explain how the scientific attitude encourages critical thinking

Thinking critically on critical thinking: why scientists’ skills need to spread

Lecturer in Psychology, University of Tasmania

Disclosure statement

Rachel Grieve does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Tasmania provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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MATHS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION: We’ve asked our authors about the state of maths and science education in Australia and its future direction. Today, Rachel Grieve discusses why we need to spread science-specific skills into the wider curriculum.

When we think of science and maths, stereotypical visions of lab coats, test-tubes, and formulae often spring to mind.

But more important than these stereotypes are the methods that underpin the work scientists do – namely generating and systematically testing hypotheses. A key part of this is critical thinking.

It’s a skill that often feels in short supply these days, but you don’t necessarily need to study science or maths in order gain it. It’s time to take critical thinking out of the realm of maths and science and broaden it into students’ general education.

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is a reflective and analytical style of thinking, with its basis in logic, rationality, and synthesis. It means delving deeper and asking questions like: why is that so? Where is the evidence? How good is that evidence? Is this a good argument? Is it biased? Is it verifiable? What are the alternative explanations?

Critical thinking moves us beyond mere description and into the realms of scientific inference and reasoning. This is what enables discoveries to be made and innovations to be fostered.

For many scientists, critical thinking becomes (seemingly) intuitive, but like any skill set, critical thinking needs to be taught and cultivated. Unfortunately, educators are unable to deposit this information directly into their students’ heads. While the theory of critical thinking can be taught, critical thinking itself needs to be experienced first-hand.

So what does this mean for educators trying to incorporate critical thinking within their curricula? We can teach students the theoretical elements of critical thinking. Take for example working through [statistical problems](http://wdeneys.org/data/COGNIT_1695.pdf](http://wdeneys.org/data/COGNIT_1695.pdf) like this one:

In a 1,000-person study, four people said their favourite series was Star Trek and 996 said Days of Our Lives. Jeremy is a randomly chosen participant in this study, is 26, and is doing graduate studies in physics. He stays at home most of the time and likes to play videogames. What is most likely? a. Jeremy’s favourite series is Star Trek b. Jeremy’s favourite series is Days of Our Lives

Some critical thought applied to this problem allows us to know that Jeremy is most likely to prefer Days of Our Lives.

Can you teach it?

It’s well established that statistical training is associated with improved decision-making. But the idea of “teaching” critical thinking is itself an oxymoron: critical thinking can really only be learned through practice. Thus, it is not surprising that student engagement with the critical thinking process itself is what pays the dividends for students.

As such, educators try to connect students with the subject matter outside the lecture theatre or classroom. For example, problem based learning is now widely used in the health sciences, whereby students must figure out the key issues related to a case and direct their own learning to solve that problem. Problem based learning has clear parallels with real life practice for health professionals.

Critical thinking goes beyond what might be on the final exam and life-long learning becomes the key. This is a good thing, as practice helps to improve our ability to think critically over time .

Just for scientists?

For those engaging with science, learning the skills needed to be a critical consumer of information is invaluable. But should these skills remain in the domain of scientists? Clearly not: for those engaging with life, being a critical consumer of information is also invaluable, allowing informed judgement.

Being able to actively consider and evaluate information, identify biases, examine the logic of arguments, and tolerate ambiguity until the evidence is in would allow many people from all backgrounds to make better decisions. While these decisions can be trivial (does that miracle anti-wrinkle cream really do what it claims?), in many cases, reasoning and decision-making can have a substantial impact, with some decisions have life-altering effects. A timely case-in-point is immunisation.

Pushing critical thinking from the realms of science and maths into the broader curriculum may lead to far-reaching outcomes. With increasing access to information on the internet, giving individuals the skills to critically think about that information may have widespread benefit, both personally and socially.

The value of science education might not always be in the facts, but in the thinking.

This is the sixth part of our series Maths and Science Education .

• Maths and science education

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35 Scientific Thinking and Reasoning

Kevin N. Dunbar, Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD

David Klahr, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

• Published: 21 November 2012
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Scientific thinking refers to both thinking about the content of science and the set of reasoning processes that permeate the field of science: induction, deduction, experimental design, causal reasoning, concept formation, hypothesis testing, and so on. Here we cover both the history of research on scientific thinking and the different approaches that have been used, highlighting common themes that have emerged over the past 50 years of research. Future research will focus on the collaborative aspects of scientific thinking, on effective methods for teaching science, and on the neural underpinnings of the scientific mind.

There is no unitary activity called “scientific discovery”; there are activities of designing experiments, gathering data, inventing and developing observational instruments, formulating and modifying theories, deducing consequences from theories, making predictions from theories, testing theories, inducing regularities and invariants from data, discovering theoretical constructs, and others. — Simon, Langley, & Bradshaw, 1981 , p. 2

What Is Scientific Thinking and Reasoning?

There are two kinds of thinking we call “scientific.” The first, and most obvious, is thinking about the content of science. People are engaged in scientific thinking when they are reasoning about such entities and processes as force, mass, energy, equilibrium, magnetism, atoms, photosynthesis, radiation, geology, or astrophysics (and, of course, cognitive psychology!). The second kind of scientific thinking includes the set of reasoning processes that permeate the field of science: induction, deduction, experimental design, causal reasoning, concept formation, hypothesis testing, and so on. However, these reasoning processes are not unique to scientific thinking: They are the very same processes involved in everyday thinking. As Einstein put it:

The scientific way of forming concepts differs from that which we use in our daily life, not basically, but merely in the more precise definition of concepts and conclusions; more painstaking and systematic choice of experimental material, and greater logical economy. (The Common Language of Science, 1941, reprinted in Einstein, 1950 , p. 98)

Nearly 40 years after Einstein's remarkably insightful statement, Francis Crick offered a similar perspective: that great discoveries in science result not from extraordinary mental processes, but rather from rather common ones. The greatness of the discovery lies in the thing discovered.

I think what needs to be emphasized about the discovery of the double helix is that the path to it was, scientifically speaking, fairly commonplace. What was important was not the way it was discovered , but the object discovered—the structure of DNA itself. (Crick, 1988 , p. 67; emphasis added)

Under this view, scientific thinking involves the same general-purpose cognitive processes—such as induction, deduction, analogy, problem solving, and causal reasoning—that humans apply in nonscientific domains. These processes are covered in several different chapters of this handbook: Rips, Smith, & Medin, Chapter 11 on induction; Evans, Chapter 8 on deduction; Holyoak, Chapter 13 on analogy; Bassok & Novick, Chapter 21 on problem solving; and Cheng & Buehner, Chapter 12 on causality. One might question the claim that the highly specialized procedures associated with doing science in the “real world” can be understood by investigating the thinking processes used in laboratory studies of the sort described in this volume. However, when the focus is on major scientific breakthroughs, rather than on the more routine, incremental progress in a field, the psychology of problem solving provides a rich source of ideas about how such discoveries might occur. As Simon and his colleagues put it:

It is understandable, if ironic, that ‘normal’ science fits … the description of expert problem solving, while ‘revolutionary’ science fits the description of problem solving by novices. It is understandable because scientific activity, particularly at the revolutionary end of the continuum, is concerned with the discovery of new truths, not with the application of truths that are already well-known … it is basically a journey into unmapped terrain. Consequently, it is mainly characterized, as is novice problem solving, by trial-and-error search. The search may be highly selective—but it reaches its goal only after many halts, turnings, and back-trackings. (Simon, Langley, & Bradshaw, 1981 , p. 5)

The research literature on scientific thinking can be roughly categorized according to the two types of scientific thinking listed in the opening paragraph of this chapter: (1) One category focuses on thinking that directly involves scientific content . Such research ranges from studies of young children reasoning about the sun-moon-earth system (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992 ) to college students reasoning about chemical equilibrium (Davenport, Yaron, Klahr, & Koedinger, 2008 ), to research that investigates collaborative problem solving by world-class researchers in real-world molecular biology labs (Dunbar, 1995 ). (2) The other category focuses on “general” cognitive processes, but it tends to do so by analyzing people's problem-solving behavior when they are presented with relatively complex situations that involve the integration and coordination of several different types of processes, and that are designed to capture some essential features of “real-world” science in the psychology laboratory (Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1956 ; Klahr & Dunbar, 1988 ; Mynatt, Doherty, & Tweney, 1977 ).

There are a number of overlapping research traditions that have been used to investigate scientific thinking. We will cover both the history of research on scientific thinking and the different approaches that have been used, highlighting common themes that have emerged over the past 50 years of research.

A Brief History of Research on Scientific Thinking

Science is often considered one of the hallmarks of the human species, along with art and literature. Illuminating the thought processes used in science thus reveal key aspects of the human mind. The thought processes underlying scientific thinking have fascinated both scientists and nonscientists because the products of science have transformed our world and because the process of discovery is shrouded in mystery. Scientists talk of the chance discovery, the flash of insight, the years of perspiration, and the voyage of discovery. These images of science have helped make the mental processes underlying the discovery process intriguing to cognitive scientists as they attempt to uncover what really goes on inside the scientific mind and how scientists really think. Furthermore, the possibilities that scientists can be taught to think better by avoiding mistakes that have been clearly identified in research on scientific thinking, and that their scientific process could be partially automated, makes scientific thinking a topic of enduring interest.

The cognitive processes underlying scientific discovery and day-to-day scientific thinking have been a topic of intense scrutiny and speculation for almost 400 years (e.g., Bacon, 1620 ; Galilei 1638 ; Klahr 2000 ; Tweney, Doherty, & Mynatt, 1981 ). Understanding the nature of scientific thinking has been a central issue not only for our understanding of science but also for our understating of what it is to be human. Bacon's Novumm Organum in 1620 sketched out some of the key features of the ways that experiments are designed and data interpreted. Over the ensuing 400 years philosophers and scientists vigorously debated about the appropriate methods that scientists should use (see Giere, 1993 ). These debates over the appropriate methods for science typically resulted in the espousal of a particular type of reasoning method, such as induction or deduction. It was not until the Gestalt psychologists began working on the nature of human problem solving, during the 1940s, that experimental psychologists began to investigate the cognitive processes underlying scientific thinking and reasoning.

The Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer pioneered the investigation of scientific thinking (of the first type described earlier: thinking about scientific content ) in his landmark book Productive Thinking (Wertheimer, 1945 ). Wertheimer spent a considerable amount of time corresponding with Albert Einstein, attempting to discover how Einstein generated the concept of relativity. Wertheimer argued that Einstein had to overcome the structure of Newtonian physics at each step in his theorizing, and the ways that Einstein actually achieved this restructuring were articulated in terms of Gestalt theories. (For a recent and different account of how Einstein made his discovery, see Galison, 2003 .) We will see later how this process of overcoming alternative theories is an obstacle that both scientists and nonscientists need to deal with when evaluating and theorizing about the world.

One of the first investigations of scientific thinking of the second type (i.e., collections of general-purpose processes operating on complex, abstract, components of scientific thought) was carried out by Jerome Bruner and his colleagues at Harvard (Bruner et al., 1956 ). They argued that a key activity engaged in by scientists is to determine whether a particular instance is a member of a category. For example, a scientist might want to discover which substances undergo fission when bombarded by neutrons and which substances do not. Here, scientists have to discover the attributes that make a substance undergo fission. Bruner et al. saw scientific thinking as the testing of hypotheses and the collecting of data with the end goal of determining whether something is a member of a category. They invented a paradigm where people were required to formulate hypotheses and collect data that test their hypotheses. In one type of experiment, the participants were shown a card such as one with two borders and three green triangles. The participants were asked to determine the concept that this card represented by choosing other cards and getting feedback from the experimenter as to whether the chosen card was an example of the concept. In this case the participant may have thought that the concept was green and chosen a card with two green squares and one border. If the underlying concept was green, then the experimenter would say that the card was an example of the concept. In terms of scientific thinking, choosing a new card is akin to conducting an experiment, and the feedback from the experimenter is similar to knowing whether a hypothesis is confirmed or disconfirmed. Using this approach, Bruner et al. identified a number of strategies that people use to formulate and test hypotheses. They found that a key factor determining which hypothesis-testing strategy that people use is the amount of memory capacity that the strategy takes up (see also Morrison & Knowlton, Chapter 6 ; Medin et al., Chapter 11 ). Another key factor that they discovered was that it was much more difficult for people to discover negative concepts (e.g., not blue) than positive concepts (e.g., blue). Although Bruner et al.'s research is most commonly viewed as work on concepts, they saw their work as uncovering a key component of scientific thinking.

