As you can see, the title of the blog is now ‘Critical Thoughts’. The earlier title ‘Random Opinions’ was just good enough but I don’t think it captured the essence like ‘Critical Thoughts’ does. Forget the aptness, the truth is I’m in love with this concept of critical thinking. For those who don’t know, ‘Critical Thinking’ is a very interesting and important concept. The word ‘critical’ might give a negative tone to the word but that’s because of our usage of the words like ‘criticise’ and ‘criticism’. Critical thinking need not necessarily be about negativity. So what is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.

I might have taken you back to your school and college years with that kind of definition. But that’s the most comprehensive way to define critical thinking. Basically what it means is, improving one’s own thinking knowing with the awareness of the common pitfalls, and also continuously improve one’s own thinking . Apparently, good critical thinkers can be very good problem solvers.

Thinking is often casual or routine, whereas critical thinking deliberately evaluates the quality of thinking. The ability to think critically involves three things:

* Using logic, reason and the scientific method over abstract theories and emotional judgements.
* Awareness of heuristics (shortcuts) and biases (errors) that influence human thinking.
* Using these abilities systematically on everything in your life. From that, using the results to make improvements.

It is natural for humans, once an idea is formed, to look for supporting instead of conflicting evidence. The first goal of a rational thinker is that, once a theory is formed, evidence that conflicts with this theory is sought. Searching to be proven wrong, rather than vindicated, is a cornerstone of critical thinking.

Everyone thinks; it is our nature to do so. But much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed or down-right prejudiced. Yet the quality of our life and that of what we produce, make, or build depends precisely on the quality of our thought. Shoddy thinking is costly, both in money and in quality of life. Excellence in thought, however, must be systematically cultivated.

That’s a fantastic paragraph. We might not want to admit this – we are biased, prejudiced, partial and uninformed. But we still think and make decisions. May be due to the fact that our thoughts and subsequently our decisions can be faulty, we do get into problems. The quality of our decisions determine what kind of life we lead. There is a reason your office life or personal life is going in a certain way. Most of it is controllable by you provided your thoughts and decisions are good enough. It’s up to you to be aware of the known hurdles for thinking such as bias, distortion, partiality, lack of information or prejudice and ensuring that they don’t bring down the quality of your thoughts. There is a reason why it is said that ‘critical thinking is a way of taking up problems of life’.

Critical thinking is also defined as the art of taking charge of your own mind. Its value is also at root simple: if we can take charge of our own minds, we can take charge of our lives; we can improve them, bringing them under our self command and direction. Of course, this requires that we learn self-discipline and the art of self-examination. This involves becoming interested in how our minds work, how we can monitor, fine tune, and modify their operations for the better. It involves getting into the habit of reflectively examining our impulsive and accustomed ways of thinking and acting in every dimension of our lives.

Errors and mistakes can happen anywhere and everywhere. So they can happen in thoughts and thought processes as well. If the whole thought process is faulty, there is no way it’s gonna give you a good decision at the end of the process. The thing with the errors and mistakes with our thought process is, not many would come to know about the mistake. The result of the mistake in the thought process could be bad decisions, strained relationships, bad image and stuff like that. Those are things that we may not want to admit that those could be a result of our poor thinking. The thinker, which is you or me, would most probably come to know of the mistake. We have the options of believing that we are masters of the universe and not going back to analyse where exactly we went wrong and put the blame on something else or to analyse and identify why we could not come up with a good solution.

Critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it. Much like professional athletes or musicians must practice to master their sport or art, so must thinkers practice to master their minds.

Come to think of it, I think I’ve always practised ‘critical thinking’ (though I might be a novice at that) without actually knowing that such a recognised concept exists. Many a times my thoughts and decisions have gone wrong. Over a period of years, I’ve learnt to think better. I’ve learnt to decide better. Though thinking is natural, critical thinking is not natural. Biased thinking and prejudiced thinking are very natural. I don’t know how good a critical thinker I am but I’m happy that I have been able to recognise critical thinking and also distinguish normal thinking and critical thinking. I’m sure one can become a better thinker with the practice of critical thinking.

This is an open question. What kind of thinker are you – impulsive, casual or critical? Has your thinking improved over time? Over time, you would have obtained better sources of information and more experience but let’s not mistake them for improved thinking. Unless we have made a conscious attempt to improve our thinking, it would most probably be the same style of thinking loaded with more information and exeprience. Hence my question. This is an instrospective question. You can ask yourself without burdening yourself with the thought of having to admit it to others. Is our thinking casual or critical? I know this is quite a heavy subject but how often do we get to ‘think about thinking’?