideas (as they are either simultaneous or successive). [1798, Ak. VII:161]

Kant makes the same distinction in CPR :

… the I that I think is distinct from the I that it, itself, intuits …; I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intuition, and yet know myself, like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself, not as I am … [B155].

Since most of Kant’s most interesting remarks about consciousness of and knowledge of self concern consciousness of oneself, the ‘I of reflection’ via acts of apperception, we will focus on it, though empirical consciousness of self will appear again briefly from time to time.

4.2 Thesis 2: Representational Base of Consciousness of Oneself and One’s States

How does apperception give rise to consciousness of oneself and one’s states? In the passage just quoted from the Anthropology, notice the phrase “consciousness of what we are doing” — doing. The way in which one becomes conscious of an act of representing is not by receiving intuitions but by doing it: “synthesis …, as an act, … is conscious to itself, even without sensibility” (B153); “… this representation is an act of spontaneity , that is, it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility” (B132).

Equally, we can be conscious of ourselves as subject merely by doing acts of representing. No further representation is needed.

Man, … who knows the rest of nature solely through the senses, knows himself also through pure apperception; and this, indeed, in acts and inner determinations which he cannot regard as impressions of the senses [A546=B574].

How does one’s consciousness of oneself in one’s acts of representing work? Consider the sentence:

I am looking at the words on the screen in front of me.

Kant’s claim seems to be that the representation of the words on the screen is all the experience I need to be conscious not just of the words and the screen but also of the act of seeing them and of who is seeing them, namely, me. A single representation can do all three jobs. Let us call an act of representing that can make one conscious of its object, itself and oneself as its subject the representational base of consciousness of these three items. [ 7 ] Kant’s second major thesis is,

Most ordinary representations generated by most ordinary acts of synthesis provide the representational base of consciousness of oneself and one’s states.

Note that this representational base is the base not only of consciousness of one’s representational states. It is also the base of consciousness of oneself as the subject of those states—as the thing that has and does them. Though it is hard to know for sure, Kant would probably have denied that consciousness of oneself in inner sense can make one conscious of oneself as subject, of oneself as oneself, in this way.

For Kant, this distinction between consciousness of oneself and one’s states by doing acts of synthesis and consciousness of oneself and one’s states as the objects of particular representations is of fundamental importance. When one is conscious of oneself and one’s states by doing cognitive and perceptual acts, one is conscious of oneself as spontaneous, rational, self-legislating, free—as the doer of deeds, not just as a passive receptacle for representations: “I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination” (B158–159), of “the activity of the self” (B68) (Sellars, 1970–1; Pippin, 1987).

So far we have focussed on individual representations. For Kant, however, the representations that serve as the representational base of consciousness of oneself as subject are usually much ‘bigger’ than that, i.e., contain multiple objects and often multiple representations of them tied together into what Kant called ‘general experience’.

When we speak of different experiences, we can refer only to the various perceptions, all of which belong to one and the same general experience. This thoroughgoing synthetic unity of perceptions is the form of experience; it is nothing less than the synthetic unity of appearances in accordance with concepts [A110].

This general experience is the global representation introduced earlier. When I am conscious of many objects and/or representations of them as the single object of a single global representation, the latter representation is all the representation I need to be conscious not just of the global object but also of myself as the common subject of all the constituent representations.

The mind could never think its identity in the manifoldness of its representations… if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its act, whereby it subordinates all [the manifold] … to a transcendental unity… [A108].

I am conscious of myself as the single common subject of a certain group of experiences by being conscious of “the identity of the consciousness in … conjoined … representations” (B133).

4.3 Thesis 3: Consciousness in Inner Sense is Only of How One Appears to Oneself

Neither consciousness of self by doing apperceptive acts nor empirical consciousness of self as the object of particular representations yields knowledge of oneself as one is. On pain of putting his right to believe in immortality as an article of faith at risk, Kant absolutely had to claim this. As he put it,

it would be a great stumbling block, or rather would be the one unanswerable objection, to our whole critique if it were possible to prove a priori that all thinking beings are in themselves simple substances. [B409]

The same would hold for all other properties of thinking beings. Since Kant also sometimes viewed immortality, i.e., personal continuity beyond death, as a foundation of morality, morality could also be at risk. So Kant had powerful motives to maintain that one does not know oneself as one is. Yet, according to him, we seem to know at least some things about ourselves, namely, how we must function, and it would be implausible to maintain that one never conscious of one’s real self at all. Kant’s response to these pressures is ingenious.

