Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies

Martin Cohen

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118924730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia cognitiva e cognizione

Turbocharge your reasoning with Critical Thinking

Just what are the ingredients of a great argument? What is the secret to communicating your ideas clearly and persuasively? And how do you see through sloppy thinking and flim-flam? If you've ever asked any of these questions, then this book is for you!

These days, strong critical thinking skills provide a vital foundation for academic success, and Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies offers a clear and unintimidating introduction to what can otherwise be a pretty complex topic. Inside, you'll get hands-on, lively, and fun exercises that you can put to work today to improve your arguments and pin down key issues.

With this accessible and friendly guide, you'll get plain-English instruction on how to identify other people's assumptions, methodology, and conclusions, evaluate evidence, and interpret texts effectively. You'll also find tips and guidance on reading between the lines, assessing validity – and even advice on when not to apply logic too rigidly!

Critical Thinking Skills for Dummies:

• Provides tools and strategies from a range of disciplines great for developing your reflective thinking skills
• Offers expert guidance on sound reasoning and textual analysis
• Shows precisely how to use concept mapping and brainstorming to generate insights
• Demonstrates how critical thinking skills is a proven path to success as a student

Whether you're undertaking reviews, planning research projects or just keen to give your brain a workout, Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies equips you with everything you need to succeed.

Part I

Getting Started with Critical Thinking Skills

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Go to www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.

In this part . . .

• Find a quick overview of what this newfangled idea called Critical Thinking is really all about, and why everyone's doing it.
• Measure your existing thinking skills, and get a big nudge towards broadening your outlook to include emotional intelligence and awareness of everyone's inbuilt biases.
• Discover why most people's brains are happier reaching quick answers than they are at reaching the right answers — plus tips on how to avoid that tendency for yourself.
• Learn how unscrupulous folks, from political extremists to talented advertisers, have always taken advantage of uncritical thinkers.

Chapter 1

Entering the Exciting World of Critical Thinking

In This Chapter

Getting the big picture on thinking skills

Picking up cool tips for problem solving

Steering clear of common misconceptions

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts.

—François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613–1680)

Critical Thinking is about pressing points, sniffing a bit more sceptically at issues and generally looking more closely at everything. Not only at factual claims but also, and most importantly, at the ways in which people arrive at their views and ideas.

Harrumph, you may think! Why bother? Good question! I've failed plenty of job interviews in my time by being a Critical Thinker. Equally, the world has no shortage of successful people who scrupulously avoid any appearance of not only thinking critically, but thinking full-stop. My short answer is that being a Critical Thinker is still the best kind of thinker to be, even if it does sometimes mean that you're the odd one out on many issues.

In this chapter I provide an overview of Critical Thinking and what you can find in the rest of this book. I'll also cover the importance of ‘reading between the lines’ and also set the record straight on what Critical Thinking isn't.

Opening the Doors to the Arguments Clinic

You may well have been brought up not to argue. At school you were probably encouraged to sit quietly and write down facts — I was. When I was five, one teacher even used sticky tape to shut children's mouths up in class! (Yes, I was one of them.) Since then I've had some very enlightened teachers, who encouraged me to use my imagination, to solve some problems or do research. But still not to argue.

So welcome to a very different way of seeing the world — Critical Thinking. This is truly the ‘arguments clinic’ in which punters can pay for either 5-minute or hour-long arguments (as the famous Monty Python sketch has it). No, it isn't. Yes it is. Still say that it isn't? But, yes it is! (If you like, check out Chapter 17 now to discover ten of the world's most influential arguments — don't worry, I'll still be here when you get back!)

Of course, as the sketch says, this isn't proper argument at all, merely contradiction: nothing like a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. If an ability to contradict people is all you come away with after reading this book then you, like the man in the sketch, would be entitled to your money back. Don't worry, here you will find so many new ways of looking at issues that you'll soon be having the full, hour-long arguments on everything under the sun.

