gillespie 2011 inquiry
TRANSCRIPT
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INQUIRYCRITICALTHINKINGACROSSTHEDISCIPLINES
Contents
Robert H. Ennis Critical Thinking: Reection and Perspective Part I................ 4
Michael A. Gillespie Assessing Critical Thinking about Values:A Quasi-Experimental Study.................................................. 19
Articles from the Members of the Lone Star College CyFair Campus Critical Thinking Based
Faculty Learning Community (CTB-FLC)
Maria Sanders Embracing Critical Thinking as a Model forProfessional Development: Creating CTB-FLCsOn Your Campus..................................................................... 29
Maria Sanders &Jason Moulenbelt Dening Critical Thinking: How Far Have We Come?.......... 38
Frank Codispoti The Academic College Course is an Argument ..................... 47
Idolina Hernandez Critical Thinking and Social Interaction in theOnline Environment............................................................... 55
Heather Mong & Ben Clegg Review of David Levys Tools of Critical Thinking:Metathoughts for Psychology................................................. 62
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2 INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
Copyright Permission and Disclaimer
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Frank Fair, Managing Editor
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3SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1
From the Editors DeskFrank Fair
I am very pleased that in this issue ofINQUIRYwe continue the series of reection pieces that Gerald
Nosich began so well in the previous issue. Now it is Bob Enniss turn, and his contribution is so rich, so
replete with relevant detail, that it has been split into two parts. Critical Thinking: Reection and Perspec-
tive Part I appears in this issue and covers Bobs initial involvement with the eld of critical thinking and
the evolution of his conceptualization of critical thinking. Critical Thinking: Reection and Perspective
Part II has equally meaty content, and it will appear in the next issue,INQUIRYVol. 26, No. 2 (Summer
2011). It will cover Bobs perspective on issues involved in the assessment and teaching of critical thinking.
Next comes a piece by Michael Gillespie Assessing Critical Thinking about Values: A Quasi-experi-
mental Study that reports on a study of an innovative program at Bowling Green State University whose
goal is to foster critical thinking in the context of considering values. Many universities have programs
with similar intent, and Gillespies careful study provides a model for how one might assess such programs.Then we have a series of articles contributed by faculty members from the Cypress Fairbanks (CyFair)
campus of the Lone Star College System. With an enrollment of 85,000 students on its several campuses,
the Lone Star system is the largest institution of higher education in the Houston area and the fastest grow-
ing community college system in Texas. A faculty member and administrator from Lone Star-CyFair, Maria
Sanders, describes in Embracing Critical Thinking as a Model for Faculty Development how she and a
number of other faculty members from diverse disciplines formed a CTB-FLC, a Critical Thinking Based
Faculty Learning Community, in which critical thinking served as a focus for a low-cost, potentially high-
impact faculty development effort. Then come three essays that are fruits of this effort. The rst essay by
Maria Sanders and Jason Moulenbelt Dening Critical Thinking: How Far Have We Come? surveys
the often bewildering variety of conceptions of critical thinking with a view toward noting difculties this
variety poses for critical thinking assessments and for interdisciplinary collaborations. The second essay,
The Academic College Course is an Argument, is a spirited defense by Frank Codispoti of the lecture as
an instructional mode when done well and when approached with an emphasis on the same sort of critical
thinking skills that students are supposed to bring to course reading matter. (Note: anyone interested in
improving lectures might also look at the article on Successful Lecturing by Patricia deWinstanley and
Robert Bjork in Applying the Science of Learning to University Teaching and Beyond,edited by Diane
Halpern and Milton Hakel, a 2002 collection from Jossey-Bass.) Finally, Idolina Hernandezs essay Criti-
cal Thinking and Social Interaction in the Online Environment considers how the use of discussion boards
in the online course environment can foster critical thinking by encouraging the appropriate processes of
social interaction.
The last contribution is a review of David Levys Tools of Critical Thinking: Metathoughts for Psy-
chology.Heather Mong and Ben Clegg give an informative account of the book and a generally favorable
review, but they have a few caveats, mainly about what might be needed to avoid some of the thinkingpitfalls that the Levy discusses.
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4 INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
It is an honor to have received Editor Frank Fairs
request to write a personal historical report about the
development of critical thinking education.1 My response
emphasizes the period 1950-2010, but does reach further
into the past, and is by no means a historians history of
critical thinking. It is a personal view of the critical thinking
movement and my involvement in it. Part I deals with how
I became involved in the critical thinking movement and
how my denition and conception of critical thinking have
evolved. Part II will deal with efforts to assess and to teach
critical thinking and with problems and future prospects.
My Background: How I Arrived atCritical Thinking
Although in my K-12 years I was exposed to an ex-
cellent traditional education, I, like Gerald Nosich (2010),
was quite ignorant and naive in making my early decisions.
Because I did well in high school math and physics, and
because of the encouragement of my teachers and parents, I
went to MIT in 1945, right at the end of World War II, plan-
ning to become an engineer. Although I did well for four
semesters in the math, engineering, and science aspects of
the curriculum, I developed some misgivings. For those
and other personal reasons, I interrupted my studies andjoined the US Army, serving in the Army of Occupation
in Japan in 1947. There I experienced a 19-year-old-type
total revision of my goals and interests. The war-making
technology and its effects (including what I saw in Hi-
roshima during a visit there on the second anniversary
of the bomb) convinced me that the world did not need
engineers or more science and technology. It needed a
population suffused with wisdom. At the time I thought
that philosophy was the ultimate repository of wisdom, so I
decided to obtain a bachelors degree in philosophy rather
than engineering, having done no investigating about the
nature of academic philosophy.
MIT at that time had no philosophy courses, so I
cautiously took a leave of absence, never to return. I
transferred to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. There
the contemporary philosophy to which I was exposed was
logical positivism, but also some of John Deweys work.
Neither satised me. Logical positivism seemed to be an
interesting, challenging system, like chess, but without
relevance to wisdom; and Deweys defense of his positions,
as well as some of his positions, seemed weak. Further-
more, even though his advocacy of reective thinking
(Dewey, 1933) would later appeal to me, that was not part
of what was presented to me as Deweys philosophy. Nor
did I see relevance to wisdom in my history of philosophy
courses. The content came too thick and fast for me to
grapple with and to discuss what I now see as important
ideas and issues. Grappling and discussing were not part
of the total curriculum that I experienced, though they are
what I now think are crucial elements in critical thinking
instruction, though of course not in themselves sufcient.
As a result of frustration in my search for wisdom,
I instead considered a career in the theater because my
extra-curricular experiences there were exciting and fun,and the theater actually is a way of promoting wisdom
(e.g., Twelve Angry Men, a timeless play). But I rejected
the theater, partly because I saw so many unemployed
actors and dancers who were much more talented than I.
There was a bit of critical thinking here: making observa-
tions and using the information in considering and being
open to alternatives (to some extent) when making deci-
sions. But these practices were not part of my traditional
education.
