In theory, theory and practice are equivalent. In practice, theory and practice are quite different.
My engineering and computer science classes taught me more about "how to think" than the liberal arts classes I took - those seemed to focus on regurgitating facts or the professor's viewpoint. And I certainly didn't get the impression that the in-major kids were doing anything different, just better practiced regurgitation.
I think if "liberal arts" education were fulfilling its promise, it would have long ago adopted programming (an unforgiving applied logic) as a core component (scheme/haskell, not python). People in general learn by example, while teachers (having already learned) tend to emphasize abstract models. This is a great recipe for model precession, fostering an illusion of thinking critically while being at the mercy of now-invisible built in assumptions.
That's funny because I don't think my computer science classes taught me much about programming (other than learning about deterministic finite automatons) or thinking and the best preparation I had for real world programming came from formal logic classes. Which were in the philosophy department.
I'm certainly not saying my CS/EE classes were spot on in their approach, but they forced me to solve problems, which I think is a fundamental component of learning that is easy to ignore.
I'm guessing your logic classes had similar problem solving where errors were objectively called out. I regrettably didn't take philosophy classes, but only softer things that were subjectively graded via essay. In retrospect, they seem like fine topics to have studied after one developed critical thinking skills, but when presented as competitors to hard logic they devolved into a subjective/memorization fest
(I'd love to upvote you for friendly insightful discussion, but I appear to be unable to vote on comments. email to hn@ has so far gone unanswered)
The thing about liberal arts is it teaches you to argue any point of view, right or wrong, with equal facility. With engineering, you cannot argue that the rocket didn't blow up.
I.e. with engineering, reality is the check on the validity of your critical thinking. With liberal arts, there is no such check.
Maybe, but if all your teachers have obvious biases and they grade on how well you pander to their biases, and all their biases just happen to line up, then you're left only able to argue one side of things.
It's not hard to imagine going to a liberal arts college where the professors are all moderately to aggressively liberal and/or Democrat.
I'm not saying that it's RIGHT that this could happen, but that it's not unreasonable to expect that it COULD happen.
Its not about bias. Professors honestly believe that what they are teaching you is the truth and that their viewpoint is the correct one. They don't want to hear your ability to argue with them or present critical thought. They want to know that you absorbed their viewpoint. When you write a paper contrary to their viewpoint, they see it as you not understanding the material, not as you understanding the material and choosing an opposing viewpoint.
I think you and I have described the same thing using different words. Just because someone doesn't know they have a bias doesn't mean that they don't have a bias.
There's a bunch of replies all over this thread that are almost comical examples of HN users trying to rebut the positions of people they agree with.
I don't know if that's because internet commenters in general just use the preceding comment as a springboard to jump onto their own soapbox, or if HN users are particularly bad at reading and responding to the content of a text (while loudly denouncing such worthless literary skills).
> liberal arts ... teaches you to argue any point of view, right or wrong, with equal facility
Is this really a good thing? There are certainly plenty of things in this world that are relative, unanswerable, or heuristics based on differing utility functions. But arguments about those things should still be logically right, based on differing assumptions that are made explicit.
I did not consider it a good thing, when I had convinced myself and all my opinions to lay at a middle/neutral point where I couldn't select a single one. It made me feel as though I had no sense of self. I studied a bit of Zen with some folks, where I started simplifying every point of view to 'thinking about thinking', or a deconstructionist approach to every conceptual construction. This allowed me to assign a more weighted value to every opinion I could have, so I felt as though I was being somewhat more careful. With this mindset, I still feel as though I am tricking myself, but, I add concepts/values/ideas/understandings/acceptance of understandings much more slowly and less definitively.
Even then, there's the foggy feeling that remains, every thought exists in some context with some assumptions. You can continue to question what assumptions exist that you aren't aware of, and redefine your opinions through that vocabulary instead, and perhaps convince yourself into a point of view you would never consciously switch to given knowledge of the prior, through the trickery of time and language.
Trying to maintain a coherent view of the world assuming the possibility of relativism across all domains is insanity. Trying to function with that mass of unanswerables leading to possibly infinitely descending chains of undefined, fuzzy variables is like hitting a wall of meaningless symbols. It makes doing things in reality trivial. The task of coming to know what you explicitly, continuously define as unknowable is impossible.
