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

Chapter 4. Self-Understanding

The preceding chapters emphasized these points:

• 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 fairmindedness.

• 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 fairminded thinking).

• Fairmindedness requires that we develop a network of interrelated traits of mind.

• Developing as a thinker is challenging and requires internal motivation.

This chapter lays a ...