Teaching Philosophy 40:4, December 2017

DOI: 10.5840/teachphil201812277

How Can We Get Students to Think Critically

about Intransigent Beliefs?

TRACY BOWELL
JUSTINE KINGSBURY
University of Waikato

Abstract: Part of the job of the philosophy teacher, and in particular the criti-
cal thinking teacher, is to encourage students to critically examine their own
beliefs. There are some beliefs that are difficult to think critically about, even
for those who have critical thinking skills and are committed to applying them
to their own beliefs.  These resistant beliefs are not all of a kind, and so a
range of different strategies may be needed to get students to think critically
about them.  In this paper we suggest some such strategies.

1. Introduction
Ideally people should subject their own beliefs to impartial scrutiny,
weighing up the evidence for and against them and modifying them
as the evidence demands. Philosophy teaching, focused as it is on
reflection, reasons and arguments, is on the face of it a likely means
of developing this ability in students. However, there are psychologi-
cal barriers to thinking critically about one’s own beliefs even when
the beliefs in question are mundane and inconsequential. Examples
include confirmation bias (preferentially noticing and over-rating the
significance of evidence in favour of our current belief [Koriat, Li-
chtenstein, and Fischhoff 1980]), belief perseverance (a tendency to
continue to believe things even after our reasons to believe them have
been undermined [Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard 1975]), the tendency
to evaluate arguments whose conclusions we believe more favourably
than equally good ones whose conclusions we don’t believe (Markovits
2003; Stanovich and West 2008), and the tendency to be less sensitive
to our own inconsistencies than to the inconsistencies of others (Paul
2002: 181). These psychological tendencies are not dependent on any
feature of the beliefs in question other than their being one’s own.
© Teaching Philosophy, 2017. All rights reserved. 0145-5788 pp. 395–405
396 TRACY BOWELL AND JUSTINE KINGSBURY

In this paper we concern ourselves with beliefs that are even more
than usually difficult to think critically about. These intransigent be-
liefs are not all of a kind, and strategies for getting ourselves and our
students to think critically about them will differ accordingly. Some
beliefs are resistant to critical thinking because we are unaware that
we hold them, some because we are unaware of our reasons for hold-
ing them, some because they are hard-won, some because they are
identity-constituting or in some other way central to how we live our
lives, some because they are socially or culturally reinforced. A belief
can belong to more than one of these categories, and not every belief
that has one of these characteristics is resistant to critical thinking: for
example, sometimes simply pointing out to someone that they have no
good reason to hold a previously unexamined belief suffices to dispel
that belief.
Other things being equal, it is a good thing to subject your own
beliefs to critical scrutiny: the very point of critical thinking is the
forming of true beliefs and the avoidance of false ones, and in general,
true beliefs tend to help one navigate the world successfully. However,
there may be exceptions. Towards the end of the paper we will discuss
some cases in which it is not clear that critically examining one’s own
beliefs is the best thing to do.
Our pedagogical suggestions for helping students learn to think
critically about their intransigent beliefs apply most straightforwardly
in the context of a first-year critical thinking course, but with appropri-
ate modifications they might also be used in an applied ethics course
or an introduction to philosophy course.

2. Beliefs We Are Unaware Of

Richard Paul and others suggest that many of our fundamental beliefs
are not rationally thought through, but rather are uncritically accepted
after being inherited from the groups within which we were brought
up as children and to which we belong as adults (Paul 1993: 192, 259,
463). Paul suggests that this process and its results are largely invisible
to us (Paul 1993: 192). We may not realize that we have a particular
belief, let alone why we do. A belief like this cannot be subjected to
critical examination, at least not without first being brought to the
surface.
Consider James, a 50-year-old who has voted for the same party
(the party his parents voted for during his childhood) in every gen-
eral election since he reached voting age. (Suppose, for the sake of
simplicity, that there are only two parties to choose between.) During
every election campaign, he listens to the arguments put forward by
the competing parties, considers their merits, and decides (always in
 THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT INTRANSIGENT BELIEFS 397

