If I Only Had a Brain...

-->

Unanswered Questions and Unquestioned Answers

Chains, my baby's got me locked up in chains.
And they ain't the kind that you can see.
Whoa, oh, these chains of love got a hold on me, yeah.

Chains, Gerry Goffin/Carol King

In my salle d'armes, everyone knows that “because the master said so” is not an acceptable reason for doing anything.  I want each and every one of my students to understand exactly why we do things the way we do them. Once you know the truth, no one can ever take that away from you. I want my students to own the truth, not just borrow it from me.

With the sword, it’s relatively easy to separate the truth from the guff by giving it a practical test.  I do this regularly, for example, with folks who believe in parrying a cut with the flat of the blade, rather than with the edge. You could say that the flaw in this theory strikes them immediately. 

In other arenas --- politics, for example ---ferreting  out a needle of truth from a haystack of lies can seem a daunting task, even impossible.

It isn’t.

But it takes a little work.

Sometimes it takes a LOT of work.

Often, you won’t like what you find.

When you are presented with “information,” you can separate the truth from the lies by asking the right questions:

1.     What is the issue, what is the presenter’s conclusion, and what are the reasons? Who benefits?

2.     What elements, words or phrases are ambiguous or undefined?

3.     What are the value conflicts and assumptions?

4.     What are the descriptive assumptions?

5.     Are there any fallacies in the presenter’s reasoning and what are they?

6.     How good is the presenter’s evidence?

7.     Are there alternative possibilities or rival causes?

8.     Is the presenter using deceptive statistics?

9.     Is any information being omitted?

10. What reasonable conclusions are possible?

If you’re not familiar with this little list, if it doesn’t make immediate and complete sense to you, then you can get a crash course in critical thinking from Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, by M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Kelley (Prentics Hall 1998), from which I purloined most of the list.

Prudence demands that you accept nothing at face value, but rather subject it to rigorous critical evaluation.

Integrity demands that you subject your own beliefs to the same rigorous critical examination, and you must be ready, willing and able to abandon even the most dearly-held belief unless it is supported by the evidence. 

Or you can parry with the flat of the blade just because someone told you to do it that way,  and see how that strikes you.

aac