Blog Reflection 5 – Critical Thinking: Definitions and Reflections

Blog Reflection 5 – Critical Thinking: Definitions and Reflections

There are two definitions from our materials that caught my attention and that I will reflect on in this post. My aim with this exercise is to review the definitions and evaluate why these definitions stood out to me.

Definition 1 and Reflection

In his book on critical thinking, to establish a core of the topic’s definition, Hughes (2000) presents a list of skills inherent in critical thinking: interpretive, reasoning, and verification. In general, I agree with this assessment on what critical thinking is, and more precisely what it entails. The need for assessing what one sees and hears is an important skill in all of life, because for me it can be very easy to misinterpret or misunderstand someone or something if I am not vigilant with assessing what the reality of a situation might be versus my reflexive unexamined assumptions. Applying reasoning to a situation or circumstance seems right to me as well for critical thinking because it involves the use of experience and attempting to weigh one’s prior experiences and situations against the present to see if greater meaning or some commonality between disparate experiences can be gleaned. And finally, the idea that verification is a key component of critical thinking seems right to me as well. Our own interpretation and reasoning might not necessarily get us to the truth, and many times cannot. Our ways of interpreting are bound by our limited experience, and our capacity to reason, however well we do it is prone to error. And so, verifying our conclusions against the conclusions of others is a necessary and important step in my estimation. Everyone else sees something more in the world than I am capable of seeing, and vice versa. So, in my view it behooves us to compare notes, as it were, with one another and with other sources outside ourselves to validate what we hear, see, and attempt to think critically about.

Definition 2 and Reflection

In the book How We Think, the author provides a definition of “reflexive thinking” (Dewey, 1910, p.6) which for the purpose of this reflection can be a proxy for critical thinking.

In this definition of critical thinking, to engage in the activity one must survey something that is known, look closely at its foundations, and apply measured and ongoing consideration of not only the known thing and its basis, but also the destinations to which those things lead (Dewey, 1910). I like this definition because it takes a well-rounded approach. By placing at center the subject of one’s critical thinking – a known thing – the definition essentially builds a map and provides an inventory of all the tools necessary to think critically. What’s more it does something I believe to be most important; it builds in a reason for the purpose of critical thinking: to determine where assumptions beliefs about things might lead. This is crucial element of critical thinking and a chief response to the question, ‘Why should we think critically?’

 

References

Dewey, J. (1910). How We Think. D. C. Heath & Co.

Hughes, W. (2000). Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills: Vol. 3rd ed. Broadview Press. https://libproxy.library.unt.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=34158&scope=site&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_85