Critical Thinking: Reection and PerspectivePart I
Robert Ennis
Abstract
This is Part I of a two-part reection by Robert Ennis on his involvement in the critical thinkingmovement. Part I deals with how he got started in the movement and with the development of his
inuential denition of critical thinking and his conception of what critical thinking involves. Part
II of the reection will appear in the next issue ofINQUIRY, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2011), and it
will cover topics concerned with assessing critical thinking, teaching critical thinking, and what the
future may hold.
Key words: critical thinking denition, rigor, criteria, logic, looseness, progressive education, Vietnam
War protests, subject matter, critical thinking movement
I am uneasy to think I decide concerning truth and falsehood, reason and folly, without
knowing upon what principles I proceed.(David Hume)
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5SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1
In 1950 I managed to get a BA in philosophy without
any knowledge of the ordinary-language philosophical
developments associated with the later Wittgenstein. More
ignorance. Then I heard about philosophy of education. It
struck me (still naively, given what I believed about phi-
losophy) that what I had learned and had not yet learned
about philosophy could somehow help the eld of educa-tion. There was some equivocation going on in my head
regarding philosophy, but I had not been sensitized to
equivocation or ambiguity in my logic course, or any other
courses. And I rightly believed that education could have an
important role in developing a world population suffused
with wisdom. I decided to go into philosophy of education.
I then received some wise (though unrequested)
advice: Learn rst-hand as a teacher what goes on in
our education system before launching into a career in
educational theory. Though I had not sought that advice,
I followed it and became a high school physical science
teacher, who also had to teach two sections of a combina-
tion of English and social studies. It was called a coreor common learnings course in progressive education
parlance, and it was a precursor to writing across the
curriculum. In the process, I heard about critical thinking
from the progressive-education movements advocacy of it,
and realized that the promotion of critical thinking would
be very important for our personal, vocational, and civic
lives, and that the survival of a democratic way of life de-
pended on the critical thinking of the voters. I still believe
this, even more strongly, and am pleased that I have been
able to spend as much time as I have on critical thinking,
only wishing that I could have accomplished more.
I tried to incorporate critical thinking in my teaching.
But I had little notion of how to teach it or even of whatcritical thinking was other than propaganda analysis
(Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938), which was
heavily negative and oversimplied in its approach (as is
commonly the case with the current fallacies approach to
teaching critical thinking).
After three years of high school teaching I became
a graduate student at the University of Illinois, and en-
rolled in a philosophy of education program with minors
in philosophy and educational measurement. I was lucky
to get an assistantship with the Illinois Project for the Im-
provement of Thinking under the leadership of B. Othanel
Smith and Kenneth Henderson. We tried to help three
Chicago-area high schools embed critical thinking in their
subject-matter instruction, physics being the area on which
I focused. I also found myself immersed in, and fascinated
by, the later-Wittgenstein movement in philosophy, which I
saw and still see to be quite relevant to education, wisdom,
and critical thinking, in spite of its excesses. I had nally
found a home combining philosophy and education.
The above-described background is, among other
things, a generalizable argument-by-example in support of
the supplementation of our subject-matter courses and oth-
er courses with a heavy dose of critical thinking instruction.
Notice that I said supplementation, not supplanting. A
necessary condition for thinking critically about anything is
being well informed, which includes subject-matter content
where relevant. Unfortunately, aside from simple deduc-
tion, principles of critical thinking were not included in thecontent that I encountered with two minor exceptions:
In high school English I was taught to make classication
(genus-differentia) denitions, and in college physics labs
I was taught to make three measurements (instead of just
one) and average the three in order to secure a more reliable
measure of a quantity. In my undergraduate deductive logic
course I was not shown thatstrictdeductive logic rarely
applies to everyday reasoning (including that of scholars,
voters, and Supreme Court Justices). However, imprecise
derivation or qualied reasoning (Ennis, 1969a & 1969b,
1981a, 1996a, 2004; discussed later in this essay) does
apply to everyday reasoning. Fortunately, material impli-
cation and its implausible cohorts were, as I remember it,not promoted in that logic course.
The fact that I did receive advice from an experienced
person about how to pursue my career is not to my credit.
I did not know enough to seek it out. It was in effect im-
posed on me by the father of a high school friend. In none
of my courses was I told the critical thinking principle that
one needs to make a special effort to get all the relevant
information appropriate for a decision, and to seek, con-
sider, and get informed about alternatives before making
an important decision.
In sum, in my K-12 and undergraduate education there
was virtually no attention to the principles, procedures,
and criteria for thinking critically in or out of the subjectsI studied. Basically I was engaged in acquiring, and was
tested on, straight subject-matter knowledge only.
The Critical Thinking Movement as I Saw Itand Associated with It:
From Progressive Education and theLater Wittgenstein to the Present
Early philosophical concerns about critical thinking
can be found, among other places, in Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, Bacon, Hume, and especially John Stuart Mill,
but John Dewey (Dewey, 1933, rst edition 1910) was the
source of inspiration for the progressive-education K-12
critical thinking movement of which the Illinois Project
for the Improvement of Thinking was a part.
The Progressive Education Movement
The progressive-education movement, which was
strong in the United States from the 1920s through the
1950s, adopted and developed Deweys emphasis on
reective thinking. Tests called Interpretation of Data,
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6 INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
Application of Principles of Science, Application of Prin-
ciples of Logical Reasoning, andNature of Proof(Smith
and Tyler, 1942, pp. 35-156) were developed to appraise
students in the Progressive Education Associations monu-
mental Eight-Year Study, which took place in the 1930s.
(See Aiken, 1942, for an overview.) In that study, the words
critical thinking and clear thinking replaced reec-tive thinking (Smith & Tyler, pp. 35-37), and a 1942
yearbook of the National Council for Social Studies used
critical thinking in its title, Teaching Critical Thinking
in the Social Studies(Anderson, 1942). My rst published
article was about the teaching of critical thinking (Critical
Thinking: More on Its Motivation, Ennis, 1956), and ap-
peared in the journal,Progressive Education. I submitted to
that journal because the progressive-education movement
was the primary promoter of critical thinking at the time.
In addition to my focus on the teaching of critical
thinking, I became the statistician for the Illinois Project for
the Improvement of Thinking, and produced conclusions
from the data obtained with the tests we used and fromour observations in the classrooms. I saw the importance
of having valid tests of critical thinking, and I realized the
dependence of such tests on ones conception of critical
thinking. As a result, my Ph.D. dissertation topic was The
Development of a Critical Thinking Test (Ennis, 1959b).
Given the state of critical thinking theory in use at the time,
I believed that the development of a critical thinking test
required the prior development and specication of a con-
ception of critical thinking. So my dissertation combined
the development of a conception with the development of
a test. The conception leaned heavily on my philosophi-
cal forbears, as well as this question: How do people go
wrong in their thinking? Because of my assistantship andthesis work I was able at the time to contribute directly to
the literature on the teaching of (Ennis, 1956), the nature
of (Ennis, 1962, 1964b), and assessment of (Ennis, 1958,
1959b) critical thinking. In particular, my 1962 article
on the nature of critical thinking, A Concept of Critical
Thinking, has received much attention. Michael Roth
(Roth, 2010), in an article in the Chronicle of Higher
Educationchallenging critical thinking, attributed critical
thinkings becoming popular to this article. Harvey Seigel
(Siegel, 1988) deemed the article highly inuential (p.
