It is hard to give advice about applications for this chapter. Applications are its whole purpose. Chapter 12 has failed if you are left curious about where in daily life to apply it. Still, think about one thing. You have no doubt noticed—maybe with frustration—that Chapter 12 has a different tone and texture from that of all the preceding chapters. At every turn the methods we use (e.g., the critique of a moral position as inconsistent) are acknowledged to be hard to apply, open to further debate, far from the last word on the subject. And though we have frameworks for organizing our moral, legal, or aesthetic reasoning, each framework appears alongside several others that contradict it. How can a moral perspective simplify our deliberations if we then have to deliberate about which framework to adopt?There's no mystery here. Chapters 1–11 have isolated certain elements of critical thinking to make them easier to see. Each chapter's exercises give real-world examples of the points they illustrate; still, those examples are artificially simplified to fit into a given chapter. You now return to the buzzing confusion of daily life's critical thinking, in which examples arrive unaccompanied by hints about which methods to apply to them.

The right question is not whether a critical question leads you to decisive answers about any of these cases, but whether it lets you make progress on them. After all, you will probably never run a mile in less than four and a half minutes. But you will get closer to that elusive goal if you keep it as your ideal and if you train with a regimen designed to approach four and a half minutes. It is wise to expect as much from critical thinking: By showing what a complete and precise answer can be, it gets you as close to those answers as we can normally come, even if it does not reach them.