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Thinking in "C"
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What does Critical Thinking mean?
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According to Merriman-Webster Dictionary, CRITICAL is an adjective meaning exercising or involving careful judgement or judicious evaluation. It may also imply an effort to see a thing clearly and truly in order to judge it fairly. THINKING is defined as a noun meaning the action of using one's mind to produce thoughts. Or in plain English, critical thinking is the ability to interpret, evaluate, and form one's own opinion based on information given. Or as many mothers have said "Use your head!"
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Critical thinking is to derive an answer through logical reasoning of the information given. Logical reasoning is taking supporting statements and adding them with statements which support the conclusion thus revealing the truth.
There are four ways to look at the information. The first is conjunctions. If A and B are true, then the statement is true. If either are false, the statment is false. With disjunctions either A or B needs to be true for the statment to be true. Negations statements need to be anything except A to be true. Finally, conditionals are if A then B statements. If B can be believed to be true, then no matter what A is the statement is true. However, if B is false then A must be false for the statement to be true. The statement would be false if A is true.
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An argument is valid if the conclusion cannot be false due to one false premise (i.e. all premises must be true ENSURING the conclusion WILL be true). Validity looks at the argument (premises in relationship to the conclusion) only. It does not examine if the statements themselves are true. If an argument is found to be valid it is a deductive argument. An inductive argument is one, which all the statments are true, but the conclusion MIGHT be true.
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Critical Thinking
Links for information regarding critical thinking.
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Critical Links
Links of information to stimulate critical thought and some which do not.
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Favorite Links
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