A second early line of research on scientific thinking was developed by Peter Wason and his colleagues (Wason, 1968 ). Like Bruner et al., Wason saw a key component of scientific thinking as being the testing of hypotheses. Whereas Bruner et al. focused on the different types of strategies that people use to formulate hypotheses, Wason focused on whether people adopt a strategy of trying to confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses. Using Popper's ( 1959 ) theory that scientists should try and falsify rather than confirm their hypotheses, Wason devised a deceptively simple task in which participants were given three numbers, such as 2-4-6, and were asked to discover the rule underlying the three numbers. Participants were asked to generate other triads of numbers and the experimenter would tell the participant whether the triad was consistent or inconsistent with the rule. They were told that when they were sure they knew what the rule was they should state it. Most participants began the experiment by thinking that the rule was even numbers increasing by 2. They then attempted to confirm their hypothesis by generating a triad like 8-10-12, then 14-16-18. These triads are consistent with the rule and the participants were told yes, that the triads were indeed consistent with the rule. However, when they proposed the rule—even numbers increasing by 2—they were told that the rule was incorrect. The correct rule was numbers of increasing magnitude! From this research, Wason concluded that people try to confirm their hypotheses, whereas normatively speaking, they should try to disconfirm their hypotheses. One implication of this research is that confirmation bias is not just restricted to scientists but is a general human tendency.

It was not until the 1970s that a general account of scientific reasoning was proposed. Herbert Simon, often in collaboration with Allan Newell, proposed that scientific thinking is a form of problem solving. He proposed that problem solving is a search in a problem space. Newell and Simon's theory of problem solving is discussed in many places in this handbook, usually in the context of specific problems (see especially Bassok & Novick, Chapter 21 ). Herbert Simon, however, devoted considerable time to understanding many different scientific discoveries and scientific reasoning processes. The common thread in his research was that scientific thinking and discovery is not a mysterious magical process but a process of problem solving in which clear heuristics are used. Simon's goal was to articulate the heuristics that scientists use in their research at a fine-grained level. By constructing computer programs that simulated the process of several major scientific discoveries, Simon and colleagues were able to articulate the specific computations that scientists could have used in making those discoveries (Langley, Simon, Bradshaw, & Zytkow, 1987 ; see section on “Computational Approaches to Scientific Thinking”). Particularly influential was Simon and Lea's ( 1974 ) work demonstrating that concept formation and induction consist of a search in two problem spaces: a space of instances and a space of rules. This idea has influenced problem-solving accounts of scientific thinking that will be discussed in the next section.

Overall, the work of Bruner, Wason, and Simon laid the foundations for contemporary research on scientific thinking. Early research on scientific thinking is summarized in Tweney, Doherty and Mynatt's 1981 book On Scientific Thinking , where they sketched out many of the themes that have dominated research on scientific thinking over the past few decades. Other more recent books such as Cognitive Models of Science (Giere, 1993 ), Exploring Science (Klahr, 2000 ), Cognitive Basis of Science (Carruthers, Stich, & Siegal, 2002 ), and New Directions in Scientific and Technical Thinking (Gorman, Kincannon, Gooding, & Tweney, 2004 ) provide detailed analyses of different aspects of scientific discovery. Another important collection is Vosnadiau's handbook on conceptual change research (Vosniadou, 2008 ). In this chapter, we discuss the main approaches that have been used to investigate scientific thinking.

How does one go about investigating the many different aspects of scientific thinking? One common approach to the study of the scientific mind has been to investigate several key aspects of scientific thinking using abstract tasks designed to mimic some essential characteristics of “real-world” science. There have been numerous methodologies that have been used to analyze the genesis of scientific concepts, theories, hypotheses, and experiments. Researchers have used experiments, verbal protocols, computer programs, and analyzed particular scientific discoveries. A more recent development has been to increase the ecological validity of such research by investigating scientists as they reason “live” (in vivo studies of scientific thinking) in their own laboratories (Dunbar, 1995 , 2002 ). From a “Thinking and Reasoning” standpoint the major aspects of scientific thinking that have been most actively investigated are problem solving, analogical reasoning, hypothesis testing, conceptual change, collaborative reasoning, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning.

Scientific Thinking as Problem Solving

One of the primary goals of accounts of scientific thinking has been to provide an overarching framework to understand the scientific mind. One framework that has had a great influence in cognitive science is that scientific thinking and scientific discovery can be conceived as a form of problem solving. As noted in the opening section of this chapter, Simon ( 1977 ; Simon, Langley, & Bradshaw, 1981 ) argued that both scientific thinking in general and problem solving in particular could be thought of as a search in a problem space. A problem space consists of all the possible states of a problem and all the operations that a problem solver can use to get from one state to the next. According to this view, by characterizing the types of representations and procedures that people use to get from one state to another it is possible to understand scientific thinking. Thus, scientific thinking can be characterized as a search in various problem spaces (Simon, 1977 ). Simon investigated a number of scientific discoveries by bringing participants into the laboratory, providing the participants with the data that a scientist had access to, and getting the participants to reason about the data and rediscover a scientific concept. He then analyzed the verbal protocols that participants generated and mapped out the types of problem spaces that the participants search in (e.g., Qin & Simon, 1990 ). Kulkarni and Simon ( 1988 ) used a more historical approach to uncover the problem-solving heuristics that Krebs used in his discovery of the urea cycle. Kulkarni and Simon analyzed Krebs's diaries and proposed a set of problem-solving heuristics that he used in his research. They then built a computer program incorporating the heuristics and biological knowledge that Krebs had before he made his discoveries. Of particular importance are the search heuristics that the program uses, which include experimental proposal heuristics and data interpretation heuristics. A key heuristic was an unusualness heuristic that focused on unusual findings, which guided search through a space of theories and a space of experiments.

Klahr and Dunbar ( 1988 ) extended the search in a problem space approach and proposed that scientific thinking can be thought of as a search through two related spaces: an hypothesis space and an experiment space. Each problem space that a scientist uses will have its own types of representations and operators used to change the representations. Search in the hypothesis space constrains search in the experiment space. Klahr and Dunbar found that some participants move from the hypothesis space to the experiment space, whereas others move from the experiment space to the hypothesis space. These different types of searches lead to the proposal of different types of hypotheses and experiments. More recent work has extended the dual-space approach to include alternative problem-solving spaces, including those for data, instrumentation, and domain-specific knowledge (Klahr & Simon, 1999 ; Schunn & Klahr, 1995 , 1996 ).

Scientific Thinking as Hypothesis Testing

Many researchers have regarded testing specific hypotheses predicted by theories as one of the key attributes of scientific thinking. Hypothesis testing is the process of evaluating a proposition by collecting evidence regarding its truth. Experimental cognitive research on scientific thinking that specifically examines this issue has tended to fall into two broad classes of investigations. The first class is concerned with the types of reasoning that lead scientists astray, thus blocking scientific ingenuity. A large amount of research has been conducted on the potentially faulty reasoning strategies that both participants in experiments and scientists use, such as considering only one favored hypothesis at a time and how this prevents the scientists from making discoveries. The second class is concerned with uncovering the mental processes underlying the generation of new scientific hypotheses and concepts. This research has tended to focus on the use of analogy and imagery in science, as well as the use of specific types of problem-solving heuristics.

