Introduction

It is known that human-human interaction is the most routine thing that happens in a
person’s day-to-day life. In most of these interactions, a person either receives a certain claim or
conveys a certain claim. These claims have cognitive meaning and are accepted or rejected by
other people. So, that claim is accepted or rejected in one of the two ways. It can be either be
rigorously tested and analyzed, or it can be done passively. So, this “rigorously tested and
analyzed” method of accepting and rejecting a claim is what is referred to as critical thinking.
This active ways of accepting or rejecting the claim that is received or claimed has many aspects
like standard (what criteria must be addressed for a thinking to be critical), principles,
characteristics (what can be said about how critical thinkers differ from that of the uncritical
ones), barriers (what are the obstacles that makes a thinker take an uncritical path), and
benefits of critical thinking.

Meaning of critical thing

“Critical thinking is an active, persistent, and careful consideration of a belief or supposed form
of knowledge in the lights of the grounds, which support it and the further conclusions to which
it tends” (John Dewey).
“Critical thinking is an attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems
and subjects that come within the range of one’s experience, knowledge of the methods of
logical enquiry and reasoning” (Edward Glaser).
“Critical thinking is a reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe
or to do” (Robert Ennis).
“Critical thinking is a skilled and active interpretation and evaluation of observations and
communication, information and argumentation” (Micheal Serven)
“Critical thinking is that mode of thinking – about any subject, content or problem – in which
the thinker improves his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in
thinking and imposing intellectual standards up on them” (Richard Paul).
One important term in many these definitions is “active”, which implies that up on receiving
information, an active process needs to be done to analyze the validity or the strength of those
claims.
Critical thinking is also referred as “criticocreative” thinking. The term “criticocreative” is used
because of two reasons. One is because of the term “critical” is seen as negative, and it
provokes thoughts like “is critical thinking all about criticizing and finding weaknesses in claims
of others?”. The second one is that critical thinking is all about imagining different conditions
and scenarios and examining different aspects of and thinking creatively to have as deep insight
to a claim.

Standards of critical thinking

“What criteria must be fulfilled to for critical thinking to proceed?”. Some standards of critical
thinking are least below.
1. Clarity: A claim is said to be clear if it conveys an information by minimizing the effects of
vagueness and obscurity. It also means things that are mention must be specific enough
for the audience to understand. For example, rather than saying “is your school bad?” it
is best to say “is the way you learn in school bad?”.
2. Precision: A claim is said to be precise if an information in a claim is conveyed as exact
and careful as possible.
3. Accuracy: A claim is said to be accurate if the information conveyed is true and real.
4. Relevance: A claim is said to be relevant if the information one coined must have some
type of contribution to the degree of acceptance of the claims to the audience.
5. Consistency: A claim is said to be consistent if fulfills the following conditions. One is it
must be logically consistent, which means, the whole premises that are there to support
as evidence must be true. Second condition is called practical consistency, which means,
providing claims that are impractical is being inconsistent. So, practicability is one aspect
critical thinking.
6. Logical correctness: A claim is said to be logically correct if the premises have good
rational relationship with each other and with the conclusion.
7. Completeness: A claim is said to be complete if the following conditions are met. One is
it must be analyzed as deep as possible rather than giving shallow and superficial
analysis. Second, it must include all the necessary information for a given claim.
8. Fairness: in order to have a fair thinking on a given subject, one must be open-minded,
skeptic, intellectually honest, free for bias and impartial.

Codes of intellectual conduct for effective discussion

In a discussion the main things that is observed is argument, and since it is a discussion there
are two. And the main objective of a discussion is to resolve to an agreement. The arguments
used and the analysis of those arguments is very important to the discussion. So, principle of
good arguments and critical thinking are discussed below.

