Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6

Thinking in Circles: The Power of Recursion

IN THIS CHAPTER

Refining your thinking to make it more powerful

Dialing into dialectical thinking

Taking practical ideas from design philosophies

Spotting the important points in an argument

Carl Hempel, a 20th-century American physicist, once noted one of the great circles of science — that theories don’t appear in a puff of smoke, but emerge out of a chain of events, starting with guesses about patterns that may or may not be there in the data. The guess then influences the selection of data, and that in turn affects the exact nature of the scientific theory. Science is actually a kind of a “chicken and the egg” situation — which comes first, the theory or the observation? And like the chicken and the egg, really it doesn’t make much sense to try to answer that — one affects and requires the other, in a perpetual circle.

At school, however, students are encouraged to think in straight lines: to start at the beginning, work their way through the middle, and then stop at the end. But in the big, wide world, things are more complicated ...