In a world that is constantly changing, critical thinking is an essential skill for all. Critical thinking, however, is something that is not intentionally taken into consideration by many but is crucial for every aspect of one’s life. The lack of this important skill can limit us from achieving our maximum potential as humans. This is a sad reality. The good thing is critical thinking is a skill that can be mastered over time with practice. In this article I summarize my findings on critical thinking. I define it in the way I understand it most and mention some of the intellectual standards that can be used to access critical thinking.
What is critical thinking?
Critical thinking is simply the process of thinking about one's own thinking in order to improve the quality of one’s thoughts. As defined by Michael Scriven & Richard Paul, critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
This is not to imply that we are not thinkers. The truth is we think, but some do not take charge of their thinking. The quality of thought affects the quality of one’s life in every aspect. For instance, to be a creative person requires deep thinking. A significant portion of our natural thinking tends to be biased, skewed, incomplete, uninformed, or even blatantly prejudiced. The good news is, intellectual thinking can be achieved by doing the intellectual work.
My history with Critical Thinking
For most of my life, I was not a critical thinker, at least not intentionally.
Critical thinking is something that I personally was not introduced to while I was in secondary school . As a result, I realized that most of my ideologies about life were faulty as I do not give any deep thought to them and only adopted them because they were handed to me. Also, I often relied on my ‘unprocessed’ thinking to make a lot of decisions but I realized I didn’t get the result I expected. Everything started to change from the moment I began to search for an understanding of what critical thinking really means.
Standards and elements Reasoning
Intellectual thinking- reasoning, varies from thinking in its simple state in that it is processed, conceptual, and intellectual as opposed to purely associational and undisciplined.
Elements of reason refer to those basic conditions implicit whenever we gather, conceptualize, apply, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate information. Some of them include:
A clear understanding of the purpose, clarity of what the goal is.
A clear understanding of the question at issue or problem to be solved
Your point of view. Ensure that your point of view is not too narrow or based on false misleading analogies for example.
Empirical dimension of reasoning,
Factual dimension of reasoning
Assumptions
Implications and Consequences
Inferences
Defects in any of these elements might pose as a problem in reasoning. The aim should be to make sure the your thought process is examined by these elements.
The standards on the other hand refer to standards applied when checking the quality of the reasoning about a problem, issue, or situation. These standards include;
Clarity
Precision
Accuracy
Relevance
Depth
Breadth
Logic
Fairness
Conclusion
Critical thinking is basically about taking charge of your thoughts. The standards of reasoning can be applied to every domain or situation. Critical thinking is necessary for every aspect of life. It is my belief that everyone can be creative in some way if they put in the hard work and master the skill of critical thinking.
These are just a few tips I got especially from reading from the critical thinking website, a great resource to help you get started on your journey.
What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments!