SMART THINKING

What is smart thinking?
There are many words associated with what is, loosely, termed 'thinking'. We
are often told to 'think about the issues', to 'analyse in more depth', to 'use
reasoning', or to 'be rational'. Sometimes (perhaps with reference to computers,
or to the legendary Star Trek character Mr Spock) we are told to 'be logical'.
Often students are told that they must think 'critically' if they are to succeed.
When people write essays or reports, they are usually advised to make sure that
they have a good 'argument' or that they 'explain in detail'. But do students
(and lecturers) really know what these words and phrases mean? Can we
actually identify the key skills and underlying techniques that allow us to think
better?
The answer is yes. Smart thinking means.knowing how to:
• work out and express your main ideas
• plan your communication of ideas so that they can be clearly understood
• check to see if you have covered all the important parts of your topic
• establish a framework or structure in which your basic facts and evidence
make sense
• present ideas by linking them together to convince readers of your conclusion.
Moreover, we must also relate thinking to knowledge and information (what we
think about), and the processes of communicating our ideas, either in written or
oral form. Thinking is one aspect of an integrated process of finding, analysing, and
communicating information. Your thinking begins even when you are deciding
'what' to read and write about.
'Smart thinking' can assist you in:
• working out where and how to look for the information you need
• understanding that information in relation to your own work
• deciding which information is relevant to your topic and which is not
• identifying when you need to find out more information to make sense of a
problem.
Smart thinking can also improve your capacity to set your communication in
context. It alerts you to the importance of:
• your audience and their expectations of what you are doing
• the requirements upon you to communicate in a certain way in a certain
situation
• your own assumptions and biases, and the role of society in forming those
biases, which will need to be considered and explored through your
communication.
To think smart, you must use reasoning. Reasoning is the basis of much of our
thinking. It is often described simply as the process of thinking through and
communicating our reasons for holding certain views or conclusions. Reasoning is,
however, better defined as a process of understanding and exploring the relationships
between the many events, objects, and ideas in our world. None of these
individual 'items' can be meaningful in and of itself. An item can only be
understood in relation to other ones. Reasoning enables us to get beyond a world
of innumerable separate events, objects, and ideas. Using reasoning, we see that all
these separate items are interconnected, and what we know about any particular
object depends on our knowledge of other objects. Sometimes the connections are
obvious; other times, they are much harder to see. Reasoning involves finding and
expressing these connections or relationships so that each individual event, object,
or idea is explicable in terms of other events, objects, or ideas.

Exercise 1.1
Smart thinking demands that we do more than just 'think' vaguely about things.
Before we look at reasoning, the key underlying process of thinking, let's consider
some common 'informal' ideas about thinking. Look at the four actions listed
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
cons and so forth'.3 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
your decision in the way that all of us take for granted (by thinking, for example,
'A university degree will help me get a better job'). When we start to make connections,
we are able to know things of which we have no direct experience (and
which may not yet have happened). Of course, since we live in a society in which
reasoning is accepted as the main method of processing information, we already use
reasoning, but we usually do not think about it.
Often, we can feel reasonably certain about our knowledge because it is based
on evidence of things that we do know about. For example:
In the past, when driving down the freeway after work, I have found that
there is usually a traffic jam. Because of the traffic jam, it always takes a
long time to get home. So, today, because I need to get home quickly, I
had better leave work earlier.
The conclusion that 'I had better leave work earlier' follows from the evidence
or reasons given for it. We can say that it is a 'reasonable' conclusion. Using
reasoning requires us to look for and rely on structures of connections between
separate things or events in the world; it also requires us to make an active effort to
create these structures—to make the connections that we cannot easily see.
The two main kinds of relationships that underpin these structures are:
• how things relate to one another, at any given moment (syntagmatic relationships
such as 'an orange is a citrus fruit' or 'citrus fruits are edible')
• how things relate to one another, over time (paradigmatic relationships such
as 'eating too many oranges made me feel sick' or 'if I want vitamin C, then I
should eat an orange').
Working out the precise relationship requires attention to a number of
'patterns' that might help us to see how one thing is linked to another. These
patterns can be understood through concepts such as:
• similarity/difference
• commonality/inconsistency
• necessity and sufficiency.
When we make these connections, we are able to function much more
effectively and to make sense of the world around us. In particular, we are more
capable of communicating our ideas and discussing knowledge with other
people.
The things, then, that we do with reasoning, as a form of communication, are:
• arguing ('You should not believe what you see on television because ... ')4
• explaining ('Digital television has been introduced because ... ')
• making decisions CI think we should buy a digital television receiver because
... ')
• predicting the future ('I expect digital television to make pay television better
because ... ')
• exploring issues ('How will digital television link to the Internet?')
• finding answers ('Why did the government decide on a higher-quality digital
television standard?')
• justifying actions ('When first introduced, I thought subscribing to pay television
was not a good idea because ... ' ).
So, smart thinking is about reasoning, which is about the use and communication
of knowledge. Researching, reading, analysing, testing, checking, planning,
and writing all depend on understanding those interrelationships. Once you
understand that knowledge consists of innumerable interrelations between small
'bits' of information, then you will be able to find, shape, and use knowledge for
yourself.
But reasoning is also about people: the authors and audiences of arguments,
explanations, and so on. And it is in relation to the human, social aspect of
reasoning that we must really be 'smart'. Reasoning is not just formal logic; nor is
it an abstract way of thinking about ideas. It is always a social act. People always use
reasoning for particular purposes (be they economic, political, or whatever). They
all have different perspectives on the issues being debated. Their age, class, race,
gender, and ethnicity all influence the broad structures upon which they rely in
reasoning. If we forget that reasoning has this social aspect, then we will run the
risk of failing to think effectively (this point will be explored in more detail in later
chapters). The connections and relations between ideas, events, proposals, and so
on only become meaningful in the context of how, when, where, and why they are
communicated with others.

How do we study smart thinking?
Thinking about thinking
Reasoning is something we already do: all of us have learnt, in one way or another,
to think and to reason, to make connections and see relationships between various
events and attitudes in our world. So, being a smart thinker is not about becoming
a different sort of person, but about improving skills that you already have. The way
to achieve this goal (and the main emphasis within this book) is to become explicitly
aware of the analytical processes involved in reasoning. If you do, then you will
be able to analyse complex issues more deeply, understand and process information
more effectively, and communicate your ideas convincingly.
In succeeding chapters, then, we will learn a way of talking and thinking about
reasoning that allows us to understand and use reasoning better. In particular, we
will learn about the 'analytical structure' of ideas, which is, essentially, the clearest
expression of reasoning. However, we usually encounter such structures 'embedded'
in the words we read and hear, or in so-called 'natural language'. We must learn to
distinguish more effectively between the structures and the natural language
through which it comes to us. We will also encounter the idea of 'analytical
questions', which can guide the way we think about and develop the relationships
that comprise our analytical structures.