the same direction) which one to vote for. He regards himself as a con-
scientious epistemic citizen—he thinks that he evaluates the arguments
open-mindedly and that during each election campaign he is open to the
possibility that this time he should vote for the other party. However,
external observers can see that James is mistaken about this. Even
when the parties shift their ground so that the other party occupies the
political ground formerly occupied by James’s party, James, while still
asserting the same substantive political views as before, continues to
vote for the same party. On the basis of his behaviour, it seems clear
that James has a set of beliefs about the two political parties that he
does not know he has.
Not knowing that he has these beliefs, James may not respond
properly to evidence against them. For example, if part of what drives
James’s voting behaviour is the unacknowledged belief that the Na-
tional Party is the party of big business and that its policies always
disadvantage regular working folk, and he notices evidence that cur-
rent National Party policies are more centrist, he may not regard this
as relevant information, since he is unaware that he has the belief in
question.

Exercise
It is clear that you cannot think critically about such a belief until you
come to be aware that you have it. How might a teacher encourage
such self-awareness in her students? Some critical thinking textbooks
include discussion of psychological barriers to critical thinking, such
as confirmation bias. In our experience students, although interested
in such biases as problems that other people have, tend to be initially
disinclined to think that they themselves have these tendencies. A first
step towards getting them to see that there may be things going on in
their heads that they cannot introspect is to have them do some of the
Harvard Implicit Association tests (IAT) (available at https://implicit.
harvard.edu/implicit)—they provide a striking illustration of this point. 1
Once students see this, they may be more inclined to notice when their
behaviour is at odds with their avowed beliefs, and providing them with
case studies such as the James case discussed above may help with this.

3. Beliefs We Are Unaware of Our Reasons for Holding

Of course, not all inherited beliefs are ones that we are unaware of.
Some have been thought through and endorsed, and others are beliefs
that the believer is aware of having but has never critically examined.
In a study in which we interviewed undergraduates about beliefs that
were in some sense “deeply held,” many of the interviewees claimed
never to have considered why they thought it was morally acceptable
398 TRACY BOWELL AND JUSTINE KINGSBURY

to eat meat (Goldberg, Kingsbury, Bowell, and Howard 2015). They’d

always thought it was okay, their families thought it was okay, they’d
never considered it might be otherwise. These participants know
what they believe, but they seem to have no idea why they believe
it. This can also be true of beliefs that seem (to an outside observer)
less important; for example, unthinking but intense allegiance to the
Milwaukee Brewers.

Assessment Exercise
A three-part exercise we sometimes set our critical thinking students
addresses this problem.
Part I: The students are asked to pick some belief they care about
and to give the best argument for it they can think of. We usually
ask them to hand this in at the end of Week 2. Because this is very
early in the course, we do not expect a high standard of argument
and we do not allocate many marks to this part of the assignment.
Usually it is worth 5 percent of the final grade, and we grade it
generously: anyone who has given an argument at all gets 3/5.
Part II: The students are asked to critically evaluate the Part I
argument of one of their fellow students and to provide construc-
tive suggestions about how to improve it. Part II is due around the
midpoint of the course or slightly later, and is worth 10 percent of
the final mark for the course.
Part III: The students receive constructive feedback on their Part I
argument from both the instructor and a fellow student (who has
evaluated their argument in Part II). At the end of the course, hope-
fully having a better understanding than before of the difference
between good and bad reasons for belief, the student improves their
original argument in response to the feedback, presenting their
improved argument both in standard form and as an argument tree,
and explaining why they have made the changes that they have (and,
if they have rejected some of the suggestions given by their fellow
student or by the instructor, explaining why they have). Sometimes
the feedback convinces them that their original conclusion was too
strong, or even that it was completely misguided. In such cases, they
are allowed to argue for whatever they now believe about the topic
at issue. Part III is worth 15 percent of the final mark for the course.

