Unit 2 critical thinking

Unit 2 Critical Thinking

批判性思维

思辨

Keynote Address — July 23, 2007

By Richard Paul, Director of Research and Professional Development at the Center for Critical Thinking,

Chair of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking

The 27th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking — July 23— 26, 2007 Berkeley, CA

In college education and in daily life, critical thinking is of vital importance. Richard Paul, in the following section, gives an enlightening discussion of the issue.

What is critical thinking? There are many ways to define it. It is a system for opening every existing system. It opens up

business, chemistry, and sports like tennis and basketball. It opens up professional practice. It opens up ethnics and enables us to see through ideology. It enables us to put things into intellectual perspective它让我们以知识的眼光看待事物. A system that opens up systems is one way to think of critical thinking.开发各种系统的系统，这是看待批判性思维的一种方式。

Here is the first definition of critical thinking.

Or, critical thinking is thinking that analyzes thought分析思想, that assesses thought评估思想, and that transforms thought for the better升华思想的思维.

Here is the second definition of critical thinking.

There’s a third way to talk about critical thinking overlapping and related to the other two. It’s thinking about thinking while thinking in order to think better.

Here is the third definition of critical thinking.

Everyone thinks. We have no choice about that. But, not everybody thinks about their thinking. And not everyone who thinks about their thinking thinks about it well. You can worry about your thinking. You can think badly of your thinking. You can be embarrassed by your thinking. You can focus on it in a

dysfunctional way 你可以以功能失调的方式关注你的思维— that is not critical thinking.

This morning, let’s think about it as a way of thinking that enables a thinker to think regularly at a higher level than most people are capable of thinking. In other words, critical thinking, as I am conceiving it, transforms thinking in two directions把思维导致两个方向. You think more systematically as a result. And you think more comprehensively as a result. And in thinking more comprehensively, you think at a higher level. Not because you are at a higher level as a person, but because you are able to put thinking into the background and see it = thinking in a larger, more comprehensive framework.

For example, we need to discover the extent to which our thinking is bound by a culture受文化的约束. Cultures are good

in many ways. But, to the extent that they lock us in to one way使我们局限于某一视角 of looking at the world, we need to transcend them我们需要超越文化. We need to think beyond them. Why is this important? It’s important because we, as creatures, are deeply determined深深地受到（我们思维方式）的左右 — in our life, and in our behavior, and in our character, and in other ways – are determined by our thinking. We have no choice but to be governed by thought. The question is, do we govern the thought that governs us我们控制了那些控制我们的思想了吗? Ideas control us.观念控制着我们 Do we control them?

Ideas control our thinking. So in order to think critically, we need to get rid of ideas.

Reversing the process so that we’re in the driver’s seat 将这个过程倒过来，这样我们就坐在驾驶座上— so that we’re

doing the thinking we need to do as well as we can – is what critical thinking is about. Our future as a species is dependent on whether we can develop the wherewithal方法 to raise our collective thinking激发我们的集体思维 so as to produce positive changes in societies across the world.

The task before us collectively is a Herculean[?h??kju?li??n]大力神的，力大无

比的，费力的one. The task of developing

critical societies. The idea of a critical society dates back many hundred years, but it was very pointedly called for明确提出 in 1906, by William Graham Sumner, the great anthropologist, who emphasized in his seminal开创性的，种子的 book, \Folkways,\《民俗论》 that if a critical society existed – that is, a society in which critical thinking was a major social value – if such a society were to emerge, it would

transform every dimension of life and practice. We are far from such a society, but we need to think about it. It needs to be part of our vision. The structure of this conference suggests some of the most important dimensions of this vision.

If you think about the task of developing critical thinking, do not think that task is going to be accomplished easily without facing barriers to critical thought, amongst which are the following. Human egocentricity, our tendency to

think with ourselves at the center of the world. Sociocentricity, our tendency to think within the confines of our social groups. Self-delusion, our tendency to create pictures of the world that deceive us and others. Narrow-mindedness, wherein we think of ourselves as broad, deep, and in touch with reality when, if only we understood, we would see ourselves as narrow and limited.

