The Critical Thinking Community - Essay Example

Critical thinking has been defined in many different ways. Scriven and Paul (2007) define critical thinking as “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully 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”. However to understand what it means to think critically one must look at the components of critical thinking and the attributes of people who think critically. The best description of what it means to think critically is the ability of the thinker to take charge of their thinking. To do this it means that the thinker is engaging in several processes including questioning, interpreting, and evaluating information, assessing and analyzing information, examining their own beliefs and assumptions, and weighing up opinions against facts.

One of the important criteria for thinking critically that differentiates it from other kinds of thinking such as creative thinking is that the thinking leads to reactive behaviors that are rational. To think critically therefore means more than just having thoughts; it means analyzing and evaluating and assessing not just thoughts but beliefs to improve life.