The Critical Thinker Podcast

The Critical Thinker Podcast is an opportunity for me to work out my thoughts on what critical thinking is all about, and to share these thoughts with a wider audience.

I think of the podcast as a complement to the tutorials offered in the Critical Thinker Academy. The Academy tutorials cover topics you commonly see in logic, critical thinking and philosophy textbooks, and develops them in a more systematic way. The podcast deals more with broader themes about the nature of critical thinking.

Use the links below to subscribe to the podcast. There’s an audio version and a video version.

Below is the episode list. The links take you to the post for that episode where you can read the show notes and add comments! The video episodes are available on YouTube, and for convenience I’ve embedded the YouTube video in the blog posts. FYI, there’s a lot more conversation going in about these videos on YouTube than on this site, so if you’d like to join in a conversation I’d recommend browsing the comments here but also clicking on the “Watch on YouTube” link (it’s the YouTube logo at the bottom of the YouTube player) and browsing the comments there.

TCT 018: Critical Thinking About Conspiracies (Part 3): Conspiracies, Mind Control and Falsifiability

by December 21, 2011 » Add more comments.
Episode018

This is Part 3 of our multi-part series on critical thinking about conspiracies. In this episode we follow up on the discussion of “default skepticism” that was introduced in episode 017, and examine what happens to the dialectic between the skeptic and the conspiracy theorist when claims about pervasive “mind control” are added to the equation.

In this episode I also introduce Karl Popper’s concept of “falsifiable” versus “unfalsifiable” theories, and discuss it’s relevance to the debate.

TCT 017: Critical Thinking About Conspiracies | Part 2

by November 12, 2011 » Add more comments.
episode017

In episode 017 of the Critical Thinker Podcast we continue our series on critical thinking about CONSPIRACIES.

In the previous episode I introduced a view that I called “default skepticism” about conspiracy theories, which in a nutshell says that the grander the conspiracy, the less likely it is to be true.

In this episode we look more closely at some of the main arguments that skeptics give for this position. What is it about conspiracy hypotheses that makes them implausible?

TCT 016: Critical Thinking About Conspiracies | Part 1

by October 12, 2011 » Add the first comment.
episode016

On this episode of The Critical Thinker Podcast we enter the fascinating world of CONSPIRACIES. I’d be happy to tell you all I know about the topic, but then I’d have to kill you.

TCT 015: Confirmation Bias and the Evolution of Reason

by July 31, 2011 » Add more comments.
episode015

In this episode I talk about a new approach to understanding confirmation bias that is getting some recent attention. It’s known as the “argumentative theory of reason”, and it claims that our ability to construct and evaluate arguments evolved in ancestral humans primarily for the sake of social persuasion and social collaboration, rather than for improving the quality of individual beliefs and decisions. In this episode I survey the theory and some of its implications for understanding who we are as critical thinkers.

This episode covers quite a bit of ground, from evolutionary psychology to collaborative reasoning to biological functions and the Greek story of Odysseus and the Sirens!

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