First, he treats inner sense: When we know ourselves as the object of a representation in inner sense, we “know even ourselves only .. as appearance …” (A278).

Inner … sense … represents to consciousness even our own selves only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves. For we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected [by ourselves] (B153).

This is the third thesis:

In inner sense, one is conscious of oneself only as one appears to oneself, not as one is.

So when we seem to be directly conscious of features of ourselves, we in fact have the same kind of consciousness of them as we have of features of things in general—we appear to ourselves to be like this, that or the other, in just the way that we know of any object only as it appears to us.

Then he turns to consciousness of oneself and one’s states by doing apperceptive acts. This is a knottier problem. Here we will consider only consciousness of oneself as subject. Certainly by the second edition, Kant had come to see how implausible it would be to maintain that one has no consciousness of oneself, one’s real self, at all when one is conscious of oneself as the subject of one’s experience, agent of one’s acts, by having these experiences and doing those acts. In the 2 nd edition, he reflects this sensitivity as early as B68; at B153, he goes so far as to say that an apparent contradiction is involved.

Furthermore, when we are conscious of ourselves as subject and agent by doing acts of apperceiving, we do appear to ourselves to be substantial, simple and continuing. He had to explain these appearances away; doing so was one of his aims, indeed, in his attacks on the second and third Paralogisms. Thus, Kant had strong motives to give consciousness of self as subject special treatment. The view that proposes is puzzling. I am not consciousness of myself as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself but only “that I am” (B157). To understand what he might mean here, we need a couple of intermediate theses. They contain the remarkable insights into reference to and consciousness of self mentioned earlier.

Kant generated the special treatment he needed by focussing first on reference to self. Here are some of the things that he said about reference to oneself as subject. It is a consciousness of self in which “nothing manifold is given.” (B135). In the kind of reference in which we gain this consciousness of self, we “denote” but do not “represent” ourselves (A382). We designate ourselves without noting “any quality whatsoever” in ourselves (A355). This yields his fourth thesis about consciousness of and knowledge of self.

The referential machinery used to obtain consciousness of self as subject requires no identifying (or other) ascription of properties to oneself.

This is a remarkably penetrating claim; remember, the study of reference and semantics generally is usually thought to have begun only with Frege. Kant is anticipating two important theses about reference to self that next saw the light of day only 200 years later.

In such cases, first-person indexicals (I, me, my, mine) cannot be analysed out in favour of anything else, in particular anything descriptionlike (the essential indexical) (Perry 1979).

Was Kant actually aware of (1) and/or (2) or had he just stumbled across something that later philosophers recognized as significant?

One standard argument for (1) goes as follows:

My use of the word ‘I’ as the subject of [statements such as ‘I feel pain’ or ‘I see a canary’] is not due to my having identified as myself something [otherwise recognized] of which I know, or believe, or wish to say, that the predicate of my statement applies to it [Shoemaker 1968, pp.558].

A standard argument for (2), that certain indexicals are essential, goes as follows. To know that I wrote a certain book a few years ago, it is not enough to know that someone over six feet tall wrote that book, or that someone who teaches philosophy at a particular university wrote that book, or … or … or … , for I could know all these things without knowing that it was me who has these properties (and I could know that it was me who wrote that book and not know that any of these things are properties of me). As Shoemaker puts it,

… no matter how detailed a token-reflexive-free description of a person is, … it cannot possibly entail that I am that person [1968, pp. 560].

Kant unquestionably articulated the argument for (1):

In attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts, we designate the subject only transcendentally … without noting in it any quality whatsoever—in fact, without knowing anything of it either directly or by inference [A355].

