![Open Textbook Library logo Library Home](https://open.umn.edu/assets/library/otl_logo-64df7bc5a6a1aedd263c2ba91645dfb179b1bf86318251c64c0636456d724ac6.webp)
![](http://writinghelp.online/777/templates/cheerup/res/banner1.gif)
Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking
(10 reviews)
![whole star critical thinking philosophy book](https://open.umn.edu/assets/common/stars/star-whole-96d7e83077162d843e82800869b1f7f50b6627cfa7476908277e9876af97bd50.webp)
Matthew Van Cleave, Lansing Community College
Copyright Year: 2016
Publisher: Matthew J. Van Cleave
Language: English
Formats Available
Conditions of use.
![critical thinking philosophy book Attribution](https://open.umn.edu/assets/library/licenses/Attribution-a5d3651e932fda36bfa1d8f97c9d7b6701caa05923ec9442a5beabb4fed8f5f4.webp)
Learn more about reviews.
Reviewed by "yusef" Alexander Hayes, Professor, North Shore Community College on 6/9/21
Formal and informal reasoning, argument structure, and fallacies are covered comprehensively, meeting the author's goal of both depth and succinctness. read more
Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less
Formal and informal reasoning, argument structure, and fallacies are covered comprehensively, meeting the author's goal of both depth and succinctness.
Content Accuracy rating: 5
The book is accurate.
Relevance/Longevity rating: 5
While many modern examples are used, and they are helpful, they are not necessarily needed. The usefulness of logical principles and skills have proved themselves, and this text presents them clearly with many examples.
Clarity rating: 5
It is obvious that the author cares about their subject, audience, and students. The text is comprehensible and interesting.
Consistency rating: 5
The format is easy to understand and is consistent in framing.
Modularity rating: 5
This text would be easy to adapt.
Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5
The organization is excellent, my one suggestion would be a concluding chapter.
Interface rating: 5
I accessed the PDF version and it would be easy to work with.
Grammatical Errors rating: 5
The writing is excellent.
Cultural Relevance rating: 5
This is not an offensive text.
Reviewed by Susan Rottmann, Part-time Lecturer, University of Southern Maine on 3/2/21
I reviewed this book for a course titled "Creative and Critical Inquiry into Modern Life." It won't meet all my needs for that course, but I haven't yet found a book that would. I wanted to review this one because it states in the preface that it... read more
Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less
I reviewed this book for a course titled "Creative and Critical Inquiry into Modern Life." It won't meet all my needs for that course, but I haven't yet found a book that would. I wanted to review this one because it states in the preface that it fits better for a general critical thinking course than for a true logic course. I'm not sure that I'd agree. I have been using Browne and Keeley's "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking," and I think that book is a better introduction to critical thinking for non-philosophy majors. However, the latter is not open source so I will figure out how to get by without it in the future. Overall, the book seems comprehensive if the subject is logic. The index is on the short-side, but fine. However, one issue for me is that there are no page numbers on the table of contents, which is pretty annoying if you want to locate particular sections.
Content Accuracy rating: 4
I didn't find any errors. In general the book uses great examples. However, they are very much based in the American context, not for an international student audience. Some effort to broaden the chosen examples would make the book more widely applicable.
Relevance/Longevity rating: 4
I think the book will remain relevant because of the nature of the material that it addresses, however there will be a need to modify the examples in future editions and as the social and political context changes.
Clarity rating: 3
The text is lucid, but I think it would be difficult for introductory-level students who are not philosophy majors. For example, in Browne and Keeley's "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking," the sub-headings are very accessible, such as "Experts cannot rescue us, despite what they say" or "wishful thinking: perhaps the biggest single speed bump on the road to critical thinking." By contrast, Van Cleave's "Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking" has more subheadings like this: "Using your own paraphrases of premises and conclusions to reconstruct arguments in standard form" or "Propositional logic and the four basic truth functional connectives." If students are prepared very well for the subject, it would work fine, but for students who are newly being introduced to critical thinking, it is rather technical.
It seems to be very consistent in terms of its terminology and framework.
Modularity rating: 4
The book is divided into 4 chapters, each having many sub-chapters. In that sense, it is readily divisible and modular. However, as noted above, there are no page numbers on the table of contents, which would make assigning certain parts rather frustrating. Also, I'm not sure why the book is only four chapter and has so many subheadings (for instance 17 in Chapter 2) and a length of 242 pages. Wouldn't it make more sense to break up the book into shorter chapters? I think this would make it easier to read and to assign in specific blocks to students.
Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4
The organization of the book is fine overall, although I think adding page numbers to the table of contents and breaking it up into more separate chapters would help it to be more easily navigable.
Interface rating: 4
The book is very simply presented. In my opinion it is actually too simple. There are few boxes or diagrams that highlight and explain important points.
The text seems fine grammatically. I didn't notice any errors.
The book is written with an American audience in mind, but I did not notice culturally insensitive or offensive parts.
Overall, this book is not for my course, but I think it could work well in a philosophy course.
![half star critical thinking philosophy book](https://open.umn.edu/assets/common/stars/star-half-7819f3ba533301f22d236d4411c33a27308551eaaf1cec02568b15988b69c16b.webp)
Reviewed by Daniel Lee, Assistant Professor of Economics and Leadership, Sweet Briar College on 11/11/19
This textbook is not particularly comprehensive (4 chapters long), but I view that as a benefit. In fact, I recommend it for use outside of traditional logic classes, but rather interdisciplinary classes that evaluate argument read more
Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less
This textbook is not particularly comprehensive (4 chapters long), but I view that as a benefit. In fact, I recommend it for use outside of traditional logic classes, but rather interdisciplinary classes that evaluate argument
To the best of my ability, I regard this content as accurate, error-free, and unbiased
The book is broadly relevant and up-to-date, with a few stray temporal references (sydney olympics, particular presidencies). I don't view these time-dated examples as problematic as the logical underpinnings are still there and easily assessed
Clarity rating: 4
My only pushback on clarity is I didn't find the distinction between argument and explanation particularly helpful/useful/easy to follow. However, this experience may have been unique to my class.
To the best of my ability, I regard this content as internally consistent
I found this text quite modular, and was easily able to integrate other texts into my lessons and disregard certain chapters or sub-sections
The book had a logical and consistent structure, but to the extent that there are only 4 chapters, there isn't much scope for alternative approaches here
No problems with the book's interface
The text is grammatically sound
Cultural Relevance rating: 4
Perhaps the text could have been more universal in its approach. While I didn't find the book insensitive per-se, logic can be tricky here because the point is to evaluate meaningful (non-trivial) arguments, but any argument with that sense of gravity can also be traumatic to students (abortion, death penalty, etc)
No additional comments
Reviewed by Lisa N. Thomas-Smith, Graduate Part-time Instructor, CU Boulder on 7/1/19
The text covers all the relevant technical aspects of introductory logic and critical thinking, and covers them well. A separate glossary would be quite helpful to students. However, the terms are clearly and thoroughly explained within the text,... read more
The text covers all the relevant technical aspects of introductory logic and critical thinking, and covers them well. A separate glossary would be quite helpful to students. However, the terms are clearly and thoroughly explained within the text, and the index is very thorough.
The content is excellent. The text is thorough and accurate with no errors that I could discern. The terminology and exercises cover the material nicely and without bias.
The text should easily stand the test of time. The exercises are excellent and would be very helpful for students to internalize correct critical thinking practices. Because of the logical arrangement of the text and the many sub-sections, additional material should be very easy to add.
The text is extremely clearly and simply written. I anticipate that a diligent student could learn all of the material in the text with little additional instruction. The examples are relevant and easy to follow.
The text did not confuse terms or use inconsistent terminology, which is very important in a logic text. The discipline often uses multiple terms for the same concept, but this text avoids that trap nicely.
The text is fairly easily divisible. Since there are only four chapters, those chapters include large blocks of information. However, the chapters themselves are very well delineated and could be easily broken up so that parts could be left out or covered in a different order from the text.
The flow of the text is excellent. All of the information is handled solidly in an order that allows the student to build on the information previously covered.
The PDF Table of Contents does not include links or page numbers which would be very helpful for navigation. Other than that, the text was very easy to navigate. All the images, charts, and graphs were very clear
I found no grammatical errors in the text.
Cultural Relevance rating: 3
The text including examples and exercises did not seem to be offensive or insensitive in any specific way. However, the examples included references to black and white people, but few others. Also, the text is very American specific with many examples from and for an American audience. More diversity, especially in the examples, would be appropriate and appreciated.
Reviewed by Leslie Aarons, Associate Professor of Philosophy, CUNY LaGuardia Community College on 5/16/19
This is an excellent introductory (first-year) Logic and Critical Thinking textbook. The book covers the important elementary information, clearly discussing such things as the purpose and basic structure of an argument; the difference between an... read more
This is an excellent introductory (first-year) Logic and Critical Thinking textbook. The book covers the important elementary information, clearly discussing such things as the purpose and basic structure of an argument; the difference between an argument and an explanation; validity; soundness; and the distinctions between an inductive and a deductive argument in accessible terms in the first chapter. It also does a good job introducing and discussing informal fallacies (Chapter 4). The incorporation of opportunities to evaluate real-world arguments is also very effective. Chapter 2 also covers a number of formal methods of evaluating arguments, such as Venn Diagrams and Propositional logic and the four basic truth functional connectives, but to my mind, it is much more thorough in its treatment of Informal Logic and Critical Thinking skills, than it is of formal logic. I also appreciated that Van Cleave’s book includes exercises with answers and an index, but there is no glossary; which I personally do not find detracts from the book's comprehensiveness.
Overall, Van Cleave's book is error-free and unbiased. The language used is accessible and engaging. There were no glaring inaccuracies that I was able to detect.
Van Cleave's Textbook uses relevant, contemporary content that will stand the test of time, at least for the next few years. Although some examples use certain subjects like former President Obama, it does so in a useful manner that inspires the use of critical thinking skills. There are an abundance of examples that inspire students to look at issues from many different political viewpoints, challenging students to practice evaluating arguments, and identifying fallacies. Many of these exercises encourage students to critique issues, and recognize their own inherent reader-biases and challenge their own beliefs--hallmarks of critical thinking.
As mentioned previously, the author has an accessible style that makes the content relatively easy to read and engaging. He also does a suitable job explaining jargon/technical language that is introduced in the textbook.
Van Cleave uses terminology consistently and the chapters flow well. The textbook orients the reader by offering effective introductions to new material, step-by-step explanations of the material, as well as offering clear summaries of each lesson.
This textbook's modularity is really quite good. Its language and structure are not overly convoluted or too-lengthy, making it convenient for individual instructors to adapt the materials to suit their methodological preferences.
The topics in the textbook are presented in a logical and clear fashion. The structure of the chapters are such that it is not necessary to have to follow the chapters in their sequential order, and coverage of material can be adapted to individual instructor's preferences.
The textbook is free of any problematic interface issues. Topics, sections and specific content are accessible and easy to navigate. Overall it is user-friendly.
I did not find any significant grammatical issues with the textbook.
The textbook is not culturally insensitive, making use of a diversity of inclusive examples. Materials are especially effective for first-year critical thinking/logic students.
I intend to adopt Van Cleave's textbook for a Critical Thinking class I am teaching at the Community College level. I believe that it will help me facilitate student-learning, and will be a good resource to build additional classroom activities from the materials it provides.
Reviewed by Jennie Harrop, Chair, Department of Professional Studies, George Fox University on 3/27/18
While the book is admirably comprehensive, its extensive details within a few short chapters may feel overwhelming to students. The author tackles an impressive breadth of concepts in Chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4, which leads to 50-plus-page chapters... read more
While the book is admirably comprehensive, its extensive details within a few short chapters may feel overwhelming to students. The author tackles an impressive breadth of concepts in Chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4, which leads to 50-plus-page chapters that are dense with statistical analyses and critical vocabulary. These topics are likely better broached in manageable snippets rather than hefty single chapters.
The ideas addressed in Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking are accurate but at times notably political. While politics are effectively used to exemplify key concepts, some students may be distracted by distinct political leanings.
The terms and definitions included are relevant, but the examples are specific to the current political, cultural, and social climates, which could make the materials seem dated in a few years without intentional and consistent updates.
While the reasoning is accurate, the author tends to complicate rather than simplify -- perhaps in an effort to cover a spectrum of related concepts. Beginning readers are likely to be overwhelmed and under-encouraged by his approach.
Consistency rating: 3
The four chapters are somewhat consistent in their play of definition, explanation, and example, but the structure of each chapter varies according to the concepts covered. In the third chapter, for example, key ideas are divided into sub-topics numbering from 3.1 to 3.10. In the fourth chapter, the sub-divisions are further divided into sub-sections numbered 4.1.1-4.1.5, 4.2.1-4.2.2, and 4.3.1 to 4.3.6. Readers who are working quickly to master new concepts may find themselves mired in similarly numbered subheadings, longing for a grounded concepts on which to hinge other key principles.
Modularity rating: 3
The book's four chapters make it mostly self-referential. The author would do well to beak this text down into additional subsections, easing readers' accessibility.
