The limits of autonomous critical thinking

This paper examines the epistemic value of two critical thinking strategies when employed by nonexperts to address technical and scientific questions. The first strategy, autonomous critical thinking , involves assessing arguments and evidence independently, without relying on expert authority. Previous discussions (including Huemer 2005, Grundmann 2021, and Matheson 2023) have concluded that this strategy is unreliable or, in any case, less reliable than deference to experts. Building on insights from Informal Logic, the paper argues that autonomous critical thinking has a deeper problem: it is practically unfeasible. This paves the way for developing, in the second part of the paper, a hybrid model of critical thinking that incorporates epistemic reliance on experts while maintaining a role for individual reasoning. The paper argues that this strategy is practically feasible, and proposes two conditions that the strategy must meet to be epistemically reliable.