Turning first to investigations of what diminishes scientific creativity, philosophers, historians, and experimental psychologists have devoted a considerable amount of research to “confirmation bias.” This occurs when scientists only consider one hypothesis (typically the favored hypothesis) and ignore other alternative hypotheses or potentially relevant hypotheses. This important phenomenon can distort the design of experiments, formulation of theories, and interpretation of data. Beginning with the work of Wason ( 1968 ) and as discussed earlier, researchers have repeatedly shown that when participants are asked to design an experiment to test a hypothesis they will predominantly design experiments that they think will yield results consistent with the hypothesis. Using the 2-4-6 task mentioned earlier, Klayman and Ha ( 1987 ) showed that in situations where one's hypothesis is likely to be confirmed, seeking confirmation is a normatively incorrect strategy, whereas when the probability of confirming one's hypothesis is low, then attempting to confirm one's hypothesis can be an appropriate strategy. Historical analyses by Tweney ( 1989 ), concerning the way that Faraday made his discoveries, and experiments investigating people testing hypotheses, have revealed that people use a confirm early, disconfirm late strategy: When people initially generate or are given hypotheses, they try and gather evidence that is consistent with the hypothesis. Once enough evidence has been gathered, then people attempt to find the boundaries of their hypothesis and often try to disconfirm their hypotheses.

In an interesting variant on the confirmation bias paradigm, Gorman ( 1989 ) showed that when participants are told that there is the possibility of error in the data that they receive, participants assume that any data that are inconsistent with their favored hypothesis are due to error. Thus, the possibility of error “insulates” hypotheses against disconfirmation. This intriguing hypothesis has not been confirmed by other researchers (Penner & Klahr, 1996 ), but it is an intriguing hypothesis that warrants further investigation.

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Critical Thinking in Science: Fostering Scientific Reasoning Skills in Students

ALI Staff | Published  July 13, 2023

Thinking like a scientist is a central goal of all science curricula.

As students learn facts, methodologies, and methods, what matters most is that all their learning happens through the lens of scientific reasoning what matters most is that it’s all through the lens of scientific reasoning.

That way, when it comes time for them to take on a little science themselves, either in the lab or by theoretically thinking through a solution, they understand how to do it in the right context.

One component of this type of thinking is being critical. Based on facts and evidence, critical thinking in science isn’t exactly the same as critical thinking in other subjects.

Students have to doubt the information they’re given until they can prove it’s right.

They have to truly understand what’s true and what’s hearsay. It’s complex, but with the right tools and plenty of practice, students can get it right.

What is critical thinking?

This particular style of thinking stands out because it requires reflection and analysis. Based on what's logical and rational, thinking critically is all about digging deep and going beyond the surface of a question to establish the quality of the question itself.

It ensures students put their brains to work when confronted with a question rather than taking every piece of information they’re given at face value.

It’s engaged, higher-level thinking that will serve them well in school and throughout their lives.

Why is critical thinking important?

Critical thinking is important when it comes to making good decisions.

It gives us the tools to think through a choice rather than quickly picking an option — and probably guessing wrong. Think of it as the all-important ‘why.’

Why is that true? Why is that right? Why is this the only option?

Finding answers to questions like these requires critical thinking. They require you to really analyze both the question itself and the possible solutions to establish validity.

Will that choice work for me? Does this feel right based on the evidence?

How does critical thinking in science impact students?

Critical thinking is essential in science.

It’s what naturally takes students in the direction of scientific reasoning since evidence is a key component of this style of thought.

It’s not just about whether evidence is available to support a particular answer but how valid that evidence is.

It’s about whether the information the student has fits together to create a strong argument and how to use verifiable facts to get a proper response.

Critical thinking in science helps students:

• Actively evaluate information
• Identify bias
• Separate the logic within arguments
• Analyze evidence

4 Ways to promote critical thinking

Figuring out how to develop critical thinking skills in science means looking at multiple strategies and deciding what will work best at your school and in your class.

Based on your student population, their needs and abilities, not every option will be a home run.

These particular examples are all based on the idea that for students to really learn how to think critically, they have to practice doing it. 

Each focuses on engaging students with science in a way that will motivate them to work independently as they hone their scientific reasoning skills.

Project-Based Learning

Project-based learning centers on critical thinking.

Teachers can shape a project around the thinking style to give students practice with evaluating evidence or other critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking also happens during collaboration, evidence-based thought, and reflection.

For example, setting students up for a research project is not only a great way to get them to think critically, but it also helps motivate them to learn.

Allowing them to pick the topic (that isn’t easy to look up online), develop their own research questions, and establish a process to collect data to find an answer lets students personally connect to science while using critical thinking at each stage of the assignment.

They’ll have to evaluate the quality of the research they find and make evidence-based decisions.

Self-Reflection

Adding a question or two to any lab practicum or activity requiring students to pause and reflect on what they did or learned also helps them practice critical thinking.

At this point in an assignment, they’ll pause and assess independently. 

You can ask students to reflect on the conclusions they came up with for a completed activity, which really makes them think about whether there's any bias in their answer.

Addressing Assumptions

One way critical thinking aligns so perfectly with scientific reasoning is that it encourages students to challenge all assumptions. 

Evidence is king in the science classroom, but even when students work with hard facts, there comes the risk of a little assumptive thinking.

Working with students to identify assumptions in existing research or asking them to address an issue where they suspend their own judgment and simply look at established facts polishes their that critical eye.

They’re getting practice without tossing out opinions, unproven hypotheses, and speculation in exchange for real data and real results, just like a scientist has to do.

Lab Activities With Trial-And-Error

Another component of critical thinking (as well as thinking like a scientist) is figuring out what to do when you get something wrong.

Backtracking can mean you have to rethink a process, redesign an experiment, or reevaluate data because the outcomes don’t make sense, but it’s okay.

The ability to get something wrong and recover is not only a valuable life skill, but it’s where most scientific breakthroughs start. Reminding students of this is always a valuable lesson.

Labs that include comparative activities are one way to increase critical thinking skills, especially when introducing new evidence that might cause students to change their conclusions once the lab has begun.

For example, you provide students with two distinct data sets and ask them to compare them.

With only two choices, there are a finite amount of conclusions to draw, but then what happens when you bring in a third data set? Will it void certain conclusions? Will it allow students to make new conclusions, ones even more deeply rooted in evidence?

