Learn Critical-Thinking Cross Disciplinarily

 Critical thinking strengthens context intelligence which is about understanding the whole meaning of functional dialects and business cultures or subcultures without getting lost in interpretation. 

Critical Thinking can be described as reasonable thinking often involving multiple thought processes focused on deciding what to believe or do for making reasoned judgments. Critical thinkers can take the reasoned consideration to evidence, context, conceptualizations, methods, and criteria for making an objective assessment. 

With “VUCA” new normal, critical thinking is one of the most important skills to learn for a career and life in order to make sound judgments. There are very few real critical thinkers because it is a complex type of thinking. Here are multifaceted perspectives of critical thinking.

From a cognitive perspective, Critical thinking requires starting with a mentally neutral position; no biases or emotional quandary: Critical Thinking is associated with the metacognitive disciplines that steer one away from believing falsehoods, more so than steering one toward the truth. Critical Thinking needs to combine different thought processes, to gather a mass of information, break it apart and reconstruct with a level of accuracy, project futuristic events, numbers, make logical reasoning via connection, discernment, penetration, and perception, etc.

Often, there are two extreme states of thinking: (1) thinking too much and (2) thinking too little. Critical Thinking deepens our true understanding of the issues, and enforces our cognitive intelligence; it is not just about overwhelming thinking chaos but about cohesive understanding and skillful reasoning) It would be good to think critically more often than we do concerning our actions. If we don't, half of our life routine part becomes "unexamined" and unnoticed. Organizations today want intellectually engaged people motivated by hard problems. They’re looking for critical thinkers with what psychologists call “need for cognition.” People with that need relish a good debate and are in a world of clashing ideas.

From a logical perspective, Critical Think is the skill for analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating, and producing coherent argumentation by examining inference: Critical thinking is to apply the objective analysis for either making sound judgments or effective decisions. Assumptions and prejudices are due to a lack of real critical thinking and deeper insight. When you intend to understand, interpret, and judge people or things, you need to form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, in-depth understanding, and clarified notions. Critical thinking implies some systematic methodology and multifaceted perspectives to arrive at the tangible and reproducible truth - the commonly accepted objective, testable or measurable, time-bound reality. Logic is often nonlinear and multidimensional in today’s digital dynamic, if you want to discover the essential meaning of a term, you must be prepared to go beyond thinking that confines itself to just things; critical thinking involves analysis, synthesis, evaluating, and producing coherent argumentation analysis, enabling you to break down an intellectual or substantial whole into parts or components; synthesis helps to combine separate elements or components in order to form a coherent whole. 

From a problem-solving perspective, there are only a very small fraction of true critical thinkers who can always dig through the root causes of problems. People lacking real critical thinking usually never question what is exactly the problem because it's the way things should be. Critical Thinking is an important skill to make logical reasoning for digging into the root causes of problems and understanding the problem from different perspectives by asking: What is the problem? Why? What seems to be the constraints? Which factors or aspects of the problem seem most critical? Where is the weakest link or the strongest constraint? Etc.

From biological point of view, critical thinking can train your mind to seek reason or to reframe its approach to a conundrum in a certain way: Our brain is hardware, our mind is software, critical thinking helps us debug defects in thoughts or things. The organization of brains or other order-preserving systems does not require the random spreading of signals ubiquitously but the highly constrained and precise selection, condensation, summation, emphasis, and direction of data to specific channels, for achieving its goals to keep our mind active and instruct our actions.

Critical Thinking is the rational analysis and evaluation of the issues in order to make a fair judgment. It involves processing information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces then putting them together to get the whole. Our left brain is more analytical, and right brain is more intuitive, the connectivity, either resonance or dissonance between our left and right brains can further stimulate our thought activities and enforce critical thinking and mental toughness. If the mind is a characteristic of living creatures, then it is highly related to what makes a living creature.

From an anthropological perspective, the essence of critical thinking is careful deliberation, examination, and testing of assumptions, and consideration of opposing views: It’s about making decisions based on open up with a diverse viewpoints, careful and comprehensive analysis and synthesis, openness to finding connections between people, ideas, things, etc. So getting input from a broad range of personalities and cognitive differences of people on the particular matter helps to stretch our criteria of thinking muscle and improve cognitive skills.

Anthropologically, according to social constructionism, the mind would be more between people, in their interaction. critical thinking helps us steer away from “conventional wisdom,” question individual, collective, social assumptions and reframe the inquiry. The opposite of critical thinking could also mean superficiality which means getting stuck to conventional understanding, or close-mindedness. By setting aside what we now appear to understand or even know, where do we at this stage define reality from assumptions? Critical thinking helps us break the routine forces, read between the lines and understand the interconnectivity between parts and the whole, for getting profound insight.

From a philosophical perspective, Critical Thinking is contextual, both reality-oriented and evidence-oriented: Real critical thinking will be able to help to understand context, foster philosophical understanding of things, drive improvement, create new ideas or build solutions and make them stick successfully. Context, in which critical thinking driven analysis is made, dictates almost everything. The context of the individual, the social dynamic, the context of checking for specific errors related to a subject, be it referencing style, and accepted convention for the structure of a study, the personal and professional characteristics of an audience. Critical Thinking is contextual, both reality-oriented and evidence-oriented.

The ultimate goals for all sorts of studies should lead to progressive problem-solving. You have to define a problem, and then, try to solve it. For this purpose, you must use rational arguments. And you have to read philosophy because it helps to see the reasoning in action. And then, when you have seen the reasoning in action, you've got an example of what's philosophy, a problem, and logical argumentation. Philosophy is the only science able to talk about the totality of human experience. Sometimes by philosophy, you dissolve and not solve the problems because it's probably that there would not be a problem to be solved at all. Critical thinking via a philosophical lens gives the freedom of thought that makes the paradigm changes possible; allows people to move forward and not get stuck in nowhere.

In the digital setting with “VUCA’ characteristics, critical thinking shouldn’t only be the “privilege” of a small percentage of people but needs to become the mainstream digital thinking scenario. Critical thinking strengthens context intelligence which is about understanding the whole meaning of functional dialects and business cultures or subcultures without getting lost in interpretation. Digital leaders and professionals need to develop critical thinking skills for making logical reasoning and practicing multidisciplinary approaches to solve problems, building professional competency and making progressive changes.

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