Practicalities and Problems

1. We anonymise the Part I arguments before distributing them to fellow
students. This seems particularly important since we have asked the
 THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT INTRANSIGENT BELIEFS 399

students to argue for conclusions that they care about, and they may
be sensitive about others in the class knowing what they have argued
for. Genuine anonymity is not possible in a very small class: we have
used this assignment only in classes of fifty or more students.
2. An earlier version of this assignment did not include instructor
feedback on the Part I arguments. The only feedback was from a fel-
low student. This disadvantaged those students whose arguments were
incompetently evaluated: the current version of the assignment ensures
that all students get some useful feedback.
3. There remains a problem for students whose Part I arguments
are incompetently evaluated: if we give them the incompetent or un-
constructive feedback from their fellow student, they have the extra
task of evaluating the feedback and seeing that it isn’t useful. Since
we, the instructors, have graded Part II and provided comments on
it, one solution is to give the student receiving the peer feedback our
comments on the peer feedback (with the grade removed). This is what
we standardly do. There are however some cases in which the peer
feedback is completely unhelpful, and there are also cases in which
the peer feedback is hostile. In those cases, we do not provide the
student with the peer feedback, but we make sure that there is plenty
of instructor feedback.
4. This assignment is labor-intensive from a grading point of view.
It is important that the grading is done by an experienced instructor.
For it to be gradable in a reasonable amount of time, the grader has to
be able to quickly see what can be done to fix an argument, and this
is a skill which can only be developed with long practice. The grading
is time-consuming even for an experienced instructor, but we think
the pay-off justifies the time spent—the three-part assignment helps
students to see the usefulness of critical thinking and shows them how
it can be applied to things that really matter to them.

Results
The final versions of the arguments are almost always greatly improved,
and in those cases where students really have argued for something
they feel strongly about, we hope (and we are explicit about this in
class) that the process has provided a model for future examination of
their own reasons for belief.

4. Hard-Won Beliefs
The literature on the influence of worldviews on critical thinking
focuses heavily on beliefs that have been imbibed with our mother’s
milk. (See for example Paul 1993; Brezinka 1994; Mezirow 1990).
However, another possible etiology for an intransigent belief is an ef-
400 TRACY BOWELL AND JUSTINE KINGSBURY

fortful process of reasoning one’s way to that belief. People may be

reluctant to critically examine hard-won beliefs, since doing so brings
with it the possibility that they will have to give them up. A person
who has made an immense effort to overcome the religious inclinations
she was brought up to, for example, may be particularly disinclined to
give proper consideration to arguments in favour of religious belief.
This effect may be reinforced if the believer has been an outspo-
ken evangelist for her hard-won beliefs, as there is the risk of loss of
face. Consider Paula, a former meat-eater who has reasoned her way
to the view that meat-eating is never morally okay and now loses no
opportunity to try to convince others that they should be vegetarians.
If Paula is faced with arguments for the morality of meat-eating and
begins to have a glimmer that there is something right about them, the
prospect of having to eat humble pie if she re-examines her reasons
for being vegetarian and decides that after all the policy is unjustified
might provide strong motivation not to re-examine them.
There are many historical examples of eminent scientists having dif-
ficulty giving up their hard-won beliefs (for example, Joseph Priestley’s
lifelong refusal to accept that that his phlogiston theory was mistaken)
and of scientific communities being unwilling to take seriously research
that has the potential to overturn theories that have been taken to be
settled (for example resistance in the 1980s to Marshall and Warren’s
bacterial explanation of stomach ulcers [see Dare and Kingsbury 2008:
510–11]). Discussing cases like these in class, making it clear why
it would have been better if the scientists in question had been more
willing to open-mindedly consider the evidence against their views,
but also presenting their failure to do so as understandable, might be
a good way of getting students to begin to think about their attitude to
hard-won beliefs of their own without feeling that they will be judged
negatively for it. 2
Apart from this, it seems that the way to address these problems
is to keep up a consistent emphasis on the importance of having
good reasons for belief and on the efficacy of critical reasoning as a
way of achieving this. Many critical thinking textbooks and courses
open with this—for example, in our first lecture we use an extended
example involving being on a jury, where you are required to evalu-
ate arguments and also present them (to your fellow jurors), and the
defendant’s future hangs on whether you and your fellow jurors do it
well. It would be a mistake, however, to think that this suffices—it
is easy for students to later lose sight of the point of the enterprise,
as they get entangled in the intricacies of validity and inductive force
and in the welter of different fallacies. One way of getting students
into the habit of thinking critically in their everyday lives is to have
one of the items of assessment be a critical thinking journal, in which
 THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT INTRANSIGENT BELIEFS 401

they reflect each week on occasions on which they have deployed their
critical capacities and occasions on which they didn’t but should have
(Bowell and Kingsbury 2015); this, combined with regular reminders
of the practical importance of being a critical thinker and an emphasis
on the epistemic virtuousness of the critical thinker (and the epistemic
viciousness of those who lack the courage to follow the evidence when
doing so would cause them embarrassment) might help to overcome
such problems. As Ben Hamby points out, in critical thinking courses
we seek to foster “the special motivation that is willingness to inquire:
the motivation that drives a person to seek out reasoned judgment
through critical inquiry, and that orients them towards recognizing
controversial issues that deserve reflection” (Hamby 2016: 3). We
should make it clear to our students that this is our aim.

