Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is an essential concept that refers to the self-guided, self-disciplined thinking that aims to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way. In this article we will look at the origins and influencers of the critical approach, and maps out the important foundations to this life changing system of thinking.

What is Critical Thinking?

Definition: Critical thinking is the art of making clear, reasoned judgments based on interpreting, understanding, applying, and synthesizing evidence. It involves questioning, analysing, interpreting, evaluating, and making judgments about what you read, hear, say, or write.

Key Components:

Analysis: Breaking down complex information into manageable parts.
Evaluation: Assessing the credibility and relevance of information sources.
Inference: Drawing logical conclusions from available evidence.
Explanation: Clearly articulating your reasoning and conclusions.
self-regulation: Reflecting on your own beliefs and biases to improve your thinking process.

Origins of Critical Thinking

The roots of critical thinking can be traced back to ancient philosophy, but it was more formally defined in the 20th century:

Evolution: Over the years, critical thinking has evolved and been integrated into various educational frameworks, highlighting its importance in developing analytical skills and fostering independent thought.

Why is Critical Thinking Important?

Empowerment: It empowers individuals to make informed decisions and solve problems effectively.
Adaptability: In a rapidly changing world, critical thinking helps people adapt to new information and challenges.
Civic Engagement: It encourages active participation in society by enabling individuals to evaluate information critically and engage in meaningful discussions.

Misapplied Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is not just a skill but a mindset that encourages continuous learning and self-improvement.

The true power of critical thinking lies in its ability to challenge our own assumptions and biases. It’s about being humble enough to acknowledge that our understanding of the world is incomplete and open to revising our beliefs based on new evidence and perspectives.

It’s like a detective investigating a crime scene. They start with a hypothesis, but they don’t cling to it blindly. They gather evidence, analyse it carefully, and adjust their hypothesis as needed. The goal isn’t to prove the detective’s initial hunch right; it’s to get as close to the truth as possible.

Unfortunately, many people use critical thinking as a way to confirm their existing beliefs rather than to challenge them. They pick and choose evidence that supports their views while ignoring or dismissing evidence that contradicts them. This is a dangerous form of “confirmation bias,” which can lead to closed-mindedness and prejudice.

To truly embrace critical thinking, we need to practice intellectual humility and be willing to question our own assumptions. It’s not about being right all the time; it’s about being open to learning and growing.

Development of Socratic Thinking

Socrates is a fascinating figure in the history of philosophy, and his methods and ideas have had a profound impact on critical thinking and ethics.

The concept of critical thinking has its intellectual roots in the teachings of the Greek philosopher Socrates (470–399 BC), who emphasized the importance of questioning and dialogue in the pursuit of knowledge.

Influence of Predecessors: Socrates was influenced by earlier philosophers, particularly Anaxagoras, who encouraged him to seek deeper explanations for natural phenomena. However, Socrates eventually turned away from natural philosophy to focus on ethical questions and human behaviour.

The Socratic Method: He developed a unique approach known as the Socratic Method, which involves asking a series of probing questions to stimulate critical thinking and illuminate ideas. This method encourages dialogue and helps individuals examine their beliefs and assumptions.

The process typically starts with a commonly held belief, which Socrates would then scrutinize through questioning, revealing contradictions and prompting deeper reflection.

Philosophical Inquiry: Socrates believed in the importance of self-examination. He famously stated, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This reflects his commitment to understanding oneself and the moral implications of one’s actions.

Application of Socratic Thinking in Life

Engaging Others: Socrates often engaged in discussions with fellow Athenians, encouraging them to think critically about their values and beliefs. He saw it as his religious duty (Evangelism) to provoke thought and self-reflection in others.

Focus on Virtue: His philosophical inquiries often centred around concepts of virtue, justice, and the good life. He believed that knowledge and virtue were interconnected; if one truly understood what was good, they would act accordingly.

