Informal Logic - Relation To Critical Thinking

Relation To Critical Thinking

See also: Critical thinking

Since the 1980s, informal logic has been partnered and even equated, in the minds of many, with critical thinking. The precise definition of "critical thinking" is a subject of much dispute. Critical thinking, as defined by Johnson, is the evaluation of an intellectual product (an argument, an explanation, a theory) in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. While critical thinking will include evaluation of arguments and hence require skills of argumentation including informal logic, critical thinking requires additional abilities not supplied by informal logic, such as the ability to obtain and assess information and to clarify meaning. Also, many believe that critical thinking requires certain dispositions. Understood in this way, "critical thinking" is a broad term for the attitudes and skills that are involved in analyzing and evaluating arguments. The critical thinking movement promotes critical thinking as an educational ideal. The movement emerged with great force in the 80s in North America as part of an ongoing critique of education as regards the thinking skills not being taught.

Read more about this topic:  Informal Logic

Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation, critical and/or thinking:

    “The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.”
    —William James (1842–1910)

    “Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see, that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he appears; he does not see that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly,—but method, and an even web; and what comes out, that was put in.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
    —Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)

    “O love is the crooked thing,
    There is nobody wise enough
    To find out all that is in it,
    For he would be thinking of love
    Till the stars had run away”
    —William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)