What are critical thinking skills?

What are critical thinking skills?

1. Thinking = any thought

2. Critical = The ability to distinguish

   • Main objectiv: asses an argument for soundness
     • Argument: Statment that claim some statment (premises) support some other statment (conclusion)
       • Statment: sentence that can be true or false
       • Premise: Statment that support another statment (the conclusion)
       • Conclusion: Statment that is supported by other statments (premises)
       • Presuppose inference: That a sentence can contain informations that can be relatet to information in another sentence
         • Inferece indicators (relate one sentence to another): Therfore, thus, because, hence, since etc.
     • (1) Asses logical strength - do conclusion follow from premises?
     • (2) Are the premises true?
     • How? By critical thinking skills:
       • (1) Interpreative skills - Clearify meaning and definitions
         • Be aware of prejudice:
           • Pay atension to the people holding the belief if contrary to your own
           • Be thorough when you hold the belief to awoid fooling yourself
         • (2) Verification skills - Determin the truth of the premises. Diferent statements have diferent methodes, see ch 6
           • (3) Reasoning skills - Assesing the caind of inference and therby the metod of assessing the argument, see ch 7-15
       • Why have critical thinking skills?
         • Information can be useless if you cant draw out:
           • Implications
           • Consequence
         • Self-interest - people do not always have ouer best in mind, and this can help us see if it is good for us
         • Intellectual self-respect
         • Be bether at persuade others
           • Remember ethical considerations
       • Goes back to 4. century bc ac a science
         • Aristoteles priciple of right reasoning - the core of logic untill 1900
           • was developed in medieval age
             • From 1900 radical development becaus of mathematicians using logic
               • Artificial intelligens
               • Computers
               • Logic has becom more abstract
                 • The book will use new insight, but hold to old principle
           • Logic shoud be practical and lead to NORMATIVE PRINCIPLES