The content of the book flows logically and well, but the information needs to be better sub-divided within each larger chapter, easing the student experience.
The book's interface is effective, allowing readers to move from one section to the next with a single click. Additional sub-sections would ease this interplay even further.
Grammatical Errors rating: 4
Some minor errors throughout.
For the most part, the book is culturally neutral, avoiding direct cultural references in an effort to remain relevant.
Reviewed by Yoichi Ishida, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Ohio University on 2/1/18
This textbook covers enough topics for a first-year course on logic and critical thinking. Chapter 1 covers the basics as in any standard textbook in this area. Chapter 2 covers propositional logic and categorical logic. In propositional logic,... read more
This textbook covers enough topics for a first-year course on logic and critical thinking. Chapter 1 covers the basics as in any standard textbook in this area. Chapter 2 covers propositional logic and categorical logic. In propositional logic, this textbook does not cover suppositional arguments, such as conditional proof and reductio ad absurdum. But other standard argument forms are covered. Chapter 3 covers inductive logic, and here this textbook introduces probability and its relationship with cognitive biases, which are rarely discussed in other textbooks. Chapter 4 introduces common informal fallacies. The answers to all the exercises are given at the end. However, the last set of exercises is in Chapter 3, Section 5. There are no exercises in the rest of the chapter. Chapter 4 has no exercises either. There is index, but no glossary.
The textbook is accurate.
The content of this textbook will not become obsolete soon.
The textbook is written clearly.
The textbook is internally consistent.
The textbook is fairly modular. For example, Chapter 3, together with a few sections from Chapter 1, can be used as a short introduction to inductive logic.
The textbook is well-organized.
There are no interface issues.
I did not find any grammatical errors.
This textbook is relevant to a first semester logic or critical thinking course.
Reviewed by Payal Doctor, Associate Professro, LaGuardia Community College on 2/1/18
This text is a beginner textbook for arguments and propositional logic. It covers the basics of identifying arguments, building arguments, and using basic logic to construct propositions and arguments. It is quite comprehensive for a beginner... read more
This text is a beginner textbook for arguments and propositional logic. It covers the basics of identifying arguments, building arguments, and using basic logic to construct propositions and arguments. It is quite comprehensive for a beginner book, but seems to be a good text for a course that needs a foundation for arguments. There are exercises on creating truth tables and proofs, so it could work as a logic primer in short sessions or with the addition of other course content.
The books is accurate in the information it presents. It does not contain errors and is unbiased. It covers the essential vocabulary clearly and givens ample examples and exercises to ensure the student understands the concepts
The content of the book is up to date and can be easily updated. Some examples are very current for analyzing the argument structure in a speech, but for this sort of text understandable examples are important and the author uses good examples.
The book is clear and easy to read. In particular, this is a good text for community college students who often have difficulty with reading comprehension. The language is straightforward and concepts are well explained.
The book is consistent in terminology, formatting, and examples. It flows well from one topic to the next, but it is also possible to jump around the text without loosing the voice of the text.
The books is broken down into sub units that make it easy to assign short blocks of content at a time. Later in the text, it does refer to a few concepts that appear early in that text, but these are all basic concepts that must be used to create a clear and understandable text. No sections are too long and each section stays on topic and relates the topic to those that have come before when necessary.
The flow of the text is logical and clear. It begins with the basic building blocks of arguments, and practice identifying more and more complex arguments is offered. Each chapter builds up from the previous chapter in introducing propositional logic, truth tables, and logical arguments. A select number of fallacies are presented at the end of the text, but these are related to topics that were presented before, so it makes sense to have these last.
The text is free if interface issues. I used the PDF and it worked fine on various devices without loosing formatting.
1. The book contains no grammatical errors.
The text is culturally sensitive, but examples used are a bit odd and may be objectionable to some students. For instance, President Obama's speech on Syria is used to evaluate an extended argument. This is an excellent example and it is explained well, but some who disagree with Obama's policies may have trouble moving beyond their own politics. However, other examples look at issues from all political viewpoints and ask students to evaluate the argument, fallacy, etc. and work towards looking past their own beliefs. Overall this book does use a variety of examples that most students can understand and evaluate.
My favorite part of this book is that it seems to be written for community college students. My students have trouble understanding readings in the New York Times, so it is nice to see a logic and critical thinking text use real language that students can understand and follow without the constant need of a dictionary.
Reviewed by Rebecca Owen, Adjunct Professor, Writing, Chemeketa Community College on 6/20/17
This textbook is quite thorough--there are conversational explanations of argument structure and logic. I think students will be happy with the conversational style this author employs. Also, there are many examples and exercises using current... read more
This textbook is quite thorough--there are conversational explanations of argument structure and logic. I think students will be happy with the conversational style this author employs. Also, there are many examples and exercises using current events, funny scenarios, or other interesting ways to evaluate argument structure and validity. The third section, which deals with logical fallacies, is very clear and comprehensive. My only critique of the material included in the book is that the middle section may be a bit dense and math-oriented for learners who appreciate the more informal, informative style of the first and third section. Also, the book ends rather abruptly--it moves from a description of a logical fallacy to the answers for the exercises earlier in the text.
The content is very reader-friendly, and the author writes with authority and clarity throughout the text. There are a few surface-level typos (Starbuck's instead of Starbucks, etc.). None of these small errors detract from the quality of the content, though.
One thing I really liked about this text was the author's wide variety of examples. To demonstrate different facets of logic, he used examples from current media, movies, literature, and many other concepts that students would recognize from their daily lives. The exercises in this text also included these types of pop-culture references, and I think students will enjoy the familiarity--as well as being able to see the logical structures behind these types of references. I don't think the text will need to be updated to reflect new instances and occurrences; the author did a fine job at picking examples that are relatively timeless. As far as the subject matter itself, I don't think it will become obsolete any time soon.
The author writes in a very conversational, easy-to-read manner. The examples used are quite helpful. The third section on logical fallacies is quite easy to read, follow, and understand. A student in an argument writing class could benefit from this section of the book. The middle section is less clear, though. A student learning about the basics of logic might have a hard time digesting all of the information contained in chapter two. This material might be better in two separate chapters. I think the author loses the balance of a conversational, helpful tone and focuses too heavily on equations.
Consistency rating: 4
Terminology in this book is quite consistent--the key words are highlighted in bold. Chapters 1 and 3 follow a similar organizational pattern, but chapter 2 is where the material becomes more dense and equation-heavy. I also would have liked a closing passage--something to indicate to the reader that we've reached the end of the chapter as well as the book.
I liked the overall structure of this book. If I'm teaching an argumentative writing class, I could easily point the students to the chapters where they can identify and practice identifying fallacies, for instance. The opening chapter is clear in defining the necessary terms, and it gives the students an understanding of the toolbox available to them in assessing and evaluating arguments. Even though I found the middle section to be dense, smaller portions could be assigned.
The author does a fine job connecting each defined term to the next. He provides examples of how each defined term works in a sentence or in an argument, and then he provides practice activities for students to try. The answers for each question are listed in the final pages of the book. The middle section feels like the heaviest part of the whole book--it would take the longest time for a student to digest if assigned the whole chapter. Even though this middle section is a bit heavy, it does fit the overall structure and flow of the book. New material builds on previous chapters and sub-chapters. It ends abruptly--I didn't realize that it had ended, and all of a sudden I found myself in the answer section for those earlier exercises.
The simple layout is quite helpful! There is nothing distracting, image-wise, in this text. The table of contents is clearly arranged, and each topic is easy to find.
Tiny edits could be made (Starbuck's/Starbucks, for one). Otherwise, it is free of distracting grammatical errors.
This text is quite culturally relevant. For instance, there is one example that mentions the rumors of Barack Obama's birthplace as somewhere other than the United States. This example is used to explain how to analyze an argument for validity. The more "sensational" examples (like the Obama one above) are helpful in showing argument structure, and they can also help students see how rumors like this might gain traction--as well as help to show students how to debunk them with their newfound understanding of argument and logic.
The writing style is excellent for the subject matter, especially in the third section explaining logical fallacies. Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this text!
Reviewed by Laurel Panser, Instructor, Riverland Community College on 6/20/17
This is a review of Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, an open source book version 1.4 by Matthew Van Cleave. The comparison book used was Patrick J. Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic 12th Edition published by Cengage as well as... read more
This is a review of Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, an open source book version 1.4 by Matthew Van Cleave. The comparison book used was Patrick J. Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic 12th Edition published by Cengage as well as the 13th edition with the same title. Lori Watson is the second author on the 13th edition.
Competing with Hurley is difficult with respect to comprehensiveness. For example, Van Cleave’s book is comprehensive to the extent that it probably covers at least two-thirds or more of what is dealt with in most introductory, one-semester logic courses. Van Cleave’s chapter 1 provides an overview of argumentation including discerning non-arguments from arguments, premises versus conclusions, deductive from inductive arguments, validity, soundness and more. Much of Van Cleave’s chapter 1 parallel’s Hurley’s chapter 1. Hurley’s chapter 3 regarding informal fallacies is comprehensive while Van Cleave’s chapter 4 on this topic is less extensive. Categorical propositions are a topic in Van Cleave’s chapter 2; Hurley’s chapters 4 and 5 provide more instruction on this, however. Propositional logic is another topic in Van Cleave’s chapter 2; Hurley’s chapters 6 and 7 provide more information on this, though. Van Cleave did discuss messy issues of language meaning briefly in his chapter 1; that is the topic of Hurley’s chapter 2.
Van Cleave’s book includes exercises with answers and an index. A glossary was not included.
Reviews of open source textbooks typically include criteria besides comprehensiveness. These include comments on accuracy of the information, whether the book will become obsolete soon, jargon-free clarity to the extent that is possible, organization, navigation ease, freedom from grammar errors and cultural relevance; Van Cleave’s book is fine in all of these areas. Further criteria for open source books includes modularity and consistency of terminology. Modularity is defined as including blocks of learning material that are easy to assign to students. Hurley’s book has a greater degree of modularity than Van Cleave’s textbook. The prose Van Cleave used is consistent.
Van Cleave’s book will not become obsolete soon.
Van Cleave’s book has accessible prose.
Van Cleave used terminology consistently.
Van Cleave’s book has a reasonable degree of modularity.
Van Cleave’s book is organized. The structure and flow of his book is fine.
Problems with navigation are not present.
Grammar problems were not present.
Van Cleave’s book is culturally relevant.
Van Cleave’s book is appropriate for some first semester logic courses.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Reconstructing and analyzing arguments
- 1.1 What is an argument?
- 1.2 Identifying arguments
- 1.3 Arguments vs. explanations
- 1.4 More complex argument structures
- 1.5 Using your own paraphrases of premises and conclusions to reconstruct arguments in standard form
- 1.6 Validity
- 1.7 Soundness
- 1.8 Deductive vs. inductive arguments
- 1.9 Arguments with missing premises
- 1.10 Assuring, guarding, and discounting
- 1.11 Evaluative language
- 1.12 Evaluating a real-life argument
Chapter 2: Formal methods of evaluating arguments
- 2.1 What is a formal method of evaluation and why do we need them?
- 2.2 Propositional logic and the four basic truth functional connectives
- 2.3 Negation and disjunction
- 2.4 Using parentheses to translate complex sentences
- 2.5 “Not both” and “neither nor”
- 2.6 The truth table test of validity
- 2.7 Conditionals
- 2.8 “Unless”
- 2.9 Material equivalence
- 2.10 Tautologies, contradictions, and contingent statements
- 2.11 Proofs and the 8 valid forms of inference
- 2.12 How to construct proofs
- 2.13 Short review of propositional logic
- 2.14 Categorical logic
- 2.15 The Venn test of validity for immediate categorical inferences
- 2.16 Universal statements and existential commitment
- 2.17 Venn validity for categorical syllogisms
Chapter 3: Evaluating inductive arguments and probabilistic and statistical fallacies
- 3.1 Inductive arguments and statistical generalizations
- 3.2 Inference to the best explanation and the seven explanatory virtues
- 3.3 Analogical arguments
- 3.4 Causal arguments
- 3.5 Probability
- 3.6 The conjunction fallacy
- 3.7 The base rate fallacy
- 3.8 The small numbers fallacy
- 3.9 Regression to the mean fallacy
- 3.10 Gambler's fallacy
Chapter 4: Informal fallacies
- 4.1 Formal vs. informal fallacies
- 4.1.1 Composition fallacy
- 4.1.2 Division fallacy
- 4.1.3 Begging the question fallacy
- 4.1.4 False dichotomy
- 4.1.5 Equivocation
- 4.2 Slippery slope fallacies
- 4.2.1 Conceptual slippery slope
- 4.2.2 Causal slippery slope
- 4.3 Fallacies of relevance
- 4.3.1 Ad hominem
- 4.3.2 Straw man
- 4.3.3 Tu quoque
- 4.3.4 Genetic
- 4.3.5 Appeal to consequences
- 4.3.6 Appeal to authority
Answers to exercises Glossary/Index
Ancillary Material
About the book.
