Thinking Skills: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

(singke) #1

140 Unit 4 Applied critical thinking


Category
of claim

2000/1 2004/5 2007/8 Change

Clinical 10,890 8872 down
2018
Work
related

97,675 68,497 down
29,178
Motor 403,892 551,899 up
148,007
ALL
CLAIMS

735,931 732,750 down
3181

What would explain this? Why would one
category of claim have risen sharply (up by
37% in just four years) when all the others
declined? One obvious answer is that the
number of accidents had risen. If that was true
it would certainly be a plausible explanation,
and therefore a reasonable hypothesis.
The trouble is, it is not true. An official
government report in 2011 states that:

DOC B

... over the past two decades, the number
and severity of accidents has reduced.
Compared with the 1994–98 average, in 2010
there were fewer people killed or seriously
injured in road accidents (−49%)... and, the
slight casualty rate was lower (−39%).


Plainly the hypothesis is dead in the water. If
the number of accidents explained the
number of claims, the trend should have been
down as sharply as it was in other categories!

Suggest and assess one or more alternative
explanations for the anomaly shown in the
table above.

Activity


Commentary
There are various explanatory avenues
which can be explored. One is that people
really are faking or exaggerating injuries,
and in very large numbers. Another is that
although there were more accidents in the

‘scope’ of an explanation is just shorthand for
how much it can explain. Staying with ancient
history for a while longer, some serious defect
among Darius’s troops, on that fateful October
day, could explain wholly why Alexander
won, without requiring any extraordinary
brilliance from his enemy. Perhaps half the
Persian soldiers had dysentery; or there was a
mutiny. These are singular explanations
which, if true, would explain a singular event.
But if Persian weakness was the whole
explanation, it would be difficult to explain
how Alexander’s elite force won so many other
battles, across most of the then known world,
and against armies that frequently
outnumbered them. By most accounts he was
never defeated (at least until he reached India,
the limit of his empire). It is highly implausible
that each time there was some different,
unique reason for victory.
Far more plausible is that Alexander, and/or
his army, was immensely talented. We say that
this explanation has ‘scope’, because as well as
explaining the outcome at Issus, it explains
countless other victories. Nor does it require his
enemies to be defective: if Alexander was
superior that was enough. Someone who
wished to detract from his achievements might
come up with a different explanation for each
of his successes, always suggesting there was
some failure in his opponents. But the standard
historical claim, that he was an amazing
general and brilliant tactician, is a far simpler
account, as well as explaining much more.

Anomalies
Look again at Doc 4 in Chapter 4.1 (page 134)
about compensation claims for injuries. In the
second paragraph of the document we read
that out of all the different kinds of claim only
motor accident claims have risen; all other
categories fell. That is to say, motor accident
claims represent an anomaly: they ‘buck the
trend’. If a table were created to match the data
for the years in question, it would look like the
following.
Free download pdf