Assessment Exercise: Critical Thinking Journal

Each week the students write at most a page about an occasion (dur-
ing that week) on which they have used critical thinking skills, or one
on which they think in retrospect that they should have done so. They
describe the circumstance, explain why critical thinking was called for,
describe their actual reasoning, evaluate it, and suggest improvements.
The instructor provides quick comments each week, but not marks.
There is an overall mark for the journal of 10 percent, most of which
is earned by participating conscientiously in the exercise of journal-
keeping rather than depending on the quality of the analysis. We do not
expect the writing to be polished. The idea is that the student should
spend only about half an hour on each journal entry.

5. Beliefs that Are Central to How We Live Our Lives and

Beliefs that Are Socially Reinforced
Some beliefs are very deeply embedded in people’s lives, such that
giving them up would necessitate rethinking many of their other be-
liefs and changing their behaviour. This may provide an incentive to
avoid critically examining them. Some participants in our study had
this kind of defensive response to questioning about why they thought
meat-eating was morally okay. For example, one says, I don’t know,
I don’t really think about it, and later, in response to some arguments
(defensively): Everyone’s entitled to their beliefs, I guess. After some
further discussion, she says, I try not to think about it.
Some of the interviewees don’t want to be faced with evidence for
fear of what they might have to conclude from it, and how they might
feel they might have to change their behaviour in response. Behaving
as you think you ought might be very difficult; easier not to come to
402 TRACY BOWELL AND JUSTINE KINGSBURY

the conclusion that you ought. A second participant says she wishes
she was a vegetarian, because she is fond of animals, but when she is
told about some of the evidence of how badly the meat industry treats
animals, she says: To a certain extent, ignorance is bliss, and later
remarks that life is easier if you don’t look at the evidence.
It seems clear these participants ought to think through their reasons
for believing in the moral acceptability of eating meat and change
their behaviour if this reasoning process necessitates it. But note that
it may be especially difficult to do so in the environment these par-
ticular participants are in. Most of them are in their late teens, many
are still living with their parents, many of them live in a farming area
in which meat-eating is taken for granted. There may be considerable
social pressure not to give up meat, as well as the difficulty of finding
anything to eat at home if you do so.
The pedagogical suggestions from the previous sections apply here
as well. These kinds of beliefs will often be ones that students are un-
aware of their reasons for holding. The three-part exercise above could
be modified to more directly address this situation. Rather than asking
the student to argue for something she feels strongly about, one might
instead try to elicit a statement of some belief that she takes absolutely
for granted, and ask her to provide reasons in support of that belief.
One might also include this kind of case in the brief for the critical
thinking journal: “If you can’t think of any occasions in the past week
when you have, or think you should have, used critical thinking skills,
try this. It’s very likely that you have some unquestioned assumptions
that have played a role in your thinking or guided your actions this
week and that might benefit from examination. For example, perhaps
you assume that it’s morally okay to eat meat, or that you should brush
your teeth exactly twice a day, or that when you go on a date, the
person who did the inviting should pay for the meal, drinks or tickets.
Pick one such assumption and consider some reasons for and against
it, and write about this process in your journal.”
There is no way to be sure, in these exercises, that the beliefs the
student chooses to discuss are genuinely ones they feel strongly about
or ones that are previously unexamined. However, our experience is
that most students enter into the process in good faith, provided it has
been made clear to them what the aim of the exercise is.