This transcendental designation, i.e., referring to oneself using ‘I’ without ‘noting any quality’ in oneself, has some unusual features. One can refer to oneself in a variety of ways, of course: as the person in the mirror, as the person born on such and such a date in such and such a place, as the first person to do X , and so on, but one way of referring to oneself is special: it does not require identifying or indeed any ascription to oneself. So Kant tells us. [ 9 ]

The question is more complicated with respect to (2). We cannot go into the complexities here (see Brook 2001). Here we will just note three passages in which Kant may be referring to the essential indexical or something like it.

The subject of the categories cannot by thinking the categories [i.e. applying them to objects] acquire a concept of itself as an object of the categories. For in order to think them, its pure self-consciousness, which is what was to be explained, must itself be presupposed. [B422]

The phrase ‘its pure self-consciousness’ seems to refer to consciousness of oneself as subject. If so, the passage may be saying that judgments about oneself, i.e., ascriptions of properties to oneself, ‘presuppose … pure self-consciousness’, i.e., consciousness of oneself via an act of ascription-free transcendental designation.

Now compare this, “it is … very evident that I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose to know any object … .” (A402), and this,

Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X . It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation. [A346=B404]

The last clause is the key one: “any judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation”. Kant seems to be saying that to know that anything is true of me, I must first know that it is me of whom it is true. This is something very like the essential indexical claim.

If reference to self takes place without ‘noting any properties’ of oneself, the consciousness that results will also have some special features.

The most important special feature is that, in this kind of consciousness of self, one is not, or need not be, conscious of any properties of oneself, certainly not any particular properties. One has the same consciousness of self no matter what else one is conscious of — thinking, perceiving, laughing, being miserable, or whatever. Kant expressed the thought this way,

through the ‘I’, as simple representation, nothing manifold is given. [B135]

the I that I think is distinct from the I that it … intuits …; I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intuition. [B155]

We now have the fifth thesis to be found in Kant:

When one is conscious of oneself as subject, one has a bare consciousness of self in which “nothing manifold is given.”

Since, on Kant’s view, one can refer to oneself as oneself without knowing any properties of oneself, not just identifying properties, ‘non-ascriptive reference to self’ might capture what is special about this form of consciousness of self better than Shoemaker’s ‘self-reference without identification’.

Transcendental designation immediately yields the distinction that Kant needs to allow that one is conscious of oneself as one is, not just of an appearance of self, and yet deny knowledge of oneself as one is. If consciousness of self ascribes nothing to the self, it can be a “bare … consciousness of self [as one is]” and yet yield no knowledge of self—it is “very far from being a knowledge of the self” (B158). This thesis returns us to consciousness of self as subject:

When one is conscious of oneself as subject, one’s bare consciousness of self yields no knowledge of self.

In Kant’s own work, he then put the idea of transcendental designation to work to explain how one can appear to oneself to be substantial, simple and persisting without these appearances reflecting how one actually is. The reason that one appears in these ways is not that the self is some strange, indefinable being. It is because of the kind of referring that we do to become conscious of oneself as subject. Given how long ago he worked, Kant’s insights into this kind of referring are nothing short of amazing.

The last of Kant’s seven theses about consciousness of self is an idea that we already met when we discussed the unity of consciousness:

When we are conscious of ourselves as subject, we are conscious of ourselves as the “single common subject” [CPR, A350] of a number of representations.

What Kant likely had in mind is nicely captured in a remark of Bennett’s (1974, p. 83): to think of myself as a plurality of things is to think of my being conscious of this plurality, “and that pre-requires an undivided me .” Unlike one of anything else, it is not optional that I think of myself as one subject across a variety of experiences (A107).

The remarks just noted about ‘bare consciousness’ and so on by no means exhaust the concerns that can be raised about Kant and what we can know about the mind. His official view has to be: nothing — about the mind’s structure and what it is composed of, at any rate, we can know nothing. As we have seen, Kant not only maintained this but did some ingenious wiggling to account for the apparent counter-evidence. But that is not the end of the story, for two reasons.

First, whatever the commitments of his philosophy, Kant the person believed that the soul is simple and persists beyond death; he found materialism utterly repugnant (1783, Ak. IV, end of §46). This is an interesting psychological fact about Kant but needs no further discussion.

Second and more importantly, Kant in fact held that we do have knowledge of the mind as it is. In particular, we know that it has forms of intuition in which it must locate things spatially and temporally, that it must synthesize the raw manifold of intuition in three ways, that its consciousness must be unified, and so on — all the aspects of the model examined above.

