hello i'm linda elder i am the president of the foundation for critical thinking i would like to introduce you to our work to our organization and tell you a little bit about our history and talk about why critical thinking is so important in human societies the foundation for critical thinking is a 501c3 nonprofit organization in california our organization begins in 1991 to support the work of the center for critical thinking which was established in 1980 by the late dr richard paul at sonoma state university the history of critical thinking is important because we need to understand first of all why we need critical thinking why we need a center and a foundation for critical thinking why we need to be working toward more critical thinking so we begin with the history of critical thinking i would say the current history in the 1970s and moving into the 1980s where we begin to have scholars focusing on the concept of critical thinking we begin to see the term critical thinking in these early years and this is coming out of a need to improve instruction it's coming out of a need that is being shown through research studies that are illuminating the fact that students are not achieving critical thinking while they're going through their educational processes so in the 1970s 1980s we begin to see that students have been going to school for many years but they're not learning fundamental critical thinking skills and from this we begin to see a movement toward bringing critical thinking into the classroom you could say the 1980s we have more what i would call a trend or a fad in critical thinking where people are starting to say oh that's great we want that we want critical thinking we've we've done cooperative learning and we've done technological education and now we need critical thinking and we want to get our critical thinking in a couple of days and we we are willing to come to a workshop or a conference for a day or two as long as we can get our critical thinking very quickly and of course critical thinking is not achieved in a simplified way it is not achieved over a couple of days it is achieved if at all over a lifetime of trying to become a fair-minded critical person so the foundation for critical thinking is here to support the work of the center for critical thinking which is focused on research we offer conferences in critical thinking we offer workshops we offer professional development programs and i'll talk a little bit more about our outreach presently if we want to understand the history of critical thinking we really need to go back many years in history and we can go back to the thinking in the life of socrates about 2 400 years ago because at that time socrates was saying look we're get we're advancing in many ways we're learning these scientific uh things and we're and that's well and good and we're focused on learning more about the earth and that's fine too but what we really need to do is focus on the thinking that we are doing because it is the thinking that we are doing that is causing the problems that we are experiencing in our lives so socrates was trying to develop methodologies for breaking down faulty thinking and then replacing it with thinking that made sense or that makes sense moving forward we see that critical thinking now today is widely used the terms are what the term is widely used in human societies across the world yet we still lack a robust conception of it in common use now we do have a robust oh robust consumption of it excuse me we do have a robust conception of critical thinking which has been developing over the last four or five decades but humans have yet to embrace this robust conception and people are still saying things like well we don't really have a definition of critical thinking uh and they're they're they're fishing around for something that sounds good or they're getting a sound bite because people love sound bites they want everything in simplified terms very frequently but critical thinking is not going to be found in a sound bite it's not going to be found in a simple book which offers one or two suggestions for improving your life critical thinking is a way of living in which we embrace intellectual virtues this means we are continually working towards embodying for example intellectual humility so that instead of being intellectually arrogant where we believe that we already know everything there is to know we begin at a very different place we we begin with the idea that there are many things that we do not know that there are many many more things that we do not know than we will ever know and so we're we're aware of the limitations of our knowledge and we're willing to admit to the limitations of our knowledge and there is no problem in admitting this and so we want to understand again the importance of this intellectual virtue in our life as well as others such as intellectual perseverance the the propensity to keep moving through difficulties in issues and problems even when it is difficult even when it is uh even when we are feeling some mental pain even when we want to do everything that we can to protect our current ways of thinking which is again the normal way of human thinking so we want to develop intellectual humility again in social perseverance intellectual autonomy so that we are willing to stand alone in our beliefs after we have done our best thinking in a situation not standing alone in our beliefs in order to just say well i i have my way of thinking and you have your way of thinking and everybody's way of thinking is just as good as everyone else's way of thinking this is an absurd uh position no when we are thinking and embracing intellectual autonomy we also embrace the tools of criticality and so we think at the highest level that we can and we then are willing to stand alone in our beliefs another important intellectual stan intellectual virtue that we want to uh aspire to and embody is intellectual integrity so that we expect the same or more of ourselves than we do other people we say what we mean and we mean what we say we live according to the principles that we espouse other intellectual virtues that we want to aspire to include intellectual courage the courage to look at my own beliefs honestly and in a forthright way and examine them truthfully to see what is really there so intellectual courage is very important fair-mindedness is an organizing intellectual virtue one thing that is missing in human life is the ability to intellectually empathize with other people especially those that we disagree with and intellectual empathy is very directly connected with fair-mindedness so these are some of the intellectual virtues that we aspire to as developing critical thinkers so going back to the history of critical thinking so again beginning in the seventh 1970s and 1980s we began to see a movement toward critical thinking to some extent in education especially in the united states and in some other countries and unfortunately what has happened since then is that the term critical thinking again has gained in use but it has gained very little an actual currency because most people do not have a rich conception of critical thinking that enables them to think about their thinking to to find problems in their thinking to correct those problems and thinking to improve their thinking in order to think at a higher level of quality so in critical thinking we're trying to develop a let us say an executive function of the mind which thinks about its own thinking normally in human life we think and we act we think and we act upon the thinking that we're doing and sometimes the thinking that we're doing is perfectly fine and sometimes that thinking is flawed critical thinking enables us to examine our thinking before we act upon the thinking [Music] humans are facing a very challenging time in our history and this is because there are certain threats that we face and if we don't accept that we face these threats then we are going to be doomed and one of the major threats as we know that we face is the problem of global warming or climate change we know that humans are contributing significantly