The Construction of "Critical Thinking": Between How We Think and What We Believe

"Critical thinking" is widely regarded as important, but difficult to define. This article provides an historical perspective by describing how "critical thinking" emerged as an object of psychological study, how the forms it took were shaped by practical and social concerns, and how these related to "critical thinking" as something that results in certain conclusions, rather than as a process of coming to conclusions. "Critical thinking" became a scientific object when psychologists attempted to measure it. The original measurement treated "critical thinking" as both an ability and an attitude. It measured logical abilities, and consistency and extremity of views, but it avoided making assumptions about the correctness of specific real-world beliefs. The correctness of such beliefs was, as problems with other related tests showed, open to dispute. Subsequent tests increasingly focused on logical abilities, and attempted to minimize further the relevance of what people believed about the real world, though they continued to depend on there being correct answers to test items, which privileged the outcome over the process. While "critical thinking" was primarily the domain of philosophers, there was renewed psychological interest in the topic in the 1980s, which increasingly presented "critical thinking" as incompatible with certain real-world ("unscientific") beliefs. Such a view more explicitly privileged the outcome over the process. It is argued that a more reflective approach, though it may be more difficult to measure, is essential if we wish to understand not only what critical thinking has been, but also what it is now.