What is Critical Thinking：什么是批判性思维.docVIP

Critical Questions For Critical Thinking (Twenty Questions with Cross Disciplinary Applicability) by Rick Allbee The practice of asking questions to facilitate learning goes back formally at least to the time of Socrates. Its pedagogical value has been reaffirmed and advocated throughout the ages. The reasons are not mysterious. Questions encourage the mind to think. They also diminish subjectivity by placing the object of inquiry in the forefront. Critical questioning, being used in the more narrow sense here of emphasizing the “critical” aspect of critical thinking, is an aspect of critical thinking that seeks to subject its subject matter to questions that will help elucidate and evaluate its content. Twenty of these questions are listed below. These questions have been developed from many disciplines and are meant to be general enough to be of cross disciplinary applicability without being so general as to be meaningless to particular disciplines. However, it should be pointed out from the onset that even asking many of these questions, let alone answering them, will require specific knowledge content of the discipline one is addressing. 1. What are its major presuppositions? Presuppositions form the implicit context(s) that guide and condition expressed knowledge. They can be as wide as one’s world view, or more narrow and closely related to the matter at hand. For example, one’s understanding of the nature of human beings (a world view question) could condition what one would consider a viable political proposal, or, what one might think would constitute one’s Human rights. 2. Does it exclude relevant perspectives from consideration? For example, holistic medicine considers additional factors beyond pharmaceuticals and surgery as relevant to bring about healing. From a different angle, some traditional religions have also questioned whether the application of pharmaceuticals, etc are sufficient to bring about healing without also addressing the spirit