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Chapter 02 30
That was what the jury, considered as a whole, was doing in 12
Angry Men—going back and forth among interpretation, analysis,
inference, and evaluation, with Henry Fonda’s character
as the person who called for more careful self-monitoring and
self-correction. The jury’s deliberation demanded reflection and
an orderly analysis and evaluation of the facts, but deliberation
is not constrained by adherence to a predetermined list or sequencing
of mental events. Nor is critical thinking.
No, it would be an unfortunate and misleading oversimplification
to reduce critical thinking to a list of skills, such as the
recipe on the lid of dehydrated soup: first analyze, then infer,
then explain, then close the lid and wait five minutes. To avoid
the misimpressions that a list might engender, we need some
other way of displaying the names of the skills.
We xii have always found it helpful when talking with college
students and faculty around the world about critical thinking skills
to use the metaphor of a sphere with the names of the skills displayed
randomly over its surface. xiii Why a sphere Three reasons.
• First, organizing the names of the skills on a sphere is truer
to our lived experience of engaging in reflective judgment,
as indicated above. We have all experienced those moments
when, in the mental space of a few seconds, our
minds fly from interpretation to analysis to inference and
evaluation as we try to sort out our thoughts before we
commit ourselves to a particular decision. We may go back
and forth interpreting what we are seeing, analyzing ideas
and drawing tentative inferences, trying to be sure that we
have things right before we make a judgment.
• Second, a sphere does not presume any given order of
events, which, for the present, is truer to the current state
of the science.
• Third, a sphere reminds us about another important characteristic
of critical thinking skills, namely that each can be
applied to the other and to themselves. xiv We can analyze
Core Critical Thinking
Skills Interact
Professionals Measure Outcomes
Musicians
Salesperson
Athletes
Nurses
Teachers
Soldiers
our inferences. We can analyze our analyses. We can explain
our interpretations. We can evaluate our explanations.
We can monitor those processes and correct any mistakes
we might see ourselves making. In this way, the core critical
thinking skills can be said to interact.
STRENGTHENING OUR CORE
CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS
Quality of
the concert
Number of
sales
Games won
Health care
outcomes
achieved
Learning
accomplished
Success of
the mission
Musicians, salespeople, athletes, nurses, teachers, and soldiers
strive to improve their likelihood of success by strengthening
the skills needed in their respective professions. Even
as they train in one skill or another, working people must not
lose sight of how those skills come together in their professional
work. The quality of the concert, the number of sales
made, the games won, the health care outcomes achieved,
the learning accomplished, and the success of the mission—
these are the outcomes that count. The same holds for critical
thinkers. Success consists of making well-reasoned, reflective
judgments to solve problems effectively and to make good
decisions. Critical thinking skills are the tools we use to accomplish
those purposes. In the driving example, our attention
was on the challenges associated with reaching the intended
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Think Critically, by Peter Facione and Carol Ann Gittens. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc.