Overview of Critical Thinking

hello I'm Linda Elder welcome to this presentation in which I will be focusing on the foundations of critical thinking the title of my presentation is advancing critical thinking throughout education and across the professions in every classroom in every country in the world we could go further into say in every profession in every business in every family in every part of human life I'm going to focus on the fundamentals of critical thinking in a very brief introduction and what this means is that I will not be able to get into contextualizations within your field I will

leave it up to you to do this what I am going to do is to help you begin to see the toolbox of critical thinking or to better see it so that you can better use it in your classrooms with students and in every part of your life you can take essentially one of two core theoretical approaches to critical thinking the first is what is typically done and that is through an emphasis on critical thinking skills and abilities often introduced to thinking skills and the second in the approach that we use is through the development

of intellectual and ethical character which we see as at the heart of critical thinking now to give you a sense of these two different approaches here you see 35 dimensions of thought and here we're going to see skills and abilities embedded in these dimensions and there there are more this is a beginning place here you see thinking independently under affective Dimensions the first category developing insight into egocentricity and sociocentricity well you should see right away that this is going beyond the typical emphasis on skills and abilities which we see here under cognitive Dimensions micro skills

for example comparing and contrasting ideals thinking precisely about thinking noting similarities and differences these of course are important but we've got to go beyond this to focus on the development of intellectual character intellectual virtues unpack what we mean by this and here are some of the core intellectual virtues at the heart of a substantive conception of critical thinking this is an important piece in our approach to critical thinking what we want in other words is not to develop students who can simply identify relevant information you see how that's a micro skill gather information State their

purpose these are important or what is more important is whether they are living whether our students are living in accordance with intellectual character or virtues for example to what degree do they embody intellectual humility to what degree are they able to recognize the difference between what they do understand what they do not understand to what degree do they even care whether someone else agrees with them or whether um they can are are able to think within other points of view and now I'm getting into intellectual empathy so we have intellectual humility the ability to distinguish

between what we know what we do not know intellectual empathy the propensity to think within points of view that are different from our own or points of view that we've never considered and even points of view that we disagree with so these are two of the intellectual virtues we would want our students to embody we want them to have intellectual autonomy to be able to stand on their own two feet and in terms of their thinking in other words we want them to be able to stand alone with their beliefs as long as they are

thinking critically about the things to um that they're that they're standing alone about so we don't want them to just say well I'm going to be different I'm not going to agree no that's not the point the point is have you thought something through critically and if you have are you willing to stand alone in your beliefs when the crowd may be against you that's very unusual it's hard to do and it's often the case that people who do this are are ostracized by others in society to what degree is the are the students able

to persevere through issues problems complexities to what degree do they get up give up easily or instead keep moving through these difficulties until they find answers to what degree do they have the courage to look into their own beliefs intellectual courage and there are others these are some of the most important intellectual virtues that have been handed to us through through the history of ideas over time and that we have also contributed to now so we want our students to develop these we've got to find ways to help them develop these and we want them

to then therefore not embody the Opposites of these trades and you see the Opposites here of the ones that I just was focusing on so the inter the opposite of intellectual humility which I was talking about before is intellectual arrogance intellectual arrogance means that we think we already know enough we don't need to know more we're not open to hearing other sides of an argument our minds are shutting down and all of us engage in this way of thinking all of us sometimes think that we know more than we do know and we've got to

push against that if we want to develop as critical thinkers the opposite of intellectual Integrity intellectual hypocrisy saying one thing and doing something else saying one thing and meaning something else intellectual Conformity the opposite of intellectual autonomy we want our students to again have intellectual perseverance rather than being intellectually lazy we want them to be fair instead of being unfair and you can see the other examples so what we need to do is to teach these Concepts explicitly to our students so they have a chance to internalize them and to and to apply them to

their own thinking and to develop their character in the direction of fair-minded critical thinking so there isn't a way to teach intellectual virtues other than teaching them and of course we don't have time to get into instructional design but one thing that we can do to develop intellectual empathy for example is have students reading within the thinking of other people so in other words reading an article reading a book and and then role playing the thinking of the author of that written word that is something that we can bring into the classroom on a regular

basis so now what we want then in the long run is to develop what our founder Richard Paul termed strong since critical thinkers in this heat he coined this term in the 1980s and by this he means fair-minded critical thinkers skilled thinkers characterized predominantly by these traits the ability and tendency to question deeply one's own views and to reconstruct sympathetically and imaginatively the strongest versions of viewpoints and perspectives opposed to one's own the ability and tendency to reason dialectically multi-logically in such a ways to determine when one's own point of view is at its weakest

and when an opposing Viewpoint is at its strongest so a critical thinker is looking to embody these trades and is not trying to avoid them or acting in bad faith the ability and propensity to change one's thinking when the evidence would require it without regard to one's own selfish or vested interests now this is a very big uh point and it's a the opposite of it is a big problem in human life so people are often selfish and in groups they often are focused on their vested interests and therefore in those cases they often do

not want to see the evidence that would require them to view to see their behavior and their thinking in a more accurate light so we want to develop strong sense critical thinking we want to avoid weeks since critical thinking and all of us sometimes are weak since critical thinkers and hopefully sometimes strong since critical thinkers so weak sense critical thinkers are those who use skills and abilities to some degree but mainly to serve their selfish interests and are often unfair or unethical thinkers they have these Tendencies they do not hold themselves or those with whom

they are eager identified to the same intellectual standards to which they hold their opponents and they do not reason empathically within points of view or frames of reference with which they disagree so this is what we want to avoid and what we want to encourage is the opposite and again weeks since critical thinkers tend to think monologically within a narrow Viewpoint so they may be good at thinking within a field but not more broadly a very good engineer highly skilled in that but not so skilled as a parent or as um a person who is

thinking in terms of civic responsibility and they tend to use intellectual skills selectively and self-deceptively to Foster and serve again their selfish interests often ignoring the truth and each of us needs to think about the degree to which we are strong sins all week since critical thinkers and weeks of critical thinkers also use Curl thinking skills to identify flaws in the reasoning of others and sophisticated arguments to refute others arguments before giving those arguments into consideration they justify their irrational thinking through highly sophisticated rationalizations they're highly skilled at manipulation so again this is what we

want our students to avoid and want to move them toward fair-minded critical thinking where they are concerned with the rights and needs of others while also pursuing their own desires and they want to help create a more rational world so here is moving forward then to some other of the concepts in critical thinking we focused a little bit of on intellectual virtues and why don't what I can do is give you an overview of the concepts in our approach that are at the core of our approach and of course there are many other Concepts that

emanate out from these but to give you a sense of the overview I've just focused on the center of this the cultivation of intellectual traits virtues dispositions or in other words intellectual character and above that we see the assessment of thought and the analysis of thought I'll be getting into each of these very briefly so if we're going to think critically want to cultivate these traits how do we do this well to some extent by understanding what's involved in reasoning and then applying intellectual standards to reasoning in order to properly assess the reasoning that we're

doing and then we have to be concerned with the problems that run across human life and those are the problems of egocentric and sociocentric thinking these are complicated Concepts but they're actually simple in terms of their core meanings egocentric thinking meaning selfishness or intellectual arrogance stuck in your way of thinking unable to get outside of your way of thinking being narrow-minded and then sociocentric thinking as group selfishness or what I term rubishness so that's looking out for my group but not being concerned about the broader picture for the human species for the country for all

countries and for all people so these are the uh this is the core and of course we need to understand that not only are we focusing on thinking but thinking for is related to feelings and desires so that is also a theory that we would need to cover if we were going to spend more time on this introduction so for our purposes here I'm going to burrow in a bit to these Concepts having begun already with the focus on the cultivation of intellectual traits or the centerpiece here you can think of your mind as continually