This is an introductory textbook in logic and critical thinking. The goal of the textbook is to provide the reader with a set of tools and skills that will enable them to identify and evaluate arguments. The book is intended for an introductory course that covers both formal and informal logic. As such, it is not a formal logic textbook, but is closer to what one would find marketed as a “critical thinking textbook.”
About the Contributors
Matthew Van Cleave , PhD, Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, 2007. VAP at Concordia College (Moorhead), 2008-2012. Assistant Professor at Lansing Community College, 2012-2016. Professor at Lansing Community College, 2016-
Contribute to this Page
![critical thinking philosophy book SEP home page](https://plato.stanford.edu/symbols/sep-man-red.png)
- Table of Contents
- Random Entry
- Chronological
- Editorial Information
- About the SEP
- Editorial Board
- How to Cite the SEP
- Special Characters
- Advanced Tools
- Support the SEP
- PDFs for SEP Friends
- Make a Donation
- SEPIA for Libraries
- Entry Contents
Bibliography
Academic tools.
- Friends PDF Preview
- Author and Citation Info
- Back to Top
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.
2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples
2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.
Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as
active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)
and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.
In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.
Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment.
For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .
2. Examples and Non-Examples
Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.
Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.
Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o’clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68–69; 1933: 91–92)
Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.
“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.
“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot’s position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69–70; 1933: 92–93)
Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).
Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.
Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).
Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).
Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).
Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).
Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).
Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond lane from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.
Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.
Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as
a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)
A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.
Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.
What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as
a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)
Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.
- It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
- The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
- The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.
One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.
If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses. As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009, 2021), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on responsiveness to reasons (Siegel 1988). Kuhn (2019) takes critical thinking to be more a dialogic practice of advancing and responding to arguments than an individual ability.
In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.
Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).
Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.
Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:
- suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
- an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
- the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
- the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
- testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)
The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).
The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).
Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.
If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.
- Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
- Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in spacing in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
- Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
- Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
- Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
- Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
- Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the spacing of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
- Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
- Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
- Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
- Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.
By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.
Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.
Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.
Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)
8. Critical Thinking Dispositions
Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016a) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).
On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.
A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.
Facione (1990a: 25) divides “affective dispositions” of critical thinking into approaches to life and living in general and approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. Adapting this distinction, one can usefully divide critical thinking dispositions into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.
Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.
- Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
- Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
- Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
- Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
- Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking. In three studies, Haran, Ritov, & Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking, including “the tendency to weigh new evidence against a favored belief, to spend sufficient time on a problem before giving up, and to consider carefully the opinions of others in forming one’s own”, led study participants to acquire information and thus to make accurate estimations.
- Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
- Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
- Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.
Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .
Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.
Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).
The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.
Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.
Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.
Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).
Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.
Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).
Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.
Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).
Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.
Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.
Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.
In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.
We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), Black (2012), and Blair (2021).
According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work. It is also helpful to be aware of the prevalence of “noise” (unwanted unsystematic variability of judgments), of how to detect noise (through a noise audit), and of how to reduce noise: make accuracy the goal, think statistically, break a process of arriving at a judgment into independent tasks, resist premature intuitions, in a group get independent judgments first, favour comparative judgments and scales (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein 2021). It is helpful as well to be aware of the concept of “bounded rationality” in decision-making and of the related distinction between “satisficing” and optimizing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2001).
Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.
Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .
What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? In a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of strategies for teaching students to think critically, Abrami et al. (2015) found that dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.
Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .
12. Controversies
Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.
McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), Bailin et al. (1999b), and Willingham (2019).
McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.
The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.
It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.
Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:
- reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
- distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
- indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
- orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
- being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
- being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
- doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
- reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
- solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
- written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
- attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
- winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)
A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as
thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)
Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should
be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)
Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.
The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:
- Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
- Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
- Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
- In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
- Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).
A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.
What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.
Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .
As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.
- Abrami, Philip C., Robert M. Bernard, Eugene Borokhovski, David I. Waddington, C. Anne Wade, and Tonje Person, 2015, “Strategies for Teaching Students to Think Critically: A Meta-analysis”, Review of Educational Research , 85(2): 275–314. doi:10.3102/0034654314551063
- Aikin, Wilford M., 1942, The Story of the Eight-year Study, with Conclusions and Recommendations , Volume I of Adventure in American Education , New York and London: Harper & Brothers. [ Aikin 1942 available online ]
- Alston, Kal, 1995, “Begging the Question: Is Critical Thinking Biased?”, Educational Theory , 45(2): 225–233. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1995.00225.x
- –––, 2001, “Re/Thinking Critical Thinking: The Seductions of Everyday Life”, Studies in Philosophy and Education , 20(1): 27–40. doi:10.1023/A:1005247128053
- American Educational Research Association, 2014, Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing / American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education , Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
- Anderson, Lorin W., David R. Krathwohl, Peter W. Airiasian, Kathleen A. Cruikshank, Richard E. Mayer, Paul R. Pintrich, James Raths, and Merlin C. Wittrock, 2001, A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives , New York: Longman, complete edition.
- Bailin, Sharon, 1987, “Critical and Creative Thinking”, Informal Logic , 9(1): 23–30. [ Bailin 1987 available online ]
- –––, 1988, Achieving Extraordinary Ends: An Essay on Creativity , Dordrecht: Kluwer. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-2780-3
- –––, 1995, “Is Critical Thinking Biased? Clarifications and Implications”, Educational Theory , 45(2): 191–197. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1995.00191.x
- Bailin, Sharon and Mark Battersby, 2009, “Inquiry: A Dialectical Approach to Teaching Critical Thinking”, in Juho Ritola (ed.), Argument Cultures: Proceedings of OSSA 09 , CD-ROM (pp. 1–10), Windsor, ON: OSSA. [ Bailin & Battersby 2009 available online ]
- –––, 2016a, “Fostering the Virtues of Inquiry”, Topoi , 35(2): 367–374. doi:10.1007/s11245-015-9307-6
- –––, 2016b, Reason in the Balance: An Inquiry Approach to Critical Thinking , Indianapolis: Hackett, 2nd edition.
- –––, 2021, “Inquiry: Teaching for Reasoned Judgment”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 31–46. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_003
- Bailin, Sharon, Roland Case, Jerrold R. Coombs, and Leroi B. Daniels, 1999a, “Common Misconceptions of Critical Thinking”, Journal of Curriculum Studies , 31(3): 269–283. doi:10.1080/002202799183124
- –––, 1999b, “Conceptualizing Critical Thinking”, Journal of Curriculum Studies , 31(3): 285–302. doi:10.1080/002202799183133
- Blair, J. Anthony, 2021, Studies in Critical Thinking , Windsor, ON: Windsor Studies in Argumentation, 2nd edition. [Available online at https://windsor.scholarsportal.info/omp/index.php/wsia/catalog/book/106]
- Berman, Alan M., Seth J. Schwartz, William M. Kurtines, and Steven L. Berman, 2001, “The Process of Exploration in Identity Formation: The Role of Style and Competence”, Journal of Adolescence , 24(4): 513–528. doi:10.1006/jado.2001.0386
- Black, Beth (ed.), 2012, An A to Z of Critical Thinking , London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
- Bloom, Benjamin Samuel, Max D. Engelhart, Edward J. Furst, Walter H. Hill, and David R. Krathwohl, 1956, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain , New York: David McKay.
- Boardman, Frank, Nancy M. Cavender, and Howard Kahane, 2018, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life , Boston: Cengage, 13th edition.
- Browne, M. Neil and Stuart M. Keeley, 2018, Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking , Hoboken, NJ: Pearson, 12th edition.
- Center for Assessment & Improvement of Learning, 2017, Critical Thinking Assessment Test , Cookeville, TN: Tennessee Technological University.
- Cleghorn, Paul. 2021. “Critical Thinking in the Elementary School: Practical Guidance for Building a Culture of Thinking”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessmen t, Leiden: Brill, pp. 150–167. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_010
- Cohen, Jacob, 1988, Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2nd edition.
- College Board, 1983, Academic Preparation for College. What Students Need to Know and Be Able to Do , New York: College Entrance Examination Board, ERIC document ED232517.
- Commission on the Relation of School and College of the Progressive Education Association, 1943, Thirty Schools Tell Their Story , Volume V of Adventure in American Education , New York and London: Harper & Brothers.
- Council for Aid to Education, 2017, CLA+ Student Guide . Available at http://cae.org/images/uploads/pdf/CLA_Student_Guide_Institution.pdf ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- Dalgleish, Adam, Patrick Girard, and Maree Davies, 2017, “Critical Thinking, Bias and Feminist Philosophy: Building a Better Framework through Collaboration”, Informal Logic , 37(4): 351–369. [ Dalgleish et al. available online ]
- Dewey, John, 1910, How We Think , Boston: D.C. Heath. [ Dewey 1910 available online ]
- –––, 1916, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education , New York: Macmillan.
- –––, 1933, How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process , Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
- –––, 1936, “The Theory of the Chicago Experiment”, Appendix II of Mayhew & Edwards 1936: 463–477.
- –––, 1938, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry , New York: Henry Holt and Company.
- Dominguez, Caroline (coord.), 2018a, A European Collection of the Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions Needed in Different Professional Fields for the 21st Century , Vila Real, Portugal: UTAD. Available at http://bit.ly/CRITHINKEDUO1 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- ––– (coord.), 2018b, A European Review on Critical Thinking Educational Practices in Higher Education Institutions , Vila Real: UTAD. Available at http://bit.ly/CRITHINKEDUO2 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- ––– (coord.), 2018c, The CRITHINKEDU European Course on Critical Thinking Education for University Teachers: From Conception to Delivery , Vila Real: UTAD. Available at http:/bit.ly/CRITHINKEDU03; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- Dominguez Caroline and Rita Payan-Carreira (eds.), 2019, Promoting Critical Thinking in European Higher Education Institutions: Towards an Educational Protocol , Vila Real: UTAD. Available at http:/bit.ly/CRITHINKEDU04; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- Ennis, Robert H., 1958, “An Appraisal of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal”, The Journal of Educational Research , 52(4): 155–158. doi:10.1080/00220671.1958.10882558
- –––, 1962, “A Concept of Critical Thinking: A Proposed Basis for Research on the Teaching and Evaluation of Critical Thinking Ability”, Harvard Educational Review , 32(1): 81–111.
- –––, 1981a, “A Conception of Deductive Logical Competence”, Teaching Philosophy , 4(3/4): 337–385. doi:10.5840/teachphil198143/429
- –––, 1981b, “Eight Fallacies in Bloom’s Taxonomy”, in C. J. B. Macmillan (ed.), Philosophy of Education 1980: Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society , Bloomington, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, pp. 269–273.
- –––, 1984, “Problems in Testing Informal Logic, Critical Thinking, Reasoning Ability”, Informal Logic , 6(1): 3–9. [ Ennis 1984 available online ]
- –––, 1987, “A Taxonomy of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities”, in Joan Boykoff Baron and Robert J. Sternberg (eds.), Teaching Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice , New York: W. H. Freeman, pp. 9–26.
- –––, 1989, “Critical Thinking and Subject Specificity: Clarification and Needed Research”, Educational Researcher , 18(3): 4–10. doi:10.3102/0013189X018003004
- –––, 1991, “Critical Thinking: A Streamlined Conception”, Teaching Philosophy , 14(1): 5–24. doi:10.5840/teachphil19911412
- –––, 1996, “Critical Thinking Dispositions: Their Nature and Assessability”, Informal Logic , 18(2–3): 165–182. [ Ennis 1996 available online ]
- –––, 1998, “Is Critical Thinking Culturally Biased?”, Teaching Philosophy , 21(1): 15–33. doi:10.5840/teachphil19982113
- –––, 2011, “Critical Thinking: Reflection and Perspective Part I”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 26(1): 4–18. doi:10.5840/inquiryctnews20112613
- –––, 2013, “Critical Thinking across the Curriculum: The Wisdom CTAC Program”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 28(2): 25–45. doi:10.5840/inquiryct20132828
- –––, 2016, “Definition: A Three-Dimensional Analysis with Bearing on Key Concepts”, in Patrick Bondy and Laura Benacquista (eds.), Argumentation, Objectivity, and Bias: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA), 18–21 May 2016 , Windsor, ON: OSSA, pp. 1–19. Available at http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/OSSA11/papersandcommentaries/105 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- –––, 2018, “Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum: A Vision”, Topoi , 37(1): 165–184. doi:10.1007/s11245-016-9401-4
- Ennis, Robert H., and Jason Millman, 1971, Manual for Cornell Critical Thinking Test, Level X, and Cornell Critical Thinking Test, Level Z , Urbana, IL: Critical Thinking Project, University of Illinois.
- Ennis, Robert H., Jason Millman, and Thomas Norbert Tomko, 1985, Cornell Critical Thinking Tests Level X & Level Z: Manual , Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publication, 3rd edition.
- –––, 2005, Cornell Critical Thinking Tests Level X & Level Z: Manual , Seaside, CA: Critical Thinking Company, 5th edition.
- Ennis, Robert H. and Eric Weir, 1985, The Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test: Test, Manual, Criteria, Scoring Sheet: An Instrument for Teaching and Testing , Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publications.