6. Some Possible Exceptions to the Claim that

All Beliefs Should Be Critically Examined
There are cases in which it is not clear that we should expect or encour-
age people to think critically about their beliefs. Consider someone, in a
society in which being overtly non-religious is very severely punished,
 THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT INTRANSIGENT BELIEFS 403

who has begun to have doubts about her religious beliefs. She could
critically examine her reasons for holding them and then, if this causes
her to cease to believe, continue to act as though she does believe.
Or she could refrain from critically examining them so as not to risk
putting herself in this position. On the face of it, it isn’t obvious that
the first of these approaches is better than the second. However, going
through the reasoning process might put her in a position to consider
other alternatives. If she comes to the conclusion that her former reli-
gious beliefs are unjustified, she is then in a position to weigh up the
consequences of being open about her beliefs and consider ways to do
so that might reduce the negative consequences (for example, taking
steps to find like-minded others who together might have resources
that might enable some dramatic alternative such as escape or reform).
If she concludes that the best thing to do is dissemble, that may be an
uncomfortable position, but it isn’t obvious that it is more uncomfort-
able than having to avoid looking front-on at beliefs you are beginning
to have doubts about. This may in the end be a matter of individual
psychology—what helps with survival in a difficult environment will
be different for different people.
This is a case in which there is extreme social pressure to maintain
a particular belief, and pedagogically it is important to be sensitive to
the possibility that for some students, the consequences of thinking
critically about some socially or culturally reinforced beliefs may be
non-trivial. This may be true also for some beliefs or sets of beliefs that
are central to the way people live their lives, whether or not they are
socially reinforced. Wittgenstein talks about religious belief this way:
It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate
commitment to a system of reference. Hence although it’s a belief, it’s really
a way of living, or a way of assessing life. (Wittgenstein 1998: 24)
This is an instance of the broader Wittgensteinian thought that some
of our talk of belief and reasons for belief is misplaced, and not ev-
erything we might normally call a belief requires justification or is
straightforwardly up for revision.
This is not to say that we should not encourage students to think
critically about their religious beliefs or other beliefs that frame their
lives. There are innumerable examples of misguided religious beliefs
having appalling consequences, so we should reason about them if we
can, and it is clear that sometimes we can. But we should approach
such matters with sensitivity, and not be surprised if the process is
difficult or if students resist it altogether.
404 TRACY BOWELL AND JUSTINE KINGSBURY

7. Conclusion
Thinking critically about one’s own beliefs is difficult, and this is
especially so for some kinds of beliefs. In this paper we have talked
about beliefs we are unaware of, unexamined beliefs, hard-won beliefs,
beliefs that are socially or culturally reinforced and beliefs that are
central to how we live our lives, and made some suggestions about ways
to encourage students to critically examine such beliefs. Our overall
pedagogical approach is to be very explicit about the value of critical
thinking in everyday life and the importance of developing good epis-
temic habits. We have also suggested some particular assignments that
we think help with developing such habits. We conclude by suggesting
that although critical thinking about one’s own beliefs is generally a
good thing, there may be cases in which it is too much to expect. 3

Notes
1. Recent research casts doubt on some of the claims made for the IAT, suggesting
for example that the implicit biases it reveals play less of a role in real world behaviour
than, on the one hand, explicit biases, and on the other hand, deliberative reasoning which
can over-ride kneejerk biased responses (see, for example, Selmi 2017). Even if these
criticisms are justified, they do not undermine the pedagogical usefulness of the IAT in
the context at hand.
2. Thanks to a referee for this suggestion.
3. Thanks to the many people who contributed to this paper either by early discussions
of the ideas or by commenting on drafts: in particular, Tim Dare, Stephanie Gibbons, Ilan
Goldberg, Ben Hamby, Darelle Howard, Jonathan McKeown-Green, Vanessa Scholes,
and an anonymous referee for this journal.

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Tracy Bowell is Pro Vice-Chancellor Teaching and Learning at the University of Waikato in
Hamilton, New Zealand. In addition to critical thinking and argumentation, she researches
and supervises PhD students in the areas of epistemology, feminist philosophy, philosophy
of education and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. E-mail: tracy.bowell@waikato.ac.nz.

Justine Kingsbury is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Waikato in

Hamilton, New Zealand. She teaches critical thinking, and has written with Tracy Bowell
on critical thinking pedagogy and on virtue argumentation theory. Her other teaching
and research areas are philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, meta-philosophy and
aesthetics. E-mail: justinek@waikato.ac.nz.