The judge needs a road

The safest opinion in public life is to call for more critical thinking. Nobody has ever lost a panel discussion by demanding it. I have said it myself, gravely, and collected approving nods from people I know to disagree with one another about everything else on earth. That should have been the warning.

When everyone agrees on a term of praise, it is usually because nobody has defined it. This note is a short tidy-up of three words that do three different jobs, and that cause three different accidents when muddled. Critical thinking. Methodical thinking. And epistemology, the word nobody risks at a dinner party.

Critical comes from the Greek kritikós, one who can tell things apart. True from false, signal from noise, a good reason from a good wrapping. Critical thinking, then, is the judge in your head, and judges are indispensable. But a judge without rules of procedure is not a court. It is just a man with opinions and a wig.

That is where the eternal demand leads when left to itself. Critical thinking without a procedure decays into the cheapest position on the market, distrust of everything. And distrust of everything is not scepticism. It is credulity turned inside out, and it spares you exactly what naivety spares you. The checking.

Method comes from methodos, the road one travels. Methodical thinking is the procedure that makes a verdict checkable. Show your working. Test the source against a second source. Ask what would prove you wrong. The road is what lets two people who disagree walk the same route and meet at the answer. Without a road, a verdict is just a mood with excellent posture.

Beneath both lies epistemology, the study of what knowledge is and when we have earned the right to say we know. It sounds like something you catch at university, but you use it every time you ask the simplest question in the language. How do we know this? Five words, the whole discipline. You never notice the ground in fair weather. It is when somebody declares that everything is relative, or that their feeling weighs as much as your working, that you find out whether your road is laid on rock or on bog.

The point is that the three do not compete. They are one landscape. The ground decides what will bear weight. The road makes the verdict checkable. The judge hands it down. No verdict is better than the road that led to it, and no road is better than the ground it is laid on. And you were given the whole landscape free at school. All of it was Greek, and none of it was Greek to you. Show your working, that was the road. Source criticism, that was judicial training. The teacher asking how do we know that, was doing the groundwork. The syllabus was never the problem. The labels came off in the removal van somewhere on the way to adulthood.

Gluing them back on has become urgent, because the machines have made judging cheap and roadbuilding dear. Anyone can now criticise anything, fluently, confidently, in seconds, with generated authority. The world is not short of verdicts. It is short of people who can show the road to one.

So the next time somebody calls for more critical thinking, and it will be tomorrow, nod warmly. Then ask the follow-up question no panel has ever prepared for. Which road is the judge supposed to take? If silence follows, you have just done epistemology in practice. It does not hurt, and it rather suits you.

This was a note, a breather ashore. Next episode we are back at sea, with a man sailing to the land of the dead to ask directions home. He, for the record, knew rock from bog, chose his road accordingly, and handed down his own verdicts. Which is why he made it home.