Unit 2 critical thinking

Unit 2  Critical Thinking 批判性思维 思辨 Keynote Address — July 23, 2007 By Richard Paul, Director of Research and Professional Development at the Center for Critical Thinking, Chair of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking The 27th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking — July 23— 26, 2007 Berkeley, CA In college education and in daily life, critical thinking is of vital importance. Richard Paul, in the following section, gives an enlightening discussion of the issue. What is critical thinking? There are many ways to define it. It is a system for opening every existing system. It opens up business, chemistry, and sports like tennis and basketball. It opens up professional practice. It opens up ethnics and enables us to see through ideology. It enables us to put things into intellectual perspective它让我们以知识的眼光看待事物. A system that opens up systems is one way to think of critical thinking.开发各种系统的系统，这是看待批判性思维的一种方式。 Here is the first definition of critical thinking. Or, critical thinking is thinking that analyzes thought分析思想, that assesses thought评估思想, and that transforms thought for the better升华思想的思维. Here is the second definition of critical thinking. There’s a third way to talk about critical thinking overlapping and related to the other two. It’s thinking about thinking while thinking in order to think better. Here is the third definition of critical thinking. Everyone thinks. We have no choice about that. But, not everybody thinks about their thinking. And not everyone who thinks about their thinking thinks about it well. You can worry about your thinking. You can think badly of your thinking. You can be embarrassed by your thinking. You can focus on it in a dysfunctional way 你可以以功能失调的方式关注你的思维— that is not critical thinking. This morning, let’s think about it as a way of thinking that enables a thinker to think regularly at a higher level than most people are capable of thinking. In other words, critical thinking, as I am conceiving it, transforms thinking in two directions把思维导致两个方向. You think more systematically as a result. And you think more comprehensively as a result. And in thinking more comprehensively, you think at a higher level. Not because you are at a higher level as a person, but because you are able to put thinking into the background and see it = thinking in a larger, more comprehensive framework. For example, we need to discover the extent to which our thinking is bound by a culture受文化的约束. Cultures are good in many ways. But, to the extent that they lock us in to one way使我们局限于某一视角 of looking at the world, we need to transcend them我们需要超越文化. We need to think beyond them. Why is this important? It’s important because we, as creatures, are deeply determined深深地受到（我们思维方式）的左右 — in our life, and in our behavior, and in our character, and in other ways – are determined by our thinking. We have no choice but to be governed by thought. The question is, do we govern the thought that governs us我们控制了那些控制我们的思想了吗?  Ideas control us.观念控制着我们 Do we control them?  Ideas control our thinking. So in order to think critically, we need to get rid of ideas. Reversing the process so that we’re in the driver’s seat 将这个过程倒过来，这样我们就坐在驾驶座上— so that we’re doing the thinking we need to do as well as we can – is what critical thinking is about. Our future as a species is dependent on whether we can develop the wherewithal方法 to raise our collective thinking激发我们的集体思维 so as to produce positive changes in societies across the world. The task before us collectively is a Herculean [?h??kju?li??n]大力神的，力大无比的，费力的one. The task of developing critical societies. The idea of a critical society dates back many hundred years, but it was very pointedly called for明确提出 in 1906, by William Graham Sumner, the great anthropologist, who emphasized in his seminal开创性的，种子的 book, "Folkways,"《民俗论》 that if a critical society existed – that is, a society in which critical thinking was a major social value – if such a society were to emerge, it would transform every dimension of life and practice. We are far from such a society, but we need to think about it. It needs to be part of our vision. The structure of this conference suggests some of the most important dimensions of this vision. If you think about the task of developing critical thinking, do not think that task is going to be accomplished easily without facing barriers to critical thought, amongst which are the following. Human egocentricity, our tendency to think with ourselves at the center of the world. Sociocentricity, our tendency to think within the confines of our social groups. Self-delusion, our tendency to create pictures of the world that deceive us and others. Narrow-mindedness, wherein we think of ourselves as broad, deep, and in touch with reality when, if only we understood, we would see ourselves as narrow and limited. Or, think of the barrier of fear. Fear undermines thinking, fear drives us to the lowest levels of thought, fear makes us defensive. It makes us little and petty. And then there is human insecurity. And, then  human habits, our tendencies to go through the same old patterns of thought and behavior and be dominated by them; our inability to target our negative habits and replace them with positive habits. Then there is routine: Ordinary routine. When you go back to your home environment, ordinary routine will click in and many of you will find that the things you intended to do, the changes you intended to make, somehow are swallowed up in the ordinary routine of things. And connected to routine there is a huge obstacle: bureaucracy. We have created all kinds of levels of monitoring and testing and controlling and limiting and sanctioning, ordering, defining our behavior and our thoughts. And, very often the bureaucrat forgets the purpose for which the institution exists.