Unit 2 Critical Thinking
批判性思维
思辨
Keynote Address — July 23, 2007
By Richard Paul, Director of Rearch and Professional Development at the Center for Critical Thinking,
Chair of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking
The 27th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking — July 23— 26, 2007
Berkeley, CA
In college education and in daily life, critical thinking is of vital importance. Richard Paul, in the following ction, gives an enlightening discussion of the issue.
What is critical thinking? There are many ways to define it. It is a system for opening every existing system. It opens up business, chemistry, and sports like tennis and basketball. It opens up professional practice. It opens up ethnics and enables us to e through ideology. It enables us to put things into intellectual perspective它让我们以知识的眼光看待事物. A system that opens up systems is one way to think of critical thinking.开发各种系统的系统，这是看待批判性思维的一种方式。
Here is the first definition of critical thinking.
Or, critical thinking is thinking that analyzes thought分析思想, that asss thought评估思想, and that transforms thought for the better升华思想的思维.
Here is the cond definition of critical thinking.
There’s a third way to talk about critical thinking overlapping and related to the other two. It’s thinking about thinking while thinking in order to think better.
Here is the third definition of critical thinking.
Everyone thinks. We have no choice about that. But, not everybody thinks about their thinking. And not everyone who thinks about their thinking thinks about it well. You can worry about your thinking. You can think badly of your thinking. You can be embarrasd by your thinking. You can focus on it in a dysfunctional way 你可以以功能失调的方式关注你的思维— that is not critical thinking.
This morning, let’s think about it as a way of thinking that enables a thinker to think regularly at a higher level than most people are capable of thinking. In other words, critical thinking, as I am conceiving it, transforms thinking in two directions把思维导致两个方向. You think more systematically as a result. And you think more comprehensively as a result. And in thinking more comprehensively, you think at a higher level. Not becau you are at a higher level as a person, but becau you are able to put thinking into the background and e it = thinking in a larger, more comprehensive framework.
For example, we need to discover the extent to which our thinking is bound by a culture受文化的约束. Cultures are good in many ways. But, to the extent that they lock us in to one way使我们局限于某一视角 of looking at the world, we need to transcend them我们需要超越文化. We need to think beyond them. Why is this important? It’s important becau we, as creatures, are deeply determined深深地受到（我们思维方式）的左右 — in our life, and in our behavior, and in our character, and in other ways – are determined by our thinking. We have no choice but to be governed by thought. The question is, do we govern the thought that governs us我们控制了那些控制我们的思想了吗? Ideas control u
s.观念控制着我们 Do we control them?
