A few years back, I posted a piece on this page about how difficult it can be to accurately and sufficiently describe what critical thinking (CT) is. Within, I presented a number of attempts made in light of a challenge to do so within the limits of 140 characters. Recently, I was asked to provide a CT workshop to a group of students who will be entering third-level education in the next academic year. Typically, I provide a “CT-lite” version to such groups as a means to ensure accessibility. It would be unfair to ask students not already enrolled in third-level education to understand or even follow some of the abstractions associated with the topic. Upon each iteration of this workshop, I do my best to ensure that my slides are as up-to-date as possible. When, on one of the first slides I present, I saw my description of CT, I got to work on editing, making sure to avoid any terms they likely wouldn’t understand because of their educational level. Then, it hit me. My description was thorough, yet short—80 characters. I did it!
Critical thinking is: a process of thinking about thinking through purposeful, self-regulated judgment.
Quickly though, I realised that I was able to do this because I knew I would elaborate quite a bit on each of the core concepts within over the course of that three-hour workshop. This slide just had to get them started. Perhaps it is the nature of the “blog post” that limits such ability in context. The average 1,000-word post just isn’t going to cut it in terms of accurately and sufficiently defining the concept. However, upon further reflection, I recognise that I have written enough posts on CT now, over the history of this blog, Thoughts on Thinking, where I can reasonably link everything that requires further explanation. Many of you will likely understand many of the terms I use, but for the ones you don’t—there’s a link! So, here’s CT in a nutshell, concise and succinct, structured consistently with the description above, along with linked elaboration in support.
Process
CT isn’t just a skill or a tendency. Sure, it includes skills and dispositions, but it’s a process—a metacognitive one at that. Simply, metacognition is “thinking about thinking” (an inspiration for this blog’s name). It is the cognitive foundation that allows CT to happen. Specifically, the process (acted upon metacognitively) is that of a sequence of skills (i.e., analysis, evaluation, and inference) and their interaction with a positive disposition toward thinking, both governed by one’s reflective judgment of the situation.
Purposeful
I often recommend that CT should only be applied to topics that one cares about or is important to them because CT requires effort (i.e., it’s not often one needs to apply CT to determine what coffee to order). In this sense, CT is goal-oriented—we use it to determine what to believe and/or what to do (i.e., decision-making), with respect to something you care about. Simply, there is a purpose for its application.
Self-Regulated
This self-regulated component of CT actually represents the integration of previously mentioned concepts, including metacognition and reflective judgment. As part of being a metacognitive process, CT requires the self-monitoring and regulation of one’s thinking in decision-making (e.g., limiting, as much as possible, the impact of gut-level bias and emotion on one’s thinking). The reflective judgment aspect comes into play when we recognise the potential for erroneously jumping to a conclusion and, instead, pause to reflect on our basis for knowing and epistemologically engage this basis in our application of decision-making.
The Nutshell
So, is that it? Yeah, that’s it. Critical thinking is a process of thinking about thinking through purposeful, self-regulated judgment. If you are well acquainted with CT, such a description is likely to suffice (though critical thinkers are likely to pick holes in the simplicity of the description—and well they should; indeed, that’s in part the point of CT). If you are novice to the world of CT, I hope the description likewise suffices in terms of introducing you to the concept. However, as the veteran critical thinkers will have pointed out, such description does not provide a thorough treatment of each of its constituent parts. With that, it doesn’t need to. CT has been described/defined. If that description has piqued your interest and you want to know more about it, then do so. That’s why I’ve provided all of these links. But for now, my goal has been simple—to make CT as simple as possible in description and, through facilitating (as best I could) a more accessible description, generate interest in a concept that might have otherwise come across as some gross abstraction of an educational ideal.