Critically Thinking

Critical Thinking

Thinking is certainly a very important part of everyone lives. Every action I do is filled with thoughts. From the book "Thinking Critically" our beliefs influence our emotions and our actions (Kiersky & Caste, 1995). I believe correct thinking in the pursuit of relevant and reliable knowledge about the world is considered critical thinking. It is decisive, directed thought. It is not easy, as it requires explicit mental energy. I believe majority of the decisions and issues we face do not require critical thinking. The purpose of critical thinking is to help answer the question of whether or not to adopt a belief (Kiersky et al., 1995). Critical thinking is concerned with the justification and validation of my beliefs. As a child, I was not born with the power to think critically, nor did I develop this ability naturally beyond survival-level thinking. My critical thinking was taught to me. The United States Navy contributed to the teaching of my critical thinking. The Navy helped me increase my awareness in ways on how I think and form a basis, how I justify, how I explain, how I rationalize, and how I persuade. I find that critical thinking sharpened my skills in evaluating the claims made by others and organizing, presenting, and putting into writing my own arguments. Critical thinking also enhanced anyone problem-solving and decision-making skills. I was a paralegal in the United States Navy that really required problem solving and decision making. I handled personal and sensitive cases that required critical and political thinking, which ranged from anthrax issues to accepting gifts from foreign allies. Reviewing my homework, discussed by Paul and Elder (2006, chap. 1), I found critical thinking serves two incompatible ends. The first one is self-centeredness and the other is called fair-mindedness. I considered myself as fair-mindedness.

This thinking process is challenging. I believe fair-mindedness mimics the method of scientific investigation. A question is identified, an hypothesis formulated, relevant data sought and gathered, the hypothesis is logically tested and evaluated, and reliable conclusion are drawn from the result. All of the skills of scientific investigation are matched by critical thinking, which I see is nothing more than scientific method used in everyday life (Kiersky et al.). Critical thinking is scientific thinking. This chapter also defined the requirement of fair-mindedness. For a person to be fair-minded, he or she should strive to treat every viewpoint relevant to a situation in an unbiased, unprejudiced way. Fair-mindedness is broken down into seven intellectual traits (Paul et al., 2006). The traits are intellectual humility, courage, empathy, integrity, perseverance, confidence in reason, and autonomy.

Intellectual humility involves being keenly aware of the extent of one's ignorance when thinking through any issue, especially on an emotionally charged issue. Its opposition is an intellectual arrogance. These people are victimized by their own bias and prejudice and frequently claim to know more than they actually know. An example the chapter gives is a person may be outwardly self-deprecating by uncritically follows a cult leader, but intellectually he or she believes what does not make sense to believe and is at the same time fully confidence in his or her beliefs. Intellectual courage is where you face and fairly address ideas, beliefs, or viewpoints even when this is painful. Its opposition is cowardice. Intellectual cowardice is the fear of ideas that do not conform to one's own. Intellectual empathy correlates with ability to reconstruct accurately the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. The opposite of intellectual empathy is intellectual self-centeredness. Intellectual integrity is recognizing his or her need to be true to one's own thinking and