Page 16 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

SMART THINKING 3

below and, writing on a piece of paper, list some examples in your own life of
when you have successfully done these actions and why you did them. The
answers contain more discussion of each one. 2
• Ask questions (of ourselves and others)
• Seek out information
• Make connections
• Interpret and evaluate

Reasoning

Reasoning represents one of the great advances that human beings have made in
their ability to understand and make sense of the world. It has been described as a
'complex weave of abilities that help you get someone else's point, explain a
complicated idea, generate reasons for your viewpoints, evaluate the reasons given
by others, decide what information to accept or reject, see the pros as well as the
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cons and so forth'. Yet it is also the case that reasoning does not come naturally but
must be learnt and can be improved.
Let us begin with an easy example. Imagine you hold an apple in one hand and
an orange in the other. Now, at first sight, these two objects appear to be completely
different; each would seem to be understandable only in its own terms—that is, in
a way unique to each apple and each orange. However, we are better able to
understand them and to communicate what we think about them when we start to
make connections. Here are some examples:
• An apple is not an orange.
• An apple and an orange are similar: both are pieces of fruit.
• This apple will be, roughly speaking, the same as all the other apples
I have eaten.
• If I eat this orange and I like the taste, then I can assume that
generally I will like the taste of other oranges.
• You should eat this fruit because you are hungry.
Obviously, this list makes only a few simple connections between the two
particular pieces of fruit that we are considering; it also makes a few connections
between the orange and the apple and other pieces of fruit generally; and the latter
connections relate fruit to people.
If we did not make these connections, then every time we ate an orange, for
example, it would be a new experience. We would not be able to rely on past
experience or on our experiences with other things; nor would we be able to make
any predictions about future experience. Such a world might be interesting (as each
morning you drank your orange juice and had a whole new experience), but it
would also be extremely confusing. Moreover, if you think about a more complex
example (say, deciding to study for a university degree) you can see that, without
the ability to make connections between things, you would not be able to make