figuring things out now maybe continually is not the best word maybe routinely because you're not always figuring things out but you are very often figuring things out as you move through your day and you've got to figure things out as you drive down the road or ride the Subway or whatever you're doing you've got things coming at you and you've got to figure them out if you're on the computer if you're dealing with with anything having to do with the internet things are coming at you what are what sense are you making of those things

is the question in the sense that you're making of those things has to do with the reasoning that you're doing in your mind as you're observing or dealing with the situations that are coming at you or that you are creating so what this means is that reasoning which is the way we figure things out fundamentally through the mind uh reasoning is at the heart of the human animal and yet it is fundamentally ignored and almost all Theory critical thinking is fundamentally ignored in human societies as we stand today now there are bits and pieces of

it here and there and you'll see that as we move forward that is you'll you'll you'll see that you you know some of these Concepts and they connect with something some idea that somebody that you read about in some book but these ideas are coming to us often in an unintegrated way and so we don't see the patterns we don't have a system for reasoning at a higher level or a system for opening reasoning that we are all using as as a as as a species so what we're arguing for is the lingua of critical

thinking the language of critical thinking and if you are involved in teaching languages then you know that this is not an easy thing to do but all of us need to be using in any language that we're speaking the tools of critical thinking so now we are looking at we're looking through our minds at situations we're also creating situations and we do this through the elements of reasoning and when we when we are opening up reasoning we need then criteria to assess that reasoning and that that criteria falls under the category of what we call

intellectual standards so the elements of reasoning can be seen in a circle and what this means is that whenever you reason no matter what you're reasoning about or what you're reasoning through are what age you are or how well you reason or how smart you are or Think You Are whenever you reason you're using these elements you cannot avoid using them you may not be aware that you're using them but you are using them they may be functioning at the unconscious level which they often are but you're still using them so um when you are

teaching you have purposes and you're asking questions you're using information to decide how to put together your teaching strategies you're coming to conclusions about that information you are developing Concepts that will guide your instruction these will be directly connected with your assumptions and also connected directly to your point of view and all of this leads to implications and consequences and or Consequences so what we want is to understand that whenever wherever there is reasoning these parts are present whether you're reading a book an article an essay a cartoon listening to music all of these are

products of reasoning somebody had to do some reasoning in order to come to these conclusions and the better their reasoning the better they usually function living in the complex world that we live in today so we need to know how to take our own thinking apart and to take apart thinking of others and we need to be able to once we do this then assess thinking again using Universal intellectual standards and I'll come back to those in a few minutes but you see a few of them at the bottom of this diagram Clarity accuracy precision

relevance depth spread significance so we can say what is your purpose are you clear about your purpose what are your questions are you clear about your questions what information are you using is it accurate is it relevant is it significant is it sufficient so these are moves that we learned to make when we study critical thinking explicitly the elements of reasoning come out of this understanding if you can read the diagram at the top whenever we think we think for a purpose within a point of view based on assumptions leading to implications and consequences we

use data facts and experiences to make inferences in judgments based on Concepts and theories it to answer a question or solve a problem you see the eight elements there in a slightly different format and when we understand the top Circle we can understand the second if I understand that whenever we I think I think for a purpose then there should be only one step to this question what is my purpose right now and I need to be asking that much more often than we typically do in human life if I always think within a point

of view then I can ask this question what is my point of view right now as I'm reasoning through this issue if all of our reasoning is based on assumptions then I can ask what am I assuming right now so you can go through the rest of the wheel and get the idea so when we understand the elements of reasoning there are many questions that we can ask and should be asking based on those elements there are many ways to apply these elements once you understand them here is one way this is a template that

is often used with students in classrooms where faculty are advancing understanding of the elements of thought note the simplicity and note the details we can take an essay an article a chapter and we can have our students do this again and again we can ask them what is the main purpose of the article in number one the main purpose is number two the key question or questions the author is addressing is or are as follows what is the most important information in the article number three what are the main inferences number four and number five

