Critical Thinking
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Critical thinking includes the ability to respond to material by distinguishing between facts and opinions or personal feelings, judgments and inferences, inductive and deductive arguments, and the objective and subjective. It also includes the ability to generate questions, construct, and recognize the structure of arguments, and adequately support arguments; define, analyze, and devise solutions for problems and issues; sort, organize, classify, correlate, and analyze materials and data; integrate information and see relationships; evaluate information, materials, and data by drawing inferences, arriving at reasonable and informed conclusions, applying understanding and knowledge to new and different problems, developing rational and reasonable interpretations, suspending beliefs and remaining open to new information, methods, cultural systems, values and beliefs and by assimilating information (Halpern).
Decision making in democracies is a process of reaching agreement in group situations through discussion, debate, and analysis. Decision making should be more than the aggregation of performed opinions. Opinions must be confronted with each other in the public sphere, and all participants in this public discourse should truly listen to each other's arguments. To make proper democratic decisions, no groups should be excluded (Lipset, 1995).
The author of materials for this course defines critical thinking as awareness consisting of a set of interrelated critical questions, and the ability and willingness to ask and answer them at appropriate times.
They also define decision making as thoughtfully considering plausible options and then reaching a conclusive judgment on which option, if any, to adopt. When groups are asked to make decisions on a course of action, they seek to create a consensus, which means, at least, that each of the participants can "live with" the selected option. The decision-making research has shown that people prefer to use simple strategies to solve problems and that managers using simple problem-solving strategies are in fact judged successful by their organization (Brown, et al...