to this problem we know that humans are going to have to be the ones to find solutions to the problem and those solutions are directly dependent upon our ability to think critically about the problems and this means that we have to be able to think collectively we have to think not only collectively but we have to work together bringing our best thinking together to solve these problems and there are other problems that we face we know that the world is becoming more and more challenging we are increasingly interconnected things are happening at a faster and faster pace it is very difficult for us to keep up with these changes in order to have any kind of business or to work with any in within any field of study we're going to have to continually learn and to develop new understandings within these fields this requires all of this requires critical thinking in our approach to critical thinking there are some basic conceptual sets that we focus on i'm going to briefly mention them now and all of these these conceptual sets were developed by originally dr richard paul beginning again it really in the 1960s with his early dissertation moving forward to today we have continued to develop the theory our focus is to develop tools of mind that enable us to reason at the highest level of quality in order to solve the problems that we face and in order to live at the highest level of quality individually and collectively so within our framework for thinking for critical thinking you will find the elements of reasoning what this means is that we're focused on how to take thinking apart we ask what is involved in reasoning how does reasoning go wrong what causes problems in reasoning how do we enter and improve our thinking to eliminate these problems so we need to understand reasoning we need to understand what is entailed in the reasoning that we're doing every day and in pursuing the question what is involved in reasoning dr richard paul early on said well let's see how to boil this down and he came up with over decades of working on this question he came up with basically eight elements of reasoning whenever we reason whenever you reason whenever anyone reasons no matter how well or poorly their reasoning they have a purpose they're asking questions they're using information they're making inferences these inferences are based on their assumptions which are connected to their concepts which comes from and informs their point of view all of which leads to implications and consequences so again the elements of reasoning that we are using continually throughout the day or routinely throughout the day our purpose question information inferences concepts assumptions point of view and implications our argument is that when people are aware that they're using these elements of reasoning they have a much better chance of entering these elements and finding problems in these elements and then again improving their reasoning thereby once we've taken our thinking apart we know what their parts are in a given a situation so i can say all right my purpose in uh in parenting is this and the key questions i'm asking are these and the information i'm using is as follows and once we've done that then we can ask well how do we assess that reasoning now that we know what the reasoning is when we assess it through universal intellectual standards such as clarity accuracy precision relevance depth breadth logicalness fairness sufficiency and this is a beginning place intellectual standards these these few that i've mentioned are essential intellectual standards that we use in everyday life but that we need to be using more explicitly in order to improve our thinking these intellectual standards come from a much broader set of intellectual standards in all common or everyday languages but they give us a beginning place then as i've already mentioned in critical thinking we're not just concerned about your ability to gather relevant information for example your ability to engage in any individual skill set we're focused on how you are living your life so are you embracing intellectual virtues again such as intellectual perseverance intellectual autonomy intellectual empathy and so forth so we have intellectual virtues that we're reaching toward we need intellectual standards such as clarity accuracy and relevance to judge our reasoning in an individual situation and we need to know how to take our thinking apart and focus on the parts of reasoning we also need to be aware that we can study these parts of thinking and these intellectual standards and we can think that we are embodying intellectual virtues while we are actually deceiving ourselves so humans have the great problem of self-deception and self-deception enables us to act in egocentric ways and in sociocentric ways and and and when we engage in either of these barriers to critical thinking then there are going to be problems in our ability to think at the highest level that we can egocentric thinking basically means either that we're being selfish in a situation or a person is locked into a narrow or close-minded way of looking at a situation those are broad ways of looking at egocentric thinking and then we have all of the defense mechanisms that we are already aware of projection stereotyping and so forth then we have the problem of socio-centered thinking which means that we are either looking for more for our group without regard to the rights and needs of others or we as a group are locked into our narrow way of thinking and we're unable to see other ways of thinking that are legitimate and that are reasonable and one of the uh tendencies that comes from sociocentric thinking is the the perceived need to be validated by other people so if you are always looking to be validated by someone else and there are going to be problems in your thinking you cannot think using your own reasoning and with the tools of criticality then you can easily pers be persuaded to do things that are not in your interest or they're not in the common interest they're not concerned with the common good so we have these conceptual sets within our approach that are learned and are internalized over a lifetime once you begin to study the concepts and apply them in everyday life at the foundation for critical thinking we are concerned to advance fair-minded critical thinking across human societies we have always worked predominantly in education but we also work with business managers and leaders government leaders military leaders and indeed anyone who is interested in developing his or her thinking using the tools of criticality [Music] we have a number of outreach projects that you can participate in one important one is the center for critical thinking community online which is you can be you can reach at criticalthinkingcommunity.org there you will find the world's largest digital library many print materials as well as audio and visual materials videos that you can watch audios you can listen to we also have an academy full of many activities that you can complete in order to help you develop your understanding of these foundations i've been introducing we offer a place for you to establish your own study groups you can participate in our study groups that we offer in the community we offer webinars we offer webinar q and a sessions so you can come and ask us questions our fellows and scholars so we hope that you'll join us at our community online we also offer professional development on site at your site we can also offer professional development through online customized workshops and courses we offer semester-long online courses for credit through sonoma state university and we offer conferences and workshops at different times throughout the year we hope that you will join us as we continue to work to advance and to cultivate fair-minded critical societies our organization is now over four decades uh in length we are the longest-running organization on critical thinking in the world we're the longest-running non-profit organization on critical thinking in the world and we need everyone to help us continue our work so we will hope you will join us in our work