Facing Consequences: Socrates’ commitment to his principles was evident when he chose to accept the death penalty rather than abandon his philosophical pursuits. He viewed his trial as an opportunity to demonstrate the importance of living a life of authenticity, integrity and truth, famously stating that he would rather die than cease to practice philosophy.

Legacy: Socrates’ methods and ideas laid the groundwork for future philosophers, particularly his students like Plato, who further developed his thoughts. The Socratic Method remains a fundamental technique in education and critical thinking today.

Socrates’ approach to thinking and living was revolutionary for his time and continues to resonate today. His emphasis on questioning, dialogue, and ethical living encourages us to reflect on our own beliefs and the world around us.

Socratic Shift from Natural Philosophy

The idea that all interactive processes are organismic and natural, however, aligns with contemporary views in various fields, including systems theory and ecological psychology.

Socrates’ departure from natural philosophy to focus on ethics and human behaviour reflects a significant philosophical shift. He prioritized understanding human experience and moral reasoning over the physical world, which was a departure from the pre-Socratic focus on nature.

Organismic Processes

The notion that all interactive processes are organismic suggests that human thought and behaviour are deeply embedded in our biological and environmental contexts. This perspective emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals with their surroundings, highlighting that our reasoning is influenced by our experiences and interactions.

Flow State and Logic

The concept of flow—a state of complete absorption in an activity—can indeed be linked to how we engage with logic and reasoning. When in a flow state, individuals often experience heightened creativity and problem-solving abilities. Here’s how this relates to logic:

Balance of Challenge and Skill: Flow occurs when there’s a perfect match between the challenge of a task and the individual’s skill level, allowing for optimal engagement.
Enhanced Focus: In this state, distractions fade away, and individuals can think more clearly and logically, leading to insights that might not surface in a more fragmented state of mind.

True Logic as Flow

The idea that true logic is a flow-state suggests that effective reasoning is not just a mechanical process but a dynamic and fluid one. This perspective encourages:

Intuitive Understanding: Logic becomes more about intuitive connections rather than rigid structures.
Adaptability: Just as flow requires adaptability to the task at hand, so does logical reasoning, which must adjust to new information and contexts.

This synthesis of Socratic thought, organismic processes, and the flow state presents a rich framework for understanding how we think and interact with the world. It challenges us to consider how our environments and experiences shape our reasoning and encourages a more holistic view of logic.

John Dewey and How We Think

John Dewey: The term “critical thinking” was first coined by John Dewey in 1910 in his book How We Think. Dewey advocated for a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal, emphasizing the importance of reflective thinking in education.

John Dewey’s contributions to the concept of critical thinking are foundational and have had a lasting impact on education.

Key Concepts from Dewey’s “How We Think”

Definition of Critical Thinking: Dewey defined critical thinking as a reflective process that involves analysing and evaluating information and experiences. He believed that this kind of thinking is essential for effective problem-solving and decision-making.

Reflective Thinking: Reflective thinking, according to Dewey, is a deliberate and systematic approach to thinking that requires individuals to question their assumptions, consider alternative viewpoints, and draw conclusions based on evidence. This process is crucial in education as it encourages students to engage deeply with the material.

What is Reflective Thinking?

Reflective thinking is a deliberate and systematic process that involves analysing and evaluating one’s experiences, thoughts, and actions. Dewey believed that this type of thinking is essential for effective learning and personal growth. Here are some key aspects:

Experience as a Foundation: Dewey emphasized that our experiences shape our understanding. Reflective thinking encourages individuals to look back on their experiences to gain insights and learn from them.

Critical Analysis: It involves questioning assumptions and beliefs. Reflective thinkers critically assess their thoughts and the context in which they occur, leading to deeper understanding.

connection to Action: Reflective thinking is not just about contemplation; it should lead to action. Dewey argued that reflection should inform future decisions and behaviours, creating a cycle of continuous improvement, leading to Peak Growth, and the joy of gratitude in the Moment.

