Summary Of Dan Kurland's 'What Is Critical Thinking?'

Dan Kurland’s “What is Critical Thinking?” article analyzed the significant characteristic one must possess in order to become critical thinkers. These include rationality, self-awareness, honesty, open-mindedness, discipline and judgment. The article emphasized the importance of applying critical thinking to every aspect of our lives. At the beginning of the article, Kurland states, “In the process of satisfying our ego, however, we can often deny ourselves intellectual growth and opportunity.” I agree that more often than not, a human ego can lead to self-destruction. By being selfish, we are closing our own window to new and better opportunities. An egoistic mind will often be accompanied with close mindedness and stubbornness. Everyone

The first step to possessing critical thinking skill is to adopt rationality, which defines the importance of facts compared to emotions during decision-making period. Most people are blinded by their emotions when they face a problem, especially when the circumstances are very stressful. The inability to think beyond our emotions can lead to consequences. Most of the time, emotions make people think irrationally, thus they frequently make mistakes in life. Thinking with emotions will also obstruct our ability to become unbiased and make fair judgment. However, I disagree that during critical thinking, we have to eliminate the use of emotions completely. Most of the great revolution of the world was started with fiery passion to change the world for the better. I believe that when a person can put their emotions for a good cause, they will have a strong drive to impact the world. The second skill to develop is self-awareness. Being self-aware means that we are aware of our assumptions, bias and prejudice and are working towards eliminating them. We try to understand what influences the way we think and whether it is healthy to continue thinking that way. The influence of mass media, stereotypes and cultural bias can impair a person’s ability to think critically. Self-awareness is important because it weighs variables instead of choosing factors that only benefit us during decision

Both methods are applicable in day-to-day life in order to polish our perspective of the world. Wolfs shows how scientific method uses four steps to provide evidence and is a highly accepted method of inquiry in this modern world. This method is important for scientist to collect evidence and diminish or perform new or old theories. It applies rational thought and critical thinking into scientific inquiry. The steps required to perform scientific inquiry is similar to critical thinking. The first step is to observe a phenomenon without making any snap judgment or bias. The second step is to draw a hypothesis. Scientist must always remember that hypotheses are smart guesses or assumption and are not fact. The most common flaw of the experiment is that most scientists often believe that a theory is valid as long as the experiment matches. They are blinded with emotions and biased belief that they may will their experiment to have the result that they wanted. Therefore, many times reported scientific discoveries lacks credibility and are falsified. Frank Wolfs proposes a solution to this method which is hypotheses testing. He suggests that if the theory does not match with the experiment, it is better for scientists not to dispose it directly or judge that the theory is not valid. If the theory does not match with the experiment, scientist should still use the hypotheses in a limited range. Scientist that