Critical Thinking

Written by international authorities on critical thinking, this book details an integrated, universal concept of critical thinking that is both substantive and applicable to any and every situation in which human thinking is necessary. It provides students with the basic intellectual tools needed for life-long learning, helping them understand the mind and how its three functions—thinking, feeling, motivating—influence one another.

Critical Thinking fosters the development of fair-minded critical thinking and explores essential intellectual standards of clarity, precision, accuracy, logicalness, significance, depth, breadth, and fairness; the importance of skilled and deep questioning; and how to take thinking apart in order to find problems in thinking and then improve thinking.

The fourth edition features
Think for Yourself activities
Glossary of critical thinking terms
New chapter on argumentation
New chapters on critical thinking in the professions (including critique of disciplines)
Discussion of the Internet's effects on our lives
Updated discussions of media bias and political propaganda, as well as egocentric and sociocentric thought as barriers to critical thinking.

The Foundation for Critical Thinking continually offers new supplementary resources on its website (CriticalThinking.org) and in its online critical thinking community (CriticalThinkingCommunity.org).

Dr. Richard Paul was a leading proponent of critical thinking and through his work and legacy remains an international authority in the field. He founded the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University in 1980, followed by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. He developed concepts, principles, and theory essentials to a robust and fairminded conception of critical thinking and authored more than 200 articles, seven books, and 24 thinker’s guides on the topic. He presented workshops to hundreds of thousands of educators over his 35-year career as a leader in the critical thinking movement.
Dr. Linda Elder is an educational psychologist and leading authority on critical thinking who has taught both psychology and critical thinking at the college level. She has been president of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and the executive director of the Center for Critical Thinking for more than 25 years. She has a special interest in the relation of thought and emotion, as well as the cognitive and affective. She has developed an original theory of the stages of critical thinking development. Elder is the author of Liberating the Mind, and has coauthored four books on critical thinking, as well as all 23 titles found in the Thinker's Guide Library.