Structured Process: Dewey proposed a structured approach to reflective thinking, often described in stages:

Identify the Problem: Recognize a situation or challenge that requires reflection.

Gather Information: Collect relevant data and experiences related to the problem.
Analyse the Information: Evaluate the information critically to understand different perspectives.
Investigate root causes: Use research skills to look into fundamental causes, and effects of the identified challenge.
Use Socratic Questioning: This ensures that no assumptions or presumptions are left unchallenged.
Our tip! Use Happy thinking!:
Draw Conclusions: Formulate insights based on the analysis and use discernment.
Take Action: Implement changes or decisions based on the conclusions drawn.
Test outcomes: Use an Exposure Therapy type approach to test the outcome of the change, and create a feedback loop that sees the challenge, investigates its causes and develop an approach that leads to that acceptance of this new conceptualisation of reality that the challenge has provided.

Collaborative Learning: Reflective thinking can also be enhanced through collaboration. Engaging with others allows for diverse viewpoints, enriching the reflective process. However, remember that their own cognitive biases may cause them to question your thinking, in order for you to avoid what they secretly think you might be thinking about! This can turn into gentle gaslighting, but is still a sign of them turning into your people policer.

Importance in Education

Reflective thinking is crucial in education for several reasons:

Promotes Deeper Learning: It encourages students to engage with material on a deeper level, moving beyond rote memorization to understanding. Rather than robotically responding to future situations and challenges through automatic ego-based responses. The individual chooses to understand the thinking behind the challenge, and the response that is closest to their true-self, not that of other, learnt and never questioned. See also, our eBook – Training the ego, and ego Pruning.
Fosters Independence: Students learn to think for themselves, developing critical thinking skills that are essential for lifelong learning.
Encourages Adaptability: By reflecting on experiences, students become more adaptable and better equipped to handle new challenges.

Reflective thinking is a dynamic process that not only enhances learning but also empowers individuals to become more thoughtful and engaged citizens. It’s about making sense of experiences and using that understanding to inform future actions. It encourages curiosity, self-confidence and positivity.

Scientific Attitude: Dewey advocated for a scientific attitude of mind, which involves curiosity, open-mindedness, and a willingness to revise one’s beliefs based on new evidence. He saw this attitude as vital for both personal growth and societal progress.

The concept of a scientific attitude is nuanced, and it’s important to understand how it can sometimes be misinterpreted or misapplied. Let’s break this down:

Understanding the Scientific Attitude

Definition: The scientific attitude refers to a mindset characterized by curiosity, scepticism, and a commitment to evidence-based reasoning. It encourages individuals to question assumptions and seek out evidence before forming conclusions.

Key Characteristics:

Open-mindedness: Being willing to consider new ideas and evidence, even if they challenge existing beliefs.
Critical Thinking: Analysing and evaluating information rigorously rather than accepting it at face value.
Adaptability: The willingness to change one’s views in light of new evidence.
Compartmentalisation: The ability to be able to contemplate a theoretical position, without it changing one’s overall view, unless it has been accepted as possibly valid, and helpful to one’s overall understanding and certainty.

Over-Reliance on Scientific Evidence

While the scientific attitude promotes a healthy scepticism and reliance on evidence, it can lead to issues when people treat scientific findings as unchallengeable facts. Here are some reasons why this happens:

Failure to maintain a healthy Window of Tolerance: The window of tolerance is not just our resilience to new, potentially negative challenges. It is also a measure of how much memory space the individual has for other thinking. Since once they have adopted all of those other ways of thinking; coping techniques that they use in order to prevent any current environmental toxicity from causing them to be triggered into panic, and fight or flight type responses, then these will take up space and time in the individuals mind, leaving less time to process new information, and less space for conceptualisation – then they are less able to think.

