what is critical thinking？

In terms of critical thinking, people often have such an idea that a man can give reasonable and insightful answers with lots of supporting examples or materials in our life. And yet, it is not the essence of critical thinking, although we usually treat having a lot of right answers to be synonymous with critical thinking.

The essence of critical thinking is a search for answers, a quest. The answer is not that important, the most important part is the process to find answers when they are not so readily available.

We almost want to be critical thinking, a critical thinker. Before that, we should know what the difference between critical thinker and uncritical thinker is.

Everybody has his or her special mental world and it is so obvious that we can distinguish different kinds of people according their minds activities by displaying various behaviors. I don’t know which one of brain and mind controls our thinking, but I guess both of them are responsible for decision making and control our life.

If I analyze this question just like above paragraph, I am an uncritical thinking. The right order to get conclusion is the following three words: investigation, interpretation and judgment. Firstly, I don’t tend to get some related materials about brain and mind; secondly, before I do research I get answer, I will try my best to collect supporting information in order to demonstrate I am right; thirdly, I hardly think about different ideas about the same issue, which makes me a little blindness.

Maybe you say that I have great intuition and it is always right. Sometimes the intuition is based on lots of unconscious thinking and people do a lot of work they never focus on. Sometimes it is not. It is imprudent to rely on intuitions.

Most of time, we would be fooled by our emotions before critical thinking because we used to follow our feelings and it is easier to relieve our presenting pressure and nervousness. It is not easy to be a critical thinker because we need to confront our innate thinking model. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t get critical thinking.

We need a habit. It wouldn’t be torturing when you are used to think independently and critically. This is a little part of the critical thinking. if you are interested in this topic as well, please read the book beyond feelings-a guide to critical thinking.