Why Be Critical?

I. INTRODUCTION Since critical thinking is evidently more difficult, more troublesome, than ordinary, garden-variety thinking, the question that naturally arises is, why bother. Why not just say, "Forget it...I'll think (and do, and be) what I want?" This kind of question is not anything new -- Plato, for instance, has Socrates raise a similar question in the Republic, namely, "Why be just?" In this paper I will consider several issues that I take to …

…that enables one to solve particular moral-realm problems. Similarly, outside the moral realm, rationality can be justified pragmatically, in the Deweyan sense, as the tendency to employ the means by which one is able to solve problems, rather than merely self-justifying, as Siegel claims. And critical thinking would thus be justified as an instrumental value, the activity necessary to achieve desired ends, including the generally desired ends that such achievement not lead to disastrous consequences.