Critical Thinking

Use better thinking to empower yourself, discover opportunities, avoid disastrous mistakes, build wealth, and achieve your biggest goals! This is your complete, up-to-the-minute blueprint for assessing and improving the way you think about everything – from business decisions to personal relationships. Drs. Richard W. Paul and Linda Elder, of the Center for Critical Thinking, offer specific guidance for making more intelligent decisions, and overcoming the irrationalities and sociocentric limits we all face.

Discover which of the “six stages” of thinking you’re in and learn how to think with clarity, relevance, logic, accuracy, depth, significance, precision, breadth, and fairness. Master strategic thinking skills you can use everywhere and learn how to critically assess what experts tell you. Packed with new examples and exercises, this guide won’t just help you think more effectively: it will help you use those skills to empower yourself, discover new opportunities, avoid disastrous mistakes, and grow your wealth. Above all, it will help you gain the confidence and clarity you need to pursue and achieve your most important goals in life – whatever they are!

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Thinking in a World of Accelerating Change and Intensifying Danger

Chapter 2 Becoming a Critic of Your Thinking

Chapter 3 Becoming a Fairminded Thinker

Chapter 4 Self-Understanding

Chapter 5 The First Four Stages of Development: What Level Thinker Are You?

Chapter 6 The Parts of Thinking

Chapter 7 The Standards for Thinking

Chapter 8 Design Your Life

Chapter 9 The Art of Making Intelligent Decisions

Chapter 10 Taking Charge of Your Irrational Tendencies

Chapter 11 Monitoring Your Sociocentric Tendencies

Chapter 12 Developing as an Ethical Reasoner

Chapter 13 Analyzing and Evaluating Thinking in Corporate and Organizational Life

Chapter 14 Strategic Thinking: Part One

Chapter 15 Strategic Thinking: Part Two

About the Authors

Richard Paul was a leading proponent of critical thinking and through his work and legacy remains an international authority in the field. He founded the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University in 1980, followed by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. He developed concepts, principles, and theory essentials to a robust and fairminded conception of critical thinking and authored more than 200 articles and seven books on the topic. He presented workshops to hundreds of thousands of educators over his 35-year career as a leader in the critical thinking movement.

Linda Elder is an educational psychologist who has taught both psychology and critical thinking at the college level. She is the President of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and the Executive Director of the Center for Critical Thinking. She has a special interest in the relation of thought and emotion, as well as the cognitive and affective. She has developed an original theory of the stages of critical thinking development. Elder has coauthored four books on critical thinking, as well as all 23 titles found in the Thinker’s Guide Library.