Propositions

Generally speaking, the concepts and procedures--the tools--of critical thinking boil down to one main point: whether to accept a proposition, reject it, or suspend judgment.  This is a little different from asking if a proposition is true, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, except that it collapses a number of possible concerns that are well worth exploring, as we will be doing in subsequent sections.  But to begin in the simplest possible terms, critical thinking deals with propositions themselves and the logical relationships among them.  For now, let us focus on mainly on the first part of this description, that is, propositions.  Some philosophers hold that propositions are the essential ideas that are expressed one way or another in various specific sentences, but our deconstructive approach will take propositions more simply to be declarative sentences that either are (1) true or false by definition or (2) appear to be either true or false under some given set of conditions.  So, all of these sentences are propositions:

The truck doesn't run.

The truck needs a tune-up.

The truck is beautiful.

And these are not:

Why doesn't the truck run?

Clean that truck!

And these need some analysis before we can be sure:

You call that a truck?

Let's go for a ride in my truck, if you know what I mean.

Departing from what has become a common practice in some philosophical circles, we will take the position that declarative sentences that are different on the surface are always different propositions and that whatever similarity they may have, including apparent equivalence, is a matter for careful description.  So the following are all different propositions in our view, in spite of the fact that they share important similarities:

If you break something here, you have to buy it.

You have to buy anything you break here.

Alles, was man hier zerbricht, muss man kaufen.

This decision makes a difference every time we approach a text in that it forces us to pay attention to nuances and stylistic choices that logicians tend to overlook.  There is a lot more history behind this decision that need not occupy us much further, except to take note of our place in it.  This is it: a deconstructive approach to a text explicitly avoids the traditional logical project of reducing what is said to logical functions of such generality that they hold from text to text and language to language.  In more practical terms, accepting or rejecting most kinds of propositions in a deconstructive way of thinking situates one in a definite set and structure of relationships, i.e., a specific frame of reference, and explicitly does not sign one up for automatically accepting similar sentences in different contexts.  Another way of saying this is that our deconstructive approach calls for an attitude that any difference is potentially important, even if a difference may initially look trivial.  This means that diffferences between propositions that can be analyzed t be logically equivalent, such as the examples immediately above, would not be bracketed out of consideration without an explicit reason.  Reasons to do this might be that we are specifically concerned with categorical relationships or because we know there will be no difference between what something refers to and what anything refers to in the sentences above.  But we would be less inclined to look past that difference if we were interested in a possible contrast between how someone's attention to a store's inventory might be affected by the first sentence in the example just above in contrast to the second.  It shouldn't be any surprise that what we are interested in will determine what similarities and differences we consider important, but that principle has not always been a very active player in the game of critical analysis  There is an old saying that the Critical Points method takes very seriously: The devil is in the details.

Of course, it is not always possible to be sufficiently persuaded that a proposition even appears to be true or false, so we have the suspend judgment option to express an unwillingness to accept or reject a proposition.  When there is a sufficiently high level of confidence that we feel justified in accepting or rejecting a proposition, that is not necessarily a commitment to accepting its truth under all possible conditions, just the ones we happen to be thinking about at the time.  Many misunderstandings can be avoided if we make this relativistic principle the expected standard.  To emphasize our key point, this relativism is all about recognizing the fact that whatever we experience is experienced from our unique perspective.  Thus, whatever we might say about our experience is similarly conditioned by the constraints of that unique perspective.  Consider which of the following claims is more likely to be accepted, all else being equal:

Taking this supplement increases one's energy level.

Taking this supplement increases my energy level.

The second is not just more likely to be true because it is a less comprehensive proposition, which is certainly necessary to notice, but also because of its authentic perspective.  When the scope issue is removed, the perspective factor is even more evident:

Taking this supplement increases his energy level.

Taking this supplement increases my energy level.

The point is not just that first-person statements are more credible, it's that perspective brings in framing information that matters not just because it is more specific, but that it is relevantly specific.  Consider the contrast here:

Taking this supplement can increase one's energy level.

If one is deficient in minerals X, Y, and Z and has no other medical conditions that would interfere, taking this supplement increases one's energy level.

In this pair of propositions, there is no first-person factor to complicate the perspective issue.  In this case, the perspective is indicated through a list of conditions under which the main idea is the case.  Again, what makes the second proposition better for most purposes than the first is that it is situated in a more evident web of meaning.  Interestingly, in this contrasting pair, the first proposition is more likely to be true than the second because it incudes all cases in which the second proposition is true and then potentially many more.  In this case, though, the extra information serves our purposes by isolating situations in which the probability that the proposition will be true in an individual case could easily be significantly increased by a match of conditions in the proposition with conditions in a situation.  There would be more likelihood, that is, of a shared frame of reference.

Having clarity about frame of reference and conditions of truth is just part of the story, then.  The question of actual acceptance remains as its own issue.  Better understanding of prevailing conditions of truth will make our positions less grand in many cases, but a truly realistically modest standard of conviction can still allow or even require us to make, for example, a decision to proceed as though the proposition is in fact true or false, as the case may be, and with apprpriate conditions acknowledged, may even go so far as to stake our lives on it.  A disposition of being modest in prionciple about assertions of truth by keeping context or frame of reference in mind does not imply any lack of seriousness about the propositions that we do affirm, even when we clearly affirm them relativistically.

Obviously, deciding the truth-value of a proposition on the basis of its probable or relativistic truth or falsity can be in some ways liberating compared to trying to live up to the expectation of unequivocal certainty, which is probably even more difficult to achieve than it already seems.  Granted, most well-adjusted people are able to accommodate reaasonable levels of doubt and still get things done, but there is still an important difference between imagining that one is working with more or less unqualified statements as a matter of course and being always aware that the ideas one is working with are relativistically qualified by default.  There is generally a cost in both speed and focus to the pervasive inclusion of conditonal qualifications for all of the propositions employed in a chain of reasoning, since every time it is done, the chain of reasoning that depends upon those propositions becomes less reliable in proportion to the confidence level (basically expressed as a percentage or a decimal) attached to each decision.  Still, while a proposition with many conditions attached obviously presents a more complicated challenge to acceptance than one that seems to be just plain true, the extra care that is needed is more likely to pay the dividend of revealing important considations that might have been overlooked in a less deliberate process.  Moreover, there are not too many claims with significant stakes that can remain looking just plain true under careful examination anyway.

Resolving the acceptance question basically hinges on two things: (1) whether terms, concepts, and phenomena that need explanation have been adequately explained so that everyone who needs to understand the situation has a reasonably clear idea of it and (2) whether there is sufficient support for a proposition to merit its acceptance.  We do not need to do the math precisely to have a rough idea of how multiple instances of less than complete confidence in the propositions one is reasoning from can dramatically erode confidence in the outcome of the reasoning once the uncertainties are compounded by combining the propositions into a chain of reasoning.  But while uncertainties may delay deciding whether a proposition will be accepted or not, there often comes a point at which another old saying kicks in: Fish or cut bait.  Sometimes you just have to decide.  Once a proposition is accepted as true, however, then as a matter of practical logic, those probability qualifications cannot just disappear; they become in a sense part of the proposition and remain in tension with the definite decision to accept or reject, which effectively rounds up commitment to 100 percent or rounds it down to zero when an action is either executed or not.  Sometimes it will make sense to move forward with a decision and not look back, while other times the recollection of a history of uncertainty will be important to further reasoning; this has to be decided case by case and, again, there is no hard and fast rule.  The important thing to remember is that it is a choice whether or not to stay mindful of uncertainties and qualifications that attend decisions to accept or reject a proposition.