Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book is woefully inadequate as a text for a critical thinking course. What are we to make of a critical thinking text that says almost nothing about objective truth, the central role of argument in critical thinking, the distinction between inductive and deductive arguments, the distinction between truth and validity, or which does not even mention any of the standard deductive forms of argument?

Furthermore, the authors do not seem to know how their "Standards for Thinking" apply to their own work. Just a few examples should suffice: (i) One of their standards is fairness. Yet in the chapter entitled "Develop as an Ethical Reasoner," the authors spend three pages laying out the arguments of PETA against the use of animals in medical experimentation, but barely a paragraph presenting the argument in favor of such experimentation. This hardly seems fair-minded to me. It would seem that, for them, being "fair-minded" involves closely arguing one's own position, but ignoring the arguments of your opponent. (One wonders if they themselves are members of PETA. But, if they are, shouldn't they admit this for the sake of honesty and complete disclosure? Or is it only bias when someone else does it?) (ii) Another of their standards is that of depth. The problem here is that they do not seem to have read the individuals whom they quote so approvingly with any depth. They repeatedly quote William Graham Sumner as an advocate of critical thinking, but seem oblivious to the fact that he is best known for his ethical relativism---a position that they themselves seem to repudiate in their chapter on ethical reasoning. Perhaps they would have discovered this for themselves had they read beyond the first 20 pages in Sumner's book, Folkways. (iii) The authors present contradictory positions in the space of a few pages, and do not seem to even notice. On the one hand, they embrace the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as morally binding because "every nation on earth has signed the declaration." However, four pages later they condemn such practices as slavery since they were justified solely in virtue of "social convention." What they do not seem to realize is that their justification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is itself based solely on social convention. Simply because it was signed by every nation on the face of the earth (itself a questionable claim)does not make it morally right or morally binding.

As a critical thinking instructor, I would be loath to recommend this book to anyone as anything other than an instructive failure. As a useful alternative, I would suggest Moore and Parker's Critical Thinking. It is much more comprehensive and more in keeping with representative views in the field.

Unlike some of the other reviewers on this site, I believe that Paul and Elder's book contains some insights. However, as a professor of philosophy who teaches both critical thinking and ethics, I would not use it in my courses.

I find the chapter "Developing as an Ethical Reasoner" to be particularly disappointing. The authors do not seem to have thought about the nature of moral disagreements or the nature of moral arguments with any "depth" or "breadth"--two of the standards they champion.

The authors maintain that "All people are obligated to respect clear-cut ethical concepts and principles." This is all well and good, but just which ethical concepts and principles are we "obligated to respect?" The authors have chosen the principles listed in the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights." But, why should we accept the principles in the Declaration rather than some others? The authors' answer is because they "are universally accepted." First of all, most of the people in the history of the world have NOT agreed with these principles. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Slobidan Milosivitch and the governments they led did not agree with them. Secondly, what the authors fail to understand is that, even if most people DID agree, this would not make these principles morally right. If tomorrow there were universal agreement that Jews should be put in concentration camps and gassed this would not make that morally right. What is morally right and morally wrong (at a practical or abstract level) cannot be decided by a simple show of hands, and yet, this is the only justification the authors provide.

What is more, the authors reduce virtually all moral problems to a failure of will. People know what the morally correct thing to do is, but ignore it, and do whatever is in their own selfish interest. They then try to portray themselves as having acted from the best of motives. What the authors fail entirely to see is that most of the really difficult moral problems we face involve cases in which ethical principles themselves come into conflict. In the issue of abortion, for example, the principle of respect for human life (that of the fetus) comes into conflict with the principle of freedom (a woman's freedom to direct her own life as she sees fit). In this case, it is not that people want to do the wrong thing out of their own selfish interest, people want to do the right thing, but because these two principles (both of which they likely accept) come into conflict, they are unsure what the morally right thing is. Paul and Elder are completely silent on this important type of moral problem--one wonders if they even see it.

In summary, the authors display only the most superficial understanding of ethical theory. They should really have done more of their homework in ethics before electing to write about ethical reasoning.