5). John McPeck (McPeck, 1981), perhaps the critical
thinking movements most vociferous critic, treated this
article as presenting the prevailing view of the conception
of critical thinking (pp. 39-57).
From Progressive Education to Emphasizing Subject
Matter
Results of the Eight-Year Study were published in
1942, when everyone was focused on World War II. I
believe that the progressive-education movement disin-
tegrated because of the overwhelming importance of the
war (1941-1945 for the United States) when the Eight-Year
Studys results appeared; the excesses that inevitably occur
in any movement; the strong criticisms of the movement
by academic subject-matter specialists (especially Arthur
Bestor of the University of Illinois); and (the nal nail
in the cofn) Russias beating the USA to having a suc-
cessful satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Sputniks appearingbefore the USAs rst satellite was blamed by many on
the schools, which were still somewhat under the inu-
ence of progressive education. I have a vivid recollection
of the large front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune
right after Sputnik, What went wrong with U.S. schools?
According to popular insight, the schools had failed to
teach science to their students. Progressive education
was held by many to be the problem. As a result, straight
subject-matter acquisition became very popular, and was
the theme in former scientist and Harvard President James
B. Conants inuential The American High School Today
(Conant, 1959).
In spite of the opposition to, and the disintegrationof, the progressive-education movement, there were con-
tinuing expressions of interest in critical thinking in the
1930s through the 1970s, mostly by philosophers. Cohen
and NagelsIntroduction to Logic and Scientic Method
(1934) introduced me as a graduate student to many aspects
of critical thinking. Max Blacks Critical Thinking: An
Introduction to Logic and Scientic Method(1946) and
W. H. WerkmeistersAn Introduction to Critical Thinking
(1948) were college textbooks that to my knowledge were
the earliest college textbooks that used the words critical
thinking in their titles. Another early text was Monroe
BeardsleysPractical Logic(1950). All four of these early
works were guides used by the staff of the Illinois Projectfor the Improvement of Thinking, of which I was a member
from 1954 to 1957.
Even Conant was a participant in the early promotion
of critical thinking at the college level with his general
editorship of the series,Harvard Case Histories in Experi-
mental Science(Conant, 1950-1954), and his authorship of
On Understanding Science(Conant, 1951). Using detailed
cases from the history of science, his series and his book
illustrated certain principles in the strategy and tactics of
science (Conant, 1951, pp. 102-111). A principal theme of
Conants in these works was opposition to a simple ve-
step concept of the scientic method(promoted I believe
by the progressive-education movement), which he felt
vastly oversimplied how scientists think. I agreed with
him in his emphasis on principles in scientic thinking
(Ennis, 1974b, 1979, 1991a, 1991b), and his complaint
about oversimplication.
From Sputnik through the mid-1970s, I was part of the
philosophically-oriented minority pressing for the incor-
poration of critical thinking in K-12 and higher education.
During this period (1959-1970), I authored 12 articles
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7SPRING 2011, VOL. 26, NO. 1
and two books concerned with the nature, teaching, and
assessment of critical thinking.
The Vietnam War Protests
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Vietnam
War and student-based concerns about relevance, authen-
ticity, and the war itself overwhelmed the subject-matteremphasis of Conant and others. But it was not only students
who challenged the academic establishment. I vividly re-
member a scholarly professor in the English Department
at Cornell University in 1968 expressing at a university
faculty meeting his contempt for the academic establish-
ment by gravely pronouncing, Were in bad trouble.
Bad trouble is not the sort of expression I expected to
hear from a scholar in the English Department at a Uni-
versity Faculty meeting. It was protest language. To use it
in those circumstances in 1968 was a powerful expression
from within of a rejection of academia.
In that context, critical thinking struggled along,
but was not very popular because of its emphasis onrigor, reection,and, alternatives,as opposed to action
now. For example, the activists of the period judged that
neutrality by our educational institutions was impossible
(generally, in that period, neutrality toward the Vietnam
War, and in one instance, toward the administration in the
late 1960s by some colleges and universities of a draft-
exemption examination, an unpopular action in the eyes
of most activists because it constituted what they felt was
complicity in the war effort). Though I opposed the war,
I disagreed with the judgment that neutrality for colleges
and universities was impossible. I argued that neutrality
on any specic issue (though not on every issue at once)
was possible, unless the argument assumed from its begin-ning that its position and recommendation on the specic
issue were correct, in which case the argument became
essentially circular (Ennis, 1969d, an improvement on an
early version, 1959a). My argument in this case involved
an ordinary-language sensitivity to reported denition and
equivocation, sub-aspects of the denition aspect of critical
thinking to be considered later and listed in the appendix
(Abilities 9b1 and 9d).
Renewed Emphasis on Critical Thinking
In the late 1970s, concern about critical thinking
moved back into the foreground, I believe because of the
excesses of the protest movement, because the war was
over, and because the protestors emphasis on relevance
had strong appeal. Howard Kahanes popular Logic and
Contemporary Rhetoric(1971) contributed to the revival
of attention to critical thinking at the time. It was written
. . . in an attempt to raise the level of political argument
and reasoning by acquainting students with the devices and
ploys which drag that level down (Kahane, 1971, Pref-
ace). But the renewed emphasis on critical thinking was
not as part of a rejuvenation of the progressive-education
movement. Critical thinking was advocated because it
provided the rigor, reection, and reasonableness that both
the anti- and pro-war forces had ignored, as evidenced by
Howard Kahanes inuential efforts.
Around 1980, interest in critical thinking suddenly ex-
ploded. The First International Conference on Informal Log-ic was held at the University of Windsor in 1978. Canada,
as I understand it, had not experienced the extreme reaction
against academia that we had in the United States. Never-
theless, there was some, and emphasis on critical thinking
and informal logic was a step back to rigor and reection.
Signicant establishment institutions contributed. The
Commission on the Humanities (1980), sponsored by the
Rockefeller Foundation, placed heavy emphasis on critical
thinking, as did the Carnegie Foundations Ernest Boyer
(Boyer, 1983). The College Board (College Board, 1983),
which is responsible for the SAT test, specied reasoning
as one of the six basic academic competencies in Aca-
demic Preparation for College.In 1983, Executive Order# 338 in the California State University System required
that in order to graduate from one of the State University
units, a student must have had nine hours of instruction
in communication and in critical thinking. At the Second
International Conference on Informal Logic at Windsor
in 1983, The Association for Informal Logic and Critical
Thinking (AILACT) was established, the membership of
which then consisted mostly of philosophers from Canada
and the United States and it still does. The American
Philosophical Associations Board of Ofcers (1985) urged
philosophers to help with attempts to test for critical think-
ing and attempts to include critical thinking in elementary
and secondary curricula.This explosion of interest was neither a return to
straight subject matter exclusively, nor to the progressive-
education movement. It was a marriage of subject matter
and one important feature of the progressive movement,
critical thinking, a marriage that to this day we struggle to
implement. In going beyond straight subject-matter acquisi-
tion, The College Board exhibited this attempted marriage
in its Academic Preparation for College: The learning
outcomes described here [including reasoning] are rigorous
as well as comprehensive (College Board, 1983, p. 3).
