Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life

Chapter 4. Self-Understanding

The preceding chapters emphasized that:

• Critical thinking requires the development of basic intellectual skills, abilities, and insights;
• Becoming a skilled thinker is like becoming skilled in basketball, ballet, or saxophone playing;
• These skills can be used to serve two incompatible ends: self-centeredness or fair-mindedness;
• The skills of critical thinking can be learned in a "weak" sense (selfish thinking);
• We are focused on the development of critical thinking in a "strong" sense (i.e., serving fair-minded thinking);
• Fair-mindedness requires that we develop a network of interrelated traits of mind;
• Developing as a thinker is challenging, requiring internal motivation.

Our goal in this chapter is to lay a ...