Critical Thinking, Logic and Reason: A Practical Guide for Students and Academics Dr Jason J Braithwaite© 2006 { Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK, B15, 2TT} Overview: Thinking critically, clearly, and effectively is not an easy process. Critical thinking is not a natural way to reason about the world. These skills, like any other, require considerable thought, effort and practise. It is both surprising and unfortunate that few academic Universities actually provide students with explicit courses directed at developing critical thinking skills and the tools of logic and reason. Contemporary university courses tend to concentrate on teaching students “ what” to think and not “ how” to think. Despite their intelligence, many students and researchers often fail dramatically at knowing how to construct a well reasoned and logical argument. This document is a practical guide for both students and academics to improve their critical thinking skills. This practical guide will help readers think more effectively about their own research and about the research of others. For students, this guide is a welcome aid for reading publications and evaluating claims. Developing critical thinking skills will also improve the student’s performance at writing cogent essays, clear laboratory reports and answering exam questions more effectively. I ntroduction: It does not automatically follow that being intelligent means the student can think critically or reason about information in a useful, effective and efficient manner. Many very intelligent people hold very odd and somewhat irrational beliefs about the world. Being smart and intelligent is simply not enough. Critical thinking is a process. It is a journey that helps us to arrive at the most useful, helpful, and most likely destinations when evaluating claims for scientific truth. Critical thinking is thinking clearly, thinking fairly, thinking rationally, thinking objectively, and thinking independently. It is a process that hopefully leads to an impartial investigation of the data and facts that remains unswayed by irrelevant emotions. The aim is to arrive at well reasoned, considered, and justifiable conclusions. Thinking critically is an ability to engage with the evidence, to consider and to evaluate the evidence (the type of evidence, the quality of evidence, etc) from multiple and relevant competing sources. Ideas that have come through scientific inquiry and the processes of critical thinking are more likely to stand on firmer ground relative to other ideas that have emerged through less rational processes (i.e., belief systems, cognitive biases, and pseudoscience). Note however, that this does not mean that such ideas are necessarily correct or true, just that they are more likely to be so. It is a game of probabilities and not one of absolutes. There are no guarantees that any evidence or argument we accept as true actually will turn out to be true. However, if you apply the principles of critical thinking in an appropriate manner, it does guarantee that you have good and justifiable reasons for accepting the claim. Although critical thinking (and all that goes with it) is intrinsic to the scientific method – it is a more general process than science itself and can be applied to all forms of knowledge which ask us to accept them as being true. Critical thinking is just as important to the home buyer trying to select the right Critical Thinking 1