Or, think of the barrier of fear. Fear undermines thinking, fear drives us to the lowest levels of thought, fear makes us defensive. It makes us little and petty. And then there is human insecurity. And, then human habits, our tendencies to go through the same old patterns of thought and behavior and be dominated by them; our inability to target our negative habits and replace them with positive habits. Then there is routine: Ordinary routine. When you go back to your home

environment, ordinary routine will click in and many of you will find that the things you intended to do, the changes you intended to make, somehow are swallowed up in the ordinary routine of things. And connected to routine there is a huge obstacle: bureaucracy. We have created all kinds of levels of monitoring and testing and controlling and limiting and sanctioning, ordering, defining our behavior and our thoughts. And, very often the bureaucrat forgets the purpose for which the institution exists.

Then for us who are teaching, student resistance to critical thinking is an obstacle, because critical thinking asks those students to learn in a new way. And it is a way that is not comfortable to most of them. Our thinking is limited by mistaken notions, by ignorance, by our limited knowledge, and by stubbornness, our activated ignorance. And finally, our

resistance to doing the intellectual work necessary to critical thinking.

We need hundreds of millions of people around the world who have learned to take and internalize the foundations of critical thought. This can be done only person-by-person through a process, which we call intellectual work. Think of the \of Thought:\Each element plays a crucial role in thought. What is our purpose? What questions are we raising? What information are we using? What assumptions are we making? What data are we gathering? What data do we not have? Given the data that we have, what is it telling us? And, when we come to conclusions about the data, what do those conclusions imply? Within what point of view are we thinking? Do we need to consider another point of view? Where can we get access to such points of view? Questions like this are questions that

(c) The Principle of the Zipper (d) The Invention of the Zipper

Passage Two

The inventor of spectacles probably lived in the town of Pisa, Italy, around 1286, and was almost certainly a craftsman working in glass. But nobody knows his name. We only know this much about him because Friar Giordane preached a sermon one Wednesday morning in February 1306 at a church in Florence. \is not yet twenty years since there was found the art of making eye-glasses which make for good vision,\said the Friar. \of the best arts and most necessary that the world has. So short a time is it since there was invented a new art that never existed. I have seen the man who first invented and created it, and I have talked to him.\We know what Friar Giordane said because admirers copied his sermons down as he gave them.

The inventor of spectacles apparently kept the method of making them to himself. Perhaps he thought this was the best way of getting money from his invention. But the idea soon got around. As early as 1300, craftsmen in Venice, the center of Europe’s glass industry, were making the new \for the eyes\shaped for far-sighted people. Concave lenses, for short-sighted people, were not developed until the late fifteenth century. Spectacles allowed people to go on reading and studying long after bad eyesight would normally have forced them to give up. They were like a new pair of eyes. The inventor of such a valuable thing should be honored, everyone thought. But for centuries no one had any idea who the inventor really was. So all kinds of candidates were put forward: Dutch, English, German, Italians from rival cities. A fake memorial was erected last century

in a church in Florence to honor a man as the true inventor of spectacles － but he never even existed!

(308 words)

6. The invention of spectacles appeared in the ________ century in Europe. ( B ) (a) 12th (b) 13th (c) 14th (d) 15th

7. The first record of the spectacles is to be found in ________. ( B ) (a) newspapers (b) church sermons (c) trade reports (d) praises of Jordan

8. The first spectacles were made for ________. ( B )

(a) any one who had an eye trouble (b) the far-sighted (c) the short-sighted

(d) both the far-sighted and the short-sighted

9. Which of the following is true? ( D ) (a) The inventor made known his method of making spectacles.

(b) Florence was the center of Europe’s glass industry in the 14th century.

(c) In the 14th century short-sighted people could read books with the help of spectacles.

(d) Early craftsmen used lenses for far-sighted people.

10. The final paragraph discusses ________. ( D )

(a) the function of spectacles (b) the fake memorial

(c) the invention of spectacles (d) the identity of the inventor

Passage Three

Europeans have been using the wheelbarrow for about eight hundred years.

But the Chinese invented it at least ten centuries before that. Ancient Chinese gave the wheelbarrow nice names －Wooden Ox and Gliding Horse. \the time taken by a man (with a similar burden) to go six feet, the Wooden Ox could get twenty feet,\wrote an admiring historian in AD 430. \(of one man) for a whole year, and yet after twenty miles the porter would not feel tired.\

A famous general called Chuke Liang developed wheelbarrows two hundred years before this historian was writing, to help carry supplies for his army. But, very recently, pictures have been discovered on ancient tombs, and bricks, of even earlier wheelbarrows. So perhaps they were invented in the first century AD.

No one knows how people in Europe found out about the wheelbarrow － or, for that matter, about many other Chinese

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