How to think clearly

By learning to question and clarify your thoughts,

you’ll improve your self-knowledge and become a
better communicator
Sometimes, when I’m grappling with a tricky topic, I pretend that I need to
explain it to a child. For example, here is my attempt at explaining the
purpose of this Guide to a notional nine-year-old:

I want to help people work out what they really think and mean, and
then to share the results with other people. This is surprisingly hard.
It’s easy to talk about what you want and like. But it can be really
difficult to work out why you want or like particular things – and why
other people should pay attention. I’m going to set out a three-part
process that can help with this.

As the parent of two young children, I often get to skip the pretending part
of this exercise. But I’d recommend giving it a try, no matter what your
domestic situation. It can be both challenging and powerful to talk
someone else through an idea, step by step, in terms that take as little as
possible for granted. Often, it’s only when I try to explain something in this
way that I discover that I don’t fully understand it myself.

As it happens, there’s a subreddit devoted to precisely this principle. It’s

called ‘Explain Like I’m Five’, and features tens of thousands of attempts at
explaining complex ideas as simply as possible. Question: how can
archaeologists translate ancient scriptures or languages? Answer: ‘It’s
basically a giant jigsaw puzzle.’ Q: how do conferencing programmes such
as Zoom handle so many different screens? A: ‘Everyone has one
connection to Zoom’s central servers.’ Q: if carbs are sugar, why can’t we
just eat sugar? A: ‘It would be a bit like replacing the firewood in your fire
pit with a tub of gasoline …’ And so on.

I enjoy browsing ‘Explain Like I’m Five’ partly because it isn’t interested in
perfection. Instead, it’s packed with comments, debates and works-in-
progress; with points and counterpoints, gags and squibs. Much like the
business of explaining something to an actual five-year-old, it’s full of
distractions and dead ends. But it’s also relentlessly committed to
dispelling errors and unexamined assumptions; and in privileging honest
questions and confessions of uncertainty over any performance of
expertise.

All of this emphasises a fundamental point about clarifying your thinking. It

asks you to admit your thoughts are unclear to begin with – and thus, that
certain elements within them need to be rethought, or placed upon more
secure foundations. It’s as if you’re shedding layers of preconception,
misconception and false consciousness. And the ultimate prize isn’t being
right, gratifying though this might be. It’s being understood.

Why should anyone care about any of this? Without wishing to be

grandiose, I’d argue that seeking clarity is both humane and life-
enhancing. To idealise, it entails the mutual and respectful pursuit of
knowledge. To be more pragmatic, it can help us know ourselves a little
better, dispel prejudices and misapprehensions – and communicate more
richly and persuasively amid the 21st century’s tumult.

Aspiring towards clarity is also inexorably iterative. Whenever you set out
to clarify your thinking, you’re not aiming to articulate an ultimate truth.
Rather, you’re aiming at a process, the result of which will always be an act
of communication, complete with all the imperfections and contingencies
this implies.

In this Guide, I want to help you think about what this process looks like for
you. As promised, I’ll do this in three stages (preceded by a pause). The
first stage entails reflecting on why you believe something to be true or
important. The second entails teasing out the assumptions this reasoning
relies upon. The third entails acknowledging what you do and don’t know,
where you’re uncertain – and what it might mean to redress these things.

Before you begin…

To start with, let’s take a moment. Draw a breath. Slow yourself down.
What’s going on? What are you thinking and feeling? What most deserves
your attention? There’s a great line in Robert Poynton’s book Do Pause
(2019) that speaks to the significance of taking stock in this way:

In a pause you can question existing ways of acting, have new ideas or
simply appreciate the life you are living. Without ever stopping to
observe yourself, how can you explore what else you might do or who
you might become?

Inviting people to pause is among the easiest advice in the world to give,
and the hardest to take. Yet it’s foundational to clarifying your thinking,
because this is where it all begins: with a moment of self-reflection.
Without pauses, there can be no second thoughts and no self-
interrogations. There is no process until you take the time to embark upon
it.

You might think that this point is too obvious to be worth making. Yet, in
my experience, it’s where most of us fall down. We all carry around
countless unclear, confused, contradictory thoughts and feelings. And
precisely because we have neither the time nor the tools to sort them out,
they mostly stay this way.

Once you’ve paused, a common psychotherapeutic exercise can help you

take a first step towards clearer thinking. It’s about observing yourself as
neutrally as possible. You make yourself comfortable, relax, then try to
notice the flow of your thoughts and feelings in a nonjudgmental way: the
flickers of anxiety, anticipation, regret; the memories and ideas bubbling
into consciousness.

