Critical Thinking

When your thinking is important consider using these steps:

Step One – Focus and Clarify your thought topics.

Usually thinking starts as some vague nagging thought. You make sense some problem, but what? You have no clue. Well you have to get a clue first. Try to state your issues one point at a time. Enumerate, elaborate, brain-storm, and then clarify or give examples.

Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention. ~Greg Anderson

Step Two – Challenge assumptions.

Are you making assumptions? Check your facts. As long as things are vague you can’t really get a firm hold on the thoughts and shake the rationale out of them, or into them. It is impossible to check the accuracy of a generalization. The nebulous can never be clear.

Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in. ~Alan Alda

Step Three – Be relevant.

Don’t get side-tracked by associated but different issues. Stick to the point. Check how each idea is connected to the main idea.

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience. ~Milton Friedman

Step Four - Know your purpose.

What are you trying to accomplish? What’s the most important thing here? Distinguish your purpose from related purposes.

To begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment. ~James Allen

Step Five - Check your emotions.

Emotions only confuse critical thinking. Notice how your emotions may be pushing your thinking in a certain direction.

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare. ~Jack Henry Abbott

Step Six- Know your own ignorance.

Each person knows less than 0.0001% of the available knowledge in the world. Even if you know more about relevant issues than your opponent, you still might be wrong. In fact, when you know stuff, it is easy to believe you know more than you actually know. Educate yourself as much as possible, but still: be humble.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. ~Alfred North Whitehead

Step Seven- Be independent.

Think critically. Don’t believe everything you read. Don’t cave in to the opinions even the forceful opinions of others.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. ~James A. Baldwin

Step Eight- Think through implications without being afraid of the implications.

Critical thinking demands that you consider where your thinking is leading you, and if you don’t like the direction these thoughts are heading you have the courage to head that way anyway.

There is an increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of things. We are becoming less prone to accept an immediate solution without questioning its larger implications. ~Arthur Erickson

Step Nine– Withhold judgment.

Don’t decide what you want to believe and then set off to prove yourself right. Critical thinking produces judgments, and it doesn’t happen the other way around.

Preconceived notions are the locks on the door to wisdom. ~Merry Browne

Step Ten– Listen to your opponents.

Listen to other viewpoints in their own words. Seriously consider their arguments. Don’t dismiss them as tempting as it is.

You need a team. You need people to push you. You need opponents. ~Wynton Marsalis

Step Eleven– Consider the possibility of cultural influences on your assumptions.

Your culture can cause you to see what fits with your cultural background, and cause you to be blind to things that would be obvious to everyone else.

A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed. ~Michael Behe