My aim by the end of this section is to give you the big picture of Critical Thinking.

Defining Critical Thinking

If you look up Critical Thinking in a dictionary, you see that it's called the philosophical examination of arguments, and I'm a philosopher. But — at the risk of annoying the Ivory Tower experts straight away — I say that this kind of philosophy isn't the sort most of them do or have a clue about. Yes, as Chapter 12 shows, Critical Thinking does have one foot in the realm of logic, in tidily setting out arguments as premises followed by conclusions. But if that were all it was, you might as well give the job to a computer.

No, Critical Thinking is really about a range of skills and understandings, including an ability to play with words, a sensitivity to context, feelings and emotions, and (the hardest skill to develop) the kind of open-mindedness that allows you to make creative leaps and gain insights.

I know that developing these skills sounds rather like a tall order for one book to achieve. But Critical Thinking is also team thinking, and I draw on the ideas of many other thinkers, including a lot of input from my editors at Wiley. As a result, you don't get my opinion of Critical Thinking Skills, but a carefully researched and lively introduction to the subject.

Spotting how the brain likes to think

Professors may sniff, but I prefer to work on exercises that are fun or interesting, which is why I have tried hard to make the ones in this book like that. Here's a rather trivial little exercise, which nonetheless illustrates something important about how the human mind operates.

Should you say ‘The yolk of the egg is white’ or ‘The yolk of the egg are white’?

When I first saw this question, I thought for a minute — and then I gave up and looked for the answers. That's my method with written exercises; it conserves my limited brain power for things like watching TV and eating crisps — at the same time! But I digress (not good in Critical Thinking). This question may form the subject of a 5-minute argument, but it shouldn't stretch to an hour, because neither version is correct: egg yolks are yellow. Boom, boom! Caught you out?

This exercise reveals that people's normal mode of thinking is bound within the parameters of certain rules and systems — due to thousands of years of evolution. In the jargon of psychology, human thinking uses certain heuristics (mental shortcuts for solving problems and making judgements quickly).

The trouble is that automatic and well-established ways of thinking can stop you from seeing new possibilities or avoiding unexpected pitfalls. Plus, the great majority of people's thinking goes on without them being aware of it. Although sometimes quick and efficient, in certain circumstances it can rush people to the wrong conclusions.

Critical Thinking is your insurance policy against these dodgy, but more or less universal, thinking habits.

Evaluating what you read, hear and think

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

—Bertrand Russell (‘The Triumph of Stupidity’ in Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell's American Essays, 1931–1935)

Critical Thinking is about actively questioning not only the conclusions of what you're reading or hearing, but also the assumptions — be they open or hidden — and the overall frame of reference. (Critical Reading is discussed in detail in Chapter 9.)

Critical Thinkers approach an issue without preconceived assumptions, let alone prejudices, towards certain conclusions. As Professor Stella Cottrell, author of a popular guide to the subject, says, Critical Thinkers are quite prepared to acknowledge a good argument that goes against them, and will refuse to resort to a bad argument even if it looks like the only one available to support them.

Ingredients that make a Critical Thinker

If you're building a Critical Thinker, à la Dr Frankenstein, here are the abilities and attributes you need:

• Tolerance: Critical Thinkers delight in hearing divergent views, and enjoy a real debate.
• Analytical skills: Critical Thinkers don't accept just any kind of talking. They want properly constructed arguments that present reasons and draw sound conclusions.
• Confidence: Critical Thinkers have to be a little bit confident to be able to examine views that others present — often people in authority.
• Curiosity: Critical Thinkers need curiosity. It may have killed the cat, but curiosity is the essential ingredient for ideas and insights.
• Truth-seeking: Critical Thinkers are on mission ‘objective truth’ — even if it turns out to undermine their own previously held convictions and long-cherished beliefs and is flat against their self-interest.

Developing Critical Thinking Skills: Reading between the Lines

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute re...