dibya’s blogosphere

No matter what we do we cannot escape our thinking. Whether we are working through a complex problem on the job, communicating with our spouses, trying to reason with our children, or even attempting to relax on our day off, our thinking is always functioning with us, determining how we see things, what the world looks like to us. Whether we recognize it or not thinking is the most significant determinant of the quality of our lives. It is our thinking that determines the extent to which we can reason well through complex problems. It is our thinking that determines the extent to which we think through the implications of the decisions we make. It is our thinking that determines whether we can identify the assumptions we are making, and whether we should questions those assumptions. Thinking is so much a part of the human experience that it is virtually impossible to imagine the human separate from thinking. In other words, because we continually think, we take for granted the phenomenon of our “thinking.” Not only do we take the fact that we think for granted, but we also tend to assume that the individual thinking that we do basically works well for us. We do not generally question our thinking. Rather we tend to live with the notion that our thinking is fine, thank you very much. (And this is even true when the quality of our lives is poor).
But many, if not most, of the problems in human life directly arise from problems in human thinking. Because we do not think well, we are often unable to accomplish our purposes at work. Because we do not think well, we are often unable to follow out the implications of our potential decisions. Because we don’t think well we often create problems for ourselves and others.

It is thinking then that holds the key to human life. Yet most of us are held hostage by our thinking. Most of us have no idea what our thinking is doing. Most of us are not capable of explicitly analyzing our thinking. Therefore most of us are unable to systematically find flaws in our thinking. We are trapped by the workings of our own minds.
Yet we need not be trapped by our thinking. We have a choice. Every day we do not take charge of our thinking, we make the choice to lead limited lives. Every day we do not take charge of our thinking we make the choice to be victimized by the inadequacies in our thinking.

Critical Thinking is the disciplined art of thinking that transforms thinking. Critical thinking ensures that you use the best thinking you are capable of in any set of circumstances. The general goal of thinking is to “figure something out.” In every situation and context, we all have multiple things to figure out. Thinking enables us to do this. The problem is that our thinking often goes awry. Often it presents the world falsely to us. Often it causes us to make serious mistakes. Often it causes us to lose money, to waste resources, to make bad investments, to make foolish decisions, to hurt ourselves or others.
Nothing you can do, of course, guarantees that you will discover the complete truth about anything, but there is a way to get better at it. Excellence of thought, skill in thinking are real possibilities. However, to maximize the quality of your thinking, you must learn how to become an effective “critic” of your thinking. And to become an effective critic of your thinking, you have to make learning about thinking a priority.
Ask yourself these — rather unusual — questions: What have you learned about how you think? Did you ever study your thinking? What information do you have, for example, about how the intellectual processes that occur as your mind thinks? More to the point, perhaps, what do you really know about how to analyze, evaluate, or reconstruct your thinking? Where does your thinking come from? How much of it is of “good” quality? How much of it is of “poor” quality? How much of your thinking is vague, muddled, inconsistent, inaccurate, illogical, or superficial? Are you, in any real sense, in control of your thinking? Do you know how to test it? Do you have any conscious standards for determining when you are thinking well and when you are thinking poorly? Have you ever discovered a significant problem in your thinking and then changed it by a conscious act of will? If anyone asked you to teach them what you have learned, thus far in your life, about thinking, would you really have any idea what that was or how you learned it?

If you are like most, the only honest answers to these questions run along the lines of: “Well, I suppose I really don’t know much about my thinking or about thinking in general. I suppose in my life I have more or less taken my thinking for granted. I don’t really know how it works. I have never really studied it. I don’t know how I test it, or even if I do test it. It just happens in my mind automatically.”
In other words, serious study of thinking, serious thinking about thinking, is rare in human life. It is not a subject in most schools. It is not a subject taught at home. But if you focus your attention for a moment on the role that thinking is playing in your life, you may come to recognize that, in fact, everything you do or want or feel is influenced by your thinking.

If you begin to take thinking seriously, here are some things you will eventually discover: that all of us have, somewhere along the way, picked up bad habits of thinking; that all of us, for example, make generalizations when we don’t have the evidence to back them up; allow stereotypes to influence our thinking; form some false beliefs; look at the world from a distorted point of view; ignore or attack points of view that conflict with our own; fabricate illusions and myths which we subconsciously confuse with what is true and real; think deceptively about many aspects of our experience.