These are the raw materials that any process of clarification must work
with. The more carefully you’re able to attend to them, the more likely you
are to tease out their complexities and contradictions. And the less likely
you are to mistakenly assume that whatever seems obvious to you will
necessarily seem obvious, or compelling, to someone else.
What are you claiming, and why?

When I perform the above exercise, I notice one thing that’s on my mind is
a nagging question around what I eat. Should I become a vegetarian, or a
vegan, for ethical and environmental reasons? And if not, why not?

In philosophy, what’s known as standard form is often used to set out the
essentials of a line of thought as clearly as possible. Expressing your
thinking in standard form means writing out a numbered list of statements
followed by a conclusion. If you’ve done it properly, the numbered
statements should present a line of reasoning that justifies your final
conclusion. For example, here’s a first attempt at organising my thoughts
around diet:

1. Both eating meat and using animal products are associated with vast
amounts of unnecessary animal suffering.
2. They also use more energy and resources than most plant-based
alternatives.
3. It’s perfectly possible to have a healthy diet and live a full life without
eating meat or using most animal products.
4. So far as possible, I should try to prevent unnecessary animal
suffering, excessive energy usage and the overconsumption of
resources.

If I believe all of the above to be true, I should thus adopt a vegetarian

or a vegan diet.

You might have seen examples of this approach before, or used it in your
own work. You might also have encountered a great deal of discussion
around logical forms, reasonable and unreasonable justifications, and so
on. What I find most useful about standard form, however, is not so much
its promise of logical rigour as its insistence that I break down my thinking
into individual steps, and then ask two questions of each one:

Why should a reasonable person accept this particular claim?

What follows from this claim, once it’s been accepted?
When it comes to clarifying my thoughts and feelings, the power of such
an approach is that anything relevant can potentially be integrated into its
accounting – but only if I’m able to make this relevance explicit. Here’s
how a few further thoughts might fit into my example:

1. Both eating meat and using animal products are associated with vast
amounts of unnecessary animal suffering.
2. They also use more energy and resources than most plant-based
alternatives.
3. It’s perfectly possible to have a healthy diet and live a full life without
eating meat or using most animal products.
4. So far as possible, I should try to prevent unnecessary animal
suffering, excessive energy usage and the overconsumption of
resources.
5. If I believe all of the above to be true, I should thus adopt a vegetarian
or a vegan diet.
6. However, I’m not currently a vegetarian or a vegan.
7. This suggests that either: I don’t believe the above reasons to be
true, or to be the whole story; or that I do, yet somehow still don’t find
them compelling.

If I want to clarify my thinking around this issue, I need to investigate

the divide between my apparent beliefs and my actions.

How might you apply such an approach yourself? As you’ll have noticed,
the thoughts I’ve just added bring further complexities and qualifications
into focus. They take what was once a relatively straightforward
conclusion and turn it into something more complex – and revealing.

Paradoxically enough, this is a vital component of clarifying your thinking:

stripping away oversimplifications, no matter how compelling or
appealing, and replacing them with an honest acknowledgment of
circumstances. The logic of my initial argument might have seemed
admirably clear; but this clarity doesn’t correspond as closely as I might
wish to reality.
Honest self-examination and iteration are vital, here. Even now, reading
back my own words, I’m not sure I’ve managed to describe my state of
mind accurately – or the issues at stake. Is it really true that there’s no
ethical way of eating meat or of using animal products? Are there shades
of meaning I’ve neglected in an effort to establish clear categories of right
and wrong? Or am I simply failing to act on my beliefs because of a
combination of inertia and self-indulgence?

These are just a few of the questions my scenario begs. And behind them
is a fundamental point: that it’s only by repeatedly questioning both the
why and the what of our claims, and the claims they in turn rely on, that
we can hope to strip away the layers of habit, confusion and self-
justification that all too often typify everyday thoughts.

What have you taken for granted?

Upon what basis can I justify any claims? Some will rely on external
evidence; some on personal preferences and experiences; some on a
combination of these factors. But all of them will at some point invoke
certain assumptions that I’m prepared to accept as fundamental. And it’s
in unearthing and analysing these assumptions that the most important
clarifications await.

Assumptions are those things we take for granted: whatever we don’t

explicitly spell out, but that our thinking relies upon. Assumptions are also
extremely important. Indeed, it’s the existence of shared assumptions that
makes communication (and much else) possible. As I write these words,
I’m assuming they mean approximately the same thing to you as they do
to me. It would be incredibly tiresome if I tried to explain every word in a
sentence. It would also, in the end, be futile. I’d still have to explain my
words via other words, my ideas via other ideas, and so on. Without some
shared assumptions, there would be no way of building either common
understandings or meaningful disagreements.

While common understanding and meaningful disagreement might sound

like opposites, they’re actually two sides of the same coin. No matter how
self-evident they might seem to us, the assumptions that our ideas rest
upon might need spelling out to others. Some people could, for example,
view animal suffering as a non-issue, on the grounds that human
experience is all that counts when it comes to ethics. Some could believe
that no further justification of veganism is required beyond the self-
evident evil of inflicting unnecessary suffering on our fellow creatures.
And some (among whom I tentatively count myself) might believe that
most forms of industrial farming and fishing are abhorrent, but that there
are some circumstances under which animal products can be ethically
and sustainably sourced.

Our assumptions, in other words, aren’t just unexamined ideas. They’re

also the roots of identity and allegiance; the stuff of our personal and
shared histories; of our communities and our morality. They are the
sources of much of the greatest good and deepest harm we do to one
another. That which we take as ‘given’ is nothing less than the bedrock of
what we believe the world to be.

What follow from this? When it comes to clarifying your thinking, it means
that you need to be very clear about the difference between what follows
from your assumptions and the status of those assumptions. To take
things step by step:

Any line of thought must begin with certain assumptions: those

things that you both explicitly and implicitly accept as given. No
matter how deep you dig, you’ll never be able to find a wholly clear,
self-evident and uncontroversial claim.
A careful process of analysis can show where your assumptions lead:
what reasonably follows from them, if you assume that they’re true or
accurate.
But different lines of reasoning based on different sets of
assumptions are likely to take you in very different directions.
One of the most useful things you can thus do is to spell out both
your own and other people’s key assumptions, then to compare what
follows from each.
 If you’re sufficiently open-minded, this can help you identify
assumptions you hold in common with others, challenge faulty ones
on both sides, and respectfully engage with alternative perspectives
from your own.

Working out the implications of your assumptions is, in other words, far
from the same thing as being definitively correct; and grasping the
difference between these lies at the heart of honestly and persuasively
articulating your views.

Embrace dialogue – and know your limits

What do you make of my attempts to clarify my thinking about meat-

eating, thus far? Hopefully, even if you disagree with every single word I’ve
written, you’re more likely to understand where I’m coming from than if I
just blurted out: ‘I think that maybe I ought to stop eating meat.’ I certainly
feel more confident about what’s going on in my head. And this suggests
that, if we ever end up discussing these things in person, we’re more likely
to be able to debate our differences constructively. We’ll perhaps be able
to work out where we do and don’t disagree – and why – rather than
falling back upon blanket assertions or aspersions. In the end, we might
even arrive at a new, clearer understanding together.

This, I’d suggest, is the most precious thing about clearly presenting the
thinking behind any point of view: not that it proves your rightness or
righteousness, but that it volunteers your willingness to participate in a
reasoned exchange of ideas. At least in principle, it suggests that you’re
prepared to:

Justify your position via evidence and reasoned analysis.

Listen to, and learn from, perspectives other than your own.
Accept that, in the face of sufficiently compelling arguments or
evidence, it might be reasonable to change your mind.

This approach is underpinned by what’s known as the principle of charity:

a phrase that can sound strange in the context of disagreements, but that
embodies one of our oldest and most practical guides to constructive
debate. It exists in various formulations, all rooted in the same idea:

So far as possible, you should try to extract the maximum truthful and
reasonable content from what others say, especially if they disagree
with you.

Importantly, the principle of charity extends not only to what someone is

saying, but also to your assumptions around why they are saying it:

Unless you have decisive evidence to the contrary, you should start off
by assuming that someone else’s position is reasonable and sincerely
held, rather than that they’re malicious, ignorant or mistaken.

Why? In both cases, the answer isn’t because this is a nice thing to do, but
because it’s only by beginning with charitable assumptions that you can
get to grips with the underpinnings of someone else’s perspective – and
ensure that any judgment you eventually pass is based on a careful, fair-
minded assessment.

All of which brings us back to the most important point of all: that
clarifying your thinking means being as honest as possible about what you
don’t know, and then putting a frank engagement with these limitations at
the heart of your account.

Indeed, perhaps the most important tool in any attempt at clear thinking is
the capacity to test (and to keep on testing and refining) your ideas as if
they belonged to someone else: as acts of reasoned persuasion that must
stand, or fall, on their own terms.