The roots of three current, philosopher-led, criti-
cal-thinking-promoting organizations developed in the
1980s. One, led by Richard Paul (and currently also
Linda Elder), developed at Sonoma State University,
California, with large annual conferences of educators at
the K-12 and university levels at which many of us in
AILACT made presentations. Its current titles are Foun-
dation for Critical Thinking, Center for Critical Think-
ing, and The National Council for Excellence in Critical
Thinking. A second, led by Robert Swartz, developed at
the University of Massachusetts-Boston with a masters
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8 INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
program in critical and creative thinking, and is currently
titled the National Center for Teaching Thinking (NCTT).
I have participated in some of its workshops. A third, led
by Peter Facione, had its origins at Santa Clara Univer-
sity, California, where Facione led an effort to arrive
at an agreement by mail among forty-six specialists in
critical thinking (of which I was one) on a fairly-detaileddispositions-and-abilities denition of critical thinking.
Facione called the results The Delphi Report (Facione,
1990). His organization operates under the title Insight
Assessment. The rst two of these organizations focus on
teaching, and the third focuses on a conception of and on
the assessment of critical thinking, although all are con-
cerned with all three elements. All three have extensive
web sites. The rst and second claim national status,
but I see no interaction or cooperation between them.
AILACT, of which I am a member and past pres-
ident, is open to new members on application, has elec-
tions for its leaders, and is not publicized as well as the
above three, though it is trying to catch up. On its web siteat http://ailact.mcmaster.ca, it provides material dealing
with the nature of, teaching of, and assessment of criti-
cal thinking and informal logic, lists available consultants
from its membership, lists institutions providing advanced
instruction in critical thinking, and will be listing avail-
able critical thinking tests. AILACT also sponsors criti-
cal thinking and informal logic sessions at annual APA
meetings. More information about all four of these critical
thinking organizations can be found on their web sites.
Throughout the 1980s there was a large amount
of activity in critical thinking: workshops, conferences,
test development, new curricula, restatement of goals,
books, articles, etc., accompanied by controversies aboutall aspects of the movement. These controversies live
on, and include the basic nature of critical thinking; the
details of the nature of critical thinking; the relationship
between critical thinking and subject matter; promoting
critical thinking in the different subjects as opposed to
doing it in separate critical thinking courses (often unfor-
tunately assumed to be mutually-exclusive alternatives);
the role of metacognition (being aware of and thinking
about ones own thinking) in critical thinking; the nature
of the deduction involved in critical thinking; the role
of persuasion in critical thinking; the relation between
critical thinking and problem solving; the degree to which
critical thinking is broader than argumentation and
deduction, if at all; the possibility of assessing critical
thinking; how to assess critical thinking on a large
scale and on a small scale; the possibility of teaching
critical thinking; the role of critical thinking principles
in critical thinking instruction; whether to seek and how
to achieve transfer of the learning of critical thinking to
topics other than those used in instruction; and of course,
the value of critical thinking.
The multiplicity of critical-thinking-promoting activi-
ties from 1980 through the present involved not only phi-
losophers, but also people in all subject-matter areas. The
principal academics with whom I interacted at workshops
and conferences were philosophers, psychologists, and
speech/communication experts, each with a somewhat dif-
ferent emphasis. To oversimplify, the philosophers tendedto emphasize seeking the truth (or the rightness or correct-
ness of a process or result), and using rational methods of
doing so; psychologists tended to emphasize empirical
relationships, such as what causes what, including such
processes as metacognition, transfer of critical thinking
learning to a new area of application, and problem solving.
Speech/communication experts tended to emphasize effec-
tive persuasion. But all three were generally interested at
least to some extent in the others emphases. During this
period I contributed to general critical thinking and criti-
cal thinking in science, and authored some 41 articles and
one book, as well as co-authoring two articles, one book,
three published tests, and several unpublished tests, eachrelevant to at least one of the above-listed controversial
areas in critical thinking.
In the 1980s, the critical thinking movement em-
phasized critical thinking in K-12, as well as at the un-
dergraduate level. Extending into the 1990s and the rst
decade of the twenty-rst century, emphasis on critical
thinking increased in college and universities, at least
in mission statements. This occurred partly at the behest
of accrediting agencies and partly because people real-
ized that critical thinking is important and that existing
subject-matter acquisition generally did not adequately
prepare people to think critically in their vocational, civic,
and personal lives. All the controversies I have mentionedcontinue today, though progress has been made. Because
critical thinking is so important, I have devoted much of
my career to the task.
My Contributions to the Content of theCritical Thinking Movement
Because I am probably best known for my develop-
ment of a conception of critical thinking, and because
teaching and assessment both assume a conception of
critical thinking, the nature of critical thinking is the rst
topic to be addressed. It will be followed in Part II in the
next issue of INQUIRYby discussions of assessment,
teaching (including incorporation in a curriculum), and
future prospects.
The Nature of Critical Thinking
Early on I developed a denitionand an associated
elaborated conceptionof critical thinking (Ennis, 1962).
I am here employing the distinction between concept
and conception that John Rawls offered (Rawls, 1971,
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p. 5), following H. L. A. Hart (Hart, 1961, pp. 155-159):
A conceptis that which different, more detailed concep-
tionsof a particular idea have in common. But I use the
terms denition and conception instead of concept
and conception in order to minimize confusion. In 1962
I was not aware of the distinction and called the whole
presentation a concept of critical thinking (Ennis, 1962,p. 81), though a more appropriate title might have been a
denition and a conception of critical thinking.
As a result not only of the intense discussions of the
late 1970s and the early 1980s, but also further investiga-
tion from 1962 to 1987 of a number of critical thinking
aspects, my rst denition and conception of critical
thinking developed into a new pair (Ennis 1987b, 1991c,
1996a, 2002), which I shall call my second denition and
conception. In this section, I shall present and discuss the
features of the two pairs, the second conception having
evolved from the rst, and the second denition being
radically different from the rst, though they both treat
critical thinking as a term of approbation. An unexempli-ed presentation of the total second denition/conception
can be found in the appendix to this essay.
My First Critical Thinking Denition and the
Associated First Conception of Critical Thinking
The critical thinking denition that was presented
to me as a graduate student was the one advanced by B.
Othanel Smith (Smith, 1953), my advisor, mentor, teacher,
model, and supervisor in the Illinois Project for the Im-
provement of Thinking. Smith held that critical thinking is
both determining the meaning of statements and assessing
these statements (p. 130).
For my rst denition, I amended Smiths denitionby holding that critical thinking is the correct assessing
of statements (Ennis, 1962, p. 83). The key change from
Smiths denition was the addition of the word correct.
I felt that the determining-the-meaning part was implicit,
although I now would make it explicit because it is so
important. I added correct because I believed and still
do believe (somewhat under the ordinary-language inu-
ence of the later Wittgenstein) that critical thinking, as
used in the critical thinking movement, was not merely a
descriptive term, but also a term of approbation.