To square his beliefs about what we cannot know and what we do know about the mind, Kant could have made at least two moves. He could have said that we know these things only ‘transcendentally’, that is to say, by inference to the necessary conditions of experience. We do not know them directly, in some sense of ‘directly’, so we don’t have intuitive, i.e., sense-derived knowledge of them. Or he could have said that ontological neutrality about structure and composition is compatible with knowledge of function. As we saw, Kant’s conception of the mind is functionalist—to understand the mind, we must study what it does and can do, its functions—and the doctrine that function does not dictate form is at the heart of contemporary functionalism. According to functionalism, we can gain knowledge of the mind’s functions while knowing little or nothing about how the mind is built. Approached this way, Kant’s view that we know nothing of the structure and composition of the mind would just be a radical version of this functionalist idea. Either move would restore consistency among his various claims about knowledge of the mind.

We will close by returning to the question of Kant’s relationship to contemporary cognitive research. As we saw, some of Kant’s most characteristic doctrines about the mind are now built into the very foundations of cognitive science. We laid out what they were. Interestingly, some of the others have played little or no role.

Consider the two forms of Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept. In the form of binding, the phenomenon that he had in mind in the first kind of synthesis is now widely studied. Indeed, one model, Anne Treisman’s (1980) three-stage model, is very similar to all three stages of synthesis in Kant. According to Treisman and her colleagues, object recognition proceeds in three stages: first feature detection, then location of features on a map of locations, and then integration and identification of objects under concepts. This compares directly to Kant’s three-stage model of apprehension of features, association of features (reproduction), and recognition of integrated groups of under concepts (A98-A106). However, Kant’s second kind of recognition under concepts, the activity of tying multiple representations together into a global representation (A107–14), has received little attention.

The same was true until recently of the unity of consciousness and Kant’s work on it. However, this is changing. In the past twenty years, the unity of consciousness has come back onto the research agenda and there are now hundreds of papers and a number of books on the topic. However, claims such as Kant’s that a certain form of synthesis and certain links among the contents of experience are required for unity continue to be ignored in cognitive science, though a few philosophers have done some work on them (Brook 2004). The same is true of Kant’s views on consciousness of self; cognitive science has paid no attention to non-ascriptive identification of self and the idea of the essential indexical. Here, too, a few philosophers have worked on these issues, apparently without knowing of Kant’s contribution (Brook & DeVidi, 2001), but not cognitive scientists.

In short, the dominant model of the mind in contemporary cognitive science is Kantian, but some of his most distinctive contributions have not been taken into it (Brook, 2004).

Primary Literature

The Cambridge Edition of the Work of Immanuel Kant in Translation has translations into English complete with scholarly apparatus of nearly all Kant’s writings. It is probably the best single source for Kant’s works in English. Except for references to the Critique of Pure Reason , all references will include the volume number and where appropriate the page number of the Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Koniglichen Preussischen Academie der Wissenschaften, 29 Vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter et al., 1902– [in the format, Ak. XX:yy]).

Kant, I. (1781/1787) Critique of Pure Reason , P. Guyer and A. Wood (trans.), Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (The passages quoted in the article above generally follow this translation and/or the Kemp Smith translation but all translations were checked.) References to CPR are in the standard pagination of the 1 st (A) and 2 nd (B) editions. A reference to only one edition means that the passage appeared only in that edition.)
Kant, I. (1783) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics , P. Carus (trans.), revised and with an Introduction by James Ellington, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishers, 1977 (Ak. IV).
Kant, I. (1786) The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science , translated and with an Introduction by James Ellington, Indianapolis, IN: Library of Liberal Arts, 1970. (Ak. IV).
Kant, I. (1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View , Mary Gregor (trans.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974 (Ak. VII).

Works on Kant on the Mind and Consciousness

Thanks to Julian Wuerth for help with this section.

In the past two decades alone, of the order of 45,000 new books and new editions by or about Kant have been published. Thus, any bibliography is bound to be incomplete. In what follows, we have focused on books of the past ten years or so in English that are having an influence, along with a few important earlier commentaries. General bibliographies are readily available on the websites listed later.