In theory, logic is beautiful. But there's stuff that makes logic seem incomplete, when it comes to application. At the trail end of the thought, it still feels like thinking about everything all at once, while knowing nothing.
Let me put it another way. A science/engineering program teaches you the scientific method, which is the best technique ever discovered for separating truth from crap. That's a critical thinking skill that actually works.
As opposed to, say, arguing about who is a better President - Obama or Bush? Liberal arts majors can argue that all day, and never be able to demonstrate a thing to be true.
Completely agreed, yet there are topics that reside between those two extremes of objective truth and celebrity ephemera. Unable to be decided through science, yet still "up for decision" anyway (lovely passive voice!). This is what liberal arts is supposed to prepare one to address. But rather than correct reasoning being differentiated from crap reasoning, even among educated people we get passionate emotional appeals that ultimately devolve into tribal us-vs-them behavior.
There is a lot more to political philosophy than "Is president X better than president Y?". Moreover, who's claiming that something has to be demonstrated as true? You find no value whatsoever in discussing and considering different axioms?
Discussing them is fine. How does one determine which axiom is correct? Especially given that a skilled debater can persuasively argue either side?
Note that there have been many scientific theories that were debated persuasively, reasonably, and logically, until someone applied the scientific method and proved one side correct and the other false.
Could you please offer evidence to support your statement that liberal arts major are never able to demonstrate a thing to be true and also, as an example, apply the scientific method to the question `who is a better President - Obama or Bush?`
Yeah, I realized that. But his point is a bit narrow and strawmanish, so I thought it should be expanded.
The entire world isn't engineering, and there are plenty of things that we have to agree to disagree on (we can come up with objective solutions that minimize the disagreement, but that only goes so far). Since softer subjects will always lack clear objective answers, we could hope for a change in liberal arts teaching that required creating independent rational arguments rather than getting by by restating the specific one the professor happens to believe in.
Can all the philosophical disciplines verify their own answers? What about the social disciplines? Do you just ignore questions which aren't cleanly reducible to science or mathematics?
My complaint about liberal arts educations is that they claim to impart "critical thinking" skills, and will often additionally claim that sci/eng does not.
The revolution in the human condition has been brought about by application of the scientific method - it's the most useful critical thinking skill ever devised.
Of the classes I've taken, pure math classes are what have taught me the most about thinking. Physics a bit less, chemistry even a bit less. Chemical engineering less still.
Computer science varied depending on language - when it was Haskell the focus on thinking was a lot higher than when using Java or C, for me. The classes that used imperative languages tended to focus a lot more on nuts and bolts. Maybe that's just a preference of my uni though - they tended to teach algorithm classes etc in Haskell and database style classes in some imperative language, I think, so maybe the difference there is due to a choice from their side.
Organic chemistry, statistics, formal logic didnt evolve my thinking at all in my view.
I guess in short - the things that have developed my thinking the most are things that are about models and algorithms. You could probably run classes focusing on those, but Im not sure there is a big value in doing so compared to just teaching the subjects that are heavy in doing those tasks.
We don't need more critical thinkers we need constructive thinkers. People who add something new rather than learning what we already know.
You don't become good at critical thinking by studying critical thinking. The very problem with this approach is that you are in fact just learning a specific way of thinking and thus leaving out the critical part of it.
Furthermore in my experience many more technical people are actually great creative thinkers but not many liberal arts people are great technical thinkers.
> the liberal arts classes I took - those seemed to focus on regurgitating facts or the professor's viewpoint.
You had bad professors and/or were skating through. To a degree, you will get out what you put in.
Perhaps in STEM fields good work product often is more defined (e.g., the number either is right or wrong) and therefore more efficient for professors to evaluate than in, for example, a history class where you analyze the primary documentary sources for and the causes of the Meiji Restoration.
My engineering and computer science classes taught me more about "how to think" than the liberal arts classes I took - those seemed to focus on regurgitating facts or the professor's viewpoint. And I certainly didn't get the impression that the in-major kids were doing anything different, just better practiced regurgitation.
I think if "liberal arts" education were fulfilling its promise, it would have long ago adopted programming (an unforgiving applied logic) as a core component (scheme/haskell, not python). People in general learn by example, while teachers (having already learned) tend to emphasize abstract models. This is a great recipe for model precession, fostering an illusion of thinking critically while being at the mercy of now-invisible built in assumptions.