what are the main Concepts you know we're going to have the eight so what are the main assumptions that the author is making if we take this line of thinking seriously number seven what are some implications that will follow and finally what is the point of view from which you're looking at this and how are you seeing it when our students go through this practice again and again they come to understand the logic of whatever it is that they're reading in a much more Deep Way we can also take the same elements apply them to

the logic of a question the logic of a problem the logic of questions emerging from the problem we start by asking the question what is the problem detail that what is the key question that emerges from that what is my purpose in addressing it again having our students do this multiple times so that they learn the the concepts in critical thinking and the language of critical thinking we want them to internalize that the only way they're going to do that is if they have a considerable practice in this so we've talked about the cultivation of

intellectual traits we spent a little bit of time on the analysis of thought now let's move to the second point in the circle the assessment of thought so once we take our thinking apart we have the elements we've got we ask ourselves well now that I know what my purpose is and I can State what my question is and I know what the concepts are that I'm using or I have I'm reading an article and I can State what the purpose is I think I think I know what the questions are the author is asking

and I'm pretty sure this is the information so once the student has done that the question is how do they then judge the quality of the reasoning we judge the quality of reasoning through Universal intellectual standards notice the Simplicity here and here are some of the essential intellectual standards that we all should be using on a regular basis to develop our thinking Clarity accuracy precision relevance depth breadth logic significance and fairness and there you see a brief definition of each one and once we have internalized intellectual standards one one part of that internalization is understanding

the questions that emerge from our understanding of that standard so if I understand Clarity and thinking that it's important in thinking and I know what it means then I will routinely make certain intellectual moves such as this I don't understand what you just said can you say that in other words I didn't use the word Clarity I could have said I'm not clear on what you said can you say that in other words I didn't say that but I meant that and it's obvious when I say can you say that in other words can you

give me an example or let me tell you what I understand you to be saying is that correct these are again all intellectual moves our students need to learn to make and make on a regular basis in and out of the classroom accuracy somebody brings up some information and is trying to prove a point for that information my question might be how do you know that's accurate what is your where are you getting your evidence what is your evidence and or how's that relevant to the question that we're focusing on we want our students to

be able to be precise in their use of language this is very important and as we all know we're moving away from Precision of thought historically not more toward Precision of thought when we when we bring in Precision we're asking for more details we're asking you to unpack your thoughts we're asking you to tell us more about what you think and now with texting and the shortening of language and um we're creating we're going more and more to the concise so say it as simply as possible um tweet it out in one sentence and this

is not going to lead us to the cultivation of critical thinking because thinking frequently requires us to take take apart our thinking and to give more details and again to unpack to give specifics this is precision relevance is is another very important intellectual standard and it's very obvious I think what that means if it's relevant it's directly related to the situation or answering the question and often our students are bringing in ideas that are not relevant or we ourselves are maybe in meetings and other places and when we're thinking critically somebody will say how is

that relevant to what we're focusing on here it's a good question it's a significant question but I don't see the relevance and somebody may say well here's how it's relevant okay well good then I see that now or I'm not really seeing that so we've got to abuse this language again explicitly so that we can practice understanding the the language itself and developing our understanding of how we can better use it debt is required when a situation is complex so we take the problem of sustainability it's a highly complex question as to how we can

best sustain the Earth's resources there is only a way that we're going to answer that and that's through dealing with all of its complexities and breadth is required when there's more than one point of view that is relevant and so we know that many of the problems facing humans today are Broad and face us all and like a worldwide pandemic where everyone is potentially frightened by a virus that's spreading across the world so we've got to think broadly considering multiple points of view when dealing with many of the problems that we Face logic another important

intellectual standard do the parts fit together do they logically flow does this idea that you're using relate to this other idea that you're using if so show me the connection The Logical connection we want our students to ask the question is that logical does that seem right they may it may be logical and it may be accurate but it may not seem quite like we can accept it in those cases we want our students to dig a little further or to at least withhold judgment I'm not really sure I need to think about this significance