Allais, Lucy, 2009. “Kant, Non-Conceptual Content and the Representation of Space”, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 47(3): 383–413.
–––, 2015. Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Allison, H., 1983 [2004]. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense , 1st edition 1983, 2nd edition 2004, New Haven: Yale University Press.
–––, 1990. Kant’s Theory of Freedom , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2015. Kant’s Transcendental Deduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Altman, M. C., 2007. A Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , Boulder, CO: Westview Press
Ameriks, K., 1983. “Kant and Guyer on Apperception”, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 65: 174–86.
–––, 1990. “Kant, Fichte, and Short Arguments to Idealism”, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 72: 63–85.
–––, 2000. Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason , 2 nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2006. Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy As Critical Interpretation , Oxford: Oxford University Press
Aquila, Richard, 1989. Matter in Mind , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Banham, G., 2006. Kant’s Transcendental Imagination , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Beck, L. W., 2002. Selected Essays on Kant (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 6), Rochester NY: North American Kant Society. [NAKS has published an excellent series of roughly annual books on Kant. Some more examples will be cited below.]
Beiser, F. C., 2006. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Bennett, J., 1966. Kant’s Analytic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 1974. Kant’s Dialectic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bird, G., 2006. The Revolutionary Kant , Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing
–––, 2009. A Companion to Kant , Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Brook, A., 1993. “Kant’s A Priori Methods for Recognizing Necessary Truths”, in Return of the A Priori , Philip Hanson and Bruce Hunter (eds.), Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume), 18: 215–52.
–––, 1994. Kant and the Mind , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 1998. “Critical Notice of L. Falkenstein, Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic ”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 29: 247–68.
–––, 2001. “Kant on self-reference and self-awareness”, in A. Brook and R. DeVidi (eds.) 2001.
–––, 2004. “Kant, cognitive science, and contemporary neo-Kantianism”, in D. Zahavi (ed.), Journal of Consciousness Studies (special issue), 11: 1–25.
Buroker, J. V., 2006. Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caranti, L., 2007. Kant and the Scandal of Philosophy: The Kantian Critique of Cartesian Scepticism (Toronto Studies in Philosophy), Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Carl, Wolfgang, 1989. Der Schweigende Kant: Die Entwürfe zu einer Deduktion der Kategorien vor 1781 , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Caygill, H., 1995. A Kant Dictionary , Oxford: Blackwell Publishers
Chignell, Andrew, 2017. “Can’t Kant Cognize himself? Or, A Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism”, in Kant and the Philosophy of Mind , A. Gomes and A. Stephenson (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Choi, Yoon, 2019. “Spontaneity and Self-Consciousness in the Groundwork and the B-Critique ”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 49(7): 936–955.
Cohen, A., 2009. Kant and the Human Sciences: Biology, Anthropology and History , Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.
–––, 2014. Kant on Emotions and Value , Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.
–––, 2014. Critical Guide to Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deimling, Wiebke, 2014. “Kant’s Pragmatic Concept of Emotions,” in Kant on Emotion and Value , Alix Cohen (ed.), London: Palgrave Macmillan.
–––, 2018. “Two Different Kinds of Value? Kant on Feeling and Moral Cognition”, Kant and the Faculty of Feeling , Kelly Sorensen and Diane Williamson (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dickerson, A.B., 2007. Kant on Representation and Objectivity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Dyck, Corey W., 2014. Kant and Rational Psychology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Easton, P.A. (ed.), 1997. Logic and the Workings of the Mind (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy: Volume 5), Rochester NA: North American Kant Society.
Emundts, Dina, 2017. “Kant’s Ideal of Self-Knowledge,” in Self-Knowledge. A History , Ursula Renz (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 183–198.
–––, 2013. “Kant über Selbstbewusstsein”, in Self, World, Art. Metaphysical Topics in Kant and Hegel , Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 51–78.
Falkenstein, L., 1995. Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Forster, M. N., 2008. Kant and Skepticism , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press
Friedman, M., 1992. Kant and the Exact Sciences , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press
Frierson, Patrick R., 2003. Freedom and Anthropology in Kant’s Moral Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, S., 2012. Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks), London: Routledge Francis Taylor.
Ginsborg, H., 1990. The Role of Taste in Kant’s Theory of Cognition (Routledge Library Editions: Kant). London: Routledge Francis Taylor.
Glock, H.-J., 2003. Strawson and Kant (Mind Association Occasional Series), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldman, A., 2012. Kant and the Subject of Critique: On the Regulative Role of the Psychological Idea , South Bend, IN: University of Indiana Press.
