Abstract:Teaching critical thinking skill is a central pedagogical aim in many courses. These skills, it is hoped, will be both portable (applicable in a wide range of contexts) and durable (not forgotten quickly). Yet, both of these virtues are challenged by pervasive and potent cognitive biases, such as motivated reasoning, false consensus bias and hindsight bias. In this paper, I argue that a focus on the development of metacognitive skill shows promise as a means to inculcate debiasing habits in students. Such habits will help students become more critical thinkers. I close with suggestions for implementing this strategy.Résumé: L'enseignement des habiletés associées à la pensée critique est un objectif pédagogique central dans de nombreux cours. On souhaite que ces habiletés soient à la fois transférables-applicables dans un large éventail de contexts-, et durables. Toutefois, développer des habiletés ayant ces deux propriétés est rendu difficile par des biais cognitifs qui sont à la fois puissants et omniprésents, tels le biais de la conclusion agréable, le biais de faux consensus et le biais rétrospectif. Dans cet article, je défendrai l'idée qu'il est prometteur de mettre l'accent sur le développement d'habiletés métacognitives comme moyen d'inculquer des attitudes permettant de combattre les biais. De telles attitudes aideront à dé-velopper la pensée critique des étud-iants. Je terminerai par des suggestions quant aux manières de mettre en pratique cette stratégie.
While cognitive bias is often portrayed as a problem in need of a solution, some have argued that these biases arise from adaptive reasoning heuristics which can be rational modes of reasoning. This presents a challenge: if these heuristics are rational under the right conditions, does teaching critical thinking undermine students' ability to reason effectively in real life reasoning scenarios? I argue that to solve this challenge, we should focus on how rational ideals are best approximated in human reasoners. Educators should focus on developing the metacognitive skill to recognize when different cognitive strategies (including the heuristics) should be used. Résumé:Alors que le biais cognitif est souvent représenté comme un problème nécessitant une solution, certains ont soutenu que ces biais proviennent de l'heuristique de raisonnement adaptatif qui peut être un type de raisonnement rationnel. Cela présente un défi: si ces heuristiques sont rationnelles dans les bonnes conditions, l'enseignement de la pensée critique mine-t-il l'habileté des étudiant(e)s de raisonner efficacement dans ces conditions? J'avance qu'on relever ce défi en concentrant notre attention sur la façon dont les idéaux rationnels se rapprochent le plus de nos raisonnements. Les éducateurs devraient se concentrer sur le développement de la compétence métacognitive pour que les étudiant(e)s puissent reconnaître quand différentes stratégies cognitives (y compris les heuristiques) devraient être utilisées.
Linguists often advert to what are sometimes called linguistic intuitions. These intuitions and the uses to which they are put give rise to a variety of philosophically interesting questions: What are linguistic intuitionsfor example, what kind of attitude or mental state is involved? Why do they have evidential force and how might this force be underwritten by their causal etiology? What light might their causal etiology shed on questions of cognitive architecturefor example, as a case study of how consciously inaccessible subpersonal processes give rise to conscious states, or as a candidate example of cognitive penetrability? What methodological issues arise concerning how linguistic intuitions are gathered and interpretedfor example, might some subjects' intuitions be more reliable than others? And what bearing might all this have on philosophers' own appeals to intuitions? This paper surveys and critically discusses leading answers to these questions. In particular, we defend a 'mentalist' conception of linguistics and the role of linguistic intuitions therein.Linguistic Intuitions 715
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