This approbation feature of the rst denition is one
of several features of particular note in the 1962 deni-
tion/conception. Three other features are (a) emphasis on
detailed criteria, (b) emphasis on good judgment in an
imprecise environment because criteria do not automati-
cally yield critical thinking decisions, and (c) attention to
credibility of sources. I shall elaborate.
(a) Criteria
One basic idea in both the rst and second of my
conceptions of critical thinking came from my high school
teaching experience. It is that in order to do critical think-
ing, students need criteria for making decisions. These
criteria would give them guidance that is as precise as is
feasible in making decisions. That meant, for example, not
just that students should learn or know that they should
take into account the credibility of their sources, or that
they should judge a hypothesis by looking at the evidence;but also that they should learn or know criteria (and ac-
companying distinctions) for deciding whether a source is
credible, or for judging whether the evidence supports the
hypothesis. As a high school teacher I had no such criteria
to promote with my students.
(b) Good Judgment: Qualications, Tolerating Lack
of Precision, and SEBKUS
One cannot expect the application of these criteria
to yield a result automatically, except in mathematics
and deductive logic. And even deductive logic in real life
applications usually has to deal with implicit or explicit
qualifying words like ceteris paribus(other things be-ing equal), probably, tends to, roughly, etc., making
the application of criteria not logically necessary in most
cases (Ennis, 1969b); hence, in a way, imprecise or loose.
So good judgment in applying the criteria is needed
as well. Criteria used in making a good judgment are
generally aided by Sensitivity, Experience, Background
Knowledge, and Understanding of the Situation, that is,
SEBKUS (an acronym I developed fairly recently (En-
nis, 2004)).
These emphases on criteria and good judgment (ex-
pressed with varying degrees of qualication, and made
with SEBKUS) have permeated all my work on critical
thinking, even my work on operational denition (En-nis, 1964a), but the basic ideas started to develop when
I was a graduate student involved in the Illinois Project
for the Improvement of Thinking. They are key features
of my 1962 concept article. Many of my articles since
then have elaborated these emphases in different contexts
and with respect to different aspects of critical thinking.
If I am right about the need for good judgment (which
often requires a tolerance of some lack of precision,
that is, tolerance of some looseness), then I see no hope
for computerizing critical thinking, though I admit that
expert computer systems can probably ((!) See my
paper Probably (Ennis, 2006) for a discussion of some
details of imprecision.) do a better job in tight time limits
than many professionals.
The emphases on qualications, tolerance of impreci-
sion, and SEBKUS are not original. For example, Aristotle
suggested them in The Nichomachean Ethics (I, 3). I have
attempted to implement them in numerous places (Ennis,
1964a, 1969b Ch. 5, 1981a, 1987a, 1987b, 1991c, 1996a,
2001, 2004, 2006, 2007). But although they seem obvious
to me, they are controversial, both in and out of philosophy.
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(c) Credibility of Sources
Another feature I introduced that was not original,
but that to my knowledge was new to the philosophical
critical thinking literature is the emphasis on judging the
credibility of sources.I introduced it in my dissertation,
leaning heavily on a legal source, John Henry Wigmore.
(Wigmore, 1942) In the rst denition/conception article(1962), I discussed credibility of sources and later, at
the time of challenges to President Nixons credibility,
elaborated the imprecision of credibility criteria (Ennis,
1974a). I also incorporated credibility of sources in my
second conception of critical thinking (Ennis, 1980, 1981b,
1987a, 1991c, 1996a, 2002).
Credibility of sources is now fairly widely accepted
as an aspect of critical thinking. I suspect that it was
not mentioned in early philosophical works on critical
thinking because of philosophers traditional emphasis
on argument and reasoning (especially deductive logic).
However, I do realize that there was some philosophical
concern with this topic, for example in consideration offallacies, and in Francis Bacons idols, but criteria for
judging credibility of a source (such as the desirability
of a sources not having a conict of interest) were not at
that time advanced in the philosophical literature (so far
as I know). However, they are in both of my conceptions
of critical thinking.
My Second Critical Thinking Denition and
Conception of Critical Thinking
Going beyond the special features of the rst de-
nition/conception, (criteria, judgment/imprecision, and
credibility of sources) my second denition/conception
has several additional special features. These are (a) thedenition itself, (b) explicit inclusion of critical thinking
dispositions, (c) qualied deduction, (d) detailing of as-
sumption ascription, (e) expansion of inference-to-best-
explanation, (f) special emphasis on equivocation, and (g)
inclusion of value judging. All of these except the rst and
the last, were present in some form or were implicit in the
rst conception. I shall discuss each in turn.
(a) The Denition
John Dewey provided two informative examples of
critical thinking inHow We Think.The rst involves what
to believe about the cause of bubbling coming from under
hot, recently-washed glasses (which involved formulat-
ing alternative hypotheses and checking predictions from
them with observations). The second concerned selecting
a subway train for a timely trip to his destination (involv-
ing alternative possible decisions, exploring their prob-
able consequences, and making one decision, which was
implemented and found satisfactory). He thus exemplied
the two main emphases (belief and action) in my second
and current denition of critical thinking:
Critical thinking is reasonable reective
thinking focused on deciding what to believe
or do.(Ennis, 1987a, 1987b, 1991a, 1996a,
2002).
During the early 1980s when I was developing this
denition, Gerald Nosich urged me to add or do tobelieve, on the ground that decisions about actions (not
only decisions about beliefs) are a type of decision that is
ordinarily included in the concerns of people in the criti-
cal thinking movement and incorporated in their use of
the term. I appreciate his suggestion and did implement it.
It is not a precise denition, which fact bets the gen-
eral imprecision in the everyday use of the term critical
thinking (thus illustrating the tolerance of imprecision as
suits the circumstances, which was a topic in the previ-
ous section). If the denition is a true though imprecise
report of usage in the critical thinking movement, which
is what I hold it to be, then it describes the current no-
tion of critical thinking in that movement. But it is alsopositional in that in offering it I take the position that this
denition represents something worth implementing in
our education system and elsewhere. So I offer it also as
a defensible positional denition (a denition that takes a
position on some issue for which rational arguments can
be offered). I hold this position because I think that reason-
able and reective thinking focused on what to believe or
do should be a very important part of our personal, civic,
and vocational lives, and should receive attention in our
education system.
(b) Dispositions
The rst conception has been criticized for omittingcritical thinking dispositions (e.g., Siegel, 1988, p. 6), such
as the dispositions to be open-minded, to try to be well
informed, to be alert for alternatives, and to exercise ones
critical thinking abilities. Although I believe that critical
thinking dispositions are implicit in my rst conception, I
explicitly included them in the second conception because
they are so important and might otherwise be neglected.
Over the years, I have reorganized my presentation of
critical thinking dispositions (Ennis, 1987a, 1991c, 1996a,
1996b, 2002). See the latest version in the appendix. It is a
brief list with no examples, containing I believe the most
important ones.
