{"ops":[{"insert":"The following is adapted from the 4th edition of my "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"Learning to Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum"},{"insert":" (Pearson, 2012), p. 3-4.\n\n"},{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":"Critical Thinking Is Authentic"},{"insert":"\nCritical thinking, at its heart, is thinking about real problems. Although you can reason out puzzles and brain-teasers, the essence of critical thinking comes into play only when you address real problems and questions rather than artificial ones. Artificial problems often include the questions asked in textbooks in a field or discipline. (They can usually be “answered” merely by finding the appropriate passage in the chapter.)  \n\tCritical thinking is far more about what you actually believe or do. It is about good judgment. Artificial, narrow problems may help when you want to hone or practice specialized skills, but even those skills help only if you consciously transfer them to real-life settings. (Honing your skills at guessing the endings of murder mysteries is not likely to be good preparation for becoming a criminal investigator. In murder mysteries, all the clues are provided, the murderer is one of the characters, and someone (the author) has set up the situation to make us guess the murderer’s identity. None of that is so in a criminal investigation.))\n\tReal problems are often messy. They have loose ends. They are usually unclear: clarifying and refining them are part of thinking them through. People sometimes say that such problems have “no right or wrong answers.” But that can’t be correct. They often have "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"no single right"},{"insert":" answer. But there are "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"wrong"},{"insert":" answers, even disastrous answers: there may not be any unique right person to take as your partner in life—but there are certainly people it would be disastrous to choose.\n\n"},{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":"Authentic problems"},{"insert":"\nTo get the feel of authentic problems (in contrast to “textbook problems”), think of good novels you have read, or plays or movies you have seen. (Exclude contrived movies where everything automatically works out according to a formula.) Now consider the problems that are facing some character. Those will likely be"},{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":" "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"authentic"},{"insert":" problems. They are full of complications and other people’s cross-purposes; actions don’t work out exactly as planned; emotions and desires are heavily involved in the decisions people make.\n\tChoose an example or two like that, and try to reason through decisions that the character could make.\n"}]}