166 Informal Logic 

Teaching Critical Thinking as a Discipline 

EUGENE GARVER 

Saint John's University, by creating 
North America's first endowed Chair 
in Critical Thinking, has confronted me 
with a couple of unique opportunities. 
First, the University wisely did not 
place the Chair in any department, 
and I am consequently presented with 
the chance to think about critical 
thinking independent of considera-
tions of academic turf and FTE. This is 
such an unusual opportunity that what-
ever critical thinking might turn out to 
be when one may ignore those vulgar 
considerations might have quite limited 
relevance to the work of critical think-
ing in other circumstances; at least, 
though, those who carryon in less ideal 
situations will be able to cast their argu-
ments in terms of political necessity 
rather than intellectual justification 
Second, I have the challenge of trying 
to insure that this critical thinking pro-
gram not go away-leaving only the 
low-level skills equivalent to remedial 
writing-when all the national atten-
tion, energy, intelligence, and money 
go to on the next fashion; I hope Saint 
John's will become a place where a 
flourishing program exists in which 
faculty interests in teaching and in 
scholarship can come together in cri-
tical thinking. This latter is a challenge 
I think everyone committed to teaching 
critical thinking shares, although there 
is obviously enough diversity in inter-
pretation that your ideal of liberal 
education looks just like my nightmare 
of remedial or mechanical instruction. 
In my judgment, the challenge is to 
"thicken" critical thinking from a skill 
to a discipline, requiring commitment 
to a subject-matter rather than inde-
pendence of all subjects, a discipline in 
which we all, students, faculty qua 
teachers, faculty qua scholars, parti-
cipate and grapple with analogous 
problems. In planning my own courses, 
and in experimenting with different 
kinds of faculty development, I have 
been guided by a conception of critical 

Saint John's University 

thinking suggested by the following 
three lines of argument. To use rather 
than mention these lines of argument 
would require a different, and far more 
extended, treatment that I cannot 
undertake here. I hope, though, that 
this sketch will be sufficient to invite 
some counterargument. 

1. A non-controversial and brief way 
of describing critical thinking is atten-
tiveness to the formal aspects of think-
ing Making the idea of form more pre-
cise can be done in a variety of ways, 
each of which can be the basis for a 
different possible approach to critical 
thinking, but awareness of an articu-
lation of the formal dimensions of 
thought must be fundamental. The 
most popular resources for talking 
about the formal side of thinking, 
modern mathematical logic and cog-
nitive psychology, are, unfortunately, 
not especially well suited for exposing 
and articulating the structure of natural 
and practical thinking, precisely be-
cause they represent form as indif-
ferent to subject-matter, a relation of 
form and matter that I think under-
mines the potential autonomy of critical 
thinking. Those conceptions of form 
make the complexities of natural, 
practical argument into an inconve-
nience rather than an inevitable, and 
often desirable, feature of deliberation 
and inquiry. Everyone admits that 
there is no single schema that ade-
quately captures all acts of thought. 
Taking that truism more seriously, 
however, would require that we think 
about the use of multiple methods for 
representing arguments as somehow 
more than additive-as in the senti-
ment that since no one scheme gets 
at everything important about every 
argument, the more the better-or 
tactical-as in a decision that this argu-
ment seems to be one that calls for 
formalization by predicate calculus. 

Consequently one way of giving 
depth to the activities of critical think-



ing-and thereby preventing bowing 
to either remedial or political pres-
sures is by looking at alternative ways 
of capturing intellectual and discur-
sive forms and structures, ways that 
connect form and content more use-
fully. I have in mind readings such as 
Bacon's New Organon, Newman's 
Grammar of Assent, and Aristotle's 
Rhetoric; more generally, I propose 
that critical thinking requires a re-
search project of exploring ways of 
thinking about discursive and intel-
lectual form that range over the history 
of alternative theories of logic, rhetoric, 
and literary form. Logic has a history 
well worth recovering, and texts such 
as the ones I listed are useful occasions 
for meditation on the significance of 
the profound truth that actual thinking 
is resistant to complete codification 
by any conception of method, and give 
some reason to think that that recal-
citrance should not be reason for re-
gret. 

