How to Become a Critical Thinker: Discussion Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction

Steven (1991) defined critical thinking as “correct thinking in the pursuit of relevant and reliable knowledge about the world”. Steven further states that “it is reasonable, reflective, responsible, and skillful thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do”. It is worth noting at this stage that anybody who thinks critically is capable of asking relevant and appropriate questions, congregate needed information and data, effectively, efficiently and creatively sort through this information and data logically argue from the congregated information and data and finally come to a conclusion. Critical thinking is not low order thinking which basically involves processing of information that enables one to know where to cross the road, when to go to bed and or go for lunch but a high order thinking that can help a person to, for example, to critically analyze and evaluate societal health needs, assess the impacts of climate change on agricultural activities and to judge what is good and bad for himself in terms of to drink or not to drink alcohol.

The ability to critically think is not inborn and cannot be developed naturally beyond survival level thinking; therefore, only one option is left, to learn it. It must be taught and taught well by qualified professionals. Haskins (2006) on the other hand defined critical thinking as “A process by which we use our knowledge and intelligence to effectively arrive at the most reasonable and justifiable positions on issues, and which endeavors to identify and overcome the numerous hindrances to rational thinking” (p. 2). Haskins goes a head and explains that being intelligent and or possessing massive knowledge is not a guarantee for one to be a critical thinker. Being intelligent and possessing knowledge qualifies one to be a critical thinker only if these two are used to draw appropriate and accurate conclusions, reach objective and rationale view points.

Attributes of a Critical Thinker

Ferrett (1997) in his work titled ‘attributes of a critical thinker’ came up with attributes that are characteristic of a critical thinker. Ferrett stated that a critical thinker should: “asks pertinent questions, assesses statements and arguments, is able to admit a lack of understanding or information, has a sense of curiosity, is interested in finding new solutions, is able to clearly define a set of criteria for analyzing ideas, is willing to examine beliefs, assumptions, and opinions and weigh them against facts, listens carefully to others and is able to give feedback, sees that critical thinking is a lifelong process of self-assessment, suspends judgment until all facts have been gathered and considered, looks for evidence to support assumption and beliefs, is able to adjust opinions when new facts are found, looks for proof, examines problems closely, is able to reject information that is incorrect or irrelevant” This list is not exhaustive as some attributes vary from one critical thinker to another. These attributes are to be learned, it is a process that needs a lot of perseverance and patience. One cannot acquire them overnight but rather needs to work hard towards achieving them through learning and practicing.

Becoming a critical thinker

To become an accomplished critical thinker is a process that can be said to be stepwise in nature. Based on the work of Haskins (2006, p. 3), it involves five steps namely: step one- Adopt the attitude of a critical thinker; step two-recognizing and avoiding critical thinking hindrance; step three-identify and characterize arguments; step four-evaluate information sources; and step five-evaluate arguments. These steps will be analyzed and evaluated in order to expound on how they can assist one become an accomplished critical thinker. Step One: This step begins with development of right attitude which according to Haskins (p. 4) is compost of open mindedness, healthy skepticism, intellectual humility, free thinking, and high motivation. To be open minded is to consider new ideas. Open mindedness helps an individual to willingly look for evidence against one’s favored beliefs, objectives and priorities and to evaluate the gotten evidence justly (Hare, 2009). A lot of literatures available on open mindedness show that many people are at risk of confirmation bias (my side bias) Jefferson (1998, p. 56) said that: “people tend to overestimate arguments for claims they already accept and underestimate arguments against claims they accept”.

To be both open minded and skeptical means that one has to view facts, sources of information and examine issues wholly and exhaustively before making conclusion, be able to investigate the good and the bad things about something with the aim of getting the truth or rather getting close to the truth. For example, if someone tells you that he strongly believes that there are people who want to assassinate Barrack Obama, a critical thinker will not just believe this but will investigate and analyze all aspects of the statement to get the truth in it. One will ask him/herself these questions: what is the source of the information, what is the intention behind the information, what does the owner of the information wants to achieve? These questions help one to be open minded in getting the truth and to authenticate whether the statement is to be believed or to be brushed away. Intellectual humility is to possess consciousness of the upper maximum level of an individual’s knowledge, being sensitive to bias, narrow mindedness and the short falls of an individual’s viewpoint. This concept is based on the principle that one should not claim more than one actually knows. It makes one not to be arrogant, pretentious, and or vanity. Free thinker basically means to have an independent mind. In this case, one should not at any point want to believe due to social pressure to conform but must be ready to inquire if conformity is positively influencing one’s belief or opinion.