I enjoyed this book and got a lot out of it. For such a high level book it isn't easy reading because it requires you to think about your own thinking while you are reading it in order to get full value out of it. If you skip that exercise, in my opinion, you will not appreciate the value of this book. So if you want to grow from what the authors are offering, be prepared to take a long term vision of your own abilities and to do a lot of work. In spite of the somewhat misleading title of this book, it is not really about what most people would call "critical thinking," it is a much deeper and more useful view of thinking abilities in general.

This book presents a relatively accurate (in my opinion) and very usable model of how human reasoning works in practice and how we get better at it. In addition it offers many simple but practical drills for identifying how well you are thinking and what sorts of things would be good to work on. So I do recommend this book.

Having gotten that positive impression from my reading, I also noticed the many very negative reviews here and that made me pause and think a bit. It may be helpful to expand on what I think it good about this book and what the negative reviewers are seeing.

The authors in my opinion do two critical things very clearly (although very informally): (1) they usefully identify the intellectual virtues or ideals that underlie good thinking and how they relate to each other, and (2) they outline a loosely expertise-based practical model for going from being unaware of being a weak thinker to actively and consistently developing the skills of good thinking.

Where this book falls down a little in my own view is that it doesn't adequately address the relationship of the intellectual virtues with the *attitudes* that underlie them, indicate the stability of our attituds about thinking, or discuss in any depth the way improvement critically can rely on attitude change as well as cultivated abilities.

The authors do recognize the importance of attitude but I think they fail to persuade the reader that we have to adopt a particular set of attitudes in order to consistently embody the virtues. They mention, but do not give a realistic narrative sense of, the work involved in changing our attitudes toward thinking as well as developing the associated skills.

Perhaps worst of all, the authors make many points that I think are valid and supportable about the nature of thinking, but they provide no explicit support of their ideas in terms of available research. They rely too heavily on authority and intuitive plausibility in a field where what constitutes a solid principle is often very counter-intuitive.

I'm not saying the authors should have given us a book full of citations that no one is actually going to follow up just to impress people, I'm just saying that some of the most critical points could have been referenced in established empirical work here and there to give readers some grounding in psychological science that I think this topic needs and deserves in places.

As a result of these small gaps, I think many readers are probably going to see this book as simplistic and not very useful because they don't recognize that the authors are providing a very good high level map of a very big territory that takes a very long time and individual exploration to map in detail.

People complaining that this book doesn't offer details of logical fallacies or technical principles of reasoning are entirely right, but also somewhat missing the point of the book. Perhaps calling it "Critical Thinking" sets the expectations too specifically on the subset of skills that people associate with that topic. In my mind the authors are not really talking about "critical thinking" as most of us probably imagine it, that subset of thinking that involves examining arguments and questioning assumptions, they are talking about *reflective* thinking in general and what it takes to be good at it.

There are also people who complain because the authors disagree with them on specific topics or don't address arguments in the way they expect. I see a number of negative reviews complaining that the authors of this book did not seem to apply their own principles in the book. That's possible, but I feel as if they're looking at the proverbial finger pointing at the moon rather than seeing the beauty of the moon.

This book is pointing toward a big picture of how intellectual virtues and supporting attitudes optimally should guide thinking and the path to growth toward that ideal. Given that grand, perhaps even grandiose vision, it has some surprisingly detailed and specific ideas for improving our thinking in particular areas. So yes it perhaps does fail in some places in providing the richness of detail and explication that some of its arguments really deserve. And perhaps sometimes the authors themselves do fail to live up to the vision in their own presentation. Still, I think this book serves a useful and unique place among books on thinking because of the grandness of its vision and so I personally forgive it what I see as the minor issues that many others seem to have found so annoying that they couldn't even finish the book.

I think this book deserves and repays a deep reading and hard work but that it has to be distinguished from the typical course material on "critical thinking" both because its scope and vision are greater than that and because it lacks the immediate short term payback that people tend to expect from typical courses. This is a lifetime learning approach, not a course.

