Imagine you have been invited to a movie by a friend. But it's not a movie you want to see. So, your friend asks you why. You give your honest reason: the movie offends your sense of decency, not because of the language used or the sexuality portrayed, but because of the violence it depicts so graphically. Sure, that should be a good enough answer. But suppose your friend pursues the matter by asking you to define "offensive violence." Well, take a minute and give it a try. How would you define "offensive violence" as it applies to movies? Can you write a characterization which captures what this commonly used concept contains? Take care, though, we would not want to make the definition so broad that all movie violence would be automatically "offensive." And check to be sure your way of defining "offensive violence" fits with how the rest of the people who know and use English would understand the term. Otherwise they will not be able to understand what you mean when you use that expression.

Did you come up with a definition that works? How do you know? What you just did with the expression "offensive violence" is very much the same as what had to be done with the expression "critical thinking." At one level we all know what "critical thinking" means it means good thinking, almost the opposite of illogical, irrational, thinking. But when we test our understanding further, we run into questions. For example, is critical thinking the same as creative thinking, are they different, or is one part of the other? How do critical thinking and native intelligence or scholastic aptitude relate? Does critical thinking focus on the subject matter or content that you know or on the process you use when you reason about that content? It might not hurt at all if you formed some preliminary ideas about the questions we just raised.

We humans learn better when we stop frequently to reflect, rather than just plowing along from the top of the page to the bottom without coming up for air. Fine. So how would you propose we go about defining "critical thinking." You don't really want a definition plopped on the page for you to memorize, do you? That would be silly, almost counterproductive. The goal here is to help you sharpen your critical thinking skills and cultivate your critical thinking spirit. While memorization definitely has many valuable uses, fostering critical thinking is not among them.

A group of international experts was asked to try to form a consensus about the meaning of critical thinking. One of the first things they did was to ask themselves the question: Who are the best critical thinkers we know and what is it about them that leads us to consider them the best? So, who are the best critical thinkers you know? Why do you think they are good critical thinkers? Can you draw from those examples a description that is more abstract?

Suggestion: What can the good critical thinkers do (what mental abilities do they have), that the poor critical thinkers have trouble doing? What attitudes or approaches do the good critical thinkers habitually seem to exhibit which the poor critical thinkers seem not to possess? Above we suggested you look for a list of mental abilities and attitudes or habits, the experts, when faced with the same problem you are working on, refer to their lists as including cognitive skills and affective dispositions. As to the cognitive skills here's what the experts include as being at the very core of critical thinking:

• interpretation,
• analysis,
• evaluation,
• inference,
• explanation,
• and self-regulation.

Did any of these words or ideas come up when you tried to characterize the cognitive skills mental abilities involved in critical thinking? Quoting from the consensus statement of the national panel of experts: interpretation is "to comprehend and express the meaning or significance of a wide variety of experiences, situations, data, events, judgments, conventions, beliefs, rules, procedures, or criteria."

1 Interpretation includes the sub-skills of categorization, decoding significance, and clarifying meaning. Can you think of examples of interpretation? How about recognizing a problem and describing it without bias? How about reading a person's intentions in the expression on her face; distinguishing a main idea from subordinate ideas in a text; constructing a tentative categorization or way of organizing something you are studying; paraphrasing someone's ideas in your own words; or, clarifying what a sign, chart or graph means? What about identifying an author's purpose, theme, or point of view? How about what you did above when you clarified what "offensive violence" meant?

2. Again from the experts: analysis is "to identify the intended and actual inferential relationships among statements, questions, concepts, descriptions, or other forms of representation intended to express belief, judgment, experiences, reasons, information, or opinions." The experts include examining ideas, detecting arguments, and analyzing arguments as sub-skills of analysis. Again, can you come up with some examples of analysis? What about identifying the similarities and differences between two approaches to the solution of a given problem? What about picking out the main claim made in a newspaper editorial and tracing back the various reasons the editor offers in support of that claim? Or, what about identifying unstated assumptions; constructing a way to represent a main conclusion and the various reasons given to support or criticize it; sketching the relationship of sentences or paragraphs to each other and to the main purpose of the passage. What about graphically organizing this chapter, in your own way, knowing that its purpose is to give a preliminary idea about what critical thinking means?

