Critical Thinking Notes

Definition and Core Concepts

Critical thinking is applicable in teaching, learning, and workplace settings, involving well-supported arguments. It is defined as thinking carefully and thoughtfully about tasks, people, or beliefs, emphasizing logical, reasoned thinking rather than creative thinking. Dewey describes it as active, persistent, and careful consideration of beliefs in light of supporting grounds and further conclusions.

Skills and Attitudes

Critical thinking requires both skills and attitudes. Skills include identifying a problem, understanding assumptions, clarifying and focusing on the issue, using logic (inductive and deductive), and evaluating the validity and reliability of assumptions and information sources. Attitudes include open-mindedness, caution about making assumptions, and carefully weighing evidence. These skills and attitudes are transferable across different areas, and critical thinking is viewed as a reasoned argument with a social aspect.

Challenging Thought Processes

Thinking as argument influences beliefs, judgments, and conclusions. Kuhn’s ‘skills of argument’ include proposing alternative opinions, knowing what evidence supports these opinions, providing evidence supporting one's own opinions while rebutting alternatives, and weighing the goodness of one’s own evidence and that of others.

Value Neutrality

Critical thinking aims to improve how we think about everything in life. It involves questioning weak arguments, quick generalizations, claims without evidence, and ideas based on unreliable sources. Critical thinking is viewed as more "value-neutral" compared to critical pedagogy or theory.

Steps in Critical Thinking

The steps in critical thinking include: Identification of premises and conclusions by breaking arguments down into logical statements; clarification of arguments to identify ambiguity in stated assertions; establishment of facts by searching for contradictions to determine if an argument or theory is complete and reasonable; evaluation of logic using inductive or deductive reasoning to decide if conclusions drawn are adequately supported; and final evaluation to weigh the arguments against the evidence presented.

Core Elements of Critical Thinking

The core elements of critical thinking are interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation.

Interpretation

Interpretation involves understanding and conveying the deeper meaning or implications of experiences, situations, data, events, and beliefs. It includes making sense of complex or ambiguous information and presenting it understandably. For example, historians interpret letters from the Civil Rights Movement, exploring the emotional and social context behind them.

Analysis

Analysis involves identifying relationships between statements, concepts, or arguments. It requires examining ideas, reasoning, and detecting arguments, breaking down complex information to understand how elements fit together, including uncovering assumptions and evaluating support for claims. Examples include identifying similarities and differences between approaches, analyzing newspaper editorials to extract the main claim and reasoning, evaluating arguments by examining relationships between the main claim and supporting reasons, and organizing information graphically to show how sections relate to the overall argument.

Evaluation

Evaluation involves assessing the credibility of statements and evaluating the logical strength of relationships between information pieces. It includes determining whether an argument or claim is trustworthy, valid, or well-supported. Examples include judging an author’s or speaker’s credibility based on background, qualifications, and reputation; comparing interpretations of an event and assessing which is better supported by evidence; determining the credibility of a source (e.g., peer-reviewed journals vs. social media); checking for contradictions between statements; and assessing whether evidence logically supports the conclusion.

Inferences

Inferences involve identifying and securing elements needed to draw reasonable conclusions, forming conjectures and hypotheses, and considering relevant information and educing consequences from data, statements, principles, evidence, judgments, beliefs, opinions, concepts, descriptions, questions. It includes using known information to make educated guesses, draw conclusions, or predict outcomes. Examples include inferring rain when seeing someone with an umbrella, inferring someone is waiting for a specific time if they keep checking the clock, inferring a dead battery when a car won’t start, inferring a character’s feelings based on their actions in a story, and inferring that reading reviews can help when unsure about a product.

Explanation

Explanation involves presenting the results of one’s reasoning in a cogent and coherent way, giving a full view of the big picture by stating and justifying reasoning in terms of evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, and contextual considerations. It includes communicating complex ideas clearly by breaking them down and showing how things work. Examples include describing methods and results in a research paper, justifying procedures such as explaining why a sample size was chosen, proposing and defending explanations with evidence such as explaining why a team won a game using stats, and presenting well-reasoned arguments with strong reasons backing points.

Self-Regulation

Self-regulation involves self-consciously monitoring one’s cognitive activities, elements used, and results educed, applying skills in analysis and evaluation to one’s own inferential judgments, and questioning, confirming, validating, or correcting one’s reasoning or results. Sub-skills include self-examination and self-correction. Examples include self-examination by checking personal biases and assumptions, and self-correction by fixing mistakes or revising thinking after considering new information.