I paid hard money to fly this book from the USA and wish I had got it from the library. This topic does not lend itself to un-putdownability, but repeated attempts got me only to Chapter 3. I finished it in annoyance by speed-reading key paragraphs of each chapter and put it on the shelf.

Good points: literate and covers a breadth of good ideas, plus some nice-sounding exercises and challenges. I like the intellectual values chapters.

Bad points: No AHA! moments. No argument mapping. Diagrams that do not pull their weight and text that should be diagrammed. Woolly, wordy discussions of social conditioning and Milgram studies, that don't go near Cialdini's 'Influence' for impact. Exercises and quotes that speak of Noam Chomsky's idea of fairness.

This book's intention is to open a new (presumed redneck) student's mind so wide that the wind blows through, dusting it with the enlightened prejudices of his college environment.

Like others I found this text weirdly self-contradictory, actually at times unbelievably silly. After arguing earnestly at some length for the benefits of intellectual humility and dangers of egocentric thinking, the authors feel themselves qualified to devote a chapter to the relative merits of what they call "professional knowledge." It turns out that professional knowledge is the academic study of, oh, history and sociology and philosophy and literature and the fine arts. Presumably they mean all study of all history and sociology and philosophy and literature and the fine arts everywhere. The authors fault these disciplines for not matching up to their promises, or what are termed ideals. How the authors know that these are the ideals of the disciplines is never explained, though they do sound quite bizarre. So too do a series of wild generalizations on how "most people" don't like the arts very much. Have Paul and Elder never read the New York Times book review?

It's as if some inner crank who has been waiting for two hundred pages to get out has suddenly escaped. This is a shame, as the authors are quite good at explaining what critical thinking is and why it's important. They just don't always practice it themselves.

This was a required book for my BSN class. While it is a proper choice for an adult learner, it is quite repetative and annoying.

Caught in the maelstrom of life? Looking for a way to make sense of the chaos enmeshing you? Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life provides a method for unraveling the complexities of life and reweaving them into an integrated tapestry which gives meaning and purpose to the life of the individual and his/her relation to others.

This book is a natural correlative of a previous book by Paul: Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing World. However, the current book is not about 'survival' but about 'taking charge'. It deals with the fundamentals of critical thinking and their necessity and applicability in making the decisions which give direction to one's life. It's a book of questions, not answers,-- questions about one's thinking which as Paul and Elder state in a graphic, pg. 45, "your thinking controls your emmotions and your decisions". This book not only presents a mirror in which to see oneself through questions, but also presents the challenge to look honestly into the mirror with a view to improving the image.

Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life is written in a readily understandable and easily readable style. This a book for Everyman. It is a book to be not only read, but lived.

I bought this book for a class so it wasn't by choice.
Luckily i did actually have to use it for assigments out of the book so it was worth my money, but other than that this book is a real bore.

It has some good points to it but the authors are very verbose in pretty simple concepts.

Like I said, make sure you actually need this book before buying.

I've lost track of just how many times I've had to put the book down because I'm wading into some deep waters of bias on the part of the authors, but there have been several of those instances.

Every. single. time I encounter the rather odd biases or, perhaps, the multiple pages devoted a single elementary concept I start skimming. And then I start skipping large chunks of text. It just starts to feel so condescending.

In an odd coincidence, I'm also reading Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World," which, if you want to read about critical thinking in action, I highly recommend. Chapter 12 (The Fine Art of Baloney Detection) of Sagan's book covers in about 14 pages what it takes hundreds (yes, hundreds!) of pages for the authors of Critical Thinking to say. And he's far more engaging as a writer.

At the end of the day, however, the hypocrisy of the authors (fair-mindedness? really?) is the final nail in this coffin. I didn't know I was going to be reading in-depth about their causes, their personal beliefs, what they find personally offensive and on and on. Isn't that what Livejournal is for?

The book is very general. I am not a philosophy major but I find the book to be a easy read and quite boring. For my class I am expected to read the entire book before the semester is over, but I will not. Because it is mostly commonsense and you memorize what type of commonsense it is. I don't subject to memorization but if you read the book you will know where you will be going if you kept reading.
Hopefully that helps.