3. The experts define evaluation as meaning "to assess the credibility of statements or other representations which are accounts or descriptions of a person's perception, experience, situation, judgment, belief, or opinion; and to assess the logical strength of the actual or intended inferential relationships among statements, descriptions, questions or other forms of representation." Your examples? How about judging an author's credibility of an author or speaker, comparing the strengths and weaknesses of alternative interpretations, determining the credibility of a source of information, judging if two statements contradict each other, or judging if the evidence at hand supports the conclusion being drawn? Among the examples the experts propose are these: "recognizing the factors which make a person a credible witness regarding a given event or a credible authority with regard to a given topic," "judging if an argument's conclusion follows either with certainty or with a high level of confidence from its premises," "judging the logical strength of arguments based on hypothetical situations," "judging if a given argument is relevant or applicable or has implications for the situation at hand." Do the people you regard as good critical thinkers have the three cognitive skills described so far? Are they good at interpretation, analysis, and evaluation? What about the next three? And your examples of poor critical thinkers, are they lacking in these cognitive skills? All, or just some?

4. To the experts inference means "to identify and secure elements needed to draw reasonable conclusions; to form conjectures and hypotheses; to consider relevant information and to educe the consequences flowing from data, statements, principles, evidence, judgments, beliefs, opinions, concepts, descriptions, questions, or other forms of representation." As sub-skills of inference the experts list querying evidence, conjecturing alternatives, and drawing conclusions. Can you think of some examples of inference? You might suggest things like seeing the implications of a position someone is advocating, drawing out or constructing meaning from the elements in a reading, or identifying and securing the information needed to formulate a synthesis from multiple sources. How about this: after judging that it would be useful to resolving a given uncertainty if you knew certain facts, deciding on a plan which would yield clear knowledge regarding those facts? Or, when faced with a problem, developing a set of options for addressing it. What about, conducting a controlled experiment scientifically and applying the proper statistical methods to attempt to confirm or disconfirm an empirical hypothesis?

5. Beyond being able to interpret, analyze, evaluate and infer, good critical thinkers can do two more things. They can explain what they think and how they arrived at that judgment. And, they can apply their powers of critical thinking to themselves and improve on their previous opinions. These two skills are called "explanation" and "self-regulation." The experts define explanation as being able "to state the results of one's reasoning; to justify that reasoning in terms of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, and contextual considerations upon which one's results were based; and to present one's reasoning in the form of cogent arguments." The sub-skills under explanation are stating results, justifying procedures, and presenting arguments. Your examples first, please... Here are some more: to construct a chart which organizes one's findings, to write down for future reference your current thinking on some important and complex matter, to site the standards and contextual factors used to judge the quality of an interpretation of a text, to state research results and describe the methods and criteria used to achieve those results, to appeal to established criteria as a way of showing the reasonableness of a given judgment, to design a graphic display which accurately represents the subordinate and super-ordinate relationship among concepts or ideas, to site the evidence that led you to accept or reject an author's position on an issue, to list the factors that were considered in assigning a final course grade.

6. Maybe the most remarkable cognitive skill of all, however, is this next one. This one is remarkable because it allows good critical thinkers to improve their own thinking. In a sense this is critical thinking applied to itself. Because of that some people want to call this "meta-cognition," meaning it raises thinking to another level. But "another level" really does not fully capture it, because at that next level up what self- regulation does is look back at all the dimensions of critical thinking and double check itself. Self-regulation is like a recursive function in mathematical term, which means it can apply to everything, including itself. You can monitor and correct an interpretation you offered. You can examine and correct an inference you have drawn. You can review and reformulate one of your own explanations. You can even examine and correct your ability to examine and correct yourself! How? It's as simple as stepping back and saying to yourself, "How am I doing? Have I missed anything important? Let me double check before I go further." The experts define self-regulation to mean "self-consciously to monitor one's cognitive activities, the elements used in those activities, and the results educed, particularly by applying skills in analysis, and evaluation to one's own inferential judgments with a view toward questioning, confirming, validation, or correcting either one's reasoning or one's results." The two sub-skills here are self-examination and self-correction. Examples? Easy to examine your views on a controversial issue with sensitivity to the possible influences on your personal biases or self-interest, to monitor how well you seem to be understanding or comprehending something, to separate your personal opinions and assumptions from those of the author of a passage or text, to double check yourself by recalculating the figures, to vary your reading speed and method according to the type of material and one's purpose for reading, to reconsider your interpretation or judgment in view of further analysis of the facts of the case, to revise your answers in view of the errors you discovered in your work, to change your conclusion in view of the realization that you had misjudged the importance of certain factors when coming to your earlier decision.