- Facione, Peter A., 1990a, Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction , Research Findings and Recommendations Prepared for the Committee on Pre-College Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association, ERIC Document ED315423.
- –––, 1990b, California Critical Thinking Skills Test, CCTST – Form A , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
- –––, 1990c, The California Critical Thinking Skills Test--College Level. Technical Report #3. Gender, Ethnicity, Major, CT Self-Esteem, and the CCTST , ERIC Document ED326584.
- –––, 1992, California Critical Thinking Skills Test: CCTST – Form B, Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
- –––, 2000, “The Disposition Toward Critical Thinking: Its Character, Measurement, and Relationship to Critical Thinking Skill”, Informal Logic , 20(1): 61–84. [ Facione 2000 available online ]
- Facione, Peter A. and Noreen C. Facione, 1992, CCTDI: A Disposition Inventory , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
- Facione, Peter A., Noreen C. Facione, and Carol Ann F. Giancarlo, 2001, California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory: CCTDI: Inventory Manual , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press.
- Facione, Peter A., Carol A. Sánchez, and Noreen C. Facione, 1994, Are College Students Disposed to Think? , Millbrae, CA: The California Academic Press. ERIC Document ED368311.
- Fisher, Alec, and Michael Scriven, 1997, Critical Thinking: Its Definition and Assessment , Norwich: Centre for Research in Critical Thinking, University of East Anglia.
- Freire, Paulo, 1968 [1970], Pedagogia do Oprimido . Translated as Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Myra Bergman Ramos (trans.), New York: Continuum, 1970.
- Gigerenzer, Gerd, 2001, “The Adaptive Toolbox”, in Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (eds.), Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 37–50.
- Glaser, Edward Maynard, 1941, An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking , New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.
- Groarke, Leo A. and Christopher W. Tindale, 2012, Good Reasoning Matters! A Constructive Approach to Critical Thinking , Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 5th edition.
- Halpern, Diane F., 1998, “Teaching Critical Thinking for Transfer Across Domains: Disposition, Skills, Structure Training, and Metacognitive Monitoring”, American Psychologist , 53(4): 449–455. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.53.4.449
- –––, 2016, Manual: Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment , Mödling, Austria: Schuhfried. Available at https://pdfcoffee.com/hcta-test-manual-pdf-free.html; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- Hamby, Benjamin, 2014, The Virtues of Critical Thinkers , Doctoral dissertation, Philosophy, McMaster University. [ Hamby 2014 available online ]
- –––, 2015, “Willingness to Inquire: The Cardinal Critical Thinking Virtue”, in Martin Davies and Ronald Barnett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education , New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 77–87.
- Haran, Uriel, Ilana Ritov, and Barbara A. Mellers, 2013, “The Role of Actively Open-minded Thinking in Information Acquisition, Accuracy, and Calibration”, Judgment and Decision Making , 8(3): 188–201.
- Hatcher, Donald and Kevin Possin, 2021, “Commentary: Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking Assessment”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 298–322. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_017
- Haynes, Ada, Elizabeth Lisic, Kevin Harris, Katie Leming, Kyle Shanks, and Barry Stein, 2015, “Using the Critical Thinking Assessment Test (CAT) as a Model for Designing Within-Course Assessments: Changing How Faculty Assess Student Learning”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines , 30(3): 38–48. doi:10.5840/inquiryct201530316
- Haynes, Ada and Barry Stein, 2021, “Observations from a Long-Term Effort to Assess and Improve Critical Thinking”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 231–254. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_014
- Hiner, Amanda L. 2021. “Equipping Students for Success in College and Beyond: Placing Critical Thinking Instruction at the Heart of a General Education Program”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 188–208. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_012
- Hitchcock, David, 2017, “Critical Thinking as an Educational Ideal”, in his On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking , Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 477–497. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-53562-3_30
- –––, 2021, “Seven Philosophical Implications of Critical Thinking: Themes, Variations, Implications”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 9–30. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_002
- hooks, bell, 1994, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom , New York and London: Routledge.
- –––, 2010, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom , New York and London: Routledge.
- Johnson, Ralph H., 1992, “The Problem of Defining Critical Thinking”, in Stephen P, Norris (ed.), The Generalizability of Critical Thinking , New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 38–53.
- Kahane, Howard, 1971, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
- Kahneman, Daniel, 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow , New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Kahneman, Daniel, Olivier Sibony, & Cass R. Sunstein, 2021, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment , New York: Little, Brown Spark.
- Kenyon, Tim, and Guillaume Beaulac, 2014, “Critical Thinking Education and Debasing”, Informal Logic , 34(4): 341–363. [ Kenyon & Beaulac 2014 available online ]
- Krathwohl, David R., Benjamin S. Bloom, and Bertram B. Masia, 1964, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook II: Affective Domain , New York: David McKay.
- Kuhn, Deanna, 1991, The Skills of Argument , New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511571350
- –––, 2019, “Critical Thinking as Discourse”, Human Development, 62 (3): 146–164. doi:10.1159/000500171
- Lipman, Matthew, 1987, “Critical Thinking–What Can It Be?”, Analytic Teaching , 8(1): 5–12. [ Lipman 1987 available online ]
- –––, 2003, Thinking in Education , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition.
- Loftus, Elizabeth F., 2017, “Eavesdropping on Memory”, Annual Review of Psychology , 68: 1–18. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044138
- Makaiau, Amber Strong, 2021, “The Good Thinker’s Tool Kit: How to Engage Critical Thinking and Reasoning in Secondary Education”, in Daniel Fasko, Jr. and Frank Fair (eds.), Critical Thinking and Reasoning: Theory, Development, Instruction, and Assessment , Leiden: Brill, pp. 168–187. doi: 10.1163/9789004444591_011
- Martin, Jane Roland, 1992, “Critical Thinking for a Humane World”, in Stephen P. Norris (ed.), The Generalizability of Critical Thinking , New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 163–180.
- Mayhew, Katherine Camp, and Anna Camp Edwards, 1936, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 , New York: Appleton-Century. [ Mayhew & Edwards 1936 available online ]
- McPeck, John E., 1981, Critical Thinking and Education , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
- Moore, Brooke Noel and Richard Parker, 2020, Critical Thinking , New York: McGraw-Hill, 13th edition.
- Nickerson, Raymond S., 1998, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises”, Review of General Psychology , 2(2): 175–220. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175
- Nieto, Ana Maria, and Jorge Valenzuela, 2012, “A Study of the Internal Structure of Critical Thinking Dispositions”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 27(1): 31–38. doi:10.5840/inquiryct20122713
- Norris, Stephen P., 1985, “Controlling for Background Beliefs When Developing Multiple-choice Critical Thinking Tests”, Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice , 7(3): 5–11. doi:10.1111/j.1745-3992.1988.tb00437.x
- Norris, Stephen P. and Robert H. Ennis, 1989, Evaluating Critical Thinking (The Practitioners’ Guide to Teaching Thinking Series), Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publications.
- Norris, Stephen P. and Ruth Elizabeth King, 1983, Test on Appraising Observations , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
- –––, 1984, The Design of a Critical Thinking Test on Appraising Observations , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland. ERIC Document ED260083.
- –––, 1985, Test on Appraising Observations: Manual , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
- –––, 1990a, Test on Appraising Observations , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2nd edition.
- –––, 1990b, Test on Appraising Observations: Manual , St. John’s, NL: Institute for Educational Research and Development, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2nd edition.
- OCR [Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations], 2011, AS/A Level GCE: Critical Thinking – H052, H452 , Cambridge: OCR. Past papers available at https://pastpapers.co/ocr/?dir=A-Level/Critical-Thinking-H052-H452; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- Ontario Ministry of Education, 2013, The Ontario Curriculum Grades 9 to 12: Social Sciences and Humanities . Available at http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/ssciences9to122013.pdf ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- Passmore, John Arthur, 1980, The Philosophy of Teaching , London: Duckworth.
- Paul, Richard W., 1981, “Teaching Critical Thinking in the ‘Strong’ Sense: A Focus on Self-Deception, World Views, and a Dialectical Mode of Analysis”, Informal Logic , 4(2): 2–7. [ Paul 1981 available online ]
- –––, 1984, “Critical Thinking: Fundamental to Education for a Free Society”, Educational Leadership , 42(1): 4–14.
- –––, 1985, “McPeck’s Mistakes”, Informal Logic , 7(1): 35–43. [ Paul 1985 available online ]
- Paul, Richard W. and Linda Elder, 2006, The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools , Dillon Beach, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking, 4th edition.
- Payette, Patricia, and Edna Ross, 2016, “Making a Campus-Wide Commitment to Critical Thinking: Insights and Promising Practices Utilizing the Paul-Elder Approach at the University of Louisville”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines , 31(1): 98–110. doi:10.5840/inquiryct20163118
- Possin, Kevin, 2008, “A Field Guide to Critical-Thinking Assessment”, Teaching Philosophy , 31(3): 201–228. doi:10.5840/teachphil200831324
- –––, 2013a, “Some Problems with the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment (HCTA) Test”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 28(3): 4–12. doi:10.5840/inquiryct201328313
- –––, 2013b, “A Serious Flaw in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Test”, Informal Logic , 33(3): 390–405. [ Possin 2013b available online ]
- –––, 2013c, “A Fatal Flaw in the Collegiate Learning Assessment Test”, Assessment Update , 25 (1): 8–12.
- –––, 2014, “Critique of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Test: The More You Know, the Lower Your Score”, Informal Logic , 34(4): 393–416. [ Possin 2014 available online ]
- –––, 2020, “CAT Scan: A Critical Review of the Critical-Thinking Assessment Test”, Informal Logic , 40 (3): 489–508. [Available online at https://informallogic.ca/index.php/informal_logic/article/view/6243]
- Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Rear, David, 2019, “One Size Fits All? The Limitations of Standardised Assessment in Critical Thinking”, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education , 44(5): 664–675. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2018.1526255
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1762, Émile , Amsterdam: Jean Néaulme.
- Scheffler, Israel, 1960, The Language of Education , Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
- Scriven, Michael, and Richard W. Paul, 1987, Defining Critical Thinking , Draft statement written for the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking Instruction. Available at http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766 ; last accessed 2022 07 16.
- Sheffield, Clarence Burton Jr., 2018, “Promoting Critical Thinking in Higher Education: My Experiences as the Inaugural Eugene H. Fram Chair in Applied Critical Thinking at Rochester Institute of Technology”, Topoi , 37(1): 155–163. doi:10.1007/s11245-016-9392-1
- Siegel, Harvey, 1985, “McPeck, Informal Logic and the Nature of Critical Thinking”, in David Nyberg (ed.), Philosophy of Education 1985: Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society , Normal, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, pp. 61–72.
- –––, 1988, Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education , New York: Routledge.
- –––, 1999, “What (Good) Are Thinking Dispositions?”, Educational Theory , 49(2): 207–221. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1999.00207.x
- Simon, Herbert A., 1956, “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment”, Psychological Review , 63(2): 129–138. doi: 10.1037/h0042769
- Simpson, Elizabeth, 1966–67, “The Classification of Educational Objectives: Psychomotor Domain”, Illinois Teacher of Home Economics , 10(4): 110–144, ERIC document ED0103613. [ Simpson 1966–67 available online ]
- Skolverket, 2018, Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare , Stockholm: Skolverket, revised 2018. Available at https://www.skolverket.se/download/18.31c292d516e7445866a218f/1576654682907/pdf3984.pdf; last accessed 2022 07 15.
- Smith, B. Othanel, 1953, “The Improvement of Critical Thinking”, Progressive Education , 30(5): 129–134.
- Smith, Eugene Randolph, Ralph Winfred Tyler, and the Evaluation Staff, 1942, Appraising and Recording Student Progress , Volume III of Adventure in American Education , New York and London: Harper & Brothers.
- Splitter, Laurance J., 1987, “Educational Reform through Philosophy for Children”, Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children , 7(2): 32–39. doi:10.5840/thinking1987729
- Stanovich Keith E., and Paula J. Stanovich, 2010, “A Framework for Critical Thinking, Rational Thinking, and Intelligence”, in David D. Preiss and Robert J. Sternberg (eds), Innovations in Educational Psychology: Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Human Development , New York: Springer Publishing, pp 195–237.
- Stanovich Keith E., Richard F. West, and Maggie E. Toplak, 2011, “Intelligence and Rationality”, in Robert J. Sternberg and Scott Barry Kaufman (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, pp. 784–826. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511977244.040
- Tankersley, Karen, 2005, Literacy Strategies for Grades 4–12: Reinforcing the Threads of Reading , Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
- Thayer-Bacon, Barbara J., 1992, “Is Modern Critical Thinking Theory Sexist?”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines , 10(1): 3–7. doi:10.5840/inquiryctnews199210123
- –––, 1993, “Caring and Its Relationship to Critical Thinking”, Educational Theory , 43(3): 323–340. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1993.00323.x
- –––, 1995a, “Constructive Thinking: Personal Voice”, Journal of Thought , 30(1): 55–70.