Grier, M., 2007. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Modern European Philosophy), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guyer, P., 1980. “Kant on Apperception and A Priori Synthesis.” American Philosophical Quarterly , 17: 205–12.
–––, 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2005. Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays , Oxford: Oxford University Press
–––, 2006. Kant (Series: Routledge Philosophers), London: Routledge Taylor
–––, 1987. The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
–––, 2008. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press
Guyer, P. (ed.), 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Kant , Cambridge:Cambridge University Press
––– (ed.), 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, B., M. Black and M. Sheffield, 2010. The Arguments of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Hanna, R., 2004. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2006. Kant, Science, and Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2015. The Rational Human Condition 5—Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heidemann, D., 2012. Kant and Non-Conceptual Content , London: Routledge Taylor Francis.
Hems, N., D. Schulting and G. Banham (eds.), 2012. The Continuum Companion to Kant , London: Continuum Publishers.
Henrich, D., 1976. Identität und Objektivität , Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitäts-Verlag.
Höffe, Otfried, 1994. Immanuel Kant , Marshall Farrier (trans.), Albany: SUNY Press.
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, 1993. “Kants Paralogismen”, Kant-Studien , 84: 408-25.
Hogan, Desmond, 2009. “How to Know Unknowable Things in Themselves”, Noûs , 43(1): 49–63.
Howell, R., 1992. Kant’s Transcendental Deduction , Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers
–––, (2001). “Kant, the ‘I Think’, and Self-Awareness”, in Kant’s Legacy. Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck , Cicovacki, Predrag (ed.), Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 117–152.
Huneman, P., 2007. Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy: Volume 9), Rochester NA: North American Kant Society.
Jacobs, B. and Kain, P. (eds.), 2007. Essays on Kant’s Anthropology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Jauernig, Anja, 2019. “Finite minds and their representations in Leibniz and Kant”, in Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism , Sally Sedgwick and Dina Edmundts (eds.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 47–80.
Keller, P., 1998. Kant and the Demands of Self-consciousness , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kitcher, P., 1984. “Kant’s Real Self,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy , Allen W. Wood (ed.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 113–147.
–––, 1990. Kant’s Transcendental Psychology , New York: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2011. Kant’s Thinker , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kleingeld, P., 2011. Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klemme, Heiner, 1996. Kants Philosophie des Subjekts. Systematische und entwicklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Selbstbewußtsein und Selbsterkenntnis , Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Kneller, J., 2007. Kant and the Power of Imagination , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Korsgaard, Christine M., 1990. The Standpoint of Practical Reason , New York: Garland.
–––, 1989. “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit”, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 18(2): 101–132.
–––, 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kraus, Katharina, 2019. “The Parity and Disparity between Inner and Outer Experience in Kant”, Kantian Review 24(2): 171–195.
–––, 2020. Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation: The Nature of Inner Experience , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kreimendahl, Lothar, 1990. Kant—Der Durchbruch von 1769 , Köln: Jürgen Dinter.
Kuehn, M., 2001. Kant: A Biography , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kukla, R. (ed.), 2006. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Laywine, A., 1993. Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy: Volume 3), Rochester NA: North American Kant Society.
Longuenesse, Béatrice, 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason , Charles T. Wolfe (trans.), Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
–––, 2005. Kant on the Human Standpoint , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2007. “Kant’s ‘I think’ versus Descartes’ ‘I am a Thing that Thinks’”, in Kant and the Early Moderns , Beatrice Longuenesse and Daniel Garber (eds.), Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 9–31.
–––, 2017. I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Louden, R., 2011. Kant’s Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marshall, Colin, 2013. “Kant’s one self and the appearance/thing in itself distinction,” Kant-Studien , 104(4): 421–441.
McLear, Colin, 2011. “Kant on Animal Consciousness,” Philosophers’ Imprint , 11(15): 1–16.
Melnick, Arthur, 2009. Kant’s Theory of the Self , New York: Routledge Taylor Francis.
Meerbote, R., 1989. “Kant’s functionalism,” in J. C.Smith (ed.), Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science , Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel.
–––, 1982. “Wille and Willkür in Kant’s Theory of Action,” in Moltke S. Gram (ed.), Interpreting Kant , Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 69–84.
Merritt, Melissa, 2018. Kant on Reflection and Virtue , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mohr, Georg, 1991. Das sinnliche Ich. Innerer Sinn und Bewußtsein bei Kant , Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann.
