As we move well into the 21st century, formal instruction in critical thinking usually occurs in a one-semester course offered to first-year students at colleges and universities, frequently but by no means always housed in philosophy departments or programs. The instructors tend to be junior faculty members, PhD students, or limited term contract teachers recruited from the pool of recently graduated PhDs who have not yet obtained tenure-track positions. Such instructors’ own training in critical thinking, if any, tends to consist of the one-semester critical thinking course that they took as first-year undergraduates 5-10 years earlier, possibly supplemented by a couple of years’ experience as teaching assistants for such a course while doctoral students—time spent grading assignments and sometimes leading weekly tutorial sections. In many cases the critical thinking course a department offers has evolved from—and differs little from—the “introduction to logic” course, now supplemented with some informal logic. The instructor might be the professor who teaches the logic course, dragooned into service because of an uptick in enrolments or because somebody is away on sabbatical leave. This state of affairs has changed little in the past 40 years, despite the explosive increase of critical thinking textbooks and courses that began in the 1970s.
In sum, many instructors of critical thinking courses are thrown in at the deep end with unreliable life jackets. Understandably, most reach for the textbooks on the market to stay afloat.
Textbook publishers have shown considerable interest in the profits available from the dedicated critical thinking course market, publishing scores of handbooks. Best sellers are revised frequently in minor ways to reduce resale. Textbook authors might be aiming to write handbooks that exhibit careful reflection about what critical thinking consists of and how best to improve their students’ critical thinking skills and attitudes, but they are under pressure from publishers to include subject matter that has questionable connection to critical thinking, but meets the range of interests representing the widest slice of the market.
The instructor who is under pressure to publish original research in some other Area Of Specialization, often has little incentive to devote much time and effort to the critical thinking course, and so looks for a textbook that fits his or her experience with the subject (and that offers an accompanying, time-saving, on-line instructional and assignments package).
Granting exceptions, by and large critical thinking textbooks err on the side of the safety of tradition, and don’t always reflect the latest research. With instructors themselves learning from the textbook the unfamiliar material it contains, too often what the students receive is undigested and outdated.
Meanwhile “critical thinking” has become a buzzword, or buzz-term. It is found in virtually every college and university mission statement. Yet, simultaneously, its vagueness has been deplored and its intellectual respectability correspondingly denigrated. Although critical thinking is a capacity that is almost universally espoused, its conceptualization and instruction have not been universally accepted as serious concerns.
The situation may be changing. An encouraging sign was the timely appearance in 2015 of the big Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education. It’s a 630-page collection of 34 articles representing a wide range of theoretical viewpoints on a variety of issues related to the conception, the value and the pedagogy of critical thinking. Eight of the Palgrave Handbook contributors have authored chapters in this book.
Studies in Critical Thinking, also contributes to the intellectual respectability of critical thinking, although in a quite different way. It has been prepared to serve the needs of the critical thinking course instructor (and the course teaching assistants) cast in the roles described above. It is a compendium of analyses of concepts integral to critical thinking. Its chapters can serve as refresher lessons for more experienced instructors. Most of it, incidentally, will be accessible to the bright and motivated student in the critical thinking course.
Most of the chapters in this book were written expressly for it; the others are adaptations of previously published journal articles or book chapters. Readers will need to adapt to different audience roles, for some chapters are written to address the critical thinking course instructor and others address the student or the general reader.
Part II focuses on pedagogy: how to go about teaching critical thinking. A course that significantly improves students’ CT skills and attitudes requires special attention to its pedagogy, and Chapter 2 addresses that topic. Teaching an appropriately designed course will be not only effective, but fun to take and to teach. Part II includes also five short chapters containing innovative model exercises by experienced CT teachers that readers are welcome to try as they are, or to use them as inspirations for their own creative innovations.
The chapters in Parts III and IV deal with the contents of critical thinking in two ways. Part III focuses on arguments because argument is central to critical thinking. We sum up our positive and negative critical reflections in arguments; we communicate them to others using arguments; others communicate theirs to us using arguments. But the skills of critical thinking rely also on a substratum of theoretical understandings. The aim of Part IV has been to contain state of the art accounts, as formulated by leading scholars, of several of the most basic and widely applicable topics.
Before tackling the contents of the book, however, the reader needs to confront the elephant in the room, namely the question, “What IS critical thinking?” The term is often used loosely, so that any good thinking counts as critical thinking. On that too-broad usage there is nothing distinctive about critical thinking. Others use the term to denote good methods of problem solving or of decision-making. While good problem solving and decision-making certainly involve critical thinking, these are not the only domains that critical thinking can benefit. That usage is too narrow. Some object that the use of the term ‘critical’ has excessively negative connotations, but that objection focuses on just one sense of the term. A “critical” appraisal of something can investigate its strengths or merits along with its weaknesses of defects, and could well end up concluding with a thoroughly positive and laudatory judgment.
In the book’s opening chapter, Alec Fisher spells out the conception of critical thinking that underlies the selection of the book’s contents. This conception is tradition- and consensus-based. As Fisher recounts, it has grown out of the notion of reflective thinking John Dewey articulated early in the 20th century that has been enlarged and enhanced in accretions built up by theorists over the ensuing century. This is the conception of critical thinking that informs the contents of Studies in Critical Thinking, and so Chapter 1 is probably the best introduction to the book.