Critical Thinking Assignment Summary of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2
Chapter 1
The Benefits of Critical Thinking
Introduction
A lot of people have different opinions. When we make decisions we usually are interested in getting
the opinions of experts. Before people watch movies they look up movie reviews to see if they will
enjoy certain movies but they notice that those reviews have many different views on which movie is
the best. Even expert opinions turn to differ.
As a person deciding which opinions are you going to receive. You can decide by taking in all
opinions from different sources then adopting some of them to suit you or choose to ask questions and
get more information which will help you to decide which opinions to adopt. The book helps to
develop skills and attitudes which will help to select the opinions you prefer.
Critical Thinking to the Rescue
You need certain skills and attitudes to be able to ask in an orderly manner related questions after
reading and listening. You will learn how to ask several critical questions which will help build on the
attitudes and skills needed to be a critical thinker.
It is important to develop a spirit of curiosity, amazement and intellectual adventure when critically
thinking. As critical thinking is a continuous process which is a non-stopping search for better
answers, decisions and claims.
The term critical thinking entails having knowledge of correlative critical questions, tactfulness to
answer and ask critical questions at proper times and the desire to use the critical questions. A person
asking critical questions must show respect as they ask those questions out of a desire to satisfy their
curiosity or a need to improve on the information they already have.
The sponge thinking style is a method whereby a person absorbs all the information from different
sources. It helps create understanding for more complicated world situations and is much easy as it
only requires a good amount of concentration and memory without exhausting mental effort. Its
drawback is that there is no process followed to make decisions on which opinions to adopt resulting
in believing the last obtained opinion.
The panning for gold style of thinking is a method whereby a person reads information but chooses
for themselves what to absorb and what to ignore. The reader or listener requires a special state of
mind which is a questioning attitude. This helps draw conclusions on what is worth believing and
what is not. It is a very challenging and exhausting task.
The two methods complement each other as the reader or listener using the panning for gold style
needs plenty of information provided by the sponge thinking style so as to select well which
knowledge will be worth keeping and adopting. The two approaches lead to different patterns of
behaviour. A person using the sponge thinking style will read and understand the author then try to
memorize the information he is being given. A person using the panning for gold style method will
read and understand the new information but goes on to evaluate the author’s judgements before
deciding which claims to believe. It also emphasizes on a conversation between the author and the
reader. Hence it is interactive participation between the speaker and the listener.
The Myth of the Right Answer
The physical world is usually predictable hence people usually accept answers given by scientists on
questions about it. Human behaviour is much less predictable therefore it is often difficult for people