many people many people in the world are focused on the trivial they're focused on what is really not significant in the long term and this is unfortunate because human life is um is something that we should be celebrating and something that we should be enjoying and something that we should be advancing but to do all those things we also want to achieve at the highest levels that we can and to do that we need to focus on what is significant in achievement means different things to different people and and so what I'm saying is that

there is the there are the important things in life that we want to connect with and those are the things that are should be the our primary focus and not our clothing and our hairstyle and whether we had the newest and latest vehicle or whatever trivial ideas are pulling us away from the important things that we want to be focusing on and then of course fairness is an essential intellectual standard because where another point of view is relevant the critical thinker will think about that Viewpoint and will fully consider it in good faith not to

dismiss it but to hear it and the fact is that humans have never really valued fair-mindedness as a social goal across human societies that's not where we are quite yet we are there are many people who do see the importance and are working toward it but it's it's not a it's not a standard that we naturally want to adhere to in many cases and we have to work toward that toward being fair to everyone involved so you can take the elements standards and the trades together they form a framework for thinking that enables that enables

you to think through any field of study and these are just some examples that could be added to this list but there are this is an unlimited list that could be created so in other words we use our knowledge of the elements of reasoning intellectual standards and intellectual virtues to reason through any field of study any part of human life that we are focusing on one of the things that we have to focus on as I mentioned before is the problem of egocentric thinking and then it's um sister the problem of sociocentric thinking now these

can be taken as separate Concepts and that's because they're not exactly the same of course but there is a lot of overlap between them and one way to begin to to look at this is to understand the human mind is having natural egocentric and sociocentric tendencies while naturally also developing some intellectual skills and yet at the same time requiring the active cultivation of intellectual traits or virtues ethical sensitivities and many intellectual skills so what I'm saying here is that the Mind does of course naturally develop some intellectual skills in other words the Mind does naturally

think critically to some degree everyone at some time or at some times does think critically but maybe not enough or maybe very little and yet the human mind is also naturally inclined frequently toward egocentric and sociocentric thinking again egocentric thinking being thinking which is thinking which is trapped within itself unable to think to see other points of view unable to think within any other perspectives at least while being egocentric and the egocentric mind can also be selfish so that's selfishness is an easy concept for anyone to understand because I can ask you this do you

know anyone who is selfish and you will say yes and I will say well just think about how that person acts when he or she is being selfish now if I said can you think of someone who's selfish and you say yes and I say did you think of yourself first how many of you will admit that the selfish person that you thought of was yourself first that tells you something in itself so selfishness or rigidity of mine close-mindedness all of these uh traits bigotry Prejudice bias all of those happen in the minds of humans

all of us engage in leaves but it seems that when you're thinking within your own mind which is the only way you can think it seems that you are the one who has the right way of thinking so when we thinking in this way it's I am the way the truth and the light and I know everything and you know nothing now you do you can imagine some people that you've met who are very pushy with their their their selfishness or I'm sorry with their with their um with their narrow their own narrow-mindedness in other

words they they take their narrow views and they and they keep trying to convince you to change and you know some people who are they they think that they're always right all the time no matter what these are people that you would call hard-headed that's all coming from egocentric thinking and some obviously humans do not learn to be egocentric we are naturally skilled and inclined toward self-deception which is the mechanism the primary mechanism as far as I can tell for both egocentric and sociocentric thinking so we deceive ourselves into thinking that there's nothing wrong with

our thinking so if I'm being completely close-minded I'm telling myself all the reasons why I am correct and this other person is wrong and I may be in that process including things information that actually is correct I'm convincing myself with this correct information but what if I'm leaving out information that is also relevant and by leaving it out I can deceive myself into thinking that I'm correct and by focusing on the parts of the argument on the other side that that possibly are flawed and not focusing on the parts of the other argument that are

not flawed again I can avoid seeing reality this is done every day by people across the world and so we've got to have command of our egocentric nature and there's a lot more in this but that's a beginning place again the the related um set of tendencies in the mind to egocentric thinking can be categorized under the term socio-centered thinking so where egocentric thinking is selfish again sociocentric thinking is looking out for the the the the the the the desires of the group to protect the group you could say well there's nothing wrong with uh

protecting your group well there's nothing wrong with protecting your group as long as by doing so you're not violating the rights and needs of someone else that's the question there's no nothing wrong with pursuing your own desires as long as you're not violating the rights of someone else it all boils down to this are you denying someone or a sentient creature a right that they should naturally have um a right that they should have by their very nature so sociocentric thinking is focusing on getting more for our group and often that means more for our

can be our our our family in that um obviously we have to be concerned about our families just because you're protecting your family and providing for them does not mean you're being sociocentric the question is how do you act in the family in relationship to those outside of the family um and we can be sociocentric in terms of the way we perceive our nation or the way we think of our gender you know when people say you know women are like this we women are like this what does that mean you can't love all women

together except being very basic terms of definition and so that means that it it that understanding how we function in groups is very complex but one thing we have to be careful of is not to violate other people's rights as we're functioning in groups so if joining together is going to harm someone else then that's going to be a problem and um now the other part of sociocentric thinking other than let's say group selfishness or groupishness is the parallel to egocentric rigidity of mind and it will be sociocentric rigidity of Mind thinking within the logic

of our group and not being able to imagine any other logic being relevant to helping us reason better so we're locked into this way of thinking we validate one another in our groups we don't let people in who don't agree with our ideas and so you can think of many examples of this historically in in in your own life because it's it's these problems the problem of egocentric and sociocentric thinking are pervasive throughout human life and they cannot be left out of any um rich or substantive or robust conception of critical thinking because it's not

enough to just teach students the elements of reasoning and the intellectual standards and even the intellectual virtues because they will be using these and using them well in many cases and thinking that now they are the critical thinker and what happens is that they develop in that process very often intellectual arrogance they think that they know more than they do know and that is often related to well it is coming from either their egocentric or their sociocentric thinking or a combination of both so if we do not teach these concepts of egocentric and sociocentric thinking

directly we're really not going to be able to achieve our goal of advancing critical thinking across human societies because we'll be thinking that we're doing it when actually we're not and so these are not just psychological and sociological concepts they're direct barriers to critical thinking and anything that's a direct barrier to critical thinking must be included in its Theory a to take this a bit further and I've already said much of this but imagine that you're seeing the world on a daily basis you're looking at the world but you're looking at the world you're looking

at what's happening in the world what happens to you through lenses and these lenses are based in the egocentric and sociocentric thinking frequently so we're looking through the the lenses of our biases our distortions our project what we're projecting onto other people what we ourselves are doing one of the defense mechanisms rationalization rationalizing my behavior even though there's some kind of problem with it that I don't want to see giving reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing which may be perfectly good reasons but if they're not the real reason um all kinds of fallacies exist

in human thinking and these could form part of our lenses egocentric pathology sociocentric pathologies selfishness Group which is Prejudice bias Etc so if you're looking at the world through these lenses if our students are looking at the world through these lenses then how will critical thinking help them break through that well there is only one way that I know of and that is to teach the the the toolbox of critical thinking and that toolbox of critical thinking I have uh pointed out a couple of times but in closing let me rewind let me remind you

of these that we have the problems I've just been focusing on of egocentric and social centered thinking that serve as primary barriers to um the cultivation of intellectual traits which in dispositions and virtues and that is our main focus for critical thinking because we need to create a world which embodies fair-mindedness and critical thinking so we want to develop the ethical in the intellectual character of the human species and we do that one classroom at a time one teacher at a time one student at a time and I will end with this quote by William

Graham Sumner from folkways 1906 the critical habit of thought if usual in society will pervade all its mores because it is a way of taking up the problems of life being educated and it cannot be stampeded by its stump orders they're slow to believe they can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees without certainty and without pain they can wait for evidence and weigh evidence uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other they can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of credulity

education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens so with that thank you for joining me and I hope that you have benefited from this very brief introduction to critical thinking thank you