Learning How To Learn

Reaction to the previous post, Plague of Dunces was overwhelming with 12,456 reads to date. Vivian Sherwood, a dear friend, and Mke Griffin, a former student, suggested publish a post explaining ‘learning how to learn’ and how it actually works in people’s everyday life, how it makes them free. They also suggested I incorporate testimonies from former students who learned how to learn. Ok, Vivian, and Max ! You got it. We start with a definition.

     Definition: Learning-how-to-learn is the art of acquiring the skills of logic and using the best available evidence to seek reality, truth, goodness and beauty for the rest of your life. No teachers. No professors. Just You.

Then, we add three simple axioms:                             

#1.       We need to know the things we don’t know.

#2.      We need the skills to know what we don’t know.

#3.      We need to apply those skills to every assumption about what we think we know.

Testimony from Mike Griffin, Westfield State College Philosophy Student 1970:  “Learning how to learn; I had a classic liberal arts education with a little more philosophy and math than most History majors would have, graduating in 1974 from Westfield State. Today my life as an IT contractor does not move from company to company, but project to project. In computers, everything you know is wrong after six months; but if you have acquired the ability to teach yourself the new technologies; recognize how things have to be organized to leverage the new technologies; and communicate clearly what has to be done; you will be successful. I use tools that were developed over two millennia and apply them to sort out today’s chaos.”

There are simple reasoning concepts that must be understood before we can learn how to learn. Before my Critical Thinking and Writing Students take their first online exam, BASIC LOGIC CONCEPTS, I send them this checklist as preparation. Test yourself.

What is logic?

What is an argument?

What is an inductive argument?

What is a deductive argument?

What is a cogent argument?

What is a truth claim, a statement or a proposition?

What is a premise?

What is a conclusion?

What is a valid argument?

What is a sound argument?

Testimony from Max Holihan, Santa Barbara City College, Critical Thinking and Writing student, 2009:  “Teaching one how to think is the greatest gift one generation can give to its successor. Giving someone the key to opening the doors that they want to unlock only to find another locked door that they have the key to open is the hard work of learning to learn. The reward is finding yourself... opening those doors with the only expectation to find what is inside, and what you find inside completes a bigger picture of yourself."

After you understand basic reasoning concepts it’s time for a mental enema. That happens with mastery of informal fallacies of reasoning that we all commit. Some of us, such as the uncritical, are completely ignorant that we are committing these mental mistakes. Some of us, like advertisers, politicians, and media wonks, actually use these mental defects to deceive for their own gain. Here’s the fallacies list my students master before taking Exam #2 INFORMAL FALLACIES OF REASONING. These 17 most common fallacies are divided into three categories; Relevance, Presumption, and Ambiguity:

Fallacies of relevance rely on premises that seem to be relevant to the conclusion when, in fact, they are not. There are seven major fallacies of relevance:
1. Arguments from ignorance, i.e. from lack of knowledge
2. Appeals to inappropriate authority, i.e. from false authority
3. Arguments against the person, i.e. attacking the person, not the idea
4. Appeals to popular emotion, i.e. from what is merely popular
5. Appeals to pity, i.e. from misery or pity
6. Appeals to force, i.e. using intimidation or force to convince
7. Irrelevant conclusions, i.e. missing the point

Fallacies of presumption arise when an argument relies on a claim that is assumed to be true, but is, in fact false, dubious, or without warrant. There are five such fallacies:

1. Complex question, i.e. assuming the question is valid
2. False cause, i.e. assuming temporal sequence is a cause for something
3. Begging-the-question, i.e. arguing in a circle
4. Accident, i.e. hasty generalization of a principle to an atypical case
5. Converse accident, i.e. hasty generalization from an atypical case


Fallacies of ambiguity occur when arguments are formulated such that they rely on shifts in the meaning of words from their premises to their conclusions. Such ambiguous language results in five fallacies of ambiguity and often great humor:

 1. Equivocation, i.e. exploiting double      meaning words or phrases
 2. Amphiboly, i.e. exploiting double  meaning sentences
 3. Accent, i.e. exploiting emphasis or  inflection of words
 4. Composition, i.e confusing qualities  of parts with the whole thing
 5. Division, i.e. confusing qualities of a  whole thing with its parts   

Testimony from Christopher Byrd, former Symbolic Logic student, 1971:  “Mark--- thank you for setting me free from fallacies to examine assumptions, question media facts, be suspicious of false authorities and free of what others would think of me especially those who call me friend. If only they knew the depths of my soul. You never judged me, but you taught me how to judge. You never discriminated against me for my life choices, but you taught me how to discriminate and discern.  I came to your class a shy, conflicted, angry child licking the wounds life inflicted, playing the victim. I left your critical thinking class with the tools of learning. I printed out that Dorothy Sayers essay you gave us; The Lost Tools of Learning.  Whenever I meet a person too ignorant to question their assumptions, I give them her essay. I want you to attend my graduation from U. Mass this May. This BA in Psychology is as much yours as it is mine. Let’s have a toast and another cigar.”