But, you might say, I know of plenty of people who have skills but don't use them. We can't call someone a good critical thinker just because she or he has these six cognitive skills, however important they might be, because what if they just don't bother to use them. One response is to say that it is hard to imagine an accomplished dancer who never dances. After working to develop those skills it seems such a shame to let them grow weak with lack of practice. But dancers get tired. And they surrender to the stiffness of age or the fear of injury. In the case of critical thinking skills, we might argue that not using them once you have them is hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine a person deciding not to think. In a very real sense critical thinking is pervasive.

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The approaches to life and living in general which characterize critical thinking include:

• inquisitiveness with regard to a wide range of issues,
• concern to become and remain well-informed,
• alertness to opportunities to use critical thinking,
• trust in the processes of reasoned inquiry,
• self-confidence in one's own abilities to reason,
• open-mindedness regarding divergent world views,
• flexibility in considering alternatives and opinions understanding of the opinions of other people,
• fair-mindedness in appraising reasoning,
• honesty in facing one's own biases, prejudices, stereotypes, egocentric or sociocentric tendencies,
• prudence in suspending, making or altering judgments,
• willingness to reconsider and revise views where honest reflection suggests that change is warranted.

What would someone be like who lacked those dispositions? It might be someone who does not care about much of anything, is not interested in the facts, prefers not to think, mistrusts reasoning as a way of finding things out or solving problems, holds his or her own reasoning abilities in low esteem, is close-minded, inflexible, insensitive, can't understand what others think, is unfair when it comes to judging the quality of arguments, denies his or her own biases, jumps to conclusions or delays too long in making judgments, and never is willing to reconsider an opinion. Not someone we're looking to meet on a blind date!

The experts went beyond approaches to life and living in general to emphasize that good critical thinkers can also be described in terms of how they approach specific issues, questions, or problems. The experts said you would find

• clarity in stating the question or concern,
• orderliness in working with complexity,
• diligence in seeking relevant information,
• reasonableness in selecting and applying criteria,
• care in focusing attention on the concern at hand,
• persistence through difficulties are encountered,
• precision to the degree permitted by the subject and the circumstances.

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Someone strongly disposed toward critical thinking would probably agree with statements like these:

• "I hate talk shows where people just state their opinions but never give any reasons at all."
• "Figuring out what people really mean by what they say is important to me."
• "I always do better in jobs where I'm expected to think things out for myself."
• "I hold off making decisions until I've thought through my options."
• "Rather than relying on someone else's notes, I prefer to read the material myself."
• "I try to see the merit in another's opinion, even if I reject it later."
• "Even if a problem is tougher than I expected, I'll keep working on it."
• "Making intelligent decisions is more important than winning arguments."

A person with weak critical thinking dispositions would probably disagree with the statements above but be likely to agree with these:

• "I prefer jobs where the supervisor says exactly what to do and exactly how to do it."
• "No matter how complex the problem, you can bet there will be a simple solution."
• "I don't waste time looking things up."
• "I hate when teachers discuss problems instead of just giving the answers."
• "If my belief is truly sincere, evidence to the contrary is irrelevant."
• "Selling an idea is like selling cars, you say whatever works."