(c) Qualied Deduction
The basic ideas of deduction are important in many
aspects of thought, as I argued in A Conception of De-
ductive Logic Competence (Ennis, 1981a), although
logical necessity is too strict for many practical ap-
plications (discussed under Good Judgment above),
and although material implication and its cohorts make
trouble and must be ignored in critical thinking (Lewis,
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C. I., 1912 and Strawson, P. F., 1952). Criteria for useful
deduction have not been specied in most versions of my
second conception of critical thinking in order to save
space, but can be found in a few places (Ennis, 1969a,
1969b, 1981a, 1996a, with further application discussed
in 2004).
Deduction is usually included in attempts by phi-losophers to teach critical thinking. What is unique in
my conception is my emphasis on qualifying deductive
reasoning so as to accommodate the implicit and explicit
use of words like probably and ceteris paribus.The
explicit rejection of material implication and its cohorts is
not unique, but is controversial. Keeping deduction simple
is also a feature of my approach, but it is not unique in the
eld of critical thinking.
(d) Assumption Ascription
This second conception goes more deeply into types
of assumptions and criteria for ascribing assumptions than
is widely advocated, perhaps because of the complexityof the topic. Ordinarily students are urged to identify their
and others assumptions, but are not told how to do this.
There are different sorts of assumptions, which need
to be distinguished from each other because different
criteria apply to each. Some are presuppositions, which
must be true for another proposition to make sense (but
see Donnellan, 1966,1968). Some are assumptions in the
pejorative sense. Some are also needed assumptions (called
assumptions of the argument by Hitchcock, 1985),
which, however, are not logically necessary conditions
for drawing the conclusion, as some people think. And
some are used assumptions (called assumptions of the
arguer by Hitchcock, 1985), that is, those that someonecognitively used, either explicitly or implicitly. Reason-
able space limits preclude giving more details here, but the
distinctions and criteria for ascribing assumptions can be
found most completely in Identifying Implicit Assump-
tions (Ennis, 1982c), and to a lesser extent also in Critical
Thinking(Ennis, 1996a), Argument Appraisal Strategy
(Ennis, 2001), and Applying Soundness Standards to
Qualied Reasoning (Ennis, 2004).
(e) Inference-to-best-explanation
Although inference-to-best-explanation (IBE) is well
known in the philosophical literature as exemplied by
Gilbert Harman (Harman, 1965, 1973), a discussion by
me of one feature of Harmans approach (Ennis, 1968)
with a reply by him, and Peter Liptons book (Lipton,
2004). But outside of my work (Ennis, 1996a), IBE is not
generally advocated in the critical thinking literature. There
are three features about IBE that I should mention: (1) the
confusion that might be introduced by the name, (2) its
widespread applicability in elds other than science, and
(3) its relation to causality.
First with regard to a confusion, IBE basically consists
of an approach to evaluation of hypotheses that considers
the explanatory power of the hypothesis and the inability
of competitors to explain evidence or the outright incon-
sistency of the alternatives with the evidence. There are
details that are more controversial. But calling it infer-
ence might misleadingly suggest that it is a set of rules forgenerating hypotheses, that is, of inferring the hypothesis
directly from the evidence, which it is not. Rather IBE is an
approach containing a set of rules or criteria for evaluating
a hypothesis, and in many situations is the evaluation part
of the exploratory process of rening and developing a nal
hypothesis, which is also evaluated by IBE.
However, IBE can also be used as a label for the
intuitive leap from the known facts in a situation to a
hypothesis which should then be judged for its adequacy
by the rules or criteria of IBE. Thus IBE is both an intui-
tive generation and an approach to evaluating the product
resulting from this intuitive process. This dual meaning
can be confusing.Second, as far as applicability is concerned, IBE ap-
plies not only to scientic hypotheses, but also to historical
claims about what happened, such as, Napoleon died of
arsenic poisoning; interpretive claims in literature, such
as the claim that in Othello,Desdemonas maid, Emelia,
never dreamed he [Iago] was a villain. (Bradley, 1937,
p. 213 an example suggested to me by Bruce Warner).
It also applies to test validity claims, such as a claim I have
made to the effect that a particular critical thinking test is
a substantially valid test of college-level critical thinking
ability under standard conditions (Ennis, 2009). I have
discussed the Napoleon and Emelia examples elsewhere
(Ennis, 1996a).Third, to consider IBE in relation to causality, as I
see it, all explanatory hypotheses that account for an oc-
currence or type of occurrence are implicitly or explicitly
causal. There are some, including Bertrand Russell, who
have urged abandoning causality in our disciplined think-
ing, and there are various views about what it is and how
we identify it. This is a controversial area. In the past, I
have argued that we should not abandon causality (Ennis,
1982a), and that being a necessary condition for an effect
is not necessarily necessary (Ennis, 1982b), contrary to
necessary-condition and counterfactual analyses of specic
(singular) causal claims, e.g., the analyses of John Mackie
(1974) and David Lewis (1973). I have also tried to sketch
out a broad picture of causality (Ennis, 1973), especially
specic causal claims like The bad decisions by BP caused
the 2010 Gulf oil spill and Lack of adequate regulation
caused the spill (two seemingly inconsistent claims),
and am now working on a sufcient-condition speech-act
interpretation of specic causal claims. However, I am
convinced that causality itself is an irreducible notion.
There is still much work to be done here.
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12 INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
(f) Equivocation
Although equivocation is a standard item in a list of
fallacies, I treat it as deserving special mention because
it is particularly insidious. In my rst conception I called
it merely ambiguity, but actually it is more serious than
ambiguity. It is often connected with denitions, and I
usually mention it in association with denitions. As I usethe term, equivocation is the process of shifting between
two meanings of a term in an argument, generally proving
a proposition using one sense of the term and applying the
proposition using a different sense.
For example someone might charge that my concep-
tion of critical thinking is biased because it takes a posi-
tion on what makes for good thinking. In this example the
denition of bias that is assumed is that a person is biased
if he or she has a position on something. But the applica-
tion of the term bias seems to be a charge of unfairness
(unfairness not having been mentioned in the denition of
bias, but a characteristic ordinarily associated with the
use of the term bias). So it seems to follow that criticalthinking is unfair, ifone ignores the shift in meaning. But
of course, it does not follow.
Actually, blatant cases of equivocation (in which the
arguer explicitly adopts two meanings, and deliberately
exploits the shift between them) are rare. Most actual cases
of equivocation are more subtle, and must be uncovered
by probing. One of the subtleties is in what I have called
impact equivocation (Ennis, 1980) which is found in
arguments that have the impact of equivocation but in
which the arguer does not explicitly adopt both of the
meanings of the crucial term. Rather the arguer adopts a
special meaning for a term that is at variance with ordinary
use of the audience, makes a statement using the term inthat special meaning, which will be taken by the audience
to assume the ordinary meaning of the term, and thus be
misleading. This sometimes happens with the word bias,
and with the word reliability, a psychometric term used
in the discussion of tests. Concern with equivocation,
including impact equivocation, is one of the good things
that was part of the ordinary-language movement inspired
by the later Wittgenstein.
(g) Value judgments
Value judgments were omitted in my rst conception,
making it what I then called a truncated conception.
