Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life (2nd Edition)
Richard Paul, Linda Elder
Language: English
Pages: 480
ISBN: 0133115283
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Use better thinking to empower yourself, discover opportunities, avoid disastrous mistakes, build wealth, and achieve your biggest goals! This is your complete, up-to-the-minute blueprint for assessing and improving the way you think about everything – from business decisions to personal relationships. Drs. Richard W. Paul and Linda Elder, of the Center for Critical Thinking, offer specific guidance for making more intelligent decisions, and overcoming the irrationalities and "sociocentric" limits we all face. Discover which of the "six stages" of thinking you’re in and learn how to think with clarity, relevance, logic, accuracy, depth, significance, precision, breadth, and fairness. Master strategic thinking skills you can use everywhere and learn how to critically assess what experts tell you. Packed with new examples and exercises, this guide won’t just help you think more effectively: it will help you use those skills to empower yourself, discover new opportunities, avoid disastrous mistakes, and grow your wealth. Above all, it will help you gain the confidence and clarity you need to pursue and achieve your most important goals in life – whatever they are!
largely to the logic of personal life. In every human situation or context, multiple systems of meaning are usually present. As a critical thinker, you engage in a process of figuring out why your associates, friends, clients, children, spouses, and employers relate to you in the way they do. This is true because everyone makes sense of the situations of their own life in some way. To do this, they must, at least implicitly, make use of the eight elements of thought. If you can identify the
questions: Can you construct a list of your most significant prejudices? (Think of what you believe about your country, your religion, your company, your friends, your family, simply because others—colleagues, parents, friends, peer group, media—conveyed these to you.) Do you ever argue for or against views when you have little evidence upon which to base your judgment? Do you ever assume that your group (your company, your family, your religion, your nation, your friends) is correct (when it
to win an argument, to score points? We can follow through on the implications of our thinking. Am I genuinely thinking through the implications, or possible consequences, of my thoughts and behavior, or would I rather not consider them? Am I avoiding thinking through implications because I don't want to know what they are (because then I will be forced to change my thinking, to think more rationally about the situation)? Now let's walk through an example that suggests how a person might use
something for her rather than always expecting her to sacrifice for me. Test the Idea Focusing on the Logic of Your Egocentric Thinking Identify a situation you were recently in that, in looking back on the situation, you realize you were probably irrational. Go through each of the elements of your reasoning as described in the strategy above, analyzing the justifiability of your thinking and behavior. Try to be as honest as you possibly can, remembering that our egocentrism is always ready
is only angry at me when I do something bad, and that if he's angry at me, he dislikes me. Notice that people often equate making assumptions with making false assumptions. When people say, "Don't assume," this is what they mean. In fact, we cannot avoid making assumptions and some are justifiable. (For instance, we have assumed that people who buy this book can read English.) Rather than saying "Never assume," we say, "Be aware of and careful about the assumptions you make, and be ready to