Principles of good arguments

1. Structural: an argument must be as valid or strong as possible in order to be a good
argument. Priority must be given to the premises because these are part of the
argument that are foundation for which the conclusion stands. And these premises must
be compatible with each other and must be accompanied by sound reasoning.
 2. Relevant: The premises used must have a positive effect on the acceptance of the
conclusion, which means, they have to be true. Even if they are true, sometimes, they
not have a positive effect on the acceptance of the conclusion. These kinds of premises
are not relevant, thus must not be used.
3. Acceptable: the premises that are used in an argument must have enough reason in
order to be accepted by a rational person. These reasons may not be absolute, but have
to be reasonable. The truthiness of the premises has to be accessible to the audience
and to the opponent with a clear and precise usage of language.
4. Sufficiency: the number of evidences used to support the conclusion must be sufficient
in amount. The degree of the correctness of the evidences is very crucial. It is also
important to provide all necessary evidence that are important for the conclusion.
5. Rebuttal: an arguer may have a valid or strong argument, but if the arguer does not
account to address the counter-examples of the opponent, then the acceptance of the
conclusion may fall in jeopardy. So, the arguer needs to examine their own arguments
for weaknesses and addressed those weaknesses properly.

Principles of critical thinking

1. Fallibility: in an open discussion it must realize that a point held by someone may not be
absolute and superior. But it is important to know if a better defensible point is raised,
fallibility must be accepted, or else this discussion is not fair, which means, the
discussion is futile and raising better arguments is pointless because acceptance or
rejection will not happen.
2. Truth-seeking: discussion is not on clinging on one’s own argument, but a commitment
for searching the truth or the most valid or strongest argument. So, one must try to find
stronger argument by examining arguments of their own and arguments of others.
3. Clarity: involves using language that is free from ambiguity, vagueness, obscurity and
other linguistic confusions.
4. Burden of proof: when a claim is made, it always begs for some kind of evidence. And to
provide those evidences is very crucial.
5. Charity principle: if an argument of an arguer is re-expressed by an opponent, the
argument must be expressed in a way the meets the original intention of the arguer.
6. Suspension of judgement: if two arguments have somehow equal degree of validity, or if
they both are not defended very well, then, judgement based on opinion must be
suspended.
7. Resolution principles: if there were two arguments in an open discussion, and one
argument is more structurally formal, have more relevant information than the other,
more acceptable, have sufficient evidence and have rebuttal capability for defending
critic from an opponent, then the discussion must end with a resolution, and one is
obligated to accept the conclusion of the argument. Sometimes resolution may not
occur. This can be because of
  Not willing to be objective to the issues discussed,
 Rationally convinced by not psychologically,
 Lacking honesty, impartiality, fallibility.

Characteristics of critical thinking

Taking about arguers, they can be distinguished as critical and uncritical. These are some of
the characteristics that differentiate the uncritical from the critical.

Basic characteristics of critical thinkers

 Honest with themselves,
 Curios,
 Objective rather than subjective,
 Listen to the ideas of people attentively,
 Respect other’s opinion even when disagreeing,
 Avoid bias and impartiality,
 Don’t think themselves as infallible,
 Exercise self-control.

Basic characteristics of uncritical thinkers

 Think in unclear and imprecise ways,
 Fall easy to the barriers of critical thinking,
 Think themselves infallible,
 Close-minded, resist criticism,
 Subjective,
 Don’t respect other’s opinion,
 Don’t actively analyze,
 Don’t control their emotions.

Comparison between critical and uncritical thinkers

Barriers of critical thinking

Barrier of critical thinking are things that distort the thinking process of an individual and
make it uncritical. Some of the ways which this happens are listed below.
1. Egocentrism: is a tendency of thinking or evaluating arguments by putting ourselves at
the center. There are two ways of which egocentrism may occur. One is, when our
thoughts are based on self-interest, which is claim for something to be true only because
of the beneficiaries to us. Second is, when we commit a superiority bias, which means,
when arguers assume their arguments are superior to that of others. It is impossible to
 escape egocentrism since it is deceptive. So, a critical thinker must have a constant
surveillance in order to prevent such flaws to occur.
2. Sociocentrism: is a tendency of thinking than promotes group-centrism. This barrier is
almost the same to that of the previous one. The difference is that the later one is more
a “group” than “individual”. Group bias is one of the ways in which sociocentrism occurs.
When people think that the beliefs and opinions of their own society is superior to that
of others is a group bias. The other way is conformism, in which an individual follows the
opinion of an authority or crowd blindly. Both group-cent
3. Unwarranted assumptions and stereotypes:
4. Relativistic thinking:
5. Wishful thinking:

Benefits of critical thinking

Skills and dispositions
In classroom
In life

Conclusion
References
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