Appraising value judgments is an aspect of the second
conception, and some criteria are offered, such as getting
the facts straight (including facts about the likely conse-
quences of an action), prima facie application of acceptable
principles, and attention to alternatives. But a heavy dose
of good judgment is needed as well.
Two Overall Summaries
(a) The appendix
The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of
Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities, which is the
appendix to this paper and is in outline form, contains all
of the above-described second-conception ideas, as well
as additional features that are fairly standard in the criticalthinking literature. This outline, though unexemplied, is
comprehensive and thorough enough to be used in plan-
ning for an overall curriculum, or as a basis for a table
of specications for a critical thinking test or test series.
But it makes for difcult reading if read straight through,
especially for beginners, and it contains more than can be
incorporated in an introductory course in critical thinking.
(b) A brief summary of the second conception
Table 1 provides a very brief (super-streamlined)
overall presentation with neither listings of criteria nor
detailed listing of aspects of critical thinking. I call it
super-streamlined to show that it is a streamlined ver-sion of A streamlined conception of critical thinking
(Ennis, 1991c) and other article-length presentations of the
second conception. It also merges critical thinking abilities
and dispositions. But it can be useful as someones rst
encounter with critical thinking, or as a rough checklist for
a students paper or thesis, or for anyones act of deciding
what to believe or do.
Table 1
A Super-Streamlined Conception of
Critical Thinking
Assuming that critical thinking is reasonable reective thinkingfocused on deciding what to believe or do, a critical thinker:
1. Is open-mindedand mindful of alternatives
2. Desires to be, and is, well-informed
3. Judges well the credibilityof sources
4. Identies conclusions, reasons,and assumptions
5. Asks appropriate clarifying questions
6. Judges well the quality of an argument,including its reasons,
assumptions, evidence,and their degree of support for the
conclusion
7. Can well developand defend a reasonable position,doing
justice to challenges
8. Formulatesplausible hypotheses
9. Plans and conducts experimentswell
10. Defnes termsin a way appropriate for the context
11. Draws conclusions when warranted but with caution
12. Integratesall items in this list
Incidentally I have argued (Ennis, 1981c) that another
brief characterization of good thinking, Benjamin Blooms
popular Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Cognitive
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Domain (Bloom, 1956) is inspiring, but not very helpful
as guidance. Among other things, its six categories do
not have useful criteria that can be applied across top-
ics and subject-matter areas. For example, his category,
analysis, covers a range of important activities that vary
considerably from, for example, chemistry to literature,
with not much in common that is worth teaching as criti-cal thinking or higher-order thinking (a term in use by
Blooms followers). There is not much to teach in general
about analysis, making Blooms taxonomy vulnerable to
McPecks (1981, 1990a) complaints about the emptiness
of attempts to teach general thinking. However, in provid-
ing a list with a ve-to-one ratio of thinking categories to
knowledge (Bloom behaviorally dened knowledge
as recall, but most people have taken it in its ordinary
sense), his taxonomy is an apparently persuasive counter to
demands for exclusive attention to subject-matter knowl-
edge, as opposed to higher-order thinking.
Other TopicsRelated to the second conception, though not explic-
itly mentioned in it, is the relationship between critical
thinking and creativity. In agreement with Sharon Bailin
(1985), I hold that they are somewhat interdependent
(Ennis, 1985). Judgments that some act of thinking is
creative generally assume a positive evaluation of the
thinking (thus requiring critical thinking). Furthermore,
creativity is needed in generating hypotheses, denitions,
and alternatives, in planning experiments, and conceiving
of counter-examples.
Another so-far-undiscussed topic in this essay is the
possibility of critical thinkings being gender or culturally
biased (Wheary & Ennis, 1995; Ennis, 1998). My view isthat critical thinking is basically not gender or culturally
biased, as can be seen in a point-by-point examination of
the second conception in the Appendix.
Later, in the section labeled Teaching Critical Think-
ing in Part II, I will consider the question of whether
critical thinking is subject-specic, and the question of
the appropriate allocation of responsibility for teaching
critical thinking among various teachers, subject-matter
areas, and other units. Both questions are related to ones
conception of critical thinking, but perhaps better consid-
ered under teaching.
[To be continued inINQUIRYVol. 26, No. 2 (Sum-
mer 2011).]
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Appendix
The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of
Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities3
Critical thinking is reasonable and reective think-
ing focused on deciding what to believe or do.Thisdenition I believe captures the core of the way the term
is used in the critical thinking movement. In deciding what
to believe or do, one is helped by the employment of a set
of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that I shall
outline. These can serve as a set of comprehensive goals
for a critical thinking curriculum and its assessment. Use-
fulness in curriculum decisions, teaching, and assessment,
not elegance or mutual exclusiveness, is the purpose of this
outline. For the sake of brevity, clarication in the form of
examples, qualications, and more detail, including more
criteria, are omitted, but can be found in sources listed
below, but most fully in my Critical Thinking(1996a).
This outline is the encapsulation of many years of
work in the elaboration of the simple denition of critical
thinking given above, and it distinguishes between criticalthinking dispositions and abilities.
It is only a critical thinking contentoutline. It does not
specify grade level, curriculum sequence, emphasis, teach-
ing approach, or type of subject-matter content involved
(standard subject-matter content, general knowledge
content, streetwise-knowledge content, special knowledge
content, etc.). For assessment purposes it can only provide
a basis for developing a table of specications and the
preparation of assessment rubrics.
Critical Thinking Dispositions
Ideal critical thinkers are disposed to
1. Care that their beliefs be true,4and that their decisions
be justied; that is, care to get it right to the extent
possible; including to
a. Seek alternative hypotheses, explanations, conclu-
sions, plans, sources, etc.; and be open to them
b. Consider seriously other points of view than their
own
c. Try to be well informed
d. Endorse a position to the extent that, but only to the
extent that, it is justied by the information that is
available
e. Use their critical thinking abilities
2. Care to understand and present a position honestly
and clearly, theirs as well as others; including to
a. Discover and listen to others view and reasons
b. Be clear about the intended meaning of what is
said, written, or otherwise communicated, seeking
as much precision as the situation requires
c. Determine, and maintain focus on, the conclusion
or question
d. Seek and offer reasons
e. Take into account the total situation
f. Be reectively aware of their own basic beliefs
3. Care about every person. (This one is an auxiliary,
not constitutive, disposition. Although this concern
for people is not constitutive, critical thinking can be
dangerous without it.) Caring critical thinkers
a. Avoid intimidating or confusing others with their
critical thinking prowess, taking into account others
feelings and level of understanding
b. Are concerned about others welfare
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16 INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
Critical Thinking Abilities
The following abilities numbered 1 to 3 involve basic
clarication; 4 and 5, the bases for a decision; 6 to 8,
inference; 9 and 10, advanced clarication; and 11 and
12, supposition and integration. Abilities 13 to 15 are
auxiliary abilities, not constitutive of critical thinking,but very helpful.