What this means, is that the lower one’s window of tolerance, plus the more active memory space needed for those learnt coping behaviours, then the higher the level of complexity that the individual can conceptualise and therefore understand. Coping techniques that are constantly enforced in order to prevent the Window of Tolerance from getting lower actually decrease the persons overall ability to intellectualise and there fore defend themselves from current and future toxic experiences.

The more toxicity, pain, stress or trauma the individual is actively trying to manage, the less able they are to able think for themselves and deal with it, without external, and often, equally unreliable, confused or inadequate help.

Impact on the individuals IQ

Critical thinking, if adopted earlier in life, will actually prevent this situation from getting worse: Fewer self-imposed coping mechanisms and automatic avoidance strategies will be needed to be adopted. The individual can therefore start to use, mindfulness, self-introspection and other tools and techniques to resolve other internal thinking process that cause those existing (free intelligence limiting) defensive techniques to no longer be needed. In the long term, this will allow the individual to actually improve their IQ.

Conversely, if critical thinking is not adopted, then there will come a point where, theoretically at least, that individual will be unable to do anything else, but copy others. And they will even forget that they are no longer in control of their thinking and behaviour. Effectively, they are Robots: Statically programmed individuals, unable to change their behaviour without often, significant external influence.

Jumping to conclusions: People often make inappropriate, premature conclusions or statements and this due to the fear or apprehension of the possibility of an oncoming attack or challenge, and this often results in self-sabotage – making themselves a target for further abuse: By allowing themselves to panic due to the fear of sounding stupid, they make a stupid statement, and become a target for Scapegoating, and a focus for the openly projected fears of their peers, and also, their highly secret, yet collective fears.

This is often disclosed to the individual by them feeling uneasiness: A feeling that whatever they say, they might or indeed, go on to show themselves to be correct in those feelings of potential being exposed and made a target for everyone else, who are relieved that they themselves are not the target, and will join in with the peer based vilifications and put-downs that actively lower that individuals status within the peer group. This lowers their self-confidence, self-esteem and lower overall sense of security and feelings of acceptance.

If they have a lot of defensive checks and coping mechanisms in place, within the structure of their current mask: The current projected expression of self, which is usually of a false, idealised but entirely fictitious representation of some future, “healed” self. Will tend to become increasingly fragile. This pretence, often justified under the understanding that everyone “Fake it til they make it“, is dependent on the validation of ones sense of the concept working – by them feeling more secure within their peer group, as they see other peers accept their ideas as valid.

Any peer group interactions that show they are losing their influence and status will therefore be problematic, and may well force the individual to create other justifications in order to prevent those feelings of uneasiness and fear from becoming overwhelming.

Pretending to be “Normal”, as a coping mechanism that dumbs us down

This bogus projection of a “real” self, tries to portray a version of self that is actually self-confident, that actually has self-esteem, and if really pushed, often changes to a very compliant personality that presents itself as “chilled-out”, relaxed, unchallenged,, and willing to people-please. Just like their peers are also trying to portray themselves to be to whoever is currently taking the dominant position in that peer-group interaction.

What this means, is that a typical individual, once accepted into a peer group, will tend to develop many new intellectualised learnt behaviours and coping mechanisms, not only to retain membership of the group, but also to ensure they feel themselves as growing in status and influence in that group. Their lack of inner wholeness, becomes a determined drive for increasing levels of recognition of their overall status within the group.

This group dynamic, where an individual will feel compelled to agree with the perceived group thought-leader, for fear of isolation and rejection by the group. Coupled with the groups willingness and also need to identify an internal enemy, to be made an example of. Means that members that feel they might be imposters, will tend to conform with the groups accepted standards of behaviour. They might also be so busy trying to calculate the implications of their answers in regards to their group status, that they end up agreeing with everyone, rather than use any critical thinking, as their become more accepted by the group, and have allowed themselves to be conditioned and groomed by that peer group. This is Behaviourism in action – the individual that repeats and agrees with others instructions in public, will tend to adopt them as externally directed behavioural changes, in order that they can feel themselves securely attached into the group. An attachment driven by the anxiety of losing that feeling of connection, but also, ultimately, as a strategy to see themselves becoming dominant.

