[fab]

My point is that this whole "political spectrum" thing is really a sham. It intentionally, NOT unintentionally, inhibits reasoning, discourages critical thinking and puts you in boxes and categories.

I agree. A side effect of such categorising inhibits reasoning and critical thinking amongst the general populace, as we usually end up toeing our party line on any given issue. But putting things into nice little categories makes it easier to manage society as a whole. If there weren't these categories of thought, how would political parties in a democracy be formed? What are these political parties anyway? They are basically groups of people with SIMILAR ideologies on how they think their communities should be managed. We vote for these people, because we think they will run society in a way which we favour.

Say we banished this thought of liberalism and conservatism, how do you propose political groups be formed? Should we have referendums on every single issue and apply our critical and logical thinking on a case by case basis? Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, there will have to be SOME form of generalisation, otherwise it would be impossible to manage a democracy. It's all very well to discredit an establishment, but unless you can provide an alternative (workable) solution, it's moot.

I don't like Pilger and Fisk becasue they are from the "left-wing", but because they seem to be the kind of people who exercises the kind of actions that I just described in the previous paragraph [1].

I'm sure there are people on the 'right-wing' who excercise similar actions to [1]. Can you name any that you admire?

Yes, Americans thinking that the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis seems to be both "ignorant" and "irrational". Only that it is almost entirely "irrational." The media did not lie to the Americans.

I beg to differ. I think it had more to do with their ignorance. Before 9/11 the average American did not know the difference between a muslim, a saudi arabian, a taliban, and an iraqi and Islam. All this mumbo jumbo, genuinely confused the hell out of them, and hence it was easy to mislead them. After all how can one be critical of something when one has no prior knowledge or understanding of it in the first place?

First of all, I stand by my point which is MOST people haven't had formal training in thinking critically or applying propositional logic. I disagree with your "slightly optimistic" view that "a large portion" of the "educated population" is logical. In fact, you contradicted yourself by saying just the opposite a few lines later: "I think that's the crux of the problem. Majority of the people don't think critically."

So now thinking logically is the same as thinking critically? Personally, I think there is a subtle difference, (in fact you have already outlined that difference below, but have neglected it in your argument above), but let me elaborate with a simple example:

Given the following basic propositions
if (A and B) then C.
if (C or D) then E

Being logical would be working out 'if I have A and B then E, or if I have D then E, or even if I have all A and B and D then E'. I genuinely think most people can deduce that. If they couldn't, then they couldn't function properly in our complex society. In this simple example, being critical on the other hand, would be imo, asking if the proposition was true to begin with. Is it true to assume that (A and B) implies C? Are we certain that A and B are true? This is where people are failing because they have no idea about A, B or C! The authorities and media give us the definitions of A, B and C and we assume that they are true/accurate..

And the success of humanity is testament to that fact that most of the humanity is logical? That's simply not true.

By success of humanity I mean, humanity's progress in changing their environment and improving their quality of life and longevity and ADAPTING to those improvements. Without the collective intelligence, logic and rationality of the average human, society couldn't function as it does. Otherwise we would be in a state of total anarchy. So, how is this a post hoc fallacy?

Critical thinking DEMANDS that you are AWARE of these three ways you can screw up and carefully analyze the conclusions given to you and ensure that they don't fall in any of those three categories. Being aware of false premises AND faulty logical mechanisms are both necessary prerequisites in critical thinking. Neither is "secondary" or "subsequent".

Critical thinking demands AWARENESS. And what is awareness? The opposite of ignorance! And so I reiterate, if one is to be a critical thinker, one CANNOT be ignorant. You just cannot be critical about something you don't understand. Therefore, knowledge is a PRIMARY requirement of being critical. Being logical is secondary because it would be impossible to work out the logical validity of a statement without prior KNOWLEDGE of the statement's components.

To end, let me give you a real life example. Last semester I wrote a paper about optical character recognition (OCR)/text detection with regards to its application to an information security mechanism. My prof is a security expert but he had NO idea about OCR. He could not critique my paper and deduce if it was logical because of his ignorance of that subject. Therefore proving, that knowledge, not logic, is the primary requirement of being a critical thinker.