Critical Thinking

After David Hitchcock, “Critical Thinking,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018, rev. 2022). A concept at the crossroads of philosophy, epistemology, and pedagogy. (Three additions — Ennis’s 1985 definition, Facione’s 1990 Delphi report, and Lipman’s philosophy for children — come from sources external to this article.)

Definition

Beneath the diversity of definitions, the common core is careful goal-directed thinking. Three features (Bailin et al., 1999): (1) it aims at deciding what to believe or what to do; (2) the thinker seeks to meet standards of accuracy and adequacy; (3) the thinking actually meets those standards.

The template definition — John Dewey (who speaks of reflective thought):

“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.” (How We Think, 1910)

Dewey sees in this a scientific attitude of mind. Its opposite: the immediate acceptance of an idea is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection.”

The most cited definition — Robert Ennis: critical thinking is

“reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do.”

Formulated in “A Logical Basis for Measuring Critical Thinking Skills” (Educational Leadership, 1985), it has become the reference definition in education. Its merit is to cover in one stroke the theoretical (believing) and the practical (doing).

Variants of the standard across authors: “intellectually disciplined” thinking (Scriven & Paul), “reasonable” (Ennis), “skillful” (Lipman), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby).

The paradigmatic example (Dewey)

A student washes glasses in hot soapy water and turns them upside down on a plate: bubbles appear at the outer edge, then move back inward. Why?

Observation of a surprising fact → puzzlement;
Question clearly formulated;
Hypothesis: the hot air trapped under the glass expands, hence the bubbles;
Experiment devised: place an ice cube on the glass while the bubbles are forming;
Test: the bubbles reverse → the hypothesis is confirmed.

This micro-case contains the whole structure: observe, wonder, imagine an explanation, experiment, judge. It also shows that critical thinking requires knowledge (here, the gas law: volume varies with temperature).

Components: abilities vs. dispositions

An act of critical thinking presupposes both ability (know-how) and will (attitude).

Abilities (cognitive skills)

Main families (Glaser, Ennis, Facione, Halpern) — combining the lists would yield “more than 50 educational objectives”:

observing and judging the credibility of observation reports;
questioning (turning puzzlement into a clear question, with no hidden presupposition);
imagining possible explanations/options;
inferring and assessing the degree of certainty of conclusions;
experimenting (designing a test, reasoning statistically);
judging the credibility of sources (consulting);
analyzing and evaluating arguments;
identifying presuppositions, constructing and evaluating definitions.

Dispositions (attitudes / “intellectual virtues”)

What makes a capable person actually think critically (Facione, 1990):

open-mindedness (re-examining questions already settled);
intellectual honesty and truth-seeking (wanting to be well informed, taking other viewpoints seriously);
the habit of inquiry (Hamby holds it to be the central critical virtue);
intellectual courage, confidence in one’s ability to inquire;
willingness to suspend judgment while exploring alternatives;
trust in reason;
perseverance and the capacity for self-correction.

Ennis adds a “correlative” disposition to respect the dignity of every person: without it, a critical thinking program “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous.”

Two milestones: the Delphi consensus and philosophy for children

The Delphi Report (Facione, 1990)

To stabilize a shared definition, the American Philosophical Association commissioned Peter Facione to conduct a Delphi method study: the question is put to a panel of 46 experts (philosophers, educators, psychologists) over several anonymous rounds, until a consensus emerges. The result (Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus, 1990): critical thinking = purposeful, self-regulatory judgment resting on six cognitive skills — interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, self-regulation — combined with a dispositional dimension (the “ideal critical thinker”: inquisitive, well-informed, open-minded, honest, prudent in judgment). This underlies the California Critical Thinking Skills Test and the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory.

Philosophy for children (Lipman)

Matthew Lipman made critical thinking a goal from childhood onward. Convinced that children can think abstractly very early, he wrote philosophical novels for them (starting with Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery, 1974) and founded the IAPC (Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children) in 1974 at Montclair, with Ann Margaret Sharp. His key concept, inherited from Peirce and Dewey: the “community of inquiry” — a group of students who, through dialogue, reason together critically, creatively, and caringly. Controlled studies have shown a positive effect on reasoning, reading, and interpersonal relations. This is the pedagogical side of the ideal of critical thinking.

The role of background knowledge

Critical thinking is not a magic elixir applicable to any subject by someone who is ignorant of its facts. It requires three kinds of knowledge: critical concepts (observation/inference, necessary/sufficient, deduction/induction, hypothesis, statistical significance…), the principles of good reasoning, and substantive knowledge of the relevant domain. Hence the disposition to “stay generally well informed.”

The great controversy: general competence or domain-dependent?

John McPeck, Critical Thinking and Education (1981): a strong domain-specificity thesis. “Thinking is always thinking about something”; there are no general, transferable thinking skills. Teaching “thinking” as a separate subject would be futile — one must teach the disciplines in a way that brings out their cognitive structure.
Critics (Paul, Siegel, 1985): obvious counterexamples (writing, speaking are general skills, even though they are “about something”). Recognizing the confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions is general.
Three senses of specificity: conceptual (refutable), epistemological (partly true: authenticating a Picasso ≠ solving an equation), empirical (as a matter of fact, one can be critical in one field and not another) → hence the transfer problem: evidence of effective transfer to everyday life remains thin.
Common ground: thinking critically about a subject requires background knowledge of that subject.

Critiques of the ideal itself

The ideal of critical thinking has been challenged as culturally and ideologically situated — unduly favoring certain ways of knowing (those of a dominant group):

privileging distance over closeness, detachment over caring for others, thought over action;
privileging doubt over belief, reason over emotion, imagination, and intuition; solitary thinking over collaboration.

Feminist critique — Barbara Thayer-Bacon (1992 onward): the classical theory of critical thinking is said to be sexist insofar as it separates the self from the object. She opposes it with constructive thinking: a social, embodied, situated activity, valuing reason but also intuition, imagination, and emotion (the image of the collective “quilting bee” against the solitary thinker of Rodin’s The Thinker). An important qualification: this critique does not claim that women reason less well — tests (Facione 1990; Kuhn 1991) find no difference in skill or disposition between the sexes.

Critical pedagogies: Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968) and bell hooks (Teaching to Transgress, 1994) link critical thinking to a dialectical dialogue that abolishes domination in the classroom and leads to action. → These critics do not want to discard the ideal, but to reconceive it.