- –––, 1995b, “Doubting and Believing: Both are Important for Critical Thinking”, Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines , 15(2): 59–66. doi:10.5840/inquiryctnews199515226
- –––, 2000, Transforming Critical Thinking: Thinking Constructively , New York: Teachers College Press.
- Toulmin, Stephen Edelston, 1958, The Uses of Argument , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Turri, John, Mark Alfano, and John Greco, 2017, “Virtue Epistemology”, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition). URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/epistemology-virtue/ >
- Vincent-Lancrin, Stéphan, Carlos González-Sancho, Mathias Bouckaert, Federico de Luca, Meritxell Fernández-Barrerra, Gwénaël Jacotin, Joaquin Urgel, and Quentin Vidal, 2019, Fostering Students’ Creativity and Critical Thinking: What It Means in School. Educational Research and Innovation , Paris: OECD Publishing.
- Warren, Karen J. 1988. “Critical Thinking and Feminism”, Informal Logic , 10(1): 31–44. [ Warren 1988 available online ]
- Watson, Goodwin, and Edward M. Glaser, 1980a, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, Form A , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
- –––, 1980b, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal: Forms A and B; Manual , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation,
- –––, 1994, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, Form B , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
- Weinstein, Mark, 1990, “Towards a Research Agenda for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking”, Informal Logic , 12(3): 121–143. [ Weinstein 1990 available online ]
- –––, 2013, Logic, Truth and Inquiry , London: College Publications.
- Willingham, Daniel T., 2019, “How to Teach Critical Thinking”, Education: Future Frontiers , 1: 1–17. [Available online at https://prod65.education.nsw.gov.au/content/dam/main-education/teaching-and-learning/education-for-a-changing-world/media/documents/How-to-teach-critical-thinking-Willingham.pdf.]
- Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus, 1996, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139174763
How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.
- Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT)
- Critical Thinking Across the European Higher Education Curricula (CRITHINKEDU)
- Critical Thinking Definition, Instruction, and Assessment: A Rigorous Approach
- Critical Thinking Research (RAIL)
- Foundation for Critical Thinking
- Insight Assessment
- Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21)
- The Critical Thinking Consortium
- The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities , by Robert H. Ennis
abilities | bias, implicit | children, philosophy for | civic education | decision-making capacity | Dewey, John | dispositions | education, philosophy of | epistemology: virtue | logic: informal
Copyright © 2022 by David Hitchcock < hitchckd @ mcmaster . ca >
- Accessibility
Support SEP
Mirror sites.
View this site from another server:
- Info about mirror sites
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University
Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054
![critical thinking philosophy book Five Books](https://fivebooks.com/app/themes/five-books/assets/images/logo-floating-nav-no-text.png)
- NONFICTION BOOKS
- BEST NONFICTION 2023
- BEST NONFICTION 2024
- Historical Biographies
- The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
- Philosophical Biographies
- World War 2
- World History
- American History
- British History
- Chinese History
- Russian History
- Ancient History (up to c. 500 AD)
- Medieval History (500-1400)
- Military History
- Art History
- Travel Books
- Ancient Philosophy
- Contemporary Philosophy
- Ethics & Moral Philosophy
- Great Philosophers
- Social & Political Philosophy
- Classical Studies
- New Science Books
- Maths & Statistics
- Popular Science
- Physics Books
- Climate Change Books
- How to Write
- English Grammar & Usage
- Books for Learning Languages
- Linguistics
- Political Ideologies
- Foreign Policy & International Relations
- American Politics
- British Politics
- Religious History Books
- Mental Health
- Neuroscience
- Child Psychology
- Film & Cinema
- Opera & Classical Music
- Behavioural Economics
- Development Economics
- Economic History
- Financial Crisis
- World Economies
- Investing Books
- Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
- Data Science Books
- Sex & Sexuality
- Death & Dying
- Food & Cooking
- Sports, Games & Hobbies
- FICTION BOOKS
- BEST NOVELS 2024
- BEST FICTION 2023
- New Literary Fiction
- World Literature
- Literary Criticism
- Literary Figures
- Classic English Literature
- American Literature
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Fairy Tales & Mythology
- Historical Fiction
- Crime Novels
- Science Fiction
- Short Stories
- South Africa
- United States
- Arctic & Antarctica
- Afghanistan
- Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
- Netherlands
- Kids Recommend Books for Kids
- High School Teachers Recommendations
- Prizewinning Kids' Books
- Popular Series Books for Kids
- BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
- Ages Baby-2
- Books for Teens and Young Adults
- THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
- BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2023
- BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2023
- Best Audiobooks for Kids
- Environment
- Best Books for Teens of 2023
- Best Kids' Books of 2023
- Political Novels
- New History Books
- New Historical Fiction
- New Biography
- New Memoirs
- New World Literature
- New Economics Books
- New Climate Books
- New Math Books
- New Philosophy Books
- New Psychology Books
- New Physics Books
- THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
- Actors Read Great Books
- Books Narrated by Their Authors
- Best Audiobook Thrillers
- Best History Audiobooks
- Nobel Literature Prize
- Booker Prize (fiction)
- Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
- Financial Times (nonfiction)
- Wolfson Prize (history)
- Royal Society (science)
- Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
- Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
- Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
- The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
- Audie Awards (audiobooks)
Make Your Own List
The Best Books of 2021
The best philosophy books of 2021, recommended by nigel warburton.
![A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton](https://fivebooks.com/images/-nWyt4oj6OgAM14v/rs:fit:66:0:1/sh:0.5/plain/fb/2011/09/0300187793.01.LZ_.jpg)
A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton
Nigel Warburton —the philosopher, broadcaster and creator of the popular Philosophy Bites podcast—selects five of the best public philosophy books published in 2021, including a defence of righteous rage, an examination of the concept of 'time management,' and an intellectual biography of the political philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt.
Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor
![A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton](https://fivebooks.com/images/Sm8xzSkKpBGGANil/rs:fit:102:0:1/sh:0.5/plain/fb/2011/09/0300187793.01.LZ_.jpg)
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth
![The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - Critical Lives: Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - Critical Lives: Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill](https://fivebooks.com/images/UDHJF-C4zBSfIWnz/rs:fit:144:0:1/sh:0.5/plain/fb/books/BC_1789143799.jpg)
Critical Lives: Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill
![The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle by Myisha Cherry The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle by Myisha Cherry](https://fivebooks.com/images/SptnmSP_KH4dFYxZ/rs:fit:144:0:1/sh:0.5/plain/fb/books/7/23/BC_0197557341.jpg)
The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle by Myisha Cherry
![The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman](https://fivebooks.com/images/YUug34batqjhgotV/rs:fit:144:0:1/sh:0.5/plain/fb/books/5/a9/BC_0374159122.jpg)
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
![The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi](https://fivebooks.com/images/6xqDBRTnE_MR9F7h/rs:fit:144:0:1/sh:0.5/plain/fb/books/c/bc/BC_0393867730.jpg)
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi
![The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth The Best Philosophy Books of 2021 - Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth](https://fivebooks.com/images/voBLJ1kiqeKi4Rx6/rs:fit:140:0:1/sh:0.5/plain/fb/books/3/32/BC_1524742872.jpg)
1 Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth
2 critical lives: hannah arendt by samantha rose hill, 3 the case for rage: why anger is essential to anti-racist struggle by myisha cherry, 4 four thousand weeks: time management for mortals by oliver burkeman, 5 free: coming of age at the end of history by lea ypi.
H as 2021 been a good year for philosophy books ?
Many of them have been written by women. I could easily have come up with an all-woman list for this. I’m not sure why that has happened this year.
I know you’ve spoken about this before, but I like this idea of philosophy as a broad church. Why do you think that’s so important now?
Within academic philosophy, there’s a lot of worry about demarcation, where you draw the line between philosophy and other subjects. But I’ve always felt that ‘philosophy’ is more of a family resemblance term. Lots of qualities are shared by works of philosophy, but there’s no essence that a book must contain to make it philosophy. There are some clear-cut cases, and some at the edges.
So, I’m very happy to include Kierkegaard as a philosopher, for example, as most philosophers are, although some of what he wrote is basically imaginative fiction—exploring viewpoints rather than presenting a logical case with clear premises that lead to a conclusion. Another obvious example from the history of philosophy is Candide , Voltaire ’s short novella, which is philosophy through a fictional form.
Get the weekly Five Books newsletter
There have been huge advances in both psychology and neuroscience in the last twenty or thirty years that are very significant for philosophy. In the 18th century, there wasn’t a big division between what we call psychology and philosophy, and someone like David Hume quite happily moved between the two. For much of the history of the subject philosophers speculated about the mind from their armchairs without getting involved in what was happening in neuroscience . But now that would be unacceptable. Recent research in neuroscience is too dramatic to do that. It would be absurd to discuss the mind without some awareness of what has been discovered.
This is obviously relevant when thinking about consciousness .
Right. You can’t analyse consciousness from your armchair without awareness of recent findings about the brain and about human behaviour. But similarly, if you’re talking about politics and doing that in a vacuum, that seems to me a fairly meaningless pursuit about the definition of terms, rather than anything that might meaningfully connect with how we live.
I’ve deliberately chosen books that are accessible to a general reader because this is not a site for specialist academic philosophers. And obviously this is limited by the range of books that I’ve actually read. But the best writing that I’ve seen this year uses some kind of empirical evidence, whether that’s science, elements of personal biography, historical archives, or current events.
I think this might lead us to the first of the 2021 philosophy books that you want to recommend, which is written by a neuroscientist: Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.
Although Anil describes himself as a neuroscientist, he’s also very well read in philosophy. He uses a certain amount of autobiography in this book too — discussing the phenomenology of his own conscious life in order to illustrate points, drawing on his experience of witnessing a brain operation, and even his mother’s apparent loss of self at a certain point.
It’s a book about the nature of consciousness, one of the most intractable problems that human beings have come across. How do we understand how we, as apparently material beings made of flesh and bone—and, in particular, millions of neurones—get to the position of having qualitative experience, through the experience of the world through our senses, reflection and experience. It’s not an easy problem to unravel. The philosopher David Chalmers talks about the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, the problem of how you get from physical matter to conscious state—how you explain what the relationship between those two is.
“The best writing that I’ve seen this year uses some kind of empirical evidence, whether that’s science, biography, history, or current events”
Seth’s approach is more pragmatic in some ways. As a neuroscientist, his view is that we should deal with what he dubs the ‘real’ problem of consciousness; there is some kind of phenomenological thing that we want to explain, but by chipping away at a range of issues that connect physical processes in the brain with certain mental states, we can try to understand the relation and gradually piece together an understanding of what we are.
His own take is that our conscious experience of the world around us is a kind of controlled hallucination created by predictions and revisions that we make. We are not passive recipients of sensory information, we project an expectation and gradually refine that through our interactions with the world. This produces some weird illusions and other phenomena when things go wrong. When things go very wrong, the loss of connection with the world means that the phenomenological experience is not something that other people necessarily share. But, in a sense, we are all hallucinating the world; none of us is getting a direct picture. We project a probable scene, but that’s tested against further sensory input, and a constructive reality emerges that is constantly refreshed.
In very general terms, that’s what the book is about.
A few years ago, I interviewed Professor Dick Passingham for this site. He was one of my tutors when I studied experimental psychology. His argument was that the philosophical study of consciousness had been static for decades; only through empirical study could we possibly wrestle with this question. Neuroscience, in other words, was making the philosophy of mind obsolete. But the way you talk about this, you almost view neuroscience as a branch of applied philosophy.
It depends on the neuroscientist, I think. Anil Seth is somebody who is very philosophical in his approach, very thoughtful, and well-read in philosophy. He talks to philosophers and a range of other people interested in the mind. It would be hard not to, in the field of consciousness studies. And there are many contemporary philosophers who aren’t trained as neuroscientists, but who take neuroscience very seriously. Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland , for example. Both have been hugely interested in neuroscience. And in a younger generation, Keith Frankish . So there is a sense that those barriers are being broken down. I’m skeptical that philosophy will become obsolete, but it will become much more interesting through the interplay with science, in my view.
And the book is well written.
Brilliant. Your second 2021 philosophy book recommendation is a biography of one of the great modern thinkers, Hannah Arendt . Tell us about this book.
This is a part of a series called ‘Critical Lives.’ It’s an excellent example of an intellectual biography. Hannah Arendt was a super-powered intellectual, and was always, always thinking and writing, and thinking through writing—that’s one of the things she said she did: write to think. And when she wasn’t writing, she was mostly reading or listening to music, or just sometimes hanging out with friends. Arendt didn’t even see herself as a philosopher, but we tend to categorise her as one. I mean, she trained as a philosopher, but also wrote on a wide range of issues, probably most famously On the Origins of Totalitarianism , but also on the Eichmann trial where she famously coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil,’ and got into deep water as a result.
This book is brilliant. It’s written by Samantha Rose Hill, who must know as much as anyone about Hannah Arendt. She’s dived into Arendt’s surviving papers, notebooks, and even poetry, spending many hours in the archive. She knows every little bit of paper that Hannah Arendt scribbled on. And what’s so great about this as a biography is that Hill has done something that biographers rarely do—she’s been highly selective in what she’s included.