Thinking like a scientist

When students get the opportunity to think critically, they’re learning to trust the data over their ‘gut,’ to approach problems systematically and make informed decisions using ‘good’ evidence.

When practiced enough, this ability will engage students in science in a whole new way, providing them with opportunities to dig deeper and learn more.

It can help enrich science and motivate students to approach the subject just like a professional would.

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1.1 The Scientific Attitude: Curious, Skeptical, and Humble

1- 1 How do the scientific attitude’s three main components relate to critical thinking?

To assist your active learning of psychology, numbered Learning Objectives, framed as questions, appear at the beginning of major sections. You can test your understanding by trying to answer the question before, and then again after, you read the section.

Underlying all science is, first, a har d- headed curiosity, a passion to explore and understand without misleading or being misled. Some questions (Is there life after death?) are beyond science. Answering them in any way requires a leap of faith. With many other ideas (Can some people demonstrate ESP?), the proof is in the pudding. Let the facts speak for themselves.

Magician and paranormal investigator James Randi has used this empirical approach when testing those claiming to see glowing auras around people’s bodies:

Randi : Do you see an aura around my head?

Aura seer : Yes, indeed.

Randi : Can you still see the aura if I put this magazine in front of my face?

Aura seer : Of course.

Randi : Then if I were to step behind a wall barely taller than I am, you could determine my location from the aura visible above my head, right?

Randi once told me [DM] that no aura seer had yet agreed to take this simple test.

No matter how sensibl e- seeming or wild an idea, the smart thinker asks: Does it work? When put to the test, can its predictions be confirmed? Subjected to such scrutiny, craz y- sounding ideas sometimes find support. More often, science becomes society’s garbage disposal, sending craz y- sounding ideas to the waste heap, atop previous claims of perpetual motion machines, miracle cancer cures, and ou t- o f- body travels into centuries past. To sift reality from fantasy, sense from nonsense, requires a scientific attitude: being skeptical but not cynical, open but not gullible.

“To believe with certainty,” says a Polish proverb, “we must begin by doubting.” As scientists, psychologists approach the world of behavior with a curious skepticism, persistently asking two questions: What do you mean? How do you know?

Putting a scientific attitude into practice requires not only curiosity and skepticism but also humilit y— awareness of our own vulnerability to error and openness to surprises and new perspectives. In the last analysis, what matters are the truths nature reveals in response to our questioning. If people or other animals don’t behave as our ideas predict, then so much the worse for our ideas. This humble attitude was expressed in one of psychology’s early mottos: “The rat is always right.”

Historians of science tell us that these three attitude s— curiosity, skepticism, and humilit y— helped make modern science possible. Some deeply religious people may view science, including psychological science, as a threat. Yet many of the leaders of the scientific revolution, including Copernicus and Newton, were deeply religious people acting on the idea that “in order to love and honor God, it is necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork” (Stark, 2003a,b).

Of course, scientists, like anyone else, can have big egos and may cling to their preconceptions. It’s easy to get defensive when others challenge our cherished ideas. Nevertheless, the ideal of curious, skeptical, humble scrutiny of competing ideas unifies psychologists as a community as they check and recheck one another’s findings and conclusions.

“My deeply held belief is that if a god anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts … if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.”

Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain , 1979

Enhancing Scientific Thinking Through the Development of Critical Thinking in Higher Education

• First Online: 22 September 2019

Cite this chapter

• Heidi Hyytinen 3 ,
• Auli Toom 3 &
• Richard J. Shavelson 4  

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Contemporary higher education is committed to enhancing students’ scientific thinking in part by improving their capacity to think critically, a competence that forms a foundation for scientific thinking. We introduce and evaluate the characteristic elements of critical thinking (i.e. cognitive skills, affective dispositions, knowledge), problematising the domain-specific and general aspects of critical thinking and elaborating justifications for teaching critical thinking. Finally, we argue that critical thinking needs to be integrated into curriculum, learning goals, teaching practices and assessment. The chapter emphasises the role of constructive alignment in teaching and use of a variety of teaching methods for teaching students to think critically in order to enhance their capacity for scientific thinking.

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Hyytinen, H., Toom, A., Shavelson, R.J. (2019). Enhancing Scientific Thinking Through the Development of Critical Thinking in Higher Education. In: Murtonen, M., Balloo, K. (eds) Redefining Scientific Thinking for Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24215-2_3

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May 1, 2024

18 min read

Can Scientific Thinking Save the World?

A physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist are working together to bring better, smarter decision-making to the masses

By Lee Billings

Kislev/Getty Images

A physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist walk into a classroom.

Although it sounds like a premise for a joke, this was actually the origin of a unique collaboration between Nobel Prize–winning physicist Saul Perlmutter, philosopher John Campbell and the psychologist Rob MacCoun. Spurred by what they saw as a perilously rising tide of irrationality, misinformation and sociopolitical polarization, they teamed up in 2011 to create a multidisciplinary course at the University of California, Berkeley, with the modest goal of teaching undergraduate students how to think—more specifically, how to think like a scientist . That is, they wished to show students how to use scientific tools and techniques for solving problems, making decisions and distinguishing reality from fantasy . The course proved popular, drawing enough interest to run for more than a decade (and counting) while sparking multiple spin-offs at other universities and institutions.

Now the three researchers are bringing their message to the masses with a new book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense . And their timing is impeccable: Our world seems to have only become more uncertain and complex since their course began, with cognitive biases and information overload all too easily clouding debates over high-stakes issues such as climate change , global pandemics , and the development and regulation of artificial intelligence . But one need not be an academic expert or policymaker to find value in this book’s pages. From parsing the daily news to treating a medical condition, talking with opposite-minded relatives at Thanksgiving or even choosing how to vote in an election, Third Millennium Thinking offers lessons that anyone can use—individually and collectively—to make smarter, better decisions in everyday life.

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Scientific American spoke with Perlmutter, Campbell and MacCoun about their work—and whether it’s wishful thinking to believe logic and evidence can save the world.

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows .]

How did all of this begin, and what motivated each of you to take on such an ambitious project?

PERLMUTTER: In 2011 I was looking at our society making big decisions: “Should we raise the debt ceiling?”—things like that. And surprisingly enough, we were not doing it in a very sensible way. The conversations I was hearing about these political decisions weren’t like those I’d have over lunch with a bunch of scientists at the lab—not because of politics, but rather because of the style of how scientists tend to think about solving problems. And I thought, “Well, where did scientists learn this stuff? And is it possible for us to articulate what these concepts are and teach them in a way that people would apply them in their whole lives, not just in a lab? And can we empower them to think for themselves using the best available cognitive tools rather than teaching them to ‘just trust scientists?’”

