Critical Thinking: A Definition (of Sorts)

My first assignment: look up or define what I believe "critical thinking" means, state a definition, and make my case for why I think that it is so.

My initial thought when addressing the definition of critical thinking is to say that it means you accept nothing as true until it has been sufficiently supported with concrete evidence or logic. To me, this makes sense because being critical usually means that you will have to be persuaded or convinced of something before you will agree with or concede to an argument. Thinking critically would then be applying this state of being unconvinced to your thought process before responding to a statement or argument.

Tying this into our first reading, "Teaching Smart People How to Learn" by Chris Argyris, it has become abundantly clear to me that in every person's "theory-in-use", which is simply implementation, or lack of implementation, of the rules they believe govern their behavior, there are ingrained actions that we tend to execute without thinking about the why or the support for it. If we were all critical thinkers, we would stop and question these tendencies; or, we would recognize critical thinking in others when these habits are questioned and attempt to find some solid basis for them.

Turning to the dictionary, we find the definition of critical thinking to be "the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion" (dictionary.com). This supports my conjecture that critical thinking is primarily an inner set of actions that are taken before any physical or verbal action is produced. It similarly implies that you do not start your mode of thinking in a positive relationship with whatever it is you are attempting to be critical of; you start with a blank slate and use a series of steps to examine the subject and move in either a positive or negative direction in relation to that subject.

I think it is interesting to note that there is no prescribed method of completing those steps that comprise critical thinking as a whole. I can only assume that there are many methods that have been studied and recommended by critical thinking scholars and enthusiasts the world over, but I believe that as long as you make a thorough investigation of whatever it is you are thinking about, as long as you are actively aware of the critical thinking process and you have in your arsenal strong points of logic to line up with or find missing from a statement or argument, you will undoubtedly perform critical thinking to some extent, if not as skillfully as the most practiced individuals.