2. Critical thinking needs something 
to think about. Any method is intel-
ligible only relative to some manifold; 
put more pragmatically f the test of any 
proposed method for treating intellec-
tual form is its employment in con-
fronting a difficult text. I believe that 
a crucial aspect of the enterprise of 
keeping critical thinking from becoming 
remedial, of making critical thinking 
into a discipline with its own integrity 
and intellectual respectability (not to 
mention respectability within the aca-
demy) is the appropriation of a canon 
for critical thinking coordinate with its 
methods. If what counts as good 
method in critical thinking varies 
with the sorts of materials under exami-
nation! then the way to keep the ex-
ploration of techniques and devices 
from degenerating into a technology 
and a remedial skill is by constantly 
testing the techniques against canon-
ical readings; there's something wrong 
with a method that works for news-
paper editorials but cannot handle 
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. 

A canon for critical thinking provides 
a constant test for proposed methods; 
in addition such texts have a richness 

Teaching notes 167 

that resists reduction to any theory, 
transforming the enterprise of theory 
building into a more permanent one, 
and not something to be accomplished, 
and once accomplished, finished. A 
canon of texts of independent value is 
a crucial feature of any discipline 
that wants to encourage debate as a 
permanent feature of its intellectual 
life, because it permits pluralism and 
without degenerating into mere dis-
cord. I see the field of argumentative 
literature as constituting the appro-
priate subject-matter for critical think-
ing; there is a large body of acknowl-
edged great works that other parts of 
the humanities, such as philosophy and 
literature departments, have trouble 
accommodating, and it is those that 
critical thinking ought to be concerned 
with. 

Think of the following texts, all of 
which seem to me to be things that we 
all wish our students would read, but 
which rarely get taught because no 
discipline owns them: Cicero, de 
Natura Deorum, Augustine, Confes-
sions, Machiavelli, Prince, Luther, 
De Servo Arbitrio, Erasmus, Diatribe/ 
Montaigne, Essays, Bacon, Essays, 
Pascal, Pensees, Rousseau, Dis-
courses, Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 
Smith, Wealth of Nations, Madison 
et aI., Federalist Papers, Notes on the 
Convention. 

My canon for critical thinking is not 
generated by default, and it is no acci-
dent that these sorts of works do not 
fit comfortably within the bounds of 
departments currently constituted. 
Just what they have in common, 
though, is another story. A canon is 
not the same as a subject-matter, and 
it would take more than pure induction 
to move from this list of books to a sub-
ject-matter for critical thinking to be 
about. But that's work that cannot be 
summarized here. 

3. The interplay between method and 
canon in critical thinking is currently 
taking place in lively and diverse ways 
in many disciplines. Especially impor-
tant for combining low-level and high-
level critical thinking skills, and com-
bining teaching and research among 



168 Informal Logic 

the faculty, are works in different 
fields that claim to produce new 
readings of seminal texts, and force-
fully raise questions about the relation 
between good critical practice and the 
methods we develop to account for and 
teach those practices. These works 
typically make theoretical claims for 
themselves, in addition to producing 
novel readings, and so in themselves 
exhibit the interplay between method 
and canon. The faculty of different 
fields can produce their own lists, but 
I would point to works like Hayden 
White, Metahistory, Gerald Bruns, 
Inventions, James White, The legal 
Imagination, or Louise Dumont, From 
Mandeville to Marx. 

These three lines of argument are 
incomplete. Not only does each of them 
need further development, but they all 
need connection to the accumulated 
wisdom grounded in practice at teach-
ing critical thinking. While what I have 
been suggesting looks different from 
most of what gets called critical think-
ing these days, I think it would be fool-
ish to ignore the growing body of prac-
tical experience in teaching critical 
thinking, especially experience gener-
ated by quite different conceptions of 
critical thinking. Critical thinking is a 
bit behind English composition in the 
amount of practical experience of 

teachers it can draw on, but teachers 
of critical thinking are rapidly accumu-
lating successful and unsuccessful 
practices that are worth learning about, 
and which can be evaluated independ-
ent of the theories that supposedly 
generated them. No one can look at the 
textbooks, and discussions in Informal 
logic, in the last few years without 
being impressed by the progress in the 
state of the art. 

A desire to look at instances of suc-
cessful teaching of critical thinking 
regardless of the theories from which 
they supposedly issue, though, creates 
a further obligation to look beyond 
courses with titles like Critical Think-
ing or Informal Logic to what happens 
in kinds of good teaching that range 
from composition courses to classes in 
law schools and business schools. 
I have always found it impossible to 
understand or even take seriously my 
sincere and unphilosophical colleagues 
when they say that their students 
don't know how to think, or that they 
teach thinking. There is a duty, though, 
to try to figure out what they mean. 

Dr. Eugene Garver, Professor of Cri-
tical Thinking, Saint John's University, 
Collegeville, Minnesota 56321, 
U.S.A. 0