3 Important Critical Thinking Skills

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We learn to apply them in work and everyday life
Critical thinking is not a habit of questioning or criticizing everything. It is a complex mental activity that consists of the ability to analyze incoming information, one’s own beliefs and thoughts; to evaluate and draw conclusions. Relying on critical thinking, we form a picture of the world that corresponds to reality and, as a result, make more informed decisions.

Let's look at how to apply basic critical thinking skills in work and life with written or spoken text.

Understanding a text begins with analysis.

1. Analysis consists of the ability to divide the text into albania phone number lead parts: to highlight the thesis, arguments and extraneous materials.

A thesis is the main idea of ​​a text that needs to be proven. It is a thought, not an opinion, not a description, not an emotion, not a fact. To prove a thesis, the text must provide arguments. These can be facts, accurate data or research results obtained from verified sources and supported by expert opinion. Emotional statements are extraneous materials; they should be excluded from consideration when approaching a critical approach. This is not easy, because emotions are often used by authors of texts to prevent us from thinking critically.

Analysis allows you to track the structure of the text or notice the lack of structure.

2. The evaluation of arguments occurs according to a number of criteria, the main ones being truth, relevance and sufficiency.

Arguments can be statements whose truth has been proven. We wrote in detail about how to evaluate the truth of an argument in the article “Learning to Think Critically: Fact-Checking Skills” . It happens that authors try to use unproven statements as arguments: references to an established opinion or assumptions made by someone. This is the so-called “anticipation of the basis”, when the truth of the argument is only assumed. Such arguments cannot be taken into account when substantiating a thesis.

The truth of the arguments must be established independently of the truth of the thesis, so that a "vicious circle of evidence" does not form.

Of course, the arguments should not contradict each other, because if one of the arguments contradicts another, then one of them is false.

Relevance is the presence of a logical connection between the thesis and the argument. The thesis should logically follow from the argument. The relevance of each argument should be given special attention, because substituting a thesis during argumentation is one of the common manipulation techniques.

Argumentation is sufficient if the thesis necessarily follows from the set of arguments. In a broader sense, this is a criterion that, in addition to formal logic, also includes the “quality” of arguments: how convincing are the arguments that the author of the text presented to substantiate the thesis? Was the author impartial, was he able to avoid preferences and prejudices? Are there any extremes – insufficient or excessive argumentation?



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