The two main categories of obstacles to critical thinking are ones caused by how a person thinks, the technical term being psychological, and ones brought on by what a person believes, or philosophical. Though these two types of hindrances overlap in that how a person thinks affects what they believe, and vice versa, but they each have distinctive elements. In modern critical thinking, it is believed that the root causes of psychological impediments are a person’s fears, attitudes, desires, and motivations. When these factors play too great a role in one’s critical thinking process they distort the individual’s perspective, hindering that person’s ability to make a sound judgement. This phenomenon can take place as a result of two influences: …show more content…
A person’s worldview is an essential component in how they answer questions about the world. The problem occurs when an individual’s worldview is based on flawed logic because it will cause the answers to their questions to also be based on that flawed logic. An example of such a belief system is subjective relativism, in which it is thought that the truth of any matter is relative to every person. By that logic, literally anything could be true just by believing it enough and no one would ever be wrong. Similar to subjective relativism, social relativism states that all truths are relative, but they are relative to a society instead of every person. However, both relativist worldviews have been proven to be self-defeating because in order for every truth to be relative, there must be one objective truth stating so. Among these flawed world views is also philosophical skepticism. Philosophical skeptics believe that knowledge requires certainty beyond any doubt. By that logic though, people technically know nothing, or at least very little because one can always find something to doubt. In short, all these worldviews have self-defeating aspects that render them implausible to philosophers because believing them would cause one’s logic to be