Concept
Critical thinking
Overview
Critical thinking is the process of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to reach sound conclusions or informed choices. It involves recognizing underlying assumptions, providing justifications for ideas and actions, evaluating these justifications through comparisons with varying perspectives, and assessing their rationality and potential consequences. The goal of critical thinking is to form a judgment through the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluations. The use of the phrase critical thinking can be traced to John Dewey, who used the phrase reflective thinking, and the excellence of critical thinking in which a person can engage varies according to the individual’s knowledge base on which both depend. According to philosopher Richard W. Paul, critical thinking and analysis are competencies that can be learned or trained. The application of critical thinking includes self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of the mind. Critical thinking is not a natural process; it must be induced, and ownership of the process must be taken for successful questioning and reasoning. Critical thinking presupposes a rigorous commitment to overcoming egocentrism and sociocentrism , which leads to a mindful command of effective communication and problem solving.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Thinking on the contrary, starts, as we have seen, from doubt or uncertainty. It marks an inquiring, hunting, searching attitude, instead of one of mastery and possession. Through its critical process true knowledge is revised and extended, and our convictions as to the state of things reorganized. Clearly the last few centuries have been typically a period of revision and reorganization of beliefs.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Critical thinking is; the author is tied to Critical thinking in the knowledge graph.
For the more one insists that the antecedent situation is constituted by thought, the more one has to wonder why another type of thought is required; what need arouses it, and how it is possible for it to improve upon the work of previous constitutive thought. This difficulty at once forces idealists from a logic of experience as it is concretely experienced into a metaphysic of a purely hypothetical experience.
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
States what Critical thinking is; the author is tied to Critical thinking in the knowledge graph.
II. _The Critical Philosophy._ 40.] In common with Empiricism the Critical Philosophy assumes that experience affords the one sole foundation for cognitions; which however it does not allow to rank as truths, but only as knowledge of phenomena. The Critical theory starts originally from the distinction of elements presented in the analysis of experience, viz. the matter of sense, and its universal relations. Taking…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Critical thinking is.
Philosophers who discussed Critical thinking
- Bell hooks
- Augustine of Hippo
- Intellectual
- Robert A. Heinlein
- Maurice Blanchot
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Michel de Montaigne
- Robert C. Solomon
- Nel Noddings
Related ideas
- Feminist theory
- Contextualism
- Socratic questioning
- Cognition
- Classical Greece
- Argument
- Classical Athens
- Problem solving
- Intuition
- John Dewey
- Judgement
- Authority
- Language
- London
- Propositional logic
- Mind
- Scientific skepticism
- Evidence
- UNESCO
- Observation
- Psychology
- Plato
- Knowledge
- Rule of inference
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Humanism.