We've said so many good things about critical thinking that you might have the impression that "critical thinking" and "good thinking" mean the same thing. But that is not what the experts said. They see critical thinking as making up part of what we mean by good thinking, but not as being the only kind of good thinking. For example, they would have included creative thinking as part of good thinking. Creative or innovative thinking is the kind of thinking that leads to new insights, novel approaches, fresh perspectives, whole new ways of understanding and conceiving of things. The products of creative thought include some obvious things like music, poetry, dance, dramatic literature, inventions, and technical innovations. But there are some not so obvious examples as well, such as ways of putting a question that expand the horizons of possible solutions, or ways of conceiving of relationships challenge presuppositions and lead one to see the world in imaginative and different ways. In working on how to understand critical thinking the experts wisely left open the entire question of what the other forms good thinking might take.

Creative thinking is only one example. There is a kind of purposive, kinetic thinking that instantly coordinates movement and intention as, for example, when an athlete dribbles a soccer ball down the field during a match. There is a kind of meditative thinking which may lead to a sense of inner peace or to profound insights about human existence. In contrast, there is a kind of hyper-alert, instinctive thinking needed by soldiers in battle. There are probably other kinds of good thinking as well. Different kinds of good thinking are optimal in different circumstances or for different purposes.

Which brings us to the final question, "Why is Critical Thinking of Value?" Let's start with you first. Why would it be of value to you to have the cognitive skills of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation? Why would it be of value to you to learn to approach life and to approach specific concerns with the affective dispositions listed above. Would you have greater success in your work? Would you get better grades? Actually the answer to the grades question, scientifically speaking, is very possibly, Yes! A study of over 1100 college students shows that scores on a college level critical thinking skills test significantly correlated with college GPA.2 It has also been shown that critical thinking skills can be learned, which suggests that as one learns them one's GPA might well improve. In further support of this hypothesis is the significant correlation between critical thinking and reading comprehension. Improvements in the one are paralleled by improvements in the other.

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Liberal education is about learning to learn, to think for yourself, on your own and in collaboration with others. Liberal education leads us away from naive acceptance of authority, above self-defeating relativism, beyond ambiguous contextualism. It culminates in principled reflective judgment. Learning critical thinking, cultivating the critical spirit, is not just a means to this end, it is part of the goal itself. People who are poor critical thinkers, who lack the dispositions and skills described, cannot be said to be liberally educated, regardless of the academic degrees they may hold. Yes, there is much more to a liberal education, than critical thinking:

• There is an understanding of the methods, principles, theories and ways of achieving knowledge which are proper to the different intellectual realms.
• There is an encounter with the cultural, artistic and spiritual dimensions of life.
• There is the evolution of one's decision making to the level of principled integrity.
• There is the realization of the ways all our lives are shaped by global as well as local political, social, psychological, economic, environmental, and physical forces.
• There is the growth that comes from the interaction with cultures, languages, ethnic groups, religions, nationalities, and social classes other than one's own.
• There is the refinement of one's humane sensibilities through reflection on the recurring questions of human existence, meaning, love, life and death.
• There is the sensitivity, appreciation and critical appraisal of all that is good and to all that is bad in the human condition. As the mind awakens andmatures, and the proper nurturing and educational nourishment is provided, these others central parts of a liberal education develop as well. Critical thinking plays an essential role in achieving these purposes.

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Any thing else? What about going beyond the individual to the community? The experts say critical thinking is fundamental to, if not essential for, "a rational and democratic society." What might the experts mean by this? Well, how wise would democracy be if people abandoned critical thinking? Imagine an electorate that cared not for the facts, that did not wish to consider the pros and cons of the issues, or if they did, had not the brain power to do so. Imagine your life and the lives of your friends and family placed in the hands of juries and judges who let their biases and stereotypes govern their decisions, who do not attend to the evidence, who are not interested in reasoned inquiry, who do not know how to draw an inference or evaluate one. Without critical thinking people would be more easily exploited not only politically but economically.

Critical thinking, an informed and thoughtful citizenry, is a necessary condition for the success of democratic institutions and free market economic systems. This value is, in fact, so important that it could be argued that it is in the national interest that we should try to educate all citizens so that they can learn to think critically. Not just for their good, but for the good of the rest of us. Being a free, responsible person means being able to make rational, unconstrained choices. A person who cannot think critically, cannot make rational choices. And, those without the ability to make rational choices should not be allowed to run free, for being irresponsible, they could easily be a danger to themselves and to the rest of us.