Product Description

Critical Thinking is about becoming a better thinker in every aspect of your life: in your career, and as a consumer, citizen, friend, parent, and lover. Discover the core skills of effective thinking; then analyze your own thought processes, identify weaknesses, and overcome them. Learn how to translate more effective thinking into better decisions, less frustration, more wealth and above all, greater confidence to pursue and achieve your most important goals in life.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34358 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Review

"What sets this book apart from the others are the examples and exercises that force students to personally understand the relevance of the topic under discussion.  That the reader must learn to 'know thyself.'" 

    -- Brian J. Shelley, York Technical Institute

 

"Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life provides a fresh insight regarding this seemingly ominous subject of Critical Thinking.  The subject was so intriguing that, at times, I found the text much like a long awaited novel, hard to put down." 

    -- Jill Simons, Arkansas State University

 

"The material is written to arouse a student's curiousity by posing controversial and provocative 'think for yourself' questions..." 

    -- Becky Goodman, University of Hawaii

 

"This text is unique in that certain core values and capabilities ('virtues') are requisite..." 

    -- Michael Craven, Clark College

 

"Critical Thinking...is superior to the usual 'shortcut/toolkit' type texts..." 

    -- Gary Greer, University of Houston, Downtown

From the Inside Flap
PREFACE

You are what you think. That's right. Whatever you are doing right now, whatever you feel, whatever you want—all are determined by the quality of your thinking. If your thinking is unrealistic, it will lead you to many disappointments. If your thinking is overly pessimistic, it will deny you due recognition of the many things in which you should properly rejoice.

Test this idea for yourself. Identify some examples of your strongest feelings or emotions. Then identify the thinking that is correlated with those examples. For example, if you feel excited about college, it is because you think that good things will happen to you in college. If you dread going to class, it is probably because you think it will be boring or too difficult.

In a similar way, if the quality of your life is not what you would wish it to be, it is most likely because it is tied to the way you think about your life. If you think about it positively, you will feel positive about it. If you think about it negatively, you will feel negative about it.

For example, suppose you came to college with the view that college was going to be a lot of fun and you were going to form good friendships with fellow students who would respect and like you and, what is more, that your romantic relationships would become interesting and exciting. And let's suppose that hasn't happened. If this were the thrust of your thinking, you now would feel disappointed and maybe even frustrated (depending on how negative your experience has been interpreted by your thinking).

For most people, thinking is subconscious, never explicitly put into words. For example, most people who think negatively would not say of themselves, "I have chosen to think about myself and my experience in largely negative terms. I prefer to be as unhappy as I can be."

The problem is that when you are not aware of your thinking, you have no chance of correcting poor thinking. When thinking is subconscious, you are in no position to see any problems in it. And, if you don't see any problems in it, you won't be motivated to change it.

The truth is that since few people realize the powerful role that thinking plays in our lives, few gain significant command of it. Therefore, most people are in many ways victims of their own thinking, that is, harmed rather than helped by it. Most people are their own worst enemy. Their thinking is a continual source of problems, preventing them from recognizing opportunities, keeping them from exerting energy where it will do the most good, poisoning relationships, and leading them down blind alleys.

In this book we are concerned with helping you take charge of what you do, what you learn, and how you feel by taking command of how and what you think. We hope that you will discover the power of your thinking and will choose to develop it in ways that serve your interests, as well as the well-being of others.

The single most significant variable in determining the quality of what you learn in college is your thinking. Certainly your, teachers will play a role in your learning. Some of them will do a better job than others of helping you learn. But even the best teachers can help you very little if you lack the intellectual skills necessary for thinking well through course content.

This book introduces you to the tools of mind you need to reason well through the problems and issues you face, whether in the classroom, in your personal life, or in your professional life. If you take these ideas seriously, you can do something for yourself of lifelong value.

If all goes as we plan it, you gradually will become more and more aware of the thinking that causes you problems. And you will be able to change that thinking so you can experience a more satisfying life. You will find that learning, both inside and outside of class, will become more and more rewarding. You will increasingly be able to take the ideas you are learning in class and apply them to your life in a useful way.

The choice is yours, and the quality of your choice can only be as good as the thinking you use to come to that choice. If you think that taking command of your thinking is not important (perhaps you assume that you already have that command), this book won't help you learn to think any better than you do now. If, however, you sense that you have not yet achieved the personal control over your thinking we are speaking of, and you recognize its potential value, you will read on, and progressively take the steps to create personal control and power.

From the Back Cover

Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life, Second Edition, approaches critical thinking as a process for taking charge of and responsibility for one's thinking.  Based in theory developed over the last 25 years, the book focuses on an integrated, universal concept of critical thinking that is both substansive and practical; it fosters the development of basic intellectual skills students need to think through content in any class, subject, or discipline, as well as through any problem or issue they face.  Simply stated, this text offers students the intellectual tools they need for a lifelong learning and rational, conscientious living.

 

Written by two of the leading experts in critical thinking, this second edition has all the strengths of the original edition plus two new chapters: one focusing on fallacies in thinking, and the other dealing with the problem of propaganda and bias in the mainstream news media. 

 

 

Content highlights include:

• Think For Yourself activities
• A concrete yet substantive approach to multidisciplinary learning
• Practical ways to analyze and evaluate reasoning
• Emphasis on fair-minded critical thinking and ethical reasoning
• Egocentric and sociocentric thought as primary barriers to critical thinking
• Keys to lifelong learning, decision making, and problem solving
• A global approach to developing the mind-its thought, desires, and emotions
• Using information critically and ethically
• Thinking strategically through problems and issues in everyday life

The authors' website provides students with valuable resources to enhance their development as thinkers.  Find this at www.criticalthinking.org.

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Customer Reviews

Physician, heal thyself!
This book is woefully inadequate as a text for a critical thinking course. What are we to make of a critical thinking text that says almost nothing about objective truth, the central role of argument in critical thinking, the distinction between inductive and deductive arguments, the distinction between truth and validity, or which does not even mention any of the standard deductive forms of argument?

Furthermore, the authors do not seem to know how their "Standards for Thinking" apply to their own work. Just a few examples should suffice: (i) One of their standards is fairness. Yet in the chapter entitled "Develop as an Ethical Reasoner," the authors spend three pages laying out the arguments of PETA against the use of animals in medical experimentation, but barely a paragraph presenting the argument in favor of such experimentation. This hardly seems fair-minded to me. It would seem that, for them, being "fair-minded" involves closely arguing one's own position, but ignoring the arguments of your opponent. (One wonders if they themselves are members of PETA. But, if they are, shouldn't they admit this for the sake of honesty and complete disclosure? Or is it only bias when someone else does it?) (ii) Another of their standards is that of depth. The problem here is that they do not seem to have read the individuals whom they quote so approvingly with any depth. They repeatedly quote William Graham Sumner as an advocate of critical thinking, but seem oblivious to the fact that he is best known for his ethical relativism---a position that they themselves seem to repudiate in their chapter on ethical reasoning. Perhaps they would have discovered this for themselves had they read beyond the first 20 pages in Sumner's book, Folkways. (iii) The authors present contradictory positions in the space of a few pages, and do not seem to even notice. On the one hand, they embrace the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as morally binding because "every nation on earth has signed the declaration." However, four pages later they condemn such practices as slavery since they were justified solely in virtue of "social convention." What they do not seem to realize is that their justification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is itself based solely on social convention. Simply because it was signed by every nation on the face of the earth (itself a questionable claim)does not make it morally right or morally binding.

As a critical thinking instructor, I would be loath to recommend this book to anyone as anything other than an instructive failure. As a useful alternative, I would suggest Moore and Parker's Critical Thinking. It is much more comprehensive and more in keeping with representative views in the field.

Well-intentioned but unfocused
I paid hard money to fly this book from the USA and wish I had got it from the library. This topic does not lend itself to un-putdownability, but repeated attempts got me only to Chapter 3. I finished it in annoyance by speed-reading key paragraphs of each chapter and put it on the shelf.

Good points: literate and covers a breadth of good ideas, plus some nice-sounding exercises and challenges. I like the intellectual values chapters.

Bad points: No AHA! moments. No argument mapping. Diagrams that do not pull their weight and text that should be diagrammed. Woolly, wordy discussions of social conditioning and Milgram studies, that don't go near Cialdini's 'Influence' for impact. Exercises and quotes that speak of Noam Chomsky's idea of fairness.

This book's intention is to open a new (presumed redneck) student's mind so wide that the wind blows through, dusting it with the enlightened prejudices of his college environment.

Repetition
This was a required book for my BSN class. While it is a proper choice for an adult learner, it is quite repetative and annoying.