So You Think You Can Think: Tools for Having Intelligent Conversations and Getting Along

Unlike any other time in history, we are inundated with information from many sources of media, and depending on one’s ideology, the results can be fractious. Everyone’s racing to catch up to what is reliable, dependable, and true – all the while, feeling deep, emotional, attachments to our personal understanding of important issues. It has unfortunately become fashionable to claim that what people feel about issues should be taken as seriously as the facts about those issues. Emotional attachment to specific viewpoints and the facts about the world are often two completely different things, and we need to keep them distinct.

The skill set of Critical Thinking allows us to better separate facts from feelings and acknowledges that there is value to our beliefs, our ideas, and our opinions and that some are simply better than others. But what makes these objects of the mind and influences of behavior good, bad, better, or worse? Luckily, much of the hard work has already been done. Philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, scientists, writers, and many others have developed the Critical Thinking tools that require all of us to make such valued distinctions.

Here, DiCarlo has taken six of the most important tools and distilled them into a skill set that is easy to remember and practical to apply in everyday life. This skill set provides anyone with the capacity to be mature, diplomatic, and fair, and to disagree in a civil manner. For the majority of us, developing such skills will not happen overnight ... or in a week, or a month. It is something that is ongoing and requires continuous practice, development, and use. And in today’s age of immediacy, with information and opinion just a click away, there seems to be less and less time in which to practice such skills. Perhaps this is one of the reasons so many people are feeling their way through issues rather than thinking critically about them. With a better understanding of the tenets of critical thinking, though, readers will come away from this book with a renewed sense of engagement with thoughts, opinions, feelings, and facts.