The rest of the skills needed to learn how to learn are documented and explained in my e-Textbook, REASON ARGUE REFUTE: Critical Thinking About Anything. (The iBook version has 12 embedded mini-lecture videos)  These skills teach how to formulate valid arguments and how to test the premises of those arguments for provable evidence regardless of ideology, religion, bias or prejudice. To pass my course, each student must write a six to ten page term paper formulating a valid and sound argument. The final exam in my course requires the student to refute the argument in their term paper using the same validity and soundness skills. If they can do this, then they have learned how to learn.  They have learned that learning how to learn is learning how to recognize logic and the best evidence for any claim. Most of them can do it. Some, unfortunately, are so shackled by their bias, popular opinion, peer pressure or prejudice that they simply cannot refute themselves.

Testimony from Matthew Bixby, M.Sc., Philosophy, Edinburgh University, and former Westmont College philosophy honors student 2011: “My training in learning how to think has inspired my own desire the pass the skill on to future generations. As a result I have continued my philosophical education, especially in the areas of epistemology and ethics. Specifically, my learning how think has translated into acceptance at the University of Edinburgh,  for both of  my master's degrees in early and late Wittgenstein.  Finally, the ability to think has also translated into writing my own philosophical blog, whythink.net and the creation of various short stories, some of which are also published on the blog. I can thus say without hesitation, that learning how think has inspired my creativity, stimulated my academic career, and provided insight into my own philosophical research.”

By my calculations, well over 10,000 students have passed, literally, though my pedagogy as a professor of philosophy over the last 50 years. Ironically, I reach well over that number each week here on this blog. In either media, I learn how to teach through their questions. In return, I teach them to learn how to learn.

From David C. Quiroz UCSB–History, 2015: Hello Professor McIntire. How funny to hear from you again since I mentioned your class in an interview just yesterday! I described it as one of the most challenging, and rewarding, classes I’ve taken in my academic career. Your ears must have been burning. My reflection on your class is that it is essential for any person to maneuver through their life free from manipulation and deceit. I apply what I’ve learned in your class in my daily life, whether it be listening to see if what people say is fallacious, or whether I apply it in my writing for clarity. To be honest, I need a refresher. But I feel that the basics still remain with me. It has been a change in my personal mind hegemony. Thank you for this, and I wish you the best on your future endeavors.  

Learning how to learn is not difficult but it does require will and constant application. One of my dear friends, Vivian Sherwood is 88 years old and educated at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts many years ago. There she learned how to learn. Her life has been a series of spectacular successes in one of the toughest careers there is, Public Relations representing names far to prominent to mention here.  She applies that knowledge every day still, and her views are greatly prized by all who know her especially by the young who crave Vivian’s capacity and will to learn how to learn.

Testimony from Allison Chapin Mathematics Tutor Coordinator Santa Barbara City College: “I do remember your class, and I'm constantly recommending it to mathematics, science and engineering majors in particular. The single best thing I got out of your class was the introduction to vocabulary associated with reasoning. This opened up access to a huge world of reasoning structures that truly can be applied to anything, and used to deconstruct almost anything. I also appreciated the good, honest practice in writing using these structures.

At a certain level in mathematics, it all becomes writing proofs using deductive logic. I found that having a vocabulary to translate those forms into English smoothly allowed for much broader application of the skills I was developing in studying math, and also made the structures flow more naturally within math itself. Some really lovely fields of study can be dense and impenetrable without some fluency in logical structures, and I'm always happy to find a toolkit that makes more reading accessible. Now I get to read musings on philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics and meta-mathematics and actually have an ability to parse them!  I find myself disagreeing with your blog immediately, so you seem to be achieving your goal. It's also very entertaining and I'll have to read more of it!”

If any of this is alien, strange or totally new to you, then don’t fret. Most of your college professors, politicians, journalists and even many scientists have never been trained to learn how to learn. Proof? Just listen to the ‘Tower of Babel’ cacophony of our contemporary culture. War, barbarism, self-absorption, and orgies of feeling, now rule human consciousness and therefore world events. Everything is relative say most. There is no reality, truth, goodness or beauty say most. That’s because most have never learned how to learn. Otherwise, our world would be quite different.

REASON ARGUE REFUTE Critical Thinking About Anything 

by Mark McIntire 

Link: http://amzn.com/B00CC12QNE