The Smug Baldy Speaks

Like a many other pompous internet blowhards, or rather, distinguished members of the blogosphere, I have several themes that I return to over and over again. For me, I often find myself lamenting something to the effect of: here’s something that demonstrates how dumb people can be. I then usually bring up the notion that, if more of us were better critical thinkers, then there would be a decline in the global stupidity level. Since I place such high value on this thing called “Critical Thinking”, and I also believe that it’s something that is relatively rare, it might be worth a bit of time helping you understand what critical thinking is, and why you should actually spend time improving your own critical thinking skills.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to examine critical thinking and I’d like to get your input as well. For starters, I’ll just take on the term “Critical Thinking” itself. In later posts, I’ll cover how critical thinking is related to science and effective argumentation.

The term “Critical Thinking” starts with the word “Critical”, which has more than one definition. The most common definition of critical is negative. For example, if I wanted to find fault with your poor fashion choices as you shop at WalMart, I might be said to be critical of your coffee-stained wife-beater and flip-flops. This isn’t the same sense of the word critical (and, by the way, if that’s how you dress at WalMart, please stop).

Thinking, on the other hand, is a verb - and it is the act of applying mental effort or reason to something. Thinking isn’t the same as day-dreaming or wishing. When you are thinking, you are purposefully exerting effort, and your attention, to reason about a specific object, problem or goal.

So there you have it: Critical Thinking is essentially the process of skillfully applying your mental effort or reasoning to something. Indeed, when we talk about critical thinking being something rare, we’re really saying that critical thinking skills are apparently rare. So, in the general vernacular, there is already a consensus that critical thinking is a skill.

And that makes it something that you can learn or improve through practice and exercise.

One issue with critical thinking - as with all thinking - is that it’s invisible. You could well be the most clever, most critical thinker on the planet, but nobody would know it in the absence of some observable evidence of those skills. I’d like to suggest that critical thinking skills are certainly worth learning and practicing, but more than that, we have to become good at implementing those skills in our writing, speech and decision making. This is the part of the topic that fascinates me: how we go from a set of thinking skills to a set of real-life actions that would lead others to suspect that you possess those skills.

Let me know what you think about this.