So that was the starting point of it. But that’s not the whole story. If you put a bunch of physicists together in a faculty meeting, they don’t necessarily act much more rational than any other faculty members, right? So it was clear we really needed expertise from other fields, too, such as John’s expertise in philosophy and Rob’s expertise in social psychology. We actually put a little sign up looking for people who’d want to help develop the course. It said something like, “Are you embarrassed watching our society make decisions? Come help invent our course; come help save the world.”

MacCOUN: When Saul approached me about the course, I was delighted to work with him. Even back in 2011 I was filled with angst about the inefficacy of policy debates; I had spent years working on two big hot-button issues: drug legalization and open military service for gay and lesbian individuals. I worked with policymakers and advocates on both sides, just trying to be an honest broker in these debates to help clarify the truth—you know, “What do we actually know, and what don’t we know?” And the quality of debate for both of those issues was so bad, with so much distortion of research findings. So when Saul mentioned the course to me, I just jumped at the chance to work on this.

CAMPBELL: It was obvious to me that this was philosophically very interesting. I mean, we’re talking about how science inputs into decision-making. And in decision-making, there are always questions of value, as well as questions of fact; questions about where you want to go, as well as questions about how do we get there; and questions about what “the science” can answer. And it’s very interesting to ask, “Can we tease apart facts and values in decision-making? Does the science have anything to tell us about values?” Well, likely not. Scientists always shy away from telling us about values. So we need to know something about how broader effective concerns can be woven in with scientific results in decision-making.

Some of this is about how science is embedded in the life of a community. You take a village—you have the pub, you have the church, you know clearly what they are for and how they function in the whole community. But then the science, what is that? Is it just this kind of shimmering thing that produces telephones, TVs and stuff? How does it fit into the life of the community? How does it embed in our civilization? Classically, it’s been regarded as a “high church” kind of thing. The scientists are literally in an ivory tower and do as they please. And then occasionally, they produce these gadgets, and we’re not sure if we should like them or not. But we really need a more healthy, grounded conception of how science plays into our broader society.

I’m glad you brought up the distinction between facts and values. To me, that overlaps with the distinction between groups and individuals—“values” feel more personal and subjective and thus more directly applicable to a reader, in a way. And the book is ultimately about how individuals can empower themselves with so-called scientific thinking—presumably to live their best lives based on their personal values. But how does that accord with this other assertion you’ve just made, saying science likely doesn’t have anything to tell us about values in the first place?

PERLMUTTER: Well, I think what John was getting at is: even once we develop all these ways to think through facts, we don’t want to stop thinking through values, right? One point here is that we’ve actually made progress together thinking about values over centuries. And we have to keep talking to each other. But it’s still very helpful to separate the values and the facts because each requires a slightly different style of thinking, and you want people to be able to do both.

MacCOUN: That’s right. Scientists can’t tell us and shouldn’t tell us, in fact, what values to hold. Scientists get in trouble when they try that. We talk in the book about “pathologies” of science that sometimes happen and how those can be driven by values-based thinking. Regarding values, where science excels is in clarifying where and how they conflict so that in public policy analysis, you can inform the trade-offs to make sure that the stakeholders in a debate empirically understand how its various outcomes advance certain values while impeding others. Usually what happens next is finding solutions that minimize those trade-offs and reduce the friction between conflicting values.

And let’s be clear: when we talk about values, we sometimes talk as if people are either one thing or another. You know, someone may ask, “Are you for or against ‘freedom?’” But in reality, everyone values freedom. It’s just a question of how much, of how we differ in our rankings of such things. And we’re all looking for some way to pursue more than one value at a time, and we need other people to help us get there.

PERLMUTTER: And let’s remember that we’re not even consistent within our own selves about our individual rankings of values, which tend to fluctuate a lot based on the situation.

I love how our discussion is now reflecting the style of the book: breezy and approachable but also unflinching in talking about complexity and uncertainty. And in it, you’re trying to give readers a “tool kit” for navigating such things. That’s great, yet it can be challenging for readers who might assume it’s, say, a science-infused self-help book offering them a few simple rules about how to improve their rational thinking. This makes me wonder: If you did have to somehow reduce the book’s message to something like a series of bullet points on a note card, what would that be? What are the most essential tools in the kit?

CAMPBELL: This may be a bit ironic, but I was reading somewhere recently that where AI programs such as ChatGPT really go wrong is in not giving sources. Most of these tools don’t tell you what evidence they’re using for their outputs. And you’d think, of course, we should always show what evidence we have for anything we’re gonna say. But really, we can’t do that. Most of us can’t remember the evidence for half of what we know. What we can usually recall is how likely we thought some assertion was to be true, how probable we thought it was. And keeping track of this is a worthwhile habit of mind: if you’re going to act on any belief you might have, you need to know the strength with which you can hold that belief.

PERLMUTTER: We spend a fair amount of time on this in the book because it allows you to see that the world doesn’t come to us with certainty in almost anything. Even when we’re pretty sure of something, we’re only pretty sure, and there’s real utility in having a sense of the possibility for something contradicting what we think or expect. Many people do this naturally all the time, thinking about the odds for placing a bet on their favorite sports team or about the chance of a rain shower spoiling a picnic. Acknowledging uncertainty puts your ego in the right place. Your ego should, in the end, be attached to being pretty good at knowing how strong or weak your trust is in some fact rather than in being always right. Needing to always be right is a very problematic way to approach the world. In the book, we compare it to skiing down a mountain with all your weight rigid on both legs; if you don’t ever shift your stance to turn and slow down, you might go very fast, but you usually don’t get very far before toppling over! So instead you need to be able to maneuver and adjust to keep track of what it is that you really do know versus what you don’t. That’s how to actually get wherever you’re trying to go, and it’s also how to have useful conversations with other people who may not agree with you.

MacCOUN: And that sense of working together is important because these habits of mind we’re discussing aren’t just about your personal decision-making; they’re also about how science works in a democracy. You know, scientists end up having to work with people they disagree with all the time. And they cultivate certain communal ways of doing that—because it’s not enough to just be a “better” thinker; even people well-trained in these methods make mistakes. So you also need these habits at a communal level for other people to keep you honest. That means it’s okay, and necessary even, to interact with people who disagree with you—because that’s how you find out when you’re making mistakes. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll change your mind. But it’ll improve your thinking about your own views.

So in summary:

Try to rank your confidence in your beliefs.

Try to update your beliefs based on new evidence and don’t fear being (temporarily) wrong.

Try to productively engage with others who have different beliefs than you.

