What the World Needs - Critical Thinking

Eddie Evans on critical thinking:

Critical Thinking begins with one's own assumptions and practices. Then, everything under the sun is open to criticism. Critical thinking does not mean to cast negative thoughts, slurs, outrages, insults, or otherwise detract form the course of unveiling accurate information.

Well trained liberal arts and social science educators often use the phrase, "critical thinking." They do so because their field of study employs more qualitative than quantitative information. How does one perform "science" on a poem or the family structure outside of statistical analysis? There must be something else out there!

And there is. Critical thinking affords thinkers a set of thinking tools for thinking about the World from outside of their mindset, we often hope. Critical thinking gives us information as the World exists, as nature moves, as the mind matures (we hope). Critical thinking should not reveal what we want from the world, we hope.

In fact, outside of science, critical thinking is all that we have outside of mere gossip, big gossip, little gossip. I am saying that, it seems, everything outside of science and critical thinking amounts to so much gossip in one form or another.

We know for a fact that Socrates, through Plato, gave us exciting tools for critical thinking, and it, critical thinking, works so well with logical thinking and analysis:

Secretes is a man.

All men are mortal

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

And then we have some useful critical thinking tools here:

Who is Secretes?; What is Socrates?; When did Socrates live?; Where did Socrates live?; Why did Socrates die?; How did Socrates die?

Who, what, when, where, how, and why should be the elemental parts of the least considered critical thinking project. We can become much more sophisticated with critical thinking questions when needed, like these:

Why did not the White House use the same cameras on Iraq that Kennedy used on Cuba during the "Cuban Crisis"?

Why do the majority of Katrina's victims remain without help when the Berlin airlift proved the possibility of moving hundreds of tons of food, clothing, and needed building materials?

If using bleach is wrong for disinfecting, why is it wrong, when, where, how?

The point here is that there are answers to the questions that critical thinking gives life to. Critical thinking works so well in social affairs, art, religion, and philosophy. We should try to use it everywhere, I believe.