“Arendt is frequently misunderstood. Some people thought that by ‘banality,’ she meant that evil was commonplace”
The main part of the book is only just over 200 pages of a small-format book. It could have been 700 pages. There’s no doubt that Hill knows enough and could have spun this out to make a much longer book. As a result, we have the benefit of a highly intelligent writer, selecting what she feels to be most important to bring out about Arendt. We don’t get the feeling of being overwhelmed by details of an individual life—how many cigarettes she smoked on this day, and who she bumped into on that—but rather get to understand what really mattered. We still get a flavour of her life and interactions with friends and critics and so on. All of this is seen in sharp focus through Hill’s critical eye.
Here we have a very elegant story about Arendt’s life that brings out key moments and the most important themes in her thought.
I like that sense of reconstructing her thought and how it has developed over time through digging through her own notes. It’s a beeline directly into her brain.
Another thing about biography is that most writers cop out and only quote, say, half a line. What Hill has chosen to do, now and then, is quote five or maybe ten lines from something written by or about Arendt. Quotations from private letters, that sort of thing. You get a better sense of her voice with this. But that’s very hard to pull off. If you do too much of that, it breaks up the flow. But I think it works perfectly here. And it’s nicely illustrated, with photos throughout.
Tell us about Arendt getting into deep water. You mentioned it earlier.
The most controversial aspect of Hannah Arendt’s life (apart from her affair with Martin Heidegger when she was his student), was her writing about evil. In 1961 she went to Jerusalem to witness the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official. He was the person responsible for sorting out the deportation of people to death camps.
Arendt was particularly interested to see a senior Nazi up close. She’d never seen such a high-ranking Nazi, one who had been responsible for so much evil. She wanted to try to understand that. Famously her reaction was to describe him in terms of ‘the banality of evil.’ This was in a commissioned article for a magazine, originally, but came to be the book Eichmann in Jerusalem .
Hill zooms in on that issue in chapter 15. First of all, Arendt is frequently misunderstood. Some people thought that by ‘banality,’ she meant that evil was commonplace—that we’re all capable of doing the kinds of things that Eichmann did. But she didn’t mean that. What she was referring to was the banality of his thought, an attitude to the world which didn’t allow him to make any kind of imaginative identification with other people’s experience. What he lacked was what she calls “an expansive imagination.”
In Arendt’s words,
Eichmann was perfectly intelligent, but in this respect he was stupid. It was this stupidity that was so outrageous. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There’s nothing deep about it—nothing demonic! There’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing
She is saying that she wants to destroy the legend that evil is some kind of demonic force. This, and some other things she said in that book, resulted in a lot of criticism, particularly from some Jewish critics who felt she was wrong to talk about the complicity of the Jewish councils in overseeing the selection process for deportation. Some also criticised her ironic tone.
I love a concise book that is nonetheless intellectually rigorous. What an efficient use of reading time! Let’s move onto our next 2021 philosophy book. This is Myisha Cherry’s The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle. Cherry is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and the book is described as “a philosophical defence of anger at racial injustice.” It feels like a book of the moment.
This is very consciously written as public philosophy. All the books I’ve chosen for this list are written for a general audience, but Cherry is explicit that that’s what she’s doing. She’s a very clear writer. She draws on her own experiences of being a victim of racism a various points in her life. But she also confronts the wider issues in protesting against racism and draws on recent history to make her case.
The general argument is opposing something that has its origins in a form of Stoicism . Seneca put forward the idea that anger is a form of temporary madness, and that, wherever possible, we should extirpate it. Get rid of it. It’s a bad thing because it makes people rash, makes them do stupid things. It clouds judgment and makes us do terrible things. We should instead be cool-headed and not bring that kind of passion into human relations, particularly political relations. Fairly obviously, anger has a close link with violence, so there’s the sense that once you get angry, you release the inhibitions that stop us harming other people. So, Stoics concluded it’s always a bad thing, and they even came up with exercises to help us eliminate it from life.
There’s some logic in that.
Well, perhaps in some situations. Myisha Cherry makes the case for a certain kind of rage, rage being a subset of anger. Rage for justice in the face of injustice is her main focus. She calls this ‘Lordean rage’, after the black feminist, activist and writer Audre Lorde .
Cherry’s argument is that the energy and the possibility of collective channelled action, inspired by rage, justifies this approach, and makes it superior to a more neutral response to something as outrageous as the cold-faced racism in Charlottesville, for instance. It’s been a theme in America, particularly, for hundreds of years: this refusal to treat people of different races equally, and enshrining that in law or institutionally, and also within the police where racism has repeatedly reared its ugly head, for example, as it has done to some extent in the UK.
This book is an expansion of that idea, that rage can be a good thing and not something to be avoided. It’s clearly written, and easy to read. And it looks at specific cases in which anger has been used in positive ways. This is a case for seeing some instances of anger as positive, and important, and not as a psychological problem or something to fear.
Rage as motivational force.
Exactly. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s not a complicated argument. But it’s certainly stands in opposition to some other philosophical writers in this area who have argued that we need is to reach the state of understanding and forgiveness, and that’s how we get political progress. Martha Nussbaum has, for example, taken this line . But Myisha Cherry thinks that righteous anger, which has a long and noble tradition, is something that should be celebrated and recognised within the struggle for greater racial equality and fairness of treatment. She’s not saying, ‘get angry when someone steps on your toe,’ it’s not a wholesale justification for rage. It’s this specific kind of Lordean rage that she’s celebrating. It’s very nicely done. Again, it’s very short—a small format book of under 200 pages. It’s excellent.
Is this a book for activists, specifically?
And for your fourth 2021 philosophy book you’ve chosen Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. In the UK, it has the subtitle ‘Time and How to Use It,’ but I like the American one better: ‘Time Management for Mortals.’
Some people won’t see this as a philosophy book , but it is. It’s a book about what we do with our limited time on Earth, how we decide to prioritise and proportion our time. To that extent it’s a book of ethics in the face of inevitable death. Even if you or I live to 90, as he points out at the beginning of the book, that will only be 4,700 weeks of existence. I have to admit that when I read the title I checked the calculation because 4,000 weeks sounded far too few for a life. That’s frighteningly short. And, obviously, most people who read the book will have far fewer than 4,000 weeks left.
It’s a combination of sometimes witty, sometimes terrifying exploration of the human condition, and at the same time an antidote to those time management books that tell you how you can maximise your productivity, taking on more and more tasks and completing them efficiently. As he says, you’ll inevitably end up underachieving on some things because your time and energy are finite (something that authors of those breathless self-help books don’t always acknowledge).
He has the style of writing which draws you in and feels very personal and likeable, and he includes elements of autobiography too. He’s got a degree of distance, a degree of irony, but he’s immersed himself in the world of self-help and philosophy. It holds up a mirror to what we sacrifice, because we feel that work is the most important thing.
He points out that there is no end to a to-do list. It only grows longer.
Yes, he’s somebody who’s been absolutely caught up in all those schemes for making your life more efficient, ticking off achievements. It’s like a former alcoholic writing about drinking. He’s been there. He definitely doesn’t see busyness as a virtue, and even thinks it a good idea that we practise doing nothing. That’s an ingredient of a good life for him.
There’s a great section of the book called ‘Cosmic Insignificance Therapy’ where he spells out why he believes ultimately most people won’t put a dent in the universe, and how we can turn that to our advantage. If my life is insignificant in the grand scheme of things—and ultimately all lives are—I don’t need to beat myself up for failing to achieve something that only a few dozen people in the history of humanity have ever achieved. Once I realise that I can enjoy a modestly meaningful life through a wide range of activities, I can also perhaps come to realise that the anxieties that take up so much of our energy are, if we zoom out a bit, irrelevant. That’s the idea anyway. Burkeman is very good at giving us permission to be satisfied with doing worthwhile things on a small scale, and failing to achieve things too, without being obsessed with productivity. That in a sense is the human condition.
And your fifth choice is Free by Lea Ypi. It’s newly out, but has been making quite a splash.
This is a book which I’ve only just finished reading. It’s written by an LSE professor of political theory, Lea Ypi, who is also an expert on Immanuel Kant. It’s mostly a memoir about growing up in Albania. But that doesn’t adequately describe the book, because, as its title suggests, it’s really about different conceptions of freedom, told through experience and reflection on that experience. It’s very different from my other choices here. It’s a really fascinating and wonderful book, and beautifully written too. You won’t regret buying this one, for sure.
Why have you chosen this for a list of the best philosophy books?
It’s not straightforwardly philosophical throughout, but the underlying political questions emerge through a child’s experience of growing up in Tirana as Albania’s form of socialism is collapsing, as it finally did in 1990. Ypi describes her childhood in a communist state, where she is so much in thrall to what she is taught about freedom under communism that she even goes to hug a statue of Stalin. Her curiosity about the world reveals that her world of certainties, particularly in relation to her family, is not quite what she thought it was.
It’s a book about freedom both under Stalinist communism and in a liberal capitalist system, written from experience, and told through her and her family’s encounters with different ways in which their freedom has been curbed. Ypi thinks that if you believe you are free is a living in London, that is just as much a delusion as it was for her growing up in Tirana believing that she was free. It’s a book about a family and the degree to which historical circumstances shaped freedom for its members.
Support Five Books
Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .
There’s a passage near the end of Free where Ypi describes how this book was originally going to be an overtly philosophical one about overlapping ideas of freedom in liberal and socialist traditions, but that as soon as she started writing it, the abstract ideas turned into people she knew, people who were the product of social relations for which they were not responsible. The result is unexpected and far more than just a collection of memories. We are very fortunate that she went in this direction. Not many writers could have pulled this off with such grace and elegance.
Leaving Albania for Italy and ultimately for London was not a journey for her to a place of freedom. That would be the Hollywood version of her life. In a way this is a spoiler, but liberalism for her carries with it associations of the destruction of solidarity, and of turning a blind eye to injustice, with victims of the system whose lives are very far from free. There is a kind of ideological delusion that we suffer from in liberal societies, she argues.
Where there any other philosophy books published in 2021 that didn’t quite make your list, but which you’d like to mention?
There are two books which caught my eye, both of which could have made the list, for different reasons. Both address contemporary issues using philosophical tools. Both are provocative, though in different ways. They force the reader to think. Amia Srinivassan’s The Right to Sex , a collection of essays on themes as varied as whether or not students should sleep with their professors (her answer is no, largely for psychological reasons about the relationship), whether we should think of people who sell sex as sex workers and decriminalise prostitution (yes), whether we should abolish prisons (ultimately, in an ideal world, yes), and much more. And, more controversially perhaps, Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls , which is a clearly-written argument about gender and the implications of allowing self-declaration to be a sufficient criterion for gender change. This is a book that has been much maligned, often by people who haven’t taken the trouble to read it. There are points I disagree with in both books, but I am grateful for both writers for helping me think more clearly about the issues they address. That, I think, is the role of good public philosophy.
Part of our best books of 2021 series.
November 30, 2021
Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]
Nigel Warburton
Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, writer and host of the podcast Philosophy Bites . Featuring short interviews with the world's best philosophers on bite-size topics, the podcast has been downloaded more than 40 million times. He is also our philosophy editor here at Five Books , where he has been interviewing other philosophers about the best books on a range of philosophy topics since 2013 (you can read all the interviews he's done here: not all are about philosophy). In addition, he's recommended books for us on the best introductions to philosophy , the best critical thinking books, as well as some of the key texts to read in the Western canon . His annual recommendations of the best philosophy books of the year are among our most popular interviews on Five Books . As an author, he is best known for his introductory philosophy books, listed below:
We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.
This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.
Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.
© Five Books 2024
![critical thinking philosophy book MIT Press](https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/mit-press/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/20143118/logo.png)
On the site
Mit press essential knowledge series, critical thinking.
![critical thinking philosophy book Critical Thinking](https://mit-press-us.imgix.net/covers/9780262538282.jpg?auto=format&w=145)
by Jonathan Haber
ISBN: 9780262538282
Pub date: April 7, 2020
- Publisher: The MIT Press
232 pp. , 5 x 7 in , 10 b&w illus.
ISBN: 9780262357357
Pub date: March 13, 2020
- 9780262538282
- Published: April 2020
- 9780262357357
- Published: March 2020
- MIT Press Bookstore
- Penguin Random House
- Barnes and Noble
- Bookshop.org
- Books a Million
Other Retailers:
- Amazon.co.uk
- Waterstones
- Description
How the concept of critical thinking emerged, how it has been defined, and how critical thinking skills can be taught.
Critical thinking is regularly cited as an essential twenty-first century skill, the key to success in school and work. Given our propensity to believe fake news, draw incorrect conclusions, and make decisions based on emotion rather than reason, it might even be said that critical thinking is vital to the survival of a democratic society. But what, exactly, is critical thinking? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Jonathan Haber explains how the concept of critical thinking emerged, how it has been defined, and how critical thinking skills can be taught and assessed.
