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    Lessons from Critical Thinkers: Methods for Clear Thinking and Analysis in Everyday Situations from the Greatest Thinkers in History
    Lessons from Critical Thinkers: Methods for Clear Thinking and Analysis in Everyday Situations from the Greatest Thinkers in History
    Lessons from Critical Thinkers: Methods for Clear Thinking and Analysis in Everyday Situations from the Greatest Thinkers in History
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    Lessons from Critical Thinkers: Methods for Clear Thinking and Analysis in Everyday Situations from the Greatest Thinkers in History

    By Albert Rutherford

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    About this ebook

    Do you want to ask smart questions like Socrates, be an out-of-the-box thinker like John Stuart Mill, and rational like Descartes?



    These people have at least one thing in common; they were great critical thinkers of their time and their shared wisdom lived through the centuries.
    Lessons From Critical Thinkers provides intellectual power to engage with and participate in effective critical thoughts, arguments, debates, reading, and reflection drawn from methods in the history of philosophical cognitive development.
    •Learn to think slowly and deliberately before making a decision
    •Get ready to question opinions and even facts
    •Learn to gather information before jumping to conclusions
    •Accept and expect the biased and flawed nature of human cognition
    Lessons From Critical Thinkers gives you a thorough presentation of the ideas and principles of critical thinking practiced by the greatest minds in history. Learn about the most important critical thinking methods to make better decisions in your personal life, career, and friendships.


    Equip yourself with the essential methods for clear, analytical, logical thinking and critique in a range of ideas and everyday situations.



    •Discover critical thinking by familiarizing with concepts from other disciplines, like philosophy, cognitive biases and errors, race and gender from sociology and political science, and symbols from rhetoric.
    •Apply critical thinking and reasoning skills to your day to day problems
    •Find the most rewarding options in any opportunity.
    Lessons From Critical Thinkers is a helpful book for readers of any age and background who want to improve their critical thinking skills by learning from the greatest thinkers of all time. Learn to filter out irrelevant information efficiently and prioritize your resources to get the best results. Enhance your communication skills, reasoning, and logic.


    Improve your critical, logical, observational, and rational thinking skills with the timeless principles presented in this book.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPublishdrive
    Release dateMar 4, 2019
    ISBN9781792674181
    Lessons from Critical Thinkers: Methods for Clear Thinking and Analysis in Everyday Situations from the Greatest Thinkers in History

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      Lessons from Critical Thinkers - Albert Rutherford

      Endnotes

      Chapter 1: Socrates and Aristotle

      Socrates

      Background

      Socrates is one of the most well-known Greek philosophers, and the earliest. His work focused on morals and exists solely in accounts written by his students, Plato and Xenophon; none of his own writing is known to exist. He lived from roughly 470 BCE to 399 BCE, and was a member of an aristocratic family. He began his career as a soldier, but eventually abandoned his family to become an itinerant teacher. His teachings therefore, exist in the form of dialogue, rather than dense texts.¹

      The Socratic Method

      A teacher may have once told you he or she was using the Socratic method for class discussion; this term refers to a method of intellectual inquiry developed by Socrates and recorded in the accounts of his debates. Socrates used this method to deconstruct his opponents' arguments to find the inevitable gaps in logic, contradictions, or lack of proof. Socrates would ask his opponents a series of questions about their beliefs, eventually leading them to declare the flaws in their arguments.²

      You can think of this as the question everything mindset, which encourages people to question authority and preconceived beliefs or dogma. Socrates's goal was to reveal that people in power are not necessarily always right, that people should think for themselves and consider different arguments instead of blindly following their leaders. This process of thinking ideally involved finding hard evidence, determining if there were any flaws in logic, and predicting the implications of actions and words. The Socratic method is the most frequently-used and famous critical thinking strategy, because it provides a simple format for analyzing any argument.

      Critical thinking in general has the same ends as the Socratic method: analyzing beliefs and explanations, determining what makes an argument reasonable or not, and separating emotions from the intellectual merit of an argument or belief. Socrates's student Plato, Plato's student Aristotle, and later Greek philosophers in the school of the skeptics, all developed this process of critical thinking to analyze the appearance of things versus their true nature. Truth could be reached much faster without taking first impressions for granted, and instead thinking critically.

      Critical thinking ultimately allows its practitioner to develop a more advanced sense of personal reason, and let that highly-developed reason govern thoughts, actions, and emotional responses instead of instinct or emotion. Socratic discussion is a simple and easy way to develop critical thinking skills, because it allows the practitioner to quite literally question any flaws within an argument.

      Socratic Questioning³

      There’s no limitation to the types of questions one can ask in the Socratic method, but some questions are more helpful to the critical thinking process than others. Questions should be focused, respectful, intellectual, and critical; tuned to analyze processes, ask for more data, brainstorm interpretations, and counter assumptions. A Socratic questioner should be comfortable asking questions that keep the conversation moving, moderate the discussion, summarizing occasionally to recap what has been said, and making sure everyone is included and able to speak.

      The six types of Socratic questioning are:⁴

      Clarification questions. These ask for clarification to a statement, such as, What do you mean when you say that? or How is this connected to the argument?

      Assumption questions. These question basic assumptions about an argument. They could be, Why do we think this? or What other option could we assume?

      Perspective questions. These enquire about points of view and call them into question. You could ask for a counterargument, or raise a different view with which the group can examine an issue.

      Reason/evidence questions. These ask for specific examples to prove an argument, or explanations for a phenomenon.

      Consequence questions. These questions could be What are the implications of this argument? or How will this affect this group of people?

      Meta-questions. These are about the questions themselves; you can ask, Why are you asking this? or What is the point of your question?

      The modern critical thinking theorists, Richard Paul and Linda Elder, developed a paradigm called the Elements of Thought, an intrinsic part of their critical thinking framework. They have interwoven the Socratic method into this framework as well because it is important to overall critical thinking. The questions act as a stimulant for the brain's creative and analytic processes. This is because each known piece of information can be found using a question. Therefore, asking the right questions—that is, the ones given in the Socratic format—can help students parse out inconsistencies in others' arguments, flaws in reasoning, and creative solutions to problems. This is what critical thinking is all about.

      The Elements of Thought vary from the Socratic method, but are based in the foundations of Socrates's way of thinking. They involve thinking about the origins of thoughts, and what questions to ask based on these origins and backgrounds. For example, analyzing the motives behind someone's way of thinking because everyone has a motive. Also knowing someone's assumptions, or the consequences of a thought. Types of critically thinking about thought given by Paul and Elder closely follow the types of questions given in the Socratic method.

      Every statement in a textbook, in fact, is an answer to a question, but we never think about textbooks this way. Why? Because teachers often like to teach as much material as possible, as opposed to training students to thoughtfully engage with the things they learn. This divorces answers from questions, because only answers are given, but in fact, anything you could possibly learn is the answer to a question. If your teacher says the primary habitat of a lion is the savanna, the teacher is also implicitly asking you where the lions' main habitat is, and the information can be translated into a pointed question that is usable within the Socratic method. Thinking is not powered by the answers we're given, but

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