Critical Thinking Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life

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!

Dr. Linda Elder is President of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and Executive Director of the Center for Critical Thinking, the world’s leading institute for the promotion of critical thinking. An educational psychologist, she has developed an original stage theory of critical thinking development, and co-authors a column for The Journal of Developmental Education.

Preface

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

2. Becoming a Critic of Your Thinking

3. Becoming a Fair-Minded Thinker

4. Confidence in Reason: Recognizing that Good Reasoning Has Proven Its Worth

5. Self-Understanding

6. The First Four Stages of Development: What Level Thinker Are You?

7. The Parts of Thinking

8. The Standards for Thinking

9. Design Your Life

10. The Art of Making Intelligent Decisions

11. Taking Charge of Your Irrational Tendencies

12. Monitoring Your Sociocentric Tendencies

13. Developing as an Ethical Reasoner

14. Analyzing and Evaluating Thinking in Corporate and Organizational Life

15. The Power and Limits of Professional Knowledge (And of the Disciplines that Underlie Them)

16. Strategic Thinking Part One

17. Strategic Thinking Part Two

Glossary: A Guide to Critical Thinking Terms and Concepts

References

Index