What is QBCT?
Most of us encounter critical thinking as a set of prescriptions:
Avoid logical fallacies.
Be careful when relying on human perceptions for they contain frailties.
Take care not to “lie” with statistics or ignore the need for evidence.
Be alert to cognitive biases in human thinking.
Our introduction to these prescriptions can come from a textbook, article, or human behavior modeling obedience to these “best practices” for making reliable, relevant, and complex decisions.
Unfortunately, critical thinking is a tough sale because we are usually unaware of how frequently we make mistakes in our judgments. We cannot know those things we do not know. Tens of millions wish to know more about successful diet programs and exercises relieving their back pain. They seek answers to those topics.
By reconstructing critical thinking in the form of questions, we try to recover the lost excitement of habitually asking questions. Research suggests that by age 11 humans stop asking any but the most superficial of questions. In other words, we shut the spigot of wonder off. Even more we reduce the potential creative collaborations emerging from an active interaction among askers and respondents.
Question-Based Critical Thinking (QBCT) refers to responding to the reasoning of someone with an inventory of questions calling attention to criteria shaping the quality of the connection between support and conclusion. In other words, are there inadequacies in the pathway used to reach the BCD (Belief, Conclusion, Decision)? QBCT is not the ammunition used to criticize an argument; it is the respectful voice of curiosity searching for improved thinking.