Neiman, Susan, 1997. The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Newton, Alexandra, 2019. “Kant and the transparency of the mind,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 49(7): 890–915.
Peters, Julia, 2018. “Kant’s Gesinnung”, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 56(3): 497–518.
Pippin, R., 1987. “Kant on the spontaneity of mind”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 17: 449–476.
–––, 1982. Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason , New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Powell, C. Thomas, 1990. Kant’s Theory of Self-Consciousness , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Proops, Ian, 2010. “Kant’s First Paralogism”, Philosophical Review , 11: 449–95.
Reinhold, Carl Leonhard, 1790 [1975]. “Erörterung des Begriffs von der Freiheit des Willens”, in Materialien zu Kants “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft” , Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer (eds.), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Rosefeldt, Tobias, 2000. Das logische Ich: Kant über den Gehalt des Begriffes von sich selbst (Monographien zur philosophischen Forschung), Berlin: Philo.
Rosenberg, Jay F., 1987. “‘I Think’: Some Reflections on Kant’s Paralogisms”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy , 10: 503–30.
Sassen, B., 2000. Kant’s Early Critics , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Schwyzer, Hubert, 1990. The Unity of Understanding: A Study in Kantian Problems , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Scruton, R., 2011. Kant , New York: Sterling Publishers.
Sedgwick, S., 2007. The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Senderovicz, Y.M., 2005. The Coherence of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (Studies in German Idealism), Berlin: Springer.
Sellars, W., 1970. “…this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks…”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association , 44: 5–31.
Serck-Hanssen, Camilla, 2009. “Kant on Consciousness”, in Psychology and Philosophy , Sara Heinämaa (ed.), Berlin: Springer, 139–157.
Sgarbi, M., 2012. Kant on Spontaneity , London: Continuum Press.
Shell, Susan Meld, 1996. The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sidgwick, Henry, 1888. “The Kantian Conception of Free Will”, Mind , 13: 405–12.
Smit, Houston, 2019. “Kant’s ‘I think’ and the agential approach to self-knowledge”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 49(7): 980–1011.
Stapleford, S., 2008. Kant’s Transcendental Arguments: Disciplining Pure Reason (Continuum Studies in Philosophy), London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group
Strawson, P. F., 1966. The Bounds of Sense , London: Methuen.
Sturm, Thomas, 2017. “Reines und empirisches Selbstbewusstsein in Kants Anthropologie: Das ‘Ich’ und die rationale Charakterentwicklung”, Kant-Studien (Ergänzungshefte), 197: 195–220.
Tester, Steven, 2016. “Mental Powers and the Soul in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and the Second Paralogism”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy , 46(3): 426–452.
Thiel, Udo, 2011. The Early Modern Subject. Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ujvari, Marta, 1984. “Personal Identity Reconsidered,” Kant-Studien , 75: 328-39.
van Cleve, J., 2003. Problems from Kant , Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
Walker, R. C. S., 1978. Kant , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Watkins, E., 2009. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ward, A., 2012. Starting with Kant , London: Continuum Press.
Waxman, W., 1991. Kant’s Model of the Mind , Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2005. Kant and the Empiricists: Understanding Understanding , New York: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2019. Guide to Kant’s Psychologism Via Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and Wittgenstein , Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge.
Westphal, K. R., 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wicks, R., 2009. Kant on Judgment (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks), London: Routlege Taylor Francis.
Wolff, Robert Paul, 1960. “Kant’s Debt to Hume via Beattie”, Journal of the History of Ideas , 21: 117–23.
–––, 1963. Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Willaschek, Marcus, 2015. “The Sensibility of Human Intuition. Kant’s Causal Condition on Account of Representation”, in Kants Theorie der Erfahrung , Rainer Enskat (ed.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 129–149.
Wilson, Eric, 2016. “Habitual Desire: On Kant’s Concept of Inclination”, Kantian Review , 21(2): 211–35.
Wuerth, Julian, 2006. “Kant’s Immediatism, Pre-1781”, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 44: 489–532.
–––, 2010. “Kant’s First Paralogism, its Origin, and its Evolution: Kant on How the Soul Both Is and Is Not a Substance”, in Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy , Stephen Palmquist (ed.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 157–66.
–––, 2010. “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason”, in The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , Paul Guyer (ed), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 210–44.
–––, 2011. “Moving Beyond Kant’s Account of Agency in the Grounding”, in Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics , Larry Jost and Julian Wuerth (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 147–63.
–––, 2013. “Sense and Sensibility in Kant’s Practical Agent: Against the Intellectualism of Korsgaard and Sidgwick”, European Journal of Philosophy , 21: 1–36.
–––, 2014. Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wunderlich, Falk, 2011. Kant und die Bewußtseintheorien des 18. Jahrhunderts (Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie 64), Berlin: de Gruyter.
Zammito, John H., 2002. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Other References