Haber describes the term's origins in such disciplines as philosophy, psychology, and science. He examines the components of critical thinking, including structured thinking, language skills, background knowledge, and information literacy, along with such necessary intellectual traits as intellectual humility, empathy, and open-mindedness. He discusses how research has defined critical thinking, how elements of critical thinking have been taught for centuries, and how educators can teach critical thinking skills now.
Haber argues that the most important critical thinking issue today is that not enough people are doing enough of it. Fortunately, critical thinking can be taught, practiced, and evaluated. This book offers a guide for teachers, students, and aspiring critical thinkers everywhere, including advice for educational leaders and policy makers on how to make the teaching and learning of critical thinking an educational priority and practical reality.
Jonathan Haber was an educational researcher, writer and entrepreneur working in the fields of critical-thinking education, assessment, and technology-enabled learning whose work has been featured in the New York Times , the Boston Globe , the Chronicle of Higher Education , and the Wall Street Journal . He is the author of another MIT Press Essential Knowledge book, MOOCs , and The Critical Voter .
Additional Material
Watch MIT Press Live with Jonathan Haber.
Check out an interview with Jonathan Haber, the man who teaches you to cultivate critical thinking.
Watch Jonathan Haber discuss critical thinking on the David Pakman Show
Listen to an interview with Jonathan Haber at Partially Examined Life.
Read Jonathan Haber's piece in Inside Higher Ed: It's Time to Get Serious About Teaching Critical Thinking.
Related Books
![critical thinking philosophy book The Real World of College](https://mit-press-us.imgix.net/covers/9780262547260.jpg?auto=format&w=145)
Visit us today at 314 Main St, Cambridge, MA 02142 Close this alert
![critical thinking philosophy book The MIT Press Bookstore](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/logo_brand/public/2023-09/mitpressbookstorelogo090523.png?itok=vO3kKZUA)
Critical Thinking (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
Staff reviews.
test review
Description
An insightful guide to the practice, teaching, and history of critical thinking—from Aristotle and Plato to Thomas Dewey—for teachers, students, and anyone looking to hone their critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is regularly cited as an essential 21st century skill, the key to success in school and work. Given the propensity to believe fake news, draw incorrect conclusions, and make decisions based on emotion rather than reason, it might even be said that critical thinking is vital to the survival of a democratic society. But what, exactly, is critical thinking? Jonathan Haber explains how the concept of critical thinking emerged, how it has been defined, and how critical thinking skills can be taught and assessed. Haber describes the term's origins in such disciplines as philosophy, psychology, and science. He examines the components of critical thinking, including • structured thinking • language skills • background knowledge • information literacy • intellectual humility • empathy and open-mindedness Haber argues that the most important critical thinking issue today is that not enough people are doing enough of it. Fortunately, critical thinking can be taught, practiced, and evaluated. This book offers a guide for teachers, students, and aspiring critical thinkers everywhere, including advice for educational leaders and policy makers on how to make the teaching and learning of critical thinking an educational priority and practical reality.
About the Author
Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher, writer and entrepreneur working in the fields of critical-thinking education, assessment, and technology-enabled learning whose work has been featured in the New York Times , the Boston Globe , the Chronicle of Higher Education , and the Wall Street Journal . He is the author of another MIT Press Essential Knowledge book, MOOCS , and The Critical Voter .
Other Books in Series
![critical thinking philosophy book Universal Basic Income (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Universal Basic Income (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Galaxies (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Galaxies (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Endangered Languages (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Endangered Languages (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Blockchain Governance (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Blockchain Governance (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Cyborg (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Cyborg (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book AI Ethics (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
AI Ethics (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Machine Learning, revised and updated edition (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Machine Learning, revised and updated edition (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Espionage: A Concise History (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Espionage: A Concise History (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Cloud Computing, revised and updated edition (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Cloud Computing, revised and updated edition (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Plastics (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Plastics (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Analog (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Analog (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Memory (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Memory (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Deep Learning (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Deep Learning (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Phenomenology (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
![](http://writinghelp.online/777/templates/cheerup/res/banner1.gif)
Phenomenology (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Algorithms (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Algorithms (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Gender(s) (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Gender(s) (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Nihilism (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Nihilism (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Data Science (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Data Science (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Cybersecurity (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Cybersecurity (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Pragmatism (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-11/nocover.jpg)
Pragmatism (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
You may also like.
![critical thinking philosophy book Hamlet's BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age](https://images.booksense.com/images/174/687/9780061687174.jpg)
Hamlet's BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age
![critical thinking philosophy book 101 Clues to a Happy Life](https://images.booksense.com/images/184/842/9781662842184.jpg)
101 Clues to a Happy Life
![critical thinking philosophy book Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning](https://images.booksense.com/images/484/543/9780262543484.jpg)
Movement Matters: How Embodied Cognition Informs Teaching and Learning
![critical thinking philosophy book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence](https://images.booksense.com/images/969/114/9780062114969.jpg)
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence
![critical thinking philosophy book Death and Dying (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)](https://images.booksense.com/images/425/542/9780262542425.jpg)
Death and Dying (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
![critical thinking philosophy book Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables](https://images.booksense.com/images/926/966/9781472966926.jpg)
Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables
![critical thinking philosophy book A Passion for Ignorance: What We Choose Not to Know and Why](https://images.booksense.com/images/992/240/9780691240992.jpg)
A Passion for Ignorance: What We Choose Not to Know and Why
![critical thinking philosophy book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [50th Anniversary Edition]: An Inquiry into Values](https://images.booksense.com/images/330/342/9780063342330.jpg)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [50th Anniversary Edition]: An Inquiry into Values
![critical thinking philosophy book Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe](https://images.booksense.com/images/121/670/9780061670121.jpg)
Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe
![critical thinking philosophy book All About Love: New Visions (Love Song to the Nation #1)](https://images.booksense.com/images/470/959/9780060959470.jpg)
All About Love: New Visions (Love Song to the Nation #1)
![critical thinking philosophy book Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind](https://images.booksense.com/images/259/566/9780199566259.jpg)
Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind
![critical thinking philosophy book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen](https://images.booksense.com/images/060/230/9780593230060.jpg)
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
![critical thinking philosophy book Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist's View of the Human Condition](https://images.booksense.com/images/784/542/9780262542784.jpg)
Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist's View of the Human Condition
Sign up to receive our newsletter.
News and information from Kendall Square's underground bookstore
![critical thinking philosophy book](https://secure.ride8stir.com/202702.png)
2nd Edition
Critical Thinking: The Basics
![critical thinking philosophy book VitalSource Logo](https://www.routledge.com/images/vs.png)
- Taylor & Francis eBooks (Institutional Purchase) Opens in new tab or window
Description
Critical Thinking: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the field of critical thinking, drawing on philosophy, communication, and psychology. Emphasising its relevance both to academic literacy and to decision-making in a range of contexts, this book introduces and explains the knowledge, methods, and skills needed to identify and avoid poor reasoning, reconstruct and evaluate arguments, and engage constructively in dialogues. Topics covered include: The relationship between critical thinking, emotions, and the psychology of persuasion The role of character dispositions such as open-mindedness, courage, and self-knowledge Argument identification and reconstruction Fallacies and argument evaluation. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, and includes an additional chapter on the relationship between critical thinking and emotions. There are also new sections on concepts such as the ‘experiential mind’ and ‘need for cognitive closure’, and contemporary examples drawn from issues including conspiracy theories, the pandemic, and misuses of social media. With updated and expanded discussion questions/exercises and suggestions for further reading at the end of each main chapter, this book is an essential read for students approaching the field of critical thinking for the first time, and for the general reader wanting to improving their thinking skills and decision-making abilities.
Table of Contents
Stuart Hanscomb is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Communication at the University of Glasgow, UK. With Benjamin Franks and Sean Johnston he is author of Environmental Ethics and Behavioural Change , also available from Routledge.
Critics' Reviews
Praise for the previous edition: ' Critical Thinking: The Basics covers the basics engagingly and without unnecessary jargon, provides lots of well-chosen examples and practice exercises, and, unlike most critical thinking textbooks, explains the theoretical background to the recent rise of critical thinking in education.' - Justine Kingsbury, University of Waikato, New Zealand 'This is an excellent contribution to the growing literature on critical thinking. The discussion on causal reasoning, heuristics and biases, framing, social power, metacognition, and self-deception are timely and valuable. Critical Thinking: The Basics helps to bring together the literature on the psychology and sociology of human judgement with the philosophical art of argument analysis.' - Ted Poston, University of South Alabama, USA 'This text is loaded with references, explanations, history and examples from the development and enhancement of the understanding of critical thinking. It offers a coverage of the basics of critical thinking and also provides a sense of how the field and individual expectations of critical thinking are changing.' - Charles Blatz, Professor Emeritus at University of Toledo, USA.
About VitalSource eBooks
VitalSource is a leading provider of eBooks.
- Access your materials anywhere, at anytime.
- Customer preferences like text size, font type, page color and more.
- Take annotations in line as you read.
Multiple eBook Copies
This eBook is already in your shopping cart. If you would like to replace it with a different purchasing option please remove the current eBook option from your cart.
Book Preview
![critical thinking philosophy book critical thinking philosophy book](https://www.routledge.com/img/covers/loading-image-sm.png)
Best Books on Critical Thinking
Dive into the realm of logic and reason with this collection – the most recommended books on critical thinking, curated based on frequent recommendations from leading book blogs and publications..
![critical thinking philosophy book Thinking, Fast and Slow book cover](https://img.readthistwice.com/unsafe/240x360/books/d5682ec6-7429-4564-aa97-1ba227cccc1d.jpg)
Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.
![Critical Thinking: The Basics Critical Thinking: The Basics](https://images.tandf.co.uk/common/jackets/crclarge/978131573/9781315739465.jpg)
Critical Thinking: The Basics
DOI link for Critical Thinking: The Basics
Get Citation
Critical Thinking: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the field of critical thinking, drawing on philosophy, communication and psychology. Emphasising its relevance to decision making (in personal, professional and civic life), academic literacy and personal development, this book supports the reader in understanding and developing the knowledge and skills needed to avoid poor reasoning, reconstruct and evaluate arguments, and engage constructively in dialogues.
Topics covered include:
- the relationship between critical thinking, emotions and the psychology of persuasion
- the role of character dispositions such as open-mindedness, courage and perseverance
- argument identification and reconstruction
- fallacies and argument evaluation.
With discussion questions/exercises and suggestions for further reading at the end of each main chapter, this book is an essential read for students approaching the field of critical thinking for the first time, and for the general reader wanting to improving their thinking skills and decision making abilities.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter | 25 pages, introduction: waking up to bad arguments, chapter 1 | 31 pages, rationality, cognitive biases and emotions, chapter 2 | 21 pages, critical thinking and dispositions, chapter 3 | 22 pages, arguments and argument reconstruction, chapter 4 | 15 pages, argument forms and fallacies, chapter 5 | 52 pages, arguments and social power: authority, threats and other features of message source, chapter 6 | 39 pages, causal arguments, generalisations, arguments from consequences and slippery slope arguments, chapter 7 | 12 pages, arguments from analogy, chapter 8 | 10 pages, further fallacies.
- Privacy Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Cookie Policy
- Taylor & Francis Online
- Taylor & Francis Group
- Students/Researchers
- Librarians/Institutions
Connect with us
Registered in England & Wales No. 3099067 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG © 2024 Informa UK Limited
We’re fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books in court this week. Join us!
Internet Archive Audio
- This Just In
- Grateful Dead
- Old Time Radio
- 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
- Audio Books & Poetry
- Computers, Technology and Science
- Music, Arts & Culture
- News & Public Affairs
- Spirituality & Religion
- Radio News Archive
- Flickr Commons
- Occupy Wall Street Flickr
- NASA Images
- Solar System Collection
- Ames Research Center
- All Software
- Old School Emulation
- MS-DOS Games
- Historical Software
- Classic PC Games
- Software Library
- Kodi Archive and Support File
- Vintage Software
- CD-ROM Software
- CD-ROM Software Library
- Software Sites
- Tucows Software Library
- Shareware CD-ROMs
- Software Capsules Compilation
- CD-ROM Images
- ZX Spectrum
- DOOM Level CD
![critical thinking philosophy book critical thinking philosophy book](https://archive.org/images/book-lend.png)
- Smithsonian Libraries
- FEDLINK (US)
- Lincoln Collection
- American Libraries
- Canadian Libraries
- Universal Library
- Project Gutenberg
- Children's Library
- Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Books by Language
- Additional Collections
- Prelinger Archives
- Democracy Now!
- Occupy Wall Street
- TV NSA Clip Library
- Animation & Cartoons
- Arts & Music
- Computers & Technology
- Cultural & Academic Films
- Ephemeral Films
- Sports Videos
- Videogame Videos
- Youth Media
Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.
Mobile Apps
- Wayback Machine (iOS)
- Wayback Machine (Android)
Browser Extensions
Archive-it subscription.
- Explore the Collections
- Build Collections
Save Page Now
Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.
