Critical thinking as an educational ideal：批判性思维作为一种教育理念.doc

Critical thinking as an educational ideal The following remarks about critical thinking as an educational ideal incorporate and adapt material from chapter 4 of the book Evidence-Based Practice: Logic and Critical Thinking in Medicine, co-authored by Milos Jenicek, MD, and myself, and published in 2005 by American Medical Association (AMA) Press (Jenicek Hitchcock 2005). I acknowledge with thanks the permission of AMA Press to use this material. 1. Historical development of the concept of critical thinking 1.1 John Dewey The concept of critical thinking was first singled out just 100 years ago, by the American philosopher, John Dewey. In a book entitled How We Think, first published in 1910, Dewey presented what he called reflective thinking as an active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends (Dewey 1910, p. 6). For Dewey, such thinking arises in response to a suggested resolution of some specifically occasioned perplexity: If the suggestion that occurs is at once accepted, we have uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection. To turn the thing over in mind, to reflect, means to hunt for additional evidence, for new data, that will develop the suggestion, and will either, as we say, bear it out or make obvious its absurdity and irrelevance. . . Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry. . . (p. 13) In essence, Deweys reflective thinking is the systematic testing of hypotheses, i.e. what is sometimes called the scientific method. Reflective thinking in Dewey’s original sense begins with the definition of a problem, often a problem of understanding why a certain phenomenon occurs. One or more hypotheses are proposed as possible solutions. Then some method of systematic observation or experiment is devised as a test of these hypotheses, and carried out. The results of this investigation are analyz