Clc1

CLC1 Reasoning and Problem Solving (critical thinking)

Learning Outcomes

After completing this module, you'll be able to:

1. Define critical thinking and the key concepts underlying it

2. Identify the bad mental habits that commonly impede good thinking

3. Outline the criteria a skilled critical thinker follows in reasoning through any problem

4. Explain weak-sense critical thinking versus strong-sense critical thinking

5. Define the essential intellectual traits of a critical thinker

6. Implement suggested tactics for improving your thinking

7. Define the three basic functions of the mind (i.e., thinking, feeling, and wanting) and explain their interrelationship

Critical thinking is the art of thinking about thinking while thinking in order to make thinking better. It involves three interwoven phases: it analyzes thinking,1 it evaluates thinking,2 it improves thinking.3

To think critically, you must be willing to examine your thinking and put it to some stern tests. You must be willing to take your thinking apart (to see it as something constructed out of parts). You must be willing to identify weaknesses in your thinking (while recognizing whatever strengths it may have). And, finally, you must be willing to creatively reconstruct your thinking to make it better (overcoming the natural tendency of the mind to be rigid, to want to validate one’s current thoughts rather than improving them).

1 By focusing on the parts of thinking in any situation—its purpose, question, information, inferences, assumptions, concepts, implications, and point of view.

2 By figuring out its strengths and weaknesses: the extent to which it is clear, accurate, precise, relevant, deep, broad, logical, significant, and fair.

3 By building on its strengths while reducing its weaknesses.

Whatever sense we make of things, we have multiple choices to make. We need the best information to make the best choices. We need to figure out: What is really going...