Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 5, Number 1, Spring / Summer 2020 | Page 106

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
The Generalist and
Specifists Debate
Further complicating critical thinking
is how to develop this skill
base; contemporary arguments
in critical thinking swing between two
camps: generalists and specifists. A key
question in the debate is whether thinking
skills can exist independently from
discipline-specific content in a meaningful
way so that the transfer of critical
thinking skills is possible. On one side
are the generalists who believe “critical
thinking can be distilled down to a finite
set of constitutive skills, ones that
can be learned in a systematic way and
have applicability across all academic
disciplines” (Willingham 2007).
On the opposing side are specifists
who argue that “critical thinking
... is always contextual and intimately
tied to the particular subject matter
with which one is concerned” (Willingham
2007). The generalist position
is the philosophical basis for the standalone,
generic thinking skills course, in
which students supposedly learn skills
that transfer across subjects and domains.
But Daniel Willingham (2007)
points out that such courses “primarily
improve students” thinking with the
sort of problems they practiced in the
program, “not with other types of problems.”
This suggests that it is extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to separate
thinking skills from the content. In
other words, critical thinking is only
possible after one acquires a significant
amount of domain-specific knowledge,
and even then, it is no guarantee.
Instead of a debate between these
two camps, what might be seen as the
best of both worlds is the infusion approach,
which suggests that the generalist
and specifist approaches can be
married, as seen in Figure 4. The generalist
perspective provides for a foundation
in reasoning and the specifist perspective
applies this sound reasoning to
specific content.
Figure 4. Combining generalist and specifist perspectives (Davis 2013).
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