Introduction
7
Critical thinking movements
Richard Paul (2011) sees developments in understanding critical thinking as
occurring in three separate if overlapping waves. These began in the 1970s,
with the move to introduce formal and informal logic in the curriculum, a
practice dominated largely by philosophers and their concerns. This wave
emphasized skills in both (1) the identification of arguments and (2) the evalu-
ation of arguments. It saw identification and evaluation of logical structures,
and the awareness and avoidance of fallacies of reasoning, and so on, as largely
equivalent to critical thinking. Skills in argumentation, on this view, led to the
purportedly laudable aim of producing better critical thinkers. An implication
here was that such critical thinking could best be promoted by institutions
putting on dedicated courses, being essentially programs designed to develop
skills of logic, reasoning, and argument. We still see the influence of this wave
today with a number of generalist critical thinking and informal logic courses
taught in institutions around the world (but mainly in the United States).
The 1980s saw a second wave, with an introduction of concerns that were
much wider than critical thinking as adumbrated by philosophers. This more
educational orientation included standpoints of cognitive psychology, criti-
cal pedagogy, feminism and other perspectives, as well as discipline-specific
approaches to critical thinking (critical thinking in Business Studies, and so
on). It had a wider agenda than that of critical thinking as argumentation. It
was concerned with the development of the student as a person (rather than as
a cognitive machine) and emphasized critical thinking in relation to attitudes,
emotions, intuitions, human
being
, creativity, and so on.
The rise of
critical pedagogy
during this period—with its origins in German
critical theory, Marxism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis—resulted in an
interpretation of critical thinking far wider than that offered by first-wave the-
orists, seeing critical thinking as an ideological issue, not one concerned with
validity and reliability of arguments. As a point of difference, the first-wave
theorists took the adjective “critical” to mean “criticism” (i.e., identifying weak-
nesses in and correcting some claim or argument). The critical pedagogues, or
the second-wave theorists, by contrast, took “critical” to mean “critique” (i.e.,
identifying dimensions of meaning that might be missing or concealed behind
some claim or argument) (Kaplan 1991, 362). This is an important difference,
and one that is often the basis of misunderstanding among scholars in this
field and that results in scholars talking past one another.
A third wave of the critical thinking movement, Paul (2011) identifies as a
“commitment to transcend the predominant weaknesses of the first two waves
(rigor without comprehensiveness, on the one hand, and comprehensiveness
without rigor, on the other).” Paul sees this third wave as “only beginning to
emerge,” but he identifies this as one which includes the development of a
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