Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Critical thinking! Now that sounds like a good idea. Because it’s a kind of souped-up, laser-sharp powerful thinking, just waiting to zap rotten arguments and churn out some pretty brilliant insights instead. And don’t worry if people tell you that it is a rather high-level kind of thinking, and that only a few can do it, mainly tweedy professors who tell jokes in Latin (dimidium facti qui coepit habet — “he who has begun, has the work half done”), because critical thinking certainly isn’t like that. Critical thinking is not just for the tweedy few — but for the curious, the imaginative, the creative many. In fact the only thing that is really deeply mysterious about critical thinking is why everyone’s not doing it. I’ve got a theory about that, and it is to do with education and the kind of ways of working that people are corralled into, like so many sheep — supposedly as a preparation for life outside. Yet life outside is rarely just a business of unreflectively following set procedures and instructions, but rather something where you need constantly to reflect on what you are doing, and why — and act not as a machine, but as a person. So the first skill a critical thinker needs to learn is how to think the unthinkable, to think outside the box, to free their mind, no less.

Sounds idealistic? A bit ’60s and hippies wearing flowers? Well, yes, there’s a bit of idealism in critical thinking, just as there is in all the best things. But there’s also a lot of structure ...