Ideal critical thinkers have the ability to:
(Basic Clarication, 1 to 3)
1. Focuson a question:
a. Identify or formulate a question
b. Identify or formulate criteria for judging possible
answers
c. Keep the question and situation in mind
2. Analyze arguments:
a. Identify conclusions
b. Identify reasons or premises c. Ascribe or identify simple assumptions (see also
ability 10)
c. Identify and handle irrelevance
d. See the structure of an argument
e. Summarize
3. Ask and answer clarication and/or challenge ques-
tions, such as:
a. Why?
b. What is your main point?
c. What do you mean by______________________?
d. What would be an example?
e. What would not be an example (though close tobeing one)?
f. How does that apply to this case (describe a case,
which appears to be a counterexample)?
g. What difference does it make?
h. What are the facts?
i. Is this what you are saying:__________________?
j. Would you say more about that?
(Two Bases for a Decision: 4 and 5)
4. Judge the credibilityof a source. Major criteria(but
not necessary conditions):
a. Expertise
b. Lack of conict of interest
c. Agreement with other sources
d. Reputation
e. Use of established procedures
f. Known risk to reputation (the sources knowing of
a risk to reputation, if wrong)
g. Ability to give reasons
h. Careful habits
5. Observe, and judge observation reports. Major
criteria (but not necessary conditions, except for
the rst):
a. Minimal inferring involved
b. Short time interval between observation and report
c. Report by the observer, rather than someone else
(that is, the report is not hearsay)d. Provision of records
e. Corroboration
f. Possibility of corroboration
g. Good access
h. Competent employment of technology, if technol-
ogy applies
i. Satisfaction by observer (and reporter, if a differ-
ent person) of the credibility criteria in Ability # 4
above (Note: A third basis is your own established
conclusions.)
(Inference, 6 to 8)
6. Deduce, and judge deduction:a. Class logic
b. Conditional logic
c. Interpretation of logical terminology, including
i. Negation and double negation
ii. Necessary and sufcient condition language
iii. Such words as only, if and only if, or,
some, unless, and not both
d. Qualied deductive reasoning (a loosening for
practical purposes)
7. Make material inferences(roughly induction):
a. To generalizations. Broad considerations:
i. Typicality of data, including valid samplingwhere appropriate
ii. Volume of instances
iii. Conformity of instances to generalization
iv. Having a principled way of dealing with outliers
b. To explanatory hypotheses (IBE: inference-to-
best-explanation):
i. Major types of explanatory conclusions and
hypotheses:
a.Specic and general causal claims
b.Claims about the beliefs and attitudes of
people
c.Interpretation of authors intended meanings
d.Historical claims that certain things happened
(including criminal accusations)
e.Reported denitions
f.Claims that some proposition is an unstated,
but used, reason
ii. Characteristic investigative activities
a.Designing experiments, including planning
to control variables
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b.Seeking evidence and counterevidence, in-
cluding statistical signicance
c.Seeking other possible explanations
iii. Criteria, the rst four being essential, the fth
being desirable
a.The proposed conclusion would explain or
help explain the evidenceb.The proposed conclusion is consistent with
all known facts
c.Competitive alternative explanations are
inconsistent with facts
d.A competent sincere effort has been made
to nd supporting and opposing data, and
alternative hypotheses
e.The proposed conclusion seems plausible and
simple, tting into the broader picture
8. Make and judge value judgments
Important factors:
a. Background factsb. Consequences of accepting or rejecting the judg-
ment
c. Prima facie application of acceptable principles
d. Alternatives
e. Balancing, weighing, deciding
(Advanced Clarication, 9 and 10)
9. Dene terms and judge denitions, using appropriate
criteria
Three basic dimensions are form, function (act),
and content. A fourth, more advanced dimension is
handling equivocation.
a. Denition form. For criteria for 1 through 4 and6, see Ennis (1996, Ch 12 & 13). For #5 see Ennis
(1964, 1969c).
i. Synonym
ii. Classication
iii. Range
iv. Equivalent-expression
v. Operational
vi. Example and non-example
b. Denitional functions (acts)
i. Report a meaning (criteria: the ve for an ex-
planatory hypothesis)
ii. Stipulate a meaning (criteria: convenience,
consistency, avoidance of impact equivocation)
iii. Express a position on an issue (positional deni-
tions, including programmatic and persua-
sive denitions) Criteria: those for a position
(Ennis 2001)
c. Content of the denition
d. Identifying and handling equivocation (Ennis 1996)
10. Attribute unstated assumptions(an ability that belongs
under both basic clarication(2b) and inference(7bif)
a. Pejorative avor (dubiousness or falsity): com-
monly but not always associated to some degree
with the different types. Criteria: See #8 above.
b. Types:
i. Presuppositions (required for a proposition tomake sense)
ii. Needed assumptions (needed by the reasoning
to be at its strongest, but not logically necessary
(Ennis 1982)), (called assumptions of the argu-
ment by Hitchcock (1985))
iii. Used assumptions (judged by hypothesis-testing
criteria, Ennis 1982), called assumptions of the
arguer by Hitchcock (1985)
(Supposition and Integration, 11 and 12)
11. Consider and reason from premises, reasons, assump-
tions, positions, and other propositions with which
they disagree or about which they are in doubt, withoutletting the disagreement or doubt interfere with their
thinking (suppositional thinking)
12. Integrate the dispositions and other abilities in making
and defending a decision
(Auxiliary abilities,13 to 15)
13. Proceed in an orderly manner appropriate to the situ-
ation:
a. Follow problem solvingsteps
b. Monitor their own thinking (that is, engage in
metacognition)
c. Employ a reasonable critical thinking checklist
14. Be sensitiveto the feelings, level of knowledge, and
degree of sophistication of others
15. Employ appropriate rhetoricalstrategies in discussion
and presentation (oral and written), including employ-
ing and reacting to fallacylabels in an appropriate
manner. Examples of fallacy labels are circularity,
bandwagon, post hoc, equivocation, non se-
quitur, and straw person
Summary and Comments
In brief, the ideal critical thinker is disposed to try to
get it right, to present a position honestly and clearly, and
to care about others (this last being auxiliary, not constitu-
tive); furthermore the ideal critical thinker has the ability
to clarify, to seek and judge well the basis for a view, to
infer wisely from the basis, to imaginatively suppose and
integrate, and to do these things with dispatch, sensitivity,
and rhetorical skill.
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18 INQUIRY: CRITICAL THINKING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
In presenting this outline of critical thinking disposi-
tions and abilities, I have only attempted to depict, rather
than defend, them. The defense would require much more
space than is available, but would follow two general paths:
1) examining the traditions of good thinking in existing
successful disciplines of inquiry, and 2) seeing how we go
wrong when we attempt to decide what to believe or do.In any teaching situation for which critical thinking
is a goal, whether it be a separate critical thinking course
or module, or one in which the critical thinking content
is infused in (making critical thinking principles explicit)
or immersed in (not making critical thinking principles
explicit) standard subject-matter content, or some mixture
of these; all of the dispositions, as well as the suppositional
and integrational abilities (# 11 and #12) and auxiliary
abilities (#13 through #15) are applicable all the time and
should permeate the instruction to the extent that time and
student ability permit.
I have only attempted to outline a usable and de-
fensible set of critical thinking goals, including criteriafor making judgments