“Thinking makes you act effectively in the world.

Thinking makes you win the battles you undertake . . .

If you can think and speak and write, you are absolutely deadly.”

--Jordan Peterson (2017, Maps of Meaning, YouTube.)

​

 

    Akin to discernment and good judgment, critical thinking is an essential skill to navigate this world not only effectively but optimally. The absence of critical thinking can easily hinder one, personally and professionally, in maintaining our relationships and in achieving our life goals.  Employers often utilize critical thinking assessments to filter out the best candidates.  Lacking this skill, one can easily be led astray and fall prey to countless biases, logical fallacies, deceptions (by self and others), manipulations, propaganda, gaslighting, hypocrisy and outright lies.  In the absence of critical thinking there can be little semblance of healthy debate or sane and enlightening dialectic exchange within our society. 

​

     This is a skill rarely taught, except at the highest levels of education, if even then.  Critical thinking is a skill which goes hand in hand with that of emotional regulation, another important practice rarely taught outside of therapy or esoteric teachings largely introduced via the New Age movement.  If one is unable to remain calm and in control of ones emotions under duress, the cerebral cortex quickly goes offline, thus rendering one virtually incapable of clear and rational thinking or decision-making, let alone critical cognition.   Perhaps this is all within the grand design of human social engineering for unknown reasons, but this is a debate far beyond the scope of this essay. 

​

     The Encyclopedia Brittanica describes critical thinking as a “mode of cognition using deliberative reasoning and impartial scrutiny of information to arrive at a possible solution to a problem.” (Brittanica.com, 2024.)   The term is generally credited to educator/philosopher John Dewey and was introduced in the book, How We Think (1910.)   Dewey developed the concept as a core instructional component in opposition to the mainstream educational paradigm stressing rote memorization and the mechanistic regurgitation of facts and figures by students.

​

     In broad strokes, critical thinking can be broken down into a handful of core components: 

​

1.  Deconstructing a problem into its constituent parts to reveal its underlying logic and assumptions;

2. Recognizing and accounting for ones own biases or cognitive distortions in judgment or experience;

3. Collecting and assessing relevant evidence via information gathering, personal observation or experimentation;

4. Adjusting and re-evaluating ones own thinking in relation to the problem at hand;

5. Forming a reasoned assessment to propose a solution or offer a better understanding of the issue  (Brittanica.com, 2024.) 

 

 Meyer (2023) describes the Four Pillars of critical thinking as the following:  analysis, interpretation, evaluation and self-direction.