Definition of critical thinking
Critical thinking includes insight, analysis and evaluation in the process of thinking. It includes the thinking reaction process that may be tangible or intangible in order to get a positive judgment, and makes the scientific basis consistent with daily common sense. Critical thinking is the literal translation of English critical thinking. In modern society, critical thinking is generally established as one of the goals of education, especially higher education.
The basic elements of critical thinking are opinions, questions and arguments. Identifying, analyzing and evaluating these elements is the key to critical thinking.
Thinking skills of critical thinking
The direct goal of critical thinking education is to cultivate good critical thinkers, that is, people who can integrate various skills of critical thinking and use them effectively, and enhance their self-confidence, consciousness and good judgment in using these powerful tools in other disciplines and daily life. A good critical thinker includes both the dimension of skills and the dimension of temperament. Core critical thinking skills include explanation, analysis, evaluation, reasoning, explanation and self-adjustment.
(1) explanation
Understand and express the significance or importance of various experiences, scenarios, data, events, practices, beliefs, rules, procedures and standards. 1. Category classification uses categories to classify, distinguish, understand and describe the characteristics and meanings of information. For example, identify a problem and define its nature without prejudice; Identify useful methods for classifying and subdividing information; Use a specific classification framework to classify data, findings or opinions.
2. Interpret the sense of meaning, pay attention to and describe the information content, emotional expression, purpose, social significance, values, viewpoints, rules, procedures and standards. For example, to perceive and describe the purpose of a person asking questions; Identify the meaning of specific facial expressions or gestures in specific social situations; Understand the use of irony or rhetorical question in debate; Explain the data obtained by using special instruments.
3. Clarify the meaning to explain or clarify the context, agreement or expected meaning of words, concepts, statements, behaviors, pictures, numbers, marks, charts, symbols, rules, events or ceremonies by definition, description, analogy or figurative expression, and eliminate confusion, ambiguity or ambiguity, or design a reasonable program for this elimination.
(2) Analysis
Determine the reasoning relationship between intention and reality in the statement, and determine the questions, concepts, descriptions or other representations that express beliefs, judgments, experiences, reasons, information or opinions. 1. The concept of censorship determines the role that each expression plays or tries to play in the context of argumentation, reasoning or persuasion; Define the concept; Comparative concepts or statements; Identify problems or problems and determine their components, and at the same time determine the conceptual relationship between them and between each part and the whole.
2. Discovering an argument determines whether a statement, description, question or diagram expresses or attempts to express one (or more) reasons to support or oppose a claim, viewpoint or argument.
3. Analyze and demonstrate the reasons for supporting or opposing a certain claim, and determine its (1) main conclusion; (2) the premise or reason to support the main conclusion; (3) Deep premise or reason (premise or reason supporting the main conclusion); (4) Other unexpressed reasoning factors, such as indirect conclusions, undeclared assumptions or premises; (5) the overall structure or reasoning chain of argument; (6) Review any items that are not intended to be part of the reasoning, but are included in the presentation as background.
(3) Evaluation
Assess the credibility of statements and statements that explain people's perceptions, experiences, situations, judgments, beliefs or opinions; The logical ability to evaluate the actual or expected reasoning relationship between statements, descriptions, questions or other expressions. 1. Evaluation advocates understanding the factors related to the credibility of evaluation information or opinion sources; Assess the contextual relevance indicated by the question, information, principle, rule or procedure; Assess acceptability, that is, the true or likely true confidence level of any particular experience, situation, judgment, belief or opinion expression.
2. Evaluating the acceptability of an argument premise can prove whether the conclusion expressed by the argument can be accepted as true (deductive certainty) or possibly true (inductive or reasonable argument); Anticipate or raise doubts and objections, and evaluate whether these points involved are the main weaknesses of the evaluated argument; Determine whether an argument depends on false or suspicious assumptions or premises, and then determine how they critically affect the strength of the argument; Inference of judging rationality and fallacy; The premise of judging the acceptability of the argument and the probative force of the hypothesis; Determine to what extent additional information can strengthen or weaken the argument.
(4) Inference
Identify and master the factors needed to draw a reasonable conclusion; Form conjectures and assumptions; Considering relevant information, we can draw logical reasoning from data, statements, principles, evidence, judgments, beliefs, opinions, concepts, descriptions, questions or other expressions. 1. Seek evidence, especially understand the support premise we need, and plan to seek and collect strategies that may provide such support information; Generally speaking, it is necessary to judge the information related to the relative advantages, acceptability or rationality of a choice, problem, problem, theory, hypothesis or statement, and determine the reasonable exploration strategy to obtain these information. For example, when trying to develop a persuasive argument to support someone's point of view, it is necessary to judge what is useful background information and form a plan to clearly answer the question about whether this information is available; After judging that some missing information is closely related to determining whether a point of view is more reasonable than a competitive point of view, it is necessary to plan to search for this information and reveal whether it is available.
2. Speculative choice clarifies various options for solving problems, makes a series of speculations about a certain problem, designs optional assumptions about matters, and makes various plans to achieve the goal; Describe the sequence of predicting and designing possible outcomes of decisions, positions, policies, theories or beliefs.
3. Draw a conclusion and use an appropriate reasoning model to decide what position, viewpoint or view a person should take on a given matter or problem; For a statement, description, question or premise set, inference is made at an appropriate level of logical force and the results or assumptions supported, guaranteed, included or deduced; Successful use of various forms of reasoning, from the evidence at hand to determine some possible conclusions have the strongest guarantee, the strongest support, and according to the given information to determine which one should be rejected, or should be considered unreasonable.
5. Description
State the result of reasoning; Proof reasoning is proved by the background on which relevant evidence, concepts, methods, standards and results are based; State reasoning in a convincing form of argument. 1. state the results accurately, describe or characterize the results of reasoning activities, so as to analyze, evaluate, infer or monitor them from those results.
2. The proof program expresses the concepts, methods, standards and contextual considerations used to form evidence for interpretation, analysis, evaluation or inference, so that these processes can be accurately recorded, evaluated and described, and proved to themselves or others, or so as to remedy the defects found in the general process of implementing these processes. For example, when studying a time-consuming and difficult problem or scientific procedure, record the process and steps of inquiry; Explain the special statistical tests selected for data analysis; Describe the criteria used in evaluating the document; Explain how to understand key concepts when the clarification of concepts is essential to promote the study of specific issues; Interpretation is always a prerequisite for being satisfied with the technical methods used; Reports are used for strategies aimed at making decisions in a reasonable way; Design a quantitative or spatial information map to describe evidence.
3. Put forward arguments and explain the reasons for accepting the claim; Respond to objections to the appropriateness of methods, conceptual explanations, evidence or the context of reasoning, analysis or evaluation.
(6) Self-calibration
Consciously monitor one's cognitive activities, the elements used in those activities and the results obtained, especially apply analysis and evaluation skills to one's reasoning and judgment, so as to question, confirm, confirm or correct one's reasoning or results. 1. introspect and reflect on your own reasoning, verify the results and their application, and reflect on the application of cognitive skills; Make an objective and thoughtful meta-cognitive evaluation of your own views and reasons for persistence; Judge to what extent your thinking is influenced by lack of knowledge or stereotypes, prejudices, emotions and any other factors that suppress one's objectivity or rationality; Reflect on your own motives, values, attitudes and interests, so as to make sure that you have tried your best to avoid prejudice, be fair, thorough, objective, respect truth and rationality, and remain rational in future analysis, interpretation, evaluation, inference or expression.
2. Self-correcting, self-checking, exposing errors or deficiencies, and designing reasonable procedures to remedy or correct these errors and their causes if possible.
The importance of critical thinking
Why is critical thinking so valued in the west? This is closely related to people's new views on education and psychological development. Let's look at how people understand education and psychological development at present. Education is the process of cultivating new members of society through cultural inheritance; Its purpose is to enable new social members not only to inherit the existing social culture, but also to develop this culture in order to constantly understand and transform the world; Its concrete way is to internalize the history and culture of human society into individual psychological wisdom; It focuses on the psychological development of the ideal individual. Individual's psychological development is the result of individual's independent construction and social and cultural external guidance. Vygotsky believes that there are not only differences between human individual psychology and animal psychology, but also essential differences.
The psychological development of human beings is a process of continuous transformation from the low-level psychological function shared by human beings and animals to the unique high-level psychological function of human beings. Low-level psychological function directly interacts with the outside world; Advanced psychological function interacts with the outside world through the intermediary of symbol system, which is gradually developed by human beings in production and labor, and embodies the indirect experience of human society, so it is the result of the historical development of human society.
As an individual, the transformation of children's psychological function is also realized in the process of interaction with the social environment. This kind of social communication activity takes language symbols as the intermediary and human social experience as the content. It first exists in an external form, then gradually transforms into an internal activity, and finally internalizes into its own cognitive structure. In other words, children's psychological development is the result of constant internalization of social communication activities, and children's knowledge, thoughts, attitudes and values are all developed in the interaction with others. This psychological development process not only requires children's active and independent construction process (that is, internalization process), but also depends on the guidance and help of people around them, and more on the setting of educational goals and contents.
Because the development of individuals needs both the internal cause of self-construction and the external cause of social guidance, self-construction and social guidance constitute two aspects of unity of opposites. As the most important social orientation, education is a value orientation. In this way, independent construction and value guidance are also mutually restricted and interrelated. To say that education is a value orientation means: education has a purpose and a direction; As the spokesman of human culture, teachers have moral responsibility for the growth of students. Value orientation is mainly reflected in the value choice and value presupposition of educators in education. Self-construction means that the educated are independent individuals with free will and personal dignity; The mind and personality of the educated are actively generated in social communication activities, and the meaning of any external things can only be transformed into his own experience through the subjective understanding of the educated.
Independent construction and value guidance should not be neglected. Denying value orientation means denying education, obliterating the role of teachers and giving up teachers' responsibilities. This is a naturalistic view of education and idealism? Endogenous theory? . On the other hand, denying self-construction will degenerate value guidance into mechanical indoctrination and transmission, which will lead to behaviorism education view and absolute? External theory? In this way, the educated will be regarded as crops, not people with free will, unique and rich inner world and independent judgment. Anyway? Only by recognizing the guiding role of value rather than the leading role can we talk about the significance of independent construction; Only by determining the connotation of self-construction in psychological development (that is, internalizing social and cultural experience) can we talk about the role of value orientation.
If individual psychological development is the unity of opposites between self-construction and value guidance, what is the position of critical thinking in this development? First of all, individualizing social culture is actually sublating social culture. Experience in one's mind is not a complete copy of social culture. The individual does not fully accept all the information presented to him, but critically understands and absorbs it. What individuals pay attention to and choose is completely determined by their own self-construction on the basis of original experience. Emphasizing self-construction means that individuals have independent and selective judgment ability. Secondly, education aims at developing individual subjective personality and diversified personality. Emphasizing value guidance means that education is not forced to instill and clone thousands of people; It only provides a possible space for individuals to judge and choose independently, thus developing their own uniqueness. More importantly, the purpose of education is not only to enable individuals to inherit the existing culture, but also to create a new culture.
Individuals must have independent judgment ability to evaluate what is true, meaningful and valuable in the existing culture, and more importantly, to evaluate whether the culture they create is meaningful and valuable. In a word, the unity of opposites between independent construction and value guidance means that individuals have, need and must have critical thinking ability.
The reason why critical thinking is paid more and more attention is not only because of its importance in the whole new educational concept, but also because the acquisition of critical thinking ability has important practical significance in the ever-changing information society. As we all know, in the information society, information is the first resource. However, with the continuous growth of information, we are faced with an information ocean. This information may not be very meaningful and valuable to all of us, and our time is limited. This means that if we want to succeed, we must selectively obtain information, properly evaluate information and then make a decision.
Faced with all kinds of information, all kinds of alternative solutions to problems, and different views of others, we must make appropriate evaluations. In real life, if we leave independent critical thinking, we may be overwhelmed by the ocean of information in Wang Yang; Confused by various specious solutions; Misguided by the true lies of people with ulterior motives. Because of this, it is no wonder that people list critical thinking as one of the five skills that citizens must possess in the future. The other four skills are information processing ability, problem-solving ability, learning ability and global awareness.