Please enter a valid web address
- Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
Critical thinking : the basics
Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.
- Graphic Violence
- Explicit Sexual Content
- Hate Speech
- Misinformation/Disinformation
- Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
- Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata
![[WorldCat (this item)] [WorldCat (this item)]](https://archive.org/images/worldcat-small.png)
plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews
24 Favorites
DOWNLOAD OPTIONS
No suitable files to display here.
IN COLLECTIONS
Uploaded by station47.cebu on November 17, 2022
SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)
- Kindle $69.54
- Hardcover See all buying options
- Paperback See all buying options
Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
![critical thinking philosophy book Balancing Reasonable Justice: John Rawls and Crucial Steps Beyond (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51NMsz3O5SL._SY300_.jpg)
John Rawls's pioneering work of political philosophy A Theory of Justice has had far reaching influence on modern liberal political philosophy. Rawls' sprinciples of justice as fairness: the principle of liberty, the principle of fair equality of opportunity and the famous 'difference principle' have been both heavily criticized and incorporated into other political theories.
In this book Päivänsalo both presents a deep analysis of the whole Rawlsian canon and builds upon and goes beyond Rawls's conception by introducing a fresh theoretical framework to clarify and modify different balances of the elements of Rawlsian justice. Justice as fairness is analyzed into its parts and elements, critically examined to find the strongest most favourable interpretations of each principle and in this light the principles are reconstructed and rebalanced in such a way as to resist the most significant criticisms of the Rawlsian project.
- Kindle See all buying options
![critical thinking philosophy book The Possibility of Discussion: Relativism, Truth and Criticism of Religious Beliefs](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41HX1K3JsOL._SY300_.jpg)
- Kindle $61.09
![critical thinking philosophy book The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31ZgzPHDZ+L._SY300_.jpg)
- Kindle $65.94
![critical thinking philosophy book Preference and Information (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31hl6RXoOpL._SY300_.jpg)
- Kindle $65.99
![critical thinking philosophy book From Concept to Objectivity: Thinking Through Hegel's Subjective Logic (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31qDRRk9PQL._SY300_.jpg)
- Kindle $68.35
![critical thinking philosophy book Meaning and Structure: Structuralism of (Post)Analytic Philosophers (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31VJTB4-qmL._SY300_.jpg)
- Kindle $50.11
![critical thinking philosophy book On Thinking and the World: John McDowell's Mind and World (Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31u5RskQWGL._SY300_.jpg)
- Kindle $53.39
![critical thinking philosophy book](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31WOvAeR-PL._SY300_.jpg)
Report an issue with this series
Is this series page incomplete or incorrect? Tell us.
Customer reviews
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
- 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
No customer reviews
![critical thinking philosophy book](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/01Kv-W2ysOL._SY600_.png)
I graduated in Philosophy at the University of Milan in 2003, with a thesis on the problem of foundationalism in contemporary philosophy, and earned a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol in 2004, with a dissertation on Thomas Kuhn's "linguistic turn" and the legacy of Logical Positivism. I have held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Milan, Padua and Pisa, at the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies (Lucca) and the California Institute ot Technology. I was a fellow at Columbia University, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Huntington Library.
I have specific interests in 19th- and 20th century philosophy of science, especially Karl Popper and critical rationalism, Thomas Kuhn, the dynamics of theoretical and conceptual change, the incommensurability thesis, truth, skepticism and relativism. In the past few years, I have worked mainly in the history of science, wih special focus on Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, and the intellectual and cultural history of early-modern Europe.
![critical thinking philosophy book](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/amzn-author-media-prod/ftsssu0t3q1pk8qdpuq81qm236._SY600_.jpg)
Richard Dien Winfield is Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1982. He is married to Sujata Gupta Winfield, an immigration attorney, and has three grown children. He is the author of 24 books and numerous book chapters and journal articles. In 2018 and 2020 he ran unsuccessfully for the US House of Representatives in the Democratic Primary in Georgia's 10th District and in the US Senate special election, respectively. In both campaigns, he advocated a social rights agenda anchored in a Federal Job Guarantee, for which he argued in his 2020 book, Democracy Unchained.
![critical thinking philosophy book](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/A1IS4NKRjDL._SY600_.jpg)
Gerard Mannion is the Joseph and Winifred Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University, where he is also a Senior Research Fellow of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Co-Director of the Church and World Program and heads the 'Church and the Ecumenical Future' project. He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge University and New College, Oxford University (where he took his DPhil. in Theology and Philosophy).
Founding Chair of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network (www.ei-research.net), editor of the Series, ‘Ecclesiological Investigations’ and co-editor (with Oxford's Mark Chapman) of the series 'Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue', his academic career has taken in posts in the UK (Oxford, Leeds, Liverpool), Leuven (Belgium) and San Diego, where he was Professor of Theology and Director of the Center for Catholic Thought and Culture. He also served a full six-year term as founding co-chair of the Ecclesiology Program Unit of the American Academy of Religion and continues to serve on the Steering Committees of both the AAR’s Ecclesiology and Vatican II Studies Program Units. In 2014 he was elected to membership of the American Theological Society.
An Irish citizen, passionate about social justice, rugby union and music, he has authored, co-authored and edited some sixteen books and numerous articles and chapters elsewhere in the fields of ecclesiology, ethics and public theology, as well as in other aspects of systematic theology and philosophy.
Presently an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Catholic University, Gerard has also held Visiting Professorships at the University of Tübingen (Germany), the Dominican Institute of Theology/St Michael’s College, University of Toronto (Canada) and Chichester University (UK). He was Senior Research Fellow in Public Theology at the Centro per le Scienze Religiose of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy, 2009), a 2004 Coolidge Fellow at Union Theological Seminary/Columbia University (New York City) and a selected participant in the program on ‘Teaching the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project’ at the Ethics Institute, Dartmouth College in 2003.
Gerard has also served as an adviser to various NGOs and charities including as a theological adviser to the Theological Reference Group of CAFOD (Caritas UK) and as a member of the Social Justice Commission, the Religious Studies Board of the UK Bishops’ Conference, the committee of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain, the Queen’s Foundation Working Party on Authority and Governance in the Roman Catholic Church for its duration from 1996-2001 and of the International Assessment Board of the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences. A member of the Administrative Committee of the Catholic Social Thought Topic Session of the Catholic Theological Society of America, he also serves on the Editorial Boards of Ecclesiology and of Ecclesial Practices: the Journal of Ecclesiology, Ethnography and Congregational Studies.
Gerard was chair of the organizing committee of 'Assisi 2012: Pathways for Dialogue in the 21st Century', an ecumenical and interfaith gathering which brought together over 250 participants from 55 different countries in the city of Assisi, Italy to explore 'Thinking Outside the Ecumenical Box' for our times.(www.assisi2012.ei-research.net) and of 'Vatican II: Remembering the Future: Ecumenical, Interfaith and Secular Perspectives on the Council's Future and Promise', Georgetown University, the National Cathedral and Marymount University, May 21-24 2015 http://dc2015.ei-research.net/
- About Amazon
- Investor Relations
- Amazon Devices
- Amazon Science
- Sell products on Amazon
- Sell on Amazon Business
- Sell apps on Amazon
- Become an Affiliate
- Advertise Your Products
- Self-Publish with Us
- Host an Amazon Hub
- › See More Make Money with Us
- Amazon Business Card
- Shop with Points
- Reload Your Balance
- Amazon Currency Converter
- Amazon and COVID-19
- Your Account
- Your Orders
- Shipping Rates & Policies
- Returns & Replacements
- Manage Your Content and Devices
- Conditions of Use
- Privacy Notice
- Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
- Your Ads Privacy Choices
![](http://writinghelp.online/777/templates/cheerup/res/banner1.gif)
IMAGES
COMMENTS
by Nigel Warburton. Read. 1 Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. 2 Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling. 3 Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success by Matthew Syed. 4 The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli.
Lewis Vaughn is the author or coauthor of several books, including: Philosophy Here and Now (2013); Bioethics: Principles, Issues, and Cases, Second Edition (2013); Great Philosophical Arguments (2012); Classics of Philosophy (2011); Philosophy: The Quest for Truth, Eighth Edition (2012); How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, Sixth Edition (2011); Doing Ethics ...
This is a review of Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, an open source book version 1.4 by Matthew Van Cleave. The comparison book used was Patrick J. Hurley's A Concise Introduction to Logic 12th Edition published by Cengage as well as the 13th edition with the same title. ... Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, 2007. VAP at ...
The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims, Seventh Edition, provides the broadest range of tools to show students how critical thinking applies in their lives and the world around them. ... Lewis Vaughn is the author or coauthor of several books, including: Philosophy Here and Now (2013 ...
"This book provides a comprehensive, yet accessible, approach to critical thinking. It is perfect for any introductory course on logic or critical reasoning or for anyone who just wishes to think better. The application of these tools to conspiracy theories and fake news shows that logic can be interesting, timely, and essential."
Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. ... (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following. Weather: A ...
From the basics of good reasoning to the difference between claims, evidence and arguments, Jamie Carlin Watson, Robert Arp and Skyler King cover the topics found in an introductory course. Now revised and fully updated, this 3rd edition gives you the chance to develop critical thinking skills that can be used in and out of the classroom.
Books. Critical Thinking. Jonathan Haber. MIT Press, Apr 7, 2020 - Education - 232 pages. An insightful guide to the practice, teaching, and history of critical thinking—from Aristotle and Plato to Thomas Dewey—for teachers, students, and anyone looking to hone their critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is regularly cited as an ...
The Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy series brings high quality research monograph publishing into focus for authors, the international library market, and student, academic and research readers. ... This book explores the ancient treatments of the question of self-intellection ...
Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor. A Little History of Philosophy. by Nigel Warburton. 1 Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth. 2 Critical Lives: Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill. 3 The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle by Myisha Cherry.
How the concept of critical thinking emerged, how it has been defined, and how critical thinking skills can be taught. Critical thinking is regularly cited as an essential twenty-first century skill, the key to success in school and work. Given our propensity to believe fake news, draw incorrect conclusions, and make decisions based on emotion ...
An insightful guide to the practice, teaching, and history of critical thinking—from Aristotle and Plato to Thomas Dewey—for teachers, students, and anyone looking to hone their critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is regularly cited as an essential 21st century skill, the key to success in school and work. Given the propensity to believe fake news, draw incorrect conclusions, and ...
Critical Thinking: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the field of critical thinking, drawing on philosophy, communication, and psychology. Emphasising its relevance both to academic literacy and to decision-making in a range of contexts, this book introduces and explains the knowledge, methods, and skills needed to identify and avoid poor reasoning, reconstruct and ...
The book gives a lucid treatment of the differences between descriptive and evaluative meaning: one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist." ... 2004 - Philosophy - 403 pages "William Hughes's Critical Thinking, recently revised and updated by Jonathan Lavery, is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the essential ...
It may seem strange to begin a logic textbook with this question. 'Thinking' is perhaps the most intimate and personal thing that people do. Yet the more you 'think' about thinking, the more mysterious it can appear. It is the sort of thing that one intuitively or naturally understands, and yet cannot describe to others without great ...
Noise by Daniel Kahneman. Being Your Cat by Celia Haddon, Daniel Mills. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. Dive into the realm of logic and reason with this collection - the most recommended books on critical thinking, curated based on frequent recommendations from leading book blogs and publications.
He has published in analytic philosophy, critical thinking, and philosophy of law, and his views on punishment and responsibility have been included in major anthologies. Outside academia, Parker is a semiprofessional flamenco guitarist, performing with dancers around and about northern California; he rides a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, plays ...
A Practical Guide to Critical Thinking introduces readers to the concepts, methods, and standards for thinking critically about reasons and arguments in virtually any area of practice. While most literature on critical thinking focuses on its formal applications within philosophy, this book offers a broad conception of critical thinking and ...
-Discover critical thinking by familiarizing with concepts from other disciplines, like philosophy, cognitive biases and errors, race and gender from sociology and political science, and symbols from rhetoric.- ... I was always looking for a book like this on critical thinking. Your usual critical thinking book is filled with cherry picked good ...
Critical Thinking: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the field of critical thinking, drawing on philosophy, communication and psychology. Emphasising its relevance to decision making (in personal, professional and civic life), academic literacy and personal development, this book supports the reader in understanding and developing the knowledge and skills needed to avoid ...
"Critical Thinking: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the field of critical thinking, drawing on philosophy, communication and psychology. Emphasizing its relevance to decision making (in personal, professional and civic life), academic literacy and personal development, this book supports the reader in understanding and ...
Critical thinking, like mastering a musical instrument, requires practice. ... this book will engage both beginner and advanced readers in the field of philosophy. This book is the beginning of your journey of discovery. The treasure of truth awaits. Genres Philosophy Nonfiction Metaphysics Logic. 220 pages, Paperback. Published January 1, 2020.
Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy (30 books ... Engaging with the challenging and controversial reading of Spinoza presented by Gilles Deleuze in Expressionism in Philosophy (1968), this book focuses on Deleuze's redeployment of Spinozist concepts within the context of his own philosophical project of constructing a philosophy of ...