The phrase critical thinking first surfaced in an 1815 literary journal
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the exact words appeared in The Critical Review in 1815, describing literary analysis. Within a century they had come to mean a general mental skill. The habit itself is far older: Plato credited Socrates with probing questions that left confident people unable to justify what they claimed to know.
At its core, critical thinking means weighing facts, observations and arguments to reach sound judgments. It asks people to surface hidden assumptions, justify their ideas, compare those justifications against other viewpoints and consider the consequences. The philosopher Richard W. Paul argued that it is a learnable competence rather than something that happens naturally, and the literature stresses overcoming both egocentrism and sociocentrism.
The Greek root kritikos relates to judging and discernment. Socrates, who lived from 470 to 399 BC, taught that authority does not guarantee reliable knowledge, and that a life worth living requires asking hard questions and following their implications. In one early Platonic dialogue he weighs whether escaping from prison would be right, concluding it would betray the laws of Athens and the inner voice he claimed to hear.
The modern label is usually traced to the pragmatist John Dewey, whose book How We Think spoke of reflective thinking. In 1987 an American national council devoted to the subject offered a long formal definition that stressed disciplined conceptualising, analysing and evaluating of information as a guide to belief and action; Harvey Siegel, Peter Facione and Deanna Kuhn endorsed the same wording. Other definitions are terser, such as McPeck's 1981 phrase about reflective scepticism, and one lists seven dispositions including curiosity, open-mindedness, persistence and maturity.
The concept is contested. Halpern tied it to learned abilities like calculation and using probability, while Stanovich doubted that modern IQ tests capture it. Some scholars fold in creativity, empathy, imagination and ambiguity; others exclude these subjective practices. Kerry S. Walters criticised a purely logic-driven model for teaching students that only abstract, analytical and supposedly objective reasoning counts as legitimate thought.
Source: Critical thinking
