Or Perhaps...: What is "critical thinking"?

2010-11-06

What is "critical thinking"?

A Super-streamlined Conception of Critical Thinking

by Robert H. Ennis • June 20, 2002

Assuming that critical thinking is reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do, a critical thinker:

is open-minded and mindful of alternatives;
tries to be well-informed;
judges well the credibility of sources;
identifies conclusions, reasons, and assumptions;
judges well the quality of an argument, including the acceptability of its reasons, assumptions, and evidence;
can well develop and defend a reasonable position;
asks appropriate clarifying questions;
formulates plausible hypotheses; plans experiments well;
defines terms in a way appropriate for the context;
draws conclusions when warranted, but with caution;
integrates all items in this list when deciding what to believe or do.

For further detail, see references and items on the web site:

http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/rhennis

Another delineation is available at:

http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/teaching_resources/tips/promoting_and_assessing_critical_thinking.html

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About This Blog

This is my personal blog. It is a space where I critique and counter reactionary propaganda and save useful references pertaining to a range of issues that interest and concern me. Opinions that are expressed on this blog are mine, and mine alone, unless otherwise indicated.

I believe that no debate is worth having unless it is based upon verifiable and credible evidence -- from reputable sources -- and also upon principles of logic and disclosure of one's aims and guiding values. Opinions are ubiquitous and generally useless; an opinion plus evidence is an argument that can become the basis of a worthwhile and rational exchange.

I am often described as "left-wing," "socialist," "Marxist," and the like. (Indeed, I often also describe myself using these terms.) However, such loaded terms are seldom clarifying because they are politically charged and historically contingent, and therefore mean different things to different people.

And so, to be clear, the following values and beliefs are my starting point.

I hold humanist values and I am committed to working towards a socially just and environmentally sustainable world. In general, I believe that the material basis of human life is paramount to understanding human behaviour and working towards social betterment.

Additionally, I believe that any conception of democracy must include a significant and meaningful role for all people to participate in decision-making that affects the organization of their society, and especially its economic organization.

Wisdom & Insights

"My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world."

—Jack Layton (1950-2011)

"People are sacred. Ideas are not."

—unknown

"An opinion is just an opinion. An opinion plus evidence is an argument."

—unknown

"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."

—unknown

"I've always felt that saying what one thinks is cheap and easy. It's more useful to describe why one thinks it and, even better, how one thinks."

—Rick Salutin

"Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question."
—Barack Obama

‎"While we like to imagine that our values are complementary and perfectly consistent with one another, this is a fiction: a perfectly free society is not likely to be especially egalitarian, nor is a perfectly egalitarian society likely to be especially free."

— Joel Best

"It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies."

—Noam Chomsky

"You can't be neutral on a moving train."
—Howard Zinn

"The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

—Karl Marx

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."

—Emma Goldman

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

—Tommy Douglas

"Why would you need a dictatorship of the proletariat if the whole working class is united and there are only a tiny minority of capitalists in opposition? You could say go home, and we'd finish with the bosses. If the whole working class is united we could spit at them and flood them into the Atlantic!"

—Tony Cliff

"It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism."

—David Harvey

"In time of war, the loudest patriots are the greatest profiteers."

—August Bebel

"The virtue of uncertainty is not a comfortable idea, but then a citizen-based democracy is built upon participation, which is the very expression of permanent discomfort."

—John Ralston Saul

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

—Desmond Tutu

"The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable."

—Andrea Dworkin

"If [people] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

—W. I. Thomas

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."

—Mark Twain

"In the social production of their existence, [humans] inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of [individuals] that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

—Karl Marx

"Generally speaking, the right doesn't do single-issue politics. They see all their political and social concerns as related to a wider agenda. Shouldn't our side—those who want to challenge the priorities of a system divided between haves and have-nots—be looking for what unites us in every struggle for justice and freedom?"

—Alan Maass

"The first condition of freedom is the open act of resistance."

—Angela Davis

"You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress."

—Malcolm X

"Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change."

—Malcolm X

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

—Martin Luther King Jr.

"Those white gay men who have disposable income and who think that all they need to do is get rid of the most blatant homophobia in corporate, government, and military settings, in the legal system and on TV, and everything will fall into place, that they'll have a nice life in their little enclaves—they're dreaming. Let's say they got rid of homophobia in those places that I mentioned—which is not really getting rid of homophobia, it's getting rid of it in places that make their lives difficult—but suppose they were able to do that. If they were living in or near a city that has imploded, like Los Angeles, because of racial and economic exploitation and oppression, then how free are they going to be? I don't know why people can't understand how interconnected our fates are as creatures on this planet."

—Barbara Smith

‎"If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models."

—B. Lester (unconfirmed)

"Some of us wish to encourage in individuals the sense of justice which would embolden them to challenge the institutions that control our fate by bringing their secrets to light. Some of us wish to encourage in individuals ever greater fealty and submission to corporations and the state in order to protect the privileges and prerogatives of the powerful, lest their erosion threaten what David Brooks calls 'the fragile community'—our current, comfortable dispensation."

—Will Wilkinson (for The Economist regardingWikiLeaks and Julian Assange)

"I've always believed that you can't force a country to have a revolution, and then expect democracy to stick. Yes, you can launch a coup, topple a government, and execute a Saddam, but for a revolution to stick—for democracy to survive—a country's citizens need to be responsible for, and vested in, the social change happening around them. Otherwise they have no ownership of it, as it wasn't their revolution."

—John Aravosis

"Any movement that stands for revolutionary social change but rules out the use of force when necessary condemns itself to destruction and its supporters to unnecessary suffering."

—Chris Harman

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."

—James Bovard

"In short, the democratic system at best functions within a very narrow range in a capitalist democracy and even within this narrow range its functioning is enormously biased by the concentrations of private power and by the authoritarian and passive modes of thinking that are induced by autocratic institutions such as industries, for example. It is a truism, but one that must be constantly stressed, that capitalism and democracy are ultimately quite incompatible."

—Noam Chomsky

"I am remembering all the veterans of movements who sacrificed so much for the cause of justice—those who were killed, tortured, raped, imprisoned, or harassed; those who lived in poverty or obscurity, without remembrance; those whose long struggles and work were appropriated and disappeared by liberal gladhanders whose signatures ended up on the legislation; those who continue to struggle today for justice."

—Corvin Russell

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy — ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness — that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what — at last — I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

—Bertrand Russell