That’s a pretty good “top three” list, I think! But, pardon my cynicism, do you worry that some of this might come off as rather quaint? We mentioned at the outset how this project really began in 2011, not much more than a decade ago. Yet some would probably argue that social and technological changes across that time have now effectively placed us in a different situation, a different world. It seems—to me at least—on average much harder now than it was 10 years ago for people with divergent beliefs and values to have a pleasant, productive conversation. Are the challenges we face today really things that can be solved by everyone just getting together and talking?

CAMPBELL: I agree with you that this sort of cynicism is now widespread. Across the past few decades we seem to have forgotten how to have a conversation across a fundamental divide, so now we take for granted that it’s pointless to try to convert those holding different views. But the alternative is to run society by coercion. And just beating people down with violent subjugation is not a long-term tenable solution. If you’re going to coerce, you have to at least show your work. You have to engage with other people and explain why you think your policies are good.

MacCOUN: You can think of cynicism as this god-awful corrosive mix of skepticism and pessimism. At the other extreme, you have gullibility, which, combined with optimism, leads to wishful thinking. And that’s really not helpful either. In the book we talk about an insight Saul had, which is that scientists tend to combine skepticism with optimism—a combo I’d say is not generally cultivated in our society. Scientists are skeptical, not gullible, but they’re optimistic, not pessimistic: they tend to assume that problems have a solution. So scientists sitting around the table are more likely to be trying to figure out fixes for a problem rather than bemoaning how terrible it is.

PERLMUTTER: This is something we’ve grappled with, and there are a couple of elements, I think, that are important to transmit about it. One is that there are good reasons to be disappointed when you look at the leaders of our society. They’ve structurally now gotten themselves into a fix, where they seem unable to even publicly say what they believe, let alone find real compromises on divisive issues. Meanwhile you can find lots of examples of “citizen assembly” events where a random selection of average people who completely disagree and support the opposite sides of the political spectrum sit down together and are much more able to have a civil, thoughtful conversation than their sociopolitical leaders can. That makes me think most of the [people in the] country (but not all!) could have a very reasonable conversation with each other. So clearly there’s an opportunity that we haven’t taken advantage of to structurally find ways to empower those conversations, not just the leaders trying to act for us. That’s something to be optimistic about. Another is that the daily news portrays the world as a very scary and negative place—but we know the daily news is not offering a very good representative take on the true state of the world, especially regarding the huge improvements in human well-being that have occurred over the past few decades.

So it feels to me that many people are living in “crisis” mode because they’re always consuming news that’s presenting us crises every moment and driving us apart with wedge issues. And I think there’s optimism to be found in looking for ways to talk together again. As John says, that’s the only game in town: to try to work with people until you learn something together, as opposed to just trying to win and then having half your population being unhappy.

CAMPBELL: We are maybe the most tribal species on the planet, but we are also perhaps the most amazingly flexible and cooperative species on the planet. And as Saul said, in these almost town-hall-style deliberative citizen assemblies you see this capacity for cooperation coming out, even among people who’d be bitterly divided and [belong to] opposite tribes otherwise—so there must be ways to amplify that and to escape being locked into these tribal schisms.

MacCOUN: And it’s important to remember that research on cooperation suggests you don’t need to have everybody cooperating to get the benefits. You do need a critical mass, but you’re never going to get everyone, so you shouldn’t waste your time trying to reach 100 percent. [Political scientist] Robert Axelrod and others studying the evolution of cooperation have shown that if cooperators can find each other, they can start to thrive and begin attracting other cooperators, and they can become more robust in the face of those who are uncooperative or trying to undermine cooperation. So somehow getting that critical mass is probably the best you can hope for.

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that as we discuss large-scale social cooperation, we’re also in an election year in the U.S., ostensibly the world’s most powerful democracy. And sure, part of the equation here is breaking down walls with basic acts of kindness and humility: love thy neighbor, find common ground, and so on. But what about voting? Does scientific decision-making give us some guidance on “best practices” there?

PERLMUTTER: Well, clearly we want this to be something that transcends election years. But in general, you should avoid making decisions—voting included—purely based on fear. This is not a time in the world where fear should be the dominant thing driving our individual or collective actions. Most of our fears divide us, yet most of our strength is found in working together to solve problems. So one basic thing is not to let yourself be flustered into voting for anyone or anything out of fear. But another is to look for leaders who use and reflect the scientific style of thinking, in which you’re open to being wrong, you’re bound by evidence, and you’re able to change your mind if it turns out that you were pursuing a bad plan. And that’s something that unfortunately we very rarely see.

CAMPBELL: At the moment we have an abundance of free speech—everyone can get on to some kind of social media and explain their views to the entire country. But we seem to have forgotten that the whole point of free speech was the testing of ideas. That was why it seemed like such a good thing: through free speech, new ideas can be generated and discussed and tested. But that idea of testing the ideas you freely express has just dropped out of the culture. We really need to tune back in to that in how we teach and talk about free speech and its value. It’s not just an end in itself, you know?

MacCOUN: And let’s be mindful of some lessons from history, too. For a lot of these issues that are so polarizing and divisive, it’s probably going to turn out that neither side was completely right, and there was some third possibility that didn’t occur to most, if any, of us. This happens in science all the time, with each victorious insight usually being provisional until the next, better theory or piece of evidence comes along. And in the same way, if we can’t move past arguing about our current conception of these problems, we’re trapping ourselves in this one little region of conceptual space when the solution might lie somewhere outside. This is one of very many cognitive traps we talk about in the book. Rather than staking out our hill to die on, we should be more open to uncertainty and experimentation: we test some policy solution to a problem, and if it doesn’t work, we’re ready to rapidly make adjustments and try something else.

Maybe we can practice what we preach here, this idea of performing evidence-based testing and course correction and escaping various sorts of cognitive traps. While you were working on this book, did you find and reflect on any irrational habits of mind you might have? And was there a case where you chose a hill to die on, and you were wrong, and you begrudgingly adjusted?

