89 terms

Critical Thinking Glossary

The key vocabulary of Critical Thinking, each term defined in plain language. Start learning in the Critical Thinking subject, or drill these terms as flashcards.

Abductive reasoning: Reasoning from an observation to the best available explanation.
Ad hominem: Attacking the person rather than their argument.
Anchoring: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered when making judgements.
Antinomy: A genuine contradiction where accepted premises and valid reasoning collide, forcing us to revise an assumption.
Automation bias: The tendency to over-trust automated systems and stop checking, even against contrary evidence.
Availability bias: Judging likelihood by how easily examples come to mind.
Bayesian thinking: Updating a prior belief by degrees as new evidence arrives.
Calibrated trust: Trust scaled to how reliable a system actually is for a task and how costly an error would be.
Cognitive bias: A systematic, predictable departure from careful reasoning.
Cognitive offloading: Using external aids — notes, search, AI — to reduce mental effort, sometimes at the cost of skill.
Conclusion: The claim an argument's premises are meant to support.
Confirmation bias: The tendency to seek and notice evidence that fits an existing belief while dismissing the rest.
Confounding variable: A hidden factor that influences two correlated things, creating a link that is not causal.
Consequentialism: Judging actions mainly by their outcomes, as in utilitarian reasoning.
Correspondence theory of truth: The view that a statement is true if it matches the way the world actually is.
Critical thinking: The disciplined practice of examining information, reasoning, evidence, and assumptions before accepting a conclusion.
Deductive reasoning: Reasoning from general rules to a guaranteed conclusion; if the premises are true and valid, the conclusion must be true.
Deepfake: Synthetic media that convincingly depicts a real person saying or doing something they never did.
DEFINE framework: The Mega Maester problem-solving loop: Define, Examine, Find, Identify, Narrow, Evaluate.
Deontology: Judging actions by duties and rules rather than only by their consequences.
Dialectic: Reasoning through structured dialogue, questioning, and the exchange of opposing views.
Disinformation: False information created and spread deliberately to deceive.
Divergent thinking: Generating many possible ideas or solutions rather than converging on one.
Dunning-Kruger effect: The tendency of people with low skill in an area to overestimate their competence.
Echo chamber: An environment where a person mostly encounters views that reinforce their own.
Enthymeme: An argument with an unstated premise or conclusion that the audience is expected to supply.
Epistemology: The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge: what it is, how we get it, and its limits.
Ethics of belief: The question of when we are entitled to believe something given the evidence available.
Evidence Ladder: A hierarchy ranking evidence quality from anecdote up to replicated, reviewed studies.
Expected value: The average outcome of a choice, weighting each result by its probability.
Fallibilism: The recognition that our beliefs may be mistaken, so we hold them open to revision.
False analogy: A weak analogical argument in which the things compared differ in ways relevant to the conclusion.
False balance: Presenting two sides as equally supported when the evidence is heavily one-sided, giving a misleading impression of debate.
False dilemma: Presenting only two options when more exist.
Falsidical paradox: A paradox that reaches a false conclusion through a hidden error in reasoning.
Filter bubble: The narrowed information diet that personalised algorithms can create by showing you more of what you already engage with.
Framing: How a message is presented — the words, emphasis, and context chosen — which shapes how the same facts are received.
Fundamental attribution error: Explaining others' behaviour by character while explaining one's own by circumstance.
Gettier problem: Cases showing that a justified true belief can still fail to count as knowledge.
Hallucination (AI): When an AI system produces confident output that is false or fabricated, such as invented citations.
Heuristic: A fast mental shortcut used instead of full analysis; efficient but sometimes misleading.
Human-in-the-loop: Keeping a human with real understanding and authority to review and override an automated decision.
Illusory truth effect: The tendency to believe a statement more the more often it is repeated, regardless of whether it is true.
Incubation: Setting a problem aside so that insight can emerge after unconscious processing.
Inductive reasoning: Reasoning from specific observations to a probable generalisation.
Inference: The step from premises to a conclusion; the reasoning that connects them.
Intellectual humility: Recognising the limits of your own knowledge and being genuinely open to being wrong.
Intellectual virtue: A character trait that supports good thinking, such as curiosity, honesty, or open-mindedness.
Justified true belief: A classic definition of knowledge as a belief that is true and supported by good reasons.
Lateral reading: Judging a source by leaving it to see what other reliable sources say about it, rather than reading the page itself for cues.
Liar paradox: The self-referential puzzle of a sentence that says of itself that it is false.
Liar's dividend: The advantage wrongdoers gain when the existence of fakes lets them dismiss real evidence as fake.
Logical fallacy: A flaw in the structure of reasoning that weakens an argument even when it sounds convincing.
Maester's Code: Mega Maester's eight-line philosophy of careful, humble, evidence-led thinking.
Map and territory: The reminder that a model or description (the map) is never the full reality (the territory).
Meaningful oversight: Genuine human review of an automated decision, not a rubber stamp.
Mental model: A simplified internal representation of how something works, used to reason about it.
Metacognition: Awareness and regulation of your own thinking — noticing how you think and adjusting it.
Misinformation: False or misleading information spread without the intent to deceive.
Motivated reasoning: Reasoning aimed at reaching a desired conclusion rather than following the evidence where it leads.
Opportunity cost: The value of the best alternative given up when a choice is made.
Paradox: An argument or situation where sound-seeming reasoning leads to a self-contradictory or absurd conclusion.
Post hoc: Assuming that because one event followed another, the first caused the second.
Post-truth: A condition in which appeals to emotion and identity outweigh objective facts in shaping belief.
Practical wisdom: The ability to judge well and act rightly in real situations, beyond mere knowledge of facts.
Premise: A reason or piece of evidence offered in support of a conclusion.
Primary source: A first-hand or original record of an event or finding, as opposed to a later description of it.
Principle of charity: Interpreting others’ arguments in their strongest reasonable form rather than their weakest.
Provenance: The traceable origin and history of a piece of media, used to judge its authenticity.
Risk: A situation where the odds of outcomes are known or estimable.
Russell's paradox: The 1901 puzzle about the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, which unsettled the foundations of set theory.
Secondary source: An account that describes, interprets, or summarises primary sources rather than presenting original evidence.
Self-reference: When a statement or system refers to itself, a common source of paradox.
Ship of Theseus: The puzzle of whether an object remains the same after all its parts are gradually replaced.
Skepticism: A questioning attitude toward claims of knowledge; in its extreme form, doubting we can know anything.
Sorites paradox: The paradox of the heap: vague predicates make it unclear when small changes cross a boundary.
Soundness: A property of an argument that is both valid and has true premises.
Steelmanning: Stating the strongest, most charitable version of an opposing argument before responding to it — the opposite of a straw man.
Straw man: Misrepresenting someone's position so it is easier to attack.
Syllogism: A deductive argument in which a conclusion is drawn from two premises.
Synthetic media: Images, audio, or video generated or heavily altered by AI.
Testimony: Knowledge gained by trusting what others tell us or record; the source of most of what we know.
Trolley problem: A thought experiment contrasting outcome-based and duty-based moral reasoning.
Uncertainty: A situation where the odds themselves are unclear or unknown.
Unfalsifiability: A claim built so that no possible evidence could ever count against it — a hallmark of conspiracy thinking.
Validity: A property of an argument whose conclusion follows from its premises, regardless of whether the premises are true.
Veridical paradox: A paradox whose surprising conclusion turns out to be true once examined.
Warrant: In the Toulmin model, the principle that licenses moving from evidence (grounds) to a claim.
Zeno’s paradoxes: Ancient arguments that motion is impossible, resolved by the mathematics of infinite series.

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