00:00:20.000 What critical thinking is has often been defined in complex ways
00:00:29.000 Websites about critical thinking often devote many, many pages of text
00:00:34.000 in an attempt to unpack what critical thinking is all about.
00:00:38.000 Long lists of verbs like conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and more
00:00:44.000 are supposed to capture what critical thinking is.
00:00:49.000 These are a lot of words, but are you any clearer after reading them?
00:00:54.000 Educational institutions like the International Baccalaureate Office
00:00:58.000 similarly produce long lists of skills like this in an attempt
00:01:10.000 But I think this obvious case, rather than clarifies
00:01:14.000 the real purl of simplicity that is at the heart of critical thinking.
00:01:21.000 Individual academics engaged in education are no better than institutions in this respect.
00:01:26.000 There has recently been a flurry of articles online discussing the importance of critical thinking
00:01:31.000 and promoting its apparent absence in public discourse.
00:01:35.000 But when one denies that any clarification or definition of the term
00:01:40.000 is even desirable or possible, we should become critical.
00:01:45.000 We should be critical that the domain of education theory
00:01:49.000 is offering much at all to the conversation about critical thinking.
00:01:58.000 We should turn to those who, instead of regarding critical thinking
00:02:02.000 as the latest education fad, have actually been engaged in the study of critical thinking
00:02:10.000 As part of the philosophy called critical rationalism
00:02:18.000 Popper's ideas on what is now called critical thinking
00:02:22.000 is very close to the common sense idea of what people understand this term to mean.
00:02:28.000 Because the type of thinking we are interested in here is critical for our shared understanding of this term.
00:02:37.000 So what better place to turn for that shared understanding than a dictionary?
00:02:43.000 Critical, adjective, expressing or involving an analysis of the merits and faults
00:02:50.000 of a worker idea, or having a decisive or crucial importance in the success
00:03:05.000 Now that first sense is the sense we should mean when we refer to critical thinking.
00:03:10.000 Critical thinking will be something to do with an analysis of the merits and faults of a worker idea.
00:03:19.000 But critical thinking is critical in second sense as well.
00:03:22.000 It's critical like it's absolutely critical that you understand this,
00:03:26.000 which is to say it's essential to do this if you want to succeed.
00:03:31.000 This common sense idea and Popper's critical rationalism philosophy
00:03:36.000 explained in his numerous books written throughout the 20th century
00:03:40.000 allow us to produce a very parsimonious definition of critical thinking.
00:03:47.000 Critical thinking, thinking aimed at producing criticisms.
00:04:01.000 Now given our definition, we can turn to strategies that can work to enhance our ability to produce effective criticisms.
00:04:10.000 We can cleanly discriminate between other kinds of thinking that can be just as valuable in other areas.
00:04:16.000 And critical thinking, critical thinking, the thinking aimed at producing criticisms produces those criticisms,
00:04:25.000 precisely because criticism is the very means by which we are able to separate out the true from the false or the valuable from the worthless,
00:04:43.000 But how to produce criticism, though some strategies are known, is ultimately a creative act.
00:04:49.000 It requires creative thinking, but that discussion we will leave now for another time.