The Thinkers Guide to Intellectual Standards (Thinkers Guide Library)

Aspiring Thinker's Guide to Critical Thinking

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I even figure out how to avoid thinking if I want. You can get what you want from people if you know how to manipulate them. They can always make more money. You can always trick people if you know how. Guess what, you can even trick yourself if you know how. They use intellectual standards to decide what to believe. They use intellectual standards to keep their thinking on track. In this guide, we focus on some of the important ones.

When you use them every day, your thinking improves. Can you give examples? If everyone in the world regularly used intellectual standards, we could solve most of our big problems.

All instruments in a cockpit are relevant to flying the airplane, but they are not relevant to riding a bicycle. Questions you can ask when you are not sure whether something is relevant: Questions you can ask when you are not sure whether something is logical: Can you show me how it all fits together? How can I rewrite this paragraph so that the sentences all fit together?

How did you come to your conclusions? Explain why this makes sense to you. Should I follow along with these ideas, or should I reject them? Good athletes stay focused on their goals. Good thinkers do too. Questions you can ask to target purpose: What is my purpose in doing what I am doing? What is your purpose? What is the purpose of this assignment? What is the purpose of the main character in this story? What is my teacher trying to accomplish? What is the purpose of this textbook? Should we change our purpose? Is my purpose fair to everyone?

Here is a template to follow: What was the author trying to accomplish? What was the key question she or he addresses?

Intellectual Standards

What is the author taking for granted in this chapter [that might be questioned]? Assumptions are usually not stated and therefore can be hard to figure out.

After all, lots of ideas do. Here is a structure you can use. Write your answers on your own paper. Find two important potentially conflicting ideas. These ideas may be in a textbook or in different books or just two ideas you are concerned with.

For example, you might be concerned with ideas like: Think through one important conflict between the ideas you have selected. Clearly state one important point about that idea. This is your thesis. Write out at least one reasonable objection to your position from a different point of view. Construct a dialogue between some one defending your view and someone who intelligently opposes it. Their modest cost enables instructors to require them of all students in addition to a textbook.

Thinker's guide library

Their compactness enables students to keep them at hand whenever they are working in or out of class. Their succinctness serves as a continual reminder of the most basic principles of critical thinking. It provides the common denominator between all forms of analysis. Imminently practical for students. How to say something worth saying about something worth saying something about. It lays out the function of ethics, its main impediments, and its social counterfeits.

It focuses on the internal logic of the news as well as societal influences on the media. It focuses on the intellectual skills inherent in the well-cultivated scientific thinker. The Art of Mental Trickery and Manipulation—Introduces the concept of fallacies and details 44 foul ways to win an argument. For faculty it provides a shared concept and vocabulary. For students it is a thinking supplement to any textbook for any engineering course. Focuses on explaining basic critical thinking principles to young children using cartoon characters. It lays the foundation for the ideas found in the mini-guide How to Improve Student Learning.

It cultivates student learning encouraged in the How to Study and Learn mini-guide. Provides grading rubrics and outlines five levels of close reading and substantive writing. For pricing of other guides, please visit our web site at www. Foundation for Critical Thinking P. Box Dillon Beach, CA limited preview version The Foundation for Critical Thinking PO Box Dillon Beach, CA Foundation for Critical Thinking The Foundation for Critical Thinking seeks to promote essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking, thinking predisposed toward intellectual empathy, humility, perseverance, integrity, and responsibility.

A rich intellectual environment is possible only with critical thinking at the foundation of education. Because only when students learn to think through the content they are learning in a deep and substantive way can they apply what they are learning in their lives. Moreover, in a world of accelerating change, intensifying complexity, and increasing interdependence, critical thinking is now a requirement for economic and social survival.

It is a phenomenon to which we all, unfortunately, fall prey. We need a system for intellectual intervention, a method for pre-empting bad thinking. We need to take rational command of our cognitive processes in order to rationally determine what to accept and what to reject. In short, we need standards for thought , standards that guide us to consistently excellent thinking — standards we can count on to keep our thinking on track, to help us mirror in our minds what is happening in reality, to reveal the truth in situations, to enable us to determine how best to live our lives.

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Our goal in this guide is to provide a conscious foundation for thinking about intellectual standards, and the words that name them. Ultimately, such consciousness will enable those proficient in the use of intellectual standard words to think more effectively in every domain and subject in which, or about which, they think.

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Of course, in this brief space, we can provide merely the beginnings of a systematic analysis of standards for thought. In doing so, we open the door to the development of a broad and integrated view of intellectual standards. We offer a brief analysis of some of the most important intellectual standards in the English language.

When humans, as a species, begin to take seriously the important role of intellectual standards in the development of rational human cultures, when people understand the idea of intellectual standards in connection with a rich conception of critical thinking, when we commit ourselves to using intellectual standard words, explicitly and routinely in everyday life, we will begin to create critical societies. We will begin to bring into being ways of living in a world which further the values and skills of fairminded critical thinking. Home Begin Here Critical Thinking: Table of Contents, overviews and selected pages.

Sample of Intellectual Standards. When I first started reading this pamphlet, I wondered what relevance it might have to competitive intelligence. This was a series of lectures, first published in , detailing the way that English common law developed the concept of accessing the state for justice. At first, I did not understand why such ancient history was relevant to modern law.

But, by the time I graduated, I found that knowing the intellectual and historical roots of our common law made my understanding of the present more complete and deeper.

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