Critical Thinking

An Introduction
-Alec Fisher
 1. What is critical thinking and how to
improve it
• ‘Buzz word’ in educational circles

• Educators interested in teaching ‘thinking skills’

instead of information and content

• Critical thinking aims at teaching ‘thinking skills’

• Mostly educators would think that students would

learn thinking skills indirectly and implicitly

• Critical thinking teaches these skills directly

 Contd.
• teaches a range of transferable thinking skills

• For example it teaches skills like:

How to structure an argument

Judge the credibility of a source

Make a decision

• When we learn to use these in one context we can learn it in

other contexts, too

• Hence these skills are ‘transferable’.

 Question 1.1

Please write down what you (the reader) think

the phrase ‘critical thinking’ means. You will
have heard different uses of the phrase in
various contexts, so pull together what makes
sense to you from those uses. Even if you have
very little idea, do the best you can. At this
stage there are no right or wrong answers.
 1.1 Some classic definitions from the
critical thinking tradition
• 1.1.1 John Dewey and ‘reflective thinking’:
(American philosopher, psychologist and
educator)

– Active, persistent, and careful consideration of a

belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light
of the grounds which support it and the further
conclusions to which it tends (Dewey,1909, p. 9)
 1.1.1 contd…
• It’s essentially an active process in which you raise
questions yourself, find relevant information yourself

• ‘Persistent’ and ‘careful’ in contrast to unreflective

thinking

• focuses on grounds which support a belief (or reason to

believing something and the implications)

• Attaches huge importance on reasoning, and evaluating

reasoning

• skillful reasoning is the key element of critical thinking

 1.1.2 Edward Glaser, building on
Dewey’s ideas
(1)an attitude of being disposed to consider in a
thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come
within the range of one’s experience; (2) knowledge
of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning; and
(3) some skill in applying those methods. Critical
thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any
belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of
the evidence that supports it and the further
conclusions to which it tends. (Glaser, 1941, p. 5)
 1.1.2 contd…
• This definition owes a lot to Dewey’s original
definition

• Glaser refers of evidence in the place of grounds,

but second sentence is much the same

• Focuses on the ‘methods of logical inquiry and

reasoning’ with more or less ‘skill’
 1.1.3 Robert Ennis – a widely used
definition
• Critical thinking is reasonable, reflective thinking
that is focused on deciding what to believe or do
(Cf. Norris and Ennis, 1989)

– The definition emphasizes on being

• Reasonable and Reflective (picks up on earlier definition)

• Deciding what to… do (not explicitly mentioned earlier)

• So decision making is part of critical thinking in Ennis’s

conception
 1.1.4 Richard Paul and ‘thinking about
your thinking’
• Critical thinking is that mode of thinking – about any subject,
content or problem – in which the thinker improves the quality
of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the
structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual
standards upon them. (Paul, Fisher and Nosich, 1993, p. 4)

• It focuses on developing one’s critical thinking ability through

‘thinking about one’s thinking’ (metacognition)

• and improving it by reference to some model of good thinking

• An analogy from basketball

 1.2 Skills which underlie critical thinking:
some basic competencies
• Critical thinking skills/abilities as listed by Edward Glaser:
– To recognize problems

– To find workable means for meeting those problems

– To recognize unstated assumptions and values

– To comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity and discrimination

– To interpret data

– To put to test the generalizations and conclusions at which one arrives

– Evaluate statements

– To render accurate judgements about specific things and qualities in everyday

life (Glaser 1941, p. 6)
 In this book we shall deal with some of the fundamental
critical thinking skills, in particular how to:
• Identify the elements in a reasoned case, especially reasons and
conclusions;

• Identify and evaluate assumptions;

• Clarify and interpret expressions and ideas;

• Judge the acceptability, especially the credibility, of claims; evaluate

arguments of different kinds;

• Analyze, evaluate and produce explanations;

• Analyze, evaluate and make decisions;

• Draw inferences;

• Produce arguments.
Question 1.6
Do the following activities involve critical thinking as you
understand it?

1. You are reading a novel for pleasure

2. You are solving a routine mathematical problem in a standard, well-

learned systematic way, which requires you to reason your way through
to a conclusion. Think of an example and discuss your answer with
reference to that.

3. A professional basketball player is playing in an important match

4. You have just completed your GCSE exams and you are now trying to
decide which A-level subjects to do

5. You attempted to install some new software on your computer but it is

not working properly, so now you are trying to follow the instructions
for ‘trouble shooting.’
 Question 1.7
• Imagine someone, let us call him Andy, standing beside a
used car trying to decide whether to buy it. Andy does not
have much money and he does not know much about
cars, but he has just left college and has just been offered
a new job which requires him to have a reliable car. A
salesperson has told Andy all the advantages of the car in
question and has offered a ‘bargain’ price.

• Case 1 Let us suppose that Andy has come to like and trust
the salesperson in the course of talking about the car
(though they have never met before and Andy knows
nothing of the company for which she works) and he likes
the ‘look’ of the car so he decides to buy it.
 Case 2
• Let us suppose instead that Andy comes to like the
salesperson, but treats what she says with caution,
gets an expert mechanic to check the vehicle over,
checks prices of comparable vehicles in a used car
price guide and gets a knowledgeable friend to
advise on negotiating a price
 The question now has three parts:

• Look at Dewey’s definition above and decide whether

Andy displays ‘reflective thinking’ according to the
definition in either case. Is he ‘active’, and ‘careful’?

• Referring to Glaser’s list of skills, does Andy:

– Recognize what the problem is?
– Find workable means for dealing with the problem?
– Gather and marshal pertinent information?
– Recognize unstated assumptions and values (etc)?
– Would you say that Andy had acted reasonably in either
case?
 A final definition of critical thinking

• Critical thinking is skilled and active interpretation

and evaluation of observations and
communications, information and argumentation.
(Michael Scriven)

– Skilled activity for reason

– It involves questioning, metacognition

– Includes evaluation

– Process of determining the merit, quality, worth, or value of something

 Values of critical thinker:
• Do not just use them in the critical thinking class,
but apply them in your other studies too and in
everyday life

• Do not just acquire the skills, but value them – and

use them; in short become a critical thinker

• Do we use critical thinking while deciding whether

to accept a job offer?
 Critico-creative thinking
• Critical thinking is sometimes referred to as ‘critico-
creative’ thinking for two reasons:
– The term critical thinking is sometimes thought to
sound rather ‘negative’, as though one’s only interest is
in adversely criticizing other peoples arguments and
ideas

– To be good at evaluating arguments and ideas one

often has to be very imaginative and creative about
other possibilities, alternative considerations, different
options and so on.
 Summary of this introduction
• Critical thinking is contrasted with unreflective thinking

• It is a skillful activity

• It requires interpretation, and evaluation of

observations, communications and other sources of
information

• There are better ways to thinking than we exhibit and

that our poor thinking can be at least partially
remedied by suitable practice.
The End