Then they may put themselves into a situation where they need to answer before that information has been processed. They may well just agree with the one who is speaking, without really knowing the full implications of what has been said. Every time someone asks us, “Are you alright?“, they remind us, that we are not normal, and we are being watched, and we should, in the least, pretend to be normal and agree with them.

The same goes for ones own thoughts, which the individual can convince themselves are always correct. Yet, in the example above they have just accepted some programming from another person who has been able to over-run their logical and reasoned defences, by forcing them to process too much information at once. Especially if that person is already showing signs of distress.

This means that on the one hand, anyone of us that allows their mind to try to process too much of a statement intended, either intentionally, or unintentionally, to confuse us, is open to just swallowing that statement, for later, automatic regurgitation. It slips silently into ones memory into a place we often end up calling ego. A place which is home to our automated, learnt responses.

It also means, one the other hand, that if we are not practicing solid mindfulness combined with sound logical and rational, critical thinking. Then it means we have no checks to stop us becoming deluded. This means we are unlikely to use that filter in regard to what one says to ones friends, family and colleagues.

Behaviourism tells us that conditioning, whether instigated by self or another, means unchallenged repetition with become another repetitive programme, and out lack of checking means we can also be forced to defend it. Sometimes to the point of physical violence, and always in some kind of verbal violence and hidden threat meant to also lower our window of tolerance.

This is why everything must ultimately be challenged. But, in true baby-step form. It only takes a person to challenge one assumption each day, in order to keep that doctor at bay.

Lack of a tentative, little by little approach:

Misinterpretation of Evidence: People may misunderstand the nature of scientific evidence, viewing it as absolute rather than provisional. Science is inherently a process of inquiry, where conclusions can change with new data.

Confirmation Bias: Individuals may selectively seek out or interpret evidence that supports their pre-existing beliefs, leading to an over-reliance on certain studies or findings while ignoring contradictory evidence.

Other cognitive Biases:

Socially Cued Incongruences:

Authority of Experts: There can be a tendency to defer to experts or scientific consensus without questioning the underlying assumptions or methodologies. This can create a false sense of certainty.

Complexity of Scientific Inquiry: Scientific research often involves complex variables and uncertainties. Simplifying findings into “facts” can overlook the nuances and limitations of the research.

The Importance of Critical Engagement

To avoid the pitfalls of over-reliance on scientific evidence, it’s essential to:

Encourage Critical Thinking: Foster an environment where questioning and debate are welcomed, allowing for a deeper understanding of scientific concepts.

Promote Scientific Literacy: Educate individuals about the scientific method, including how to interpret studies and understand the context of findings.

Acknowledge Uncertainty: Recognize that science is a dynamic process, and uncertainty is a natural part of scientific inquiry.

While the scientific attitude is a powerful tool for understanding the world, it’s crucial to approach scientific evidence with a mindset that values inquiry, scepticism, and adaptability. This way, we can appreciate the strengths of scientific reasoning while remaining open to new ideas and perspectives.

Educational Goals: In his view, the goal of education should not merely be the transmission of knowledge but rather the cultivation of critical thinking skills. He believed that education should empower students to think independently and creatively, preparing them for the complexities of life.

Practical Application: Dewey emphasized that critical thinking should be applied in real-world contexts. He argued that students should engage in experiences that require them to think critically, such as discussions, debates, and problem-solving activities.

Impact on Education: Dewey’s ideas have influenced modern educational practices significantly. His emphasis on experiential learning and the importance of fostering a reflective mindset can be seen in various teaching methodologies today, such as project-based learning and inquiry-based learning.

John Dewey’s work laid the groundwork for understanding critical thinking as an essential component of education. His insights encourage educators to create environments where students can develop their reflective thinking skills, ultimately leading to more informed and engaged citizens.

This story will be continued…..