Six - Testimony Becomes Experience: The Rise of Critical Thinking

Summary

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), an Oxford don, then a Cambridge professor who wrote popular stories and Christian apologetics in the middle of the twentieth century, had much to say about testimony. In one of his most famous children stories, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), one of his minor characters is a professor disgusted that basic principles of being reasonable had not been taught to the children in his charge. Confronted by the two oldest of four siblings with a fantastic tale from their younger sister about a land of Narnia, and a mean-spirited denial from their younger brother, the professor listens carefully and asks them an unexpected question:

Does your experience lead you to regard your brother or your sister as the more reliable? I mean, which is the more truthful?

They answer that their sister is the more truthful, but that in this case, her story just can’t be true.

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

Lewis, in the manner of the traditional humanist education that reached back to Aristotle, believed reasonable people should be taught guidelines for handling testimony. Among these guidelines was the priority given to the character and circumstances of the testifier over the material testified. In other words, given a trustworthy testifier, reasonable people must open their minds to anything—even things beyond general experience—or else they risk being caught in their own experience in the way that the King of Siam refused to believe in the existence of ice. Applying this rule of priority, a rule the Ramist called “reciprocation,” yielded not an absolute conclusion on the matter, but rather a tentative way of proceeding.

What interests me most is the professor’s criticism of English logic education in the middle of the twentieth century. The schools were struggling with how to teach the social aspects of reasonableness. Self-realization, heroic individualism, and a narrow sense of humility and democracy worked to encourage an image of the lone-wolf critical thinker.