Brook, A., 2001, “The unity of consciousness”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2001 Edition) , Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2001/entries/consciousness-unity/ >.
Brook, A. and DeVidi, R. (eds.), 2001. Self-Reference and Self-Awareness , Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Perry, J., 2001, “The essential indexical”, in Brook and DeVidi 2001.
Shoemaker, S., 1968. “Self-reference and self-awareness”, in Brook and DeVidi (eds.) 2001
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Treisman, A., and Glade, G., 1980. “A feature-integration theory of attention”, Cognitive Psychology , 12: 97–136.
Wittgenstein, L., 1934–5. Blue and Brown Books , Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers.

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Kant on the Web , maintained by Steve Palmquist, Hong Kong Baptist University. Contains a bibliography of translations of Kant up to 2011 and much else.
North American Kant Society (NAKS) .

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Thanks to Paul Guyer, Paul Raymont, Rick DeVidi, Julian Wuerth, Kirsta Anderson, and an anonymous referee for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for very helpful comments.

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6.12: Immanuel Kant’s Critical Philosophy

Kant: Synthetic A Priori Judgments

Home Varieties of Judgment

Home Mathematics

Home Preconditions for Natural Science

Home Deduction of the Categories

Critical Thinking: What is it to be a Critical Thinker?

1. What is Critical Thinking?

2. Traditional Components: Logic and Fallacies

3. Additional Formal Tools: Evidence and Statistics

4. Applied Skills as Part of Being a Critical Thinker

5. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Critical Thinking

Curiosity : the desire for knowledge and understanding

Humility : or the recognition that your own understanding is limited

Skepticism : a suspicious attitude toward what other people say

Rationality or logic: The formal skills of logic are indispensable for critical thinkers

Creativity: or the ability to come up with new combinations of ideas

Empathy : the ability to see things from another person’s perspective

II. Examples

III. Critical Thinking vs. Traditional Thinking

IV. Quotes about Critical Thinking

V. The History and Importance of Critical Thinking

Philosophy Behind Critical Thinking: A Concise Overview

Key Takeaways

Understanding Critical Thinking

Definition and Process

Logic, Reason, Rationality

Strategies and Patterns

Justification and Argumentation

Clarity and Reflection

Psychological Approach to Critical Thinking

Cognition and Pattern Recognition

Bias and Judgments

Problem-Solving and Decision-Making

Philosophical Groundings

Major Philosophers and Approaches

Informal Logic and its Importance

Critical Thinking in Cultural and Social Context

Critical Thinking in a Democratic Society

Culture, Society, and Critical Thinking

Role of Critical Thinking in Education

Skills Development

Standardized Tests vs. Critical Thought

Importance of Open-Mindedness and Skepticism

Traits of an Open-Minded Thinker

Role of Curiosity and Empathy in Critical Thinking

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