Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Life

This introductory critical thinking text provides an integrated, universal concept of critical thinking that is both substantive and practical. As leading scholars of the critical thinking field, Paul and Elder give students the intellectual tools needed for life-long learning. 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 activitiesGlossary of critical thinking termsNew chapter on argumentation New chapters on critical thinking in the professions (including critique of disciplines)Discussion of the Internet's effects on our livesUpdated 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).