Why is Critical Thinking Important?
Without thinking critically, you are only looking at the surface of things. When you come across a politician's statement in the media, do you accept it at face value? Do you accept some people's statements and not others? The chances are you exercise at least some judgment based on what you know about the particular person and whether you generally agree with her or not.
Knowing whether or not you agree with someone is not necessarily the same as critical thinking, however. Your reaction may be based on emotion ("I hate that guy!") or on the fact that this elected official supports programs that are in your interest, even though they may not be in the best interests of everyone else. What is important about critical thinking is that it helps you sort out what is accurate and what is not and give you a solid, factual base for solving problems or addressing issues. Critical thinking helps you to move beyond the stereotypes and your own biases to judge individuals more accurately.
Some specific reasons for the importance of critical thinking:
It identifies bias. Critical thinking identifies both the bias in what it looks at (its object) and the biases you yourself bring to it. If you can address these honestly and adjust your thinking accordingly, you will be able to see the object in light of how it is slanted and to understand your own biases in your reaction to it.
A bias is not necessarily bad: it is simply a preferred way of looking at things. You can be racially biased, but you can also be biased toward looking at all humans as one family. You can be biased toward a liberal or conservative political point of view or toward or against tolerance. Regardless of whether most of us would consider a particular bias good or bad, not seeing it can limit how we resolve a problem or issue.
It is oriented toward the problem, issue, or situation that you are addressing. Critical thinking focuses on analyzing and understanding its object. To the extent possible, it eliminates emotional reactions, except where they become part of an approach or solution.
It is just about impossible to eliminate emotions or to divorce them from your own deeply-held assumptions and beliefs. However, you can try to understand that they are present and analyze your own emotional reactions and those of others in the situation.
There are different kinds of emotional reactions. If all the evidence points to something being true, your emotional reaction that it is not true is not helpful, no matter how badly you want to believe it. On the other hand, if a proposed solution involves harming a particular group of people "for the good of the majority", an emotional reaction that says, "we cannot let this happen" may be necessary to change the situation so that its benefits can be realized without harm to anyone. Emotions that allow you to deny reality generally produce undesirable results; emotions that encourage you to explore alternatives based on principles of fairness and justice can produce very desirable results.
It gives you the whole picture. Critical thinking never considers anything in a vacuum. Its object has a history, a source, a context. Thinking critically allows you to bring these into play, thus getting more than just the outline of what you are examining and making a realistic and effective solution to a problem more likely.
It brings in other necessary factors. Some of the things that affect the object of critical thought – previous situations, personal histories, general assumptions about an issue – may need to be examined themselves. Critical thinking identifies them and questions them as well.
During the mid-90s debate in the United States over welfare reform, much fuss was made over federal money spent on welfare. However, few people realized that the whole entitlement program accounted for less than two percent of the annual federal budget. During the height of the debate, Americans surveyed estimated their taxes going to welfare at as much as 60 percent. Had they examined the general assumptions they were using, they might have thought differently about the issue.
It considers both the simplicity and complexity of its object. A situation or issue may have a seemingly simple explanation or resolution, but it may rest on a complex combination of factors. Thinking critically unravels the relationships among these and determines what level of complexity needs to be dealt with to reach the desired conclusion.
It gives you the most nearly accurate view of reality. The whole point of critical thinking is to construct the most objective view available. 100 percent objectivity may not be possible, but the closer you can get, the better.
Most importantly, it is most likely to help you get the results you want for all the above reasons. The closer you are to dealing with things as they really are, the more likely you will be able to address a problem or issue with some hope of success.
In more general terms, the real value of critical thinking is that it is at the root of all human progress. The first ancestor of humans who said to himself, "We have always made bone tools, but they break awfully easily. I bet we could make tools out of something else. What if I tried this rock?" was using critical thinking. So were most of the social, artistic, and technological groundbreakers who followed. You would be hard-pressed to find an advance in almost any area of humanity's development that did not start with someone looking at the way things were and saying "It does not have to be that way. What if we looked at it from another angle?"
Source: Clover Park Technical College This work
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