Critical Thinking
What Is Critical Thinking?
Critical thinking is "the art of thinking about your thinking in order to make your thinking better: more clear, more accurate, or more defensible." (Paul, Binker, Adamson and Martin, 1989)
Critical thinking involves following evidence where it leads; considering all possibilities; relying on reason rather than emotion; being precise; considering a variety of viewpoints and explanations, and being concerned more with finding the truth rather than with being right.
Critical thinkers gather their information from observations, experience, reasoning and/or communication. Critical thinking bases its intellectual values on:
- Understanding the logical connections between ideas.
- Identifying, constructing and evaluating arguments.
- Detecting inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning.
- Solving problems systematically.
- Identifying the relevance and importance of ideas.
- Reflecting on the justification of one's own beliefs and values.
Critical thinking is not a matter of accumulating information. A person with a good memory and who knows a lot of facts is not necessarily good at critical thinking. Critical thinkers are able to deduce consequences from what they know, and they know how to make use of information to solve problems and to seek relevant sources of information to inform themselves.
Critical thinking should not be confused with being argumentative or being critical of other people. Although critical-thinking skills can be used to expose fallacies and bad reasoning, critical thinking can also play an important role in cooperative reasoning and constructive tasks. Critical thinking can help us acquire knowledge, improve our theories and strengthen arguments. We can use critical thinking to enhance work processes and improve social institutions.
Critical thinking often involves overcoming one's own bias. Ways of doing this include adopting a perception rather than a judgement -- using the Socratic Method. Asking open-ended questions such as those below can help you evaluate an argument and remain unbiased.
- What do you mean by____________________?
- How do you come to that conclusion?
- Why do you believe that you are right?
- What is the source of your information?
- What happens if you are wrong?
- Can you give me two sources that agree with you and explain why?
- Why is this significant?
- How do I know your are telling me the truth?
- What is an alternate explanation?
Reaching a conclusion
Critical thinking is never final. One arrives at a tentative conclusion based on evidence and one's own evaluation of the information.
William Graham Sumner offers a useful summary of critcal thinking:
Critical thinking is the examination and test of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not. The critical faculty is a product of education and training. It is a mental habit and power. It is a prime condition of human welfare that men and women should be trained in it. It is our only guarantee against delusion, deception, superstition, and misapprehension of ourselves and our earthly circumstances.
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