Critical thinking, in a nutshell, is the art of being right.

People think in many different ways. Some of those ways of thinking are more reliable than others, in the sense that they are more effective in helping people determine which propositions are true and which are false.

Critical thinking, by definition, is thinking in those more reliable or effective ways. It is applying the thinking techniques that work best in helping you arrive at knowledge rather than error.

    Critical thinking is the active, skillful deployment of those general principles

    and procedures of thinking which are most conducive to truth or accuracy in

    judgment.

But what are those general principles and procedures? It has taken many centuries to answer this question, and we still have not figured it out completely. However, we do under- stand the basics pretty well.

The foundation of critical thinking is understanding how claims are supported or op- posed by evidence, i.e., the information that is relevant to whether the claim is true or false. Any particular piece of evidence can be cast in the form of a reason for, or objection to, some claim.

So at the most basic level, the general principles and procedures you need to be a critical thinker are the ones governing reasoning and argument. In other words, they are the concepts, rules, techniques, strategies, tips and procedures described in these topics.

In understanding what critical thinking is, it might help to contrast it with some forms of

‘uncritical’ thinking:

  - Accepting things purely on faith.

  - Thinking that any person’s beliefs, including your own, are ‘true for them’ and cannot be mistaken or criticized.

  - Thinking that your beliefs or worldview somehow require your allegiance. On the contrary: your beliefs should serve you, and they will do that best if they are true.

  - Being too lazy to seek evidence or challenge beliefs.

The nature of the critical thinker was described well by Francis Bacon in the 17th century:

      ‘For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the chief point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. So I thought my nature had a kind of familiarity and relationship with Truth’. – from The Advancement of Learning.

See also: Topic Proposition