MacCOUN: Yeah, in the book we give examples of our own personal mistakes. One from my own research involves the replicability crisis and people engaging in confirmation bias. I had written a review paper summarizing evidence that seemed to show that decriminalizing drugs—that is, removing criminal penalties for them—did not lead to higher levels of use. After writing it, I had a new opportunity to test that hypothesis, looking at data from Italy, where in the 1970s they’d basically decriminalized personal possession of small quantities of all drugs. And then they recriminalized them in 1990. And then they redecriminalized in 1993. So it was like a perfect opportunity. And the data showed drug related deaths actually went down when they reinstituted penalties and went back up again when the penalties were removed. And this was completely opposite of what I had already staked my reputation on! And so, well, I had a personal bias, right? And that’s really the only reason I went and did more research, digging deeper on this Italian thing, because I didn’t like the findings. So across the same span of time I looked at Spain (a country that had decriminalized without recriminalizing) and at Germany (a country that never decriminalized during that time), and all three showed the same death pattern. This suggests that the suspicious pattern of deaths in fact had nothing to do with penalties. Now, I think that leads to the correct conclusion—my original conclusion, of course! But the point is: I’m embarrassed to admit I had fallen into the trap of confirmation bias—or, really, of its close cousin called disconfirmation bias, where you’re much tougher on evidence that seems to run counter to your beliefs. It’s a teachable moment, for sure.

CAMPBELL: It takes a lot of courage to admit these sorts of things and make the necessary transitions. One cognitive trap that affects many of us is what’s called the implicit bias blind spot, where you can be really subtle and perceptive in spotting other people’s biases but not your own. You can often see a bias of some sort in an instant in other people. But what happens when you look at yourself? The reaction is usually, “Na, I don't do that stuff!” You know, I must have been through hundreds and hundreds of student applications for admission or searches for faculty members, and I never spotted myself being biased at all, not once. “I just look at the applications straight,” right? But that can’t always be true because the person easiest to fool is yourself! Realizing that can be such a revelation.

PERLMUTTER: And this really informs one of the book’s key points: that we need to find better ways to work with people with whom we disagree—because one of the very best ways to get at your own biases is to find somebody who disagrees with you and is strongly motivated to prove you wrong. It’s hard, but you really do need the loyal opposition. Thinking back, for instance, to the big race for measuring the cosmological expansion of the universe that led to the discovery of dark energy, it was between my team and another team. Sometimes my colleagues and I would see members of the other team showing up to do their observations at the telescopes just as we were leaving from doing ours, and it was uncomfortable knowing both teams were chasing the same thing. On the other hand, that competition ensured we’d each try to figure out if the other team was making mistakes, and it greatly improved the confidence we collectively had in our results. But it’s not good enough just to have two opposing sides—you also need ways for them to engage with each other.

I realize I’ve inadvertently left probably the most basic question for last. What exactly is “third millennium thinking?”

PERLMUTTER: That’s okay, we actually leave explaining this to the book’s last chapter, too!

MacCOUN: Third millennium thinking is about recognizing a big shift that’s underway. We all have a sense of what the long millennia predating science must have been like, and we all know the tremendous advances that gradually came about as the modern scientific era emerged—from the practices of various ancient civilizations to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, all those shifts in thinking that led to the amazing scientific revolution that has so profoundly changed our world here in what, until the end of the 20th century, was the second millennium. But there’s also been disenchantment with science, especially recently. And there’s validity to concerns that science was sometimes just a handmaiden of the powerful and that scientists sometimes wield more authority than they deserve to advance their own personal projects and politics. And sometimes science can become pathological; sometimes it can fail.

A big part of third millennium thinking is acknowledging science’s historic faults but also its capacity for self-correction, some of which we’re seeing today. We think this is leading us into a new era in which science is becoming less hierarchical. It’s becoming more interdisciplinary and team-based and, in some cases, more approachable for everyday people to be meaningfully involved—think of so-called citizen science projects. Science is also becoming more open, where researchers must show their work by making their data and methods more readily available so that others can independently check it. And we hope these sorts of changes are making scientists more humble: This attitude of “yeah, I’ve got the Ph.D., so you listen to me,” that doesn’t necessarily work anymore for big, divisive policy issues. You need a more deliberative consultation in which everyday people can be involved. Scientists do need to stay in their lane to some extent and not claim authority just based on their pedigree—the authority comes from the method used, not from the pedigree.

We see these all connected in their potential to advance a new way of doing science and of being scientists, and that’s what third millennium thinking is about.

CAMPBELL: With the COVID pandemic, I think we’ve all sadly become very familiar with the idea that the freedom of the individual citizen is somehow opposed to the authority of the scientist. You know, “the scientist is a person who will boss you around, diminish your freedom and inject you with vaccines laced with mind-controlling nanobots” or whatever. And it’s such a shame. It’s so debilitating when people use or see science like that. Or alternatively, you might say, “Well, I’m no scientist, and I can’t do the math, so I’ll just believe and do whatever they tell me.” And that really is relinquishing your freedom. Science should be an enabler of individual power, not a threat to your freedom. Third millennium thinking is about achieving that, allowing as many people as possible to be empowered—to empower themselves—by using scientific thinking.

PERLMUTTER: Exactly. We're trying to help people see that this combination of trends we’re now seeing around the world is actually a very fertile opportunity for big, meaningful, positive change. And if we lean into this, it could set us in a very good position on the long-term path to a really great millennium. Even though there are all these other forces to worry about at the moment, by applying the tools, ideas and processes from the culture of science to other parts of our lives, we can have the wind at our back as we move toward a brighter, better future.

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Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.

2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples

2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.

Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as

active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)

and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.

In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.

Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment. Political and business leaders endorse its importance.

For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .

2. Examples and Non-Examples

Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.

Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.

Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o'clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68-69; 1933: 91-92)

Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.

“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.

“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot's position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Morevoer, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69-70; 1933: 92-93)

Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).

Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.

Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).

Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).

Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).

Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).

Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).

Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond line from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.

Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.

Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as

a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)

A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.

Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.

What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as

a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)

Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.

• It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
• The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
• The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.

One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.

If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on the subsequent emotive response (Siegel 1988).

In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.

Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).

Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.

Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:

• suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
• an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
• the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
• the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
• testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)

The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).

The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).

Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.

If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.

• Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
• Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in frequency in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
• Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
• Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
• Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
• Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
• Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the frequency of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
• Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
• Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
• Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
• Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.

By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.

Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.

Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.

Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)

8. Critical Thinking Dispositions

Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).

On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.

A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.

Critical thinking dispositions can usefully be divided into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started) (Facione 1990a: 25). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.

Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.

• Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
• Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
• Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking.
• Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
• Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
• Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.

Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .

Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.

Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).

The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.

Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.

Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.

Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).

Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.

Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.

Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.

Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.

Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.

In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.

We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), and Black (2012).

According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work.

Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .

What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? Abrami et al. (2015) found that in the experimental and quasi-experimental studies that they analyzed dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.

Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .

12. Controversies

Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), and Bailin et al. (1999b).

McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.

The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.

It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.

Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:

• reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
• distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
• indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
• orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
• being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
• being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
• doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
• reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
• attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
• winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)

A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as

thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)

Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should

be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)

Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.

The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:

• Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
• Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
• Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
• In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
• Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).

A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.

What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .

As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

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• The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities , by Robert H. Ennis

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