N.B.: This is Part 2 of my series on “Critical thinking in the age of A.I.”

Previously (see here), I posed a question that has been troubling me since ChatGPT was unleashed on the world on 30 November 2022: What impact will ChatGPT and other large language models have on higher education? That is, if the primary mission of higher ed is to promote critical thinking (paging John Dewey!), what impact will these models have on students’ ability to think and reason for themselves? Today, however, I want to take a step back and ask an even more fundamental question. To the point, what is critical thinking? Simply put, what do we mean when we say “the primary mission of higher ed is to promote critical thinking”?

Alas, there is no one standard or universal or commonly-accepted definition of “critical thinking”? Worse yet, some definitions are totally circular. (See, for example, this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which defines critical thinking as “careful thinking directed to a goal”.) Some scholars simply assume that critical thinking is the ability to “think for yourself”. (See, for example, this article in the Harvard Business Review.) The problem with this standard definition, however, is that it is incomplete, since we all have deep cognitive biases that distort our thinking. At a minimum, then, critical thinking has to consist of some reliable method for overcoming our biases.

That is why I propose we take a general Humean/Bayesian approach to critical thinking, for it was the great David Hume who said (in his essay on miracles), “A wise man … proportions his belief to the evidence wise man”, and it was Hume’s contemporary, the Reverend Thomas Bayes (in his posthomous essay on the “doctrine of chances”), who developed an ingenious method for updating our beliefs when new evidence becomes available. For me, then, a critical thinker is someone who is able to overcome his cognitive biases by emulating Hume and Bayes — specifically, by taking the following two intellectual steps: careful evaluation and scrutiny of the available evidence (Hume), followed by periodic “updating” as new evidence becomes available (Bayes).

With this definition in mind, we can now begin to address my original question: What impact will ChatGPT have on critical thinking? (To be continued …)