NOTES FROM THE ARCHIVES…by Linda Elder The first conference on critical thinking was held in 1980, organized by the newly established Center for Critical Thinking and convened by Richard Paul, Founder of the Center. Paul, a philosophy professor at that time, established the Center at Sonoma