If this happens, one must be ready also to abandon his/her stand on a particular issue until such a time that he/she will have carried out a comprehensive assessment and evaluation. High motivation can either be external or internal depending with the situation at hand (Haskins, 2006; Jefferson, p. 67). This type of motivation must be natural so that one may be able to work hard towards evaluating issues ‘wholly’. A critical thinker must have a vast and wide knowledge on issues he/she is dealing with; this can be achieved through research, studying and asking questions that will eventuality enable her/him to have essential knowledge. Step Two: This step involves recognizing and avoiding critical thinking hindrances. An individual’s ability to think can be highly compromised with daily happenings and experiences in his/her life. There are two categories of hindrances; the first one being unintentional/natural human limitations while the second category is those that are intentional meaning that the individual is aware of them. Critical thinking hindrances can be categorized into four major groups. These are: Basic human limitations, use of language, faulty logic or perception, and psychological pitfalls (Haskins, p. 5). Basic human limitations affects everyone and generally means that one’s understanding of issues prohibits him/her from understanding the real and true issues with total objectivity and clarity. A critical thinker therefore has to get the much needed understanding of issues at hand. Language and word use and selection is very important in critical thinking as they can either be misinterpreted or interpreted in the right way.

One must be able to get the correct and right intension in each and every word and statement so that its true meaning can be understood well. This call for critical analysis of every word as Haskins (p. 5) puts it: a critical thinker must learn to recognize when words are not intended to communicate ideas or feelings, but rather to control thought and behavior”. Faulty logic or perception makes an individual to make false conclusion that have no facts to support it. Perceiving things the way we want may be due to past experience may prevent one from perceiving the truth or taking true facts to support ones view point. Psychosocial pit falls is where one’s perception is greatly influenced by prevailing psychosocial status around him or her. More of these hindrances will be discussed under the subtopic ‘classification of hindrances’ Step Three: this step is very important and vital in becoming an accomplished critical thinker is kit enables one to identify and characterize arguments. This is the process of recognizing, constructing and evaluating of reasons to support conclusions. An argument is composed of one or more reason statement and one or more conclusion. A critical thinker must have the ability to identify arguments from either verbal or written communication. Argument can either be inductive or deductive. Deductive argument is where by one thing follows another, for example one may say that “policemen are corrupt” and Jacob is a policeman” then one can conclude that Jacob is corrupt. Inductive argument on the other are not all that direct and that with even so obvious evidence, it can not prove their conclusion. Inductive arguments depend on reasonable grounds to support their conclusions. Arguments do have indicators such as ‘therefore’, ‘thus’, ‘since’, ‘due to’, and ‘as indicated by’, and in some cases there are no indicators. These indicators help a critical thinker to pick arguments from both verbal and written communication (Haskins, p. 5).

Step four: a critical thinker must able to authenticate the sources of his/her facts, data and information. An argument that is supported by facts whose sources can not be verified means that that argument will be baseless and therefore should be believed. The method of evaluation must be sound and acceptable, for example, testimony from eye witness, scientific findings, personal experiences and published materials. A critical thinker must ensure that her/his sources of information are credible, unbiased, and accurate. All these according to Haskins (p.7) depend on source’s qualifications, integrity and reputation. Haskins further states that a critical thinker must get answers to questions such as: “Does the information source have the necessary qualifications or level of understanding to make the claim (conclusion)?; Does the source have a reputation for accuracy?; Does the source have a motive for being inaccurate or overly biased?; and Are there any reasons for questioning the honesty or integrity of the source? (p. 7).” In answering these questions and the critical thinker finds out that either the answer for the first two answers are “no” or the answers for the last two questions is “yes”, then the critical thinker should consider dropping the sources or to carry out more search for other accurate sources. A critical thinker must also ensure that any statistical figures and data used are correct, accurate and has no degree of doubt before using them to support any argument. A good example of evaluation is when one is told that one out every three people is HIV positive. A critical thinker will have to authenticate the source of this statement either through carrying out literature and statistical search from published works, peer reviewed journals, research articles and any other relevant material with the aim and objective of validating the source of the information. Once this is proved as true beyond any reasonable doubt, then the statement that one out every three people is HIV positive can therefore be confirmed as true and accurate.

Step Five: This is the final stage in becoming an accomplished critical thinker and is all about evaluating arguments. Haskins (p. 8) summarized this in three steps namely warranting assumptions, ensuring that reasoning is sufficient and relevant and that relevant information has been omitted. Assumptions are general statements made and are taken for granted to be true. Assumptions have to be analyzed critically in order to determine whether they are warranted or not. Warranted assumption is known to be true and or does not need another argument to validate it while unwarranted assumption is known not to be true and therefore needs another argument to support it. Arguments used by critical thinkers must be relevant and sufficient to ensure that the conclusion is well supported. Insufficient and irrelevant arguments can be avoided through following strictly the previous steps in becoming an accomplished critical thinker with more attention to the hindrances that contributes largely to insufficiency and irrelevancies in arguments.

For example, ‘Jacob stole my money from my room’ as evidenced by CCTV images of Jacob stealing the money is sufficient while ‘Jacob might have stolen my money’, without any evidence is based on assumptions that can be warranted and therefore not sufficient enough to support conclusion. People normally omit very important either intentionally or unintentionally and there a critical thinker must ensure that he/she tries as much as possible to identify omitted evidence through presenting opposing arguments that will help in identifying the omitted evidence. This will help the critical thinker to develop his/her own arguments. For example, in the example of policemen being corrupt, a critical thinker will present opposing arguments in which he/she may argue that they are corrupt because they are encouraged by citizens who give them bribes, if citizens were not offering them bribes then they could have not been corrupt. The policemen should not be solely blamed for corruption yet there are other people involved.

Summery of Hindrances

As mentioned earlier, hindrances can be categorized into four major categories. The first category is hindrance due to basic human limitations. Examples in this category include: confirmation bias and selective thinking where by an individual always wanting to agree with things that favor his/her beliefs, practice and on the other hand put off those that are against their beliefs; false memories and confabulations; ignorance which means to lack sufficient and relevant knowledge to support an argument; perception limitations where by one may be unaware of his/her perceptions; personal biases and prejudices; physical and emotional hindrance which include fatigue, stress, illness, diseases and mental disturbances; and lastly in this category is testimonial evidence in which one uses other people’s testimonies to support one’s own beliefs. These testimonies may be compromised due to biasness, inaccuracy and fraud. The second category is the hindrance due to use of language.

These include ambiguity which means the use of a word/expression that has more than one meaning; assuring expressions in which one uses statements that prevent others from asking him/her a question; use of jargon, use of technical terms to make very simple things look technical e.g.; emotive content, which is use of words to arouse feelings with the aim of creating bias or confusion; false implications where by one uses language that is correct but is misleading as it may suggest something false; and use of judgmental words which means to make opinions appear as facts. The third category is hindrance due to faulty logic or perception. These include arguing from ignorance where by one uses logical fallacy to claim that something is true just because it has not been proven false; ad hoc hypothesis which means using a hypothesis that in itself cannot be tested alone is used to validate facts that is against a theory or claim; irrelevant comparisons whereby an individual makes irrelevant, incorrect and inaccurate comparison e.g. making a claim that Christians are holier than Muslims, while ignoring specific religious beliefs and practices.

Slippery slope fallacy in which one argues that terrible things will happen yet he/she cannot prove that these terrible things will actually happen; and finally regressive fallacy whereby one fails to consider natural and inevitable fluctuations of things when assessing cause and effect. The last and final category is hindrances due to psychosocial pitfalls. These category include emotional appeals where by an individual misuses his/her emotions to make other people to accept his/her views e.g. after killing one’s mother, he/she may tell the judge to have mercy on him/her as he has to take care of his siblings and other family members left behind by the mother; irrelevant appeal to authority where by one may want others to support his/her views just because it is supported by prominent personalities such as powerful politicians; evading the issue, red herring where by one intentionally diverts the attention of people from real issues he/she is accused of by raising another controversial issue; fallacy of false dilemma whereby an individual eliminates available alternatives e.g., telling an individual that “you either vote for my party or I will kill you. This person will be left with no alternative but just to vote as told; ad hominem fallacy where you may find a very good idea is put forward by someone considered corrupt, instead of assessing and evaluating the idea put forward, people may decide to criticize the owner of the idea ‘who is corrupt’ rather than his idea; lastly is communal reinforcement whereby due to the fact that a claim is accepted just because the community supports it independent of its validity.

Conclusion and Recommendations

It is the nature of human beings to think although this type of thinking is biased, distorted, insufficient, partial, and discriminative. The quality of our life depends on our thinking and shoddy thinking has varied consequences in terms of poor quality of life. Critical thinking which must be systematically cultivated is very important in our day to day life and therefore people should strive towards becoming accomplished critical thinker. The steps involved in this are simple to follow and can be practiced easily even within a learning context. This should also be incorporated in school curriculums to help in equipping people with skills, techniques and attributes of a good critical thinker. In order to ensure continued improvement in quality of critical thinking literature and values, more research studies needs to be carried out so that more new techniques and methods of how one can become an accomplished critical thinker can be determined. Critical thinking skills should also be practiced at an early age to enable children and young people to acquire critical thinking skills and techniques. This will ensure that they sharpen these skills as they grow up.

Works cited

“An introduction to critical thinking”, Steven D. Schafersman, 1991. Web.

“A Practical Guide to Critical Thinking”, Haskins, G. R., 2006, Web.

“Critical Thinking: Attributes of a critical Thinker”. Ferrett, S., 1997, Peak Performance. Web.

“Critical Thinking Made Simple”, Jefferson, K. M., Jorum Publishers, Nairobi, 1998.

“Open-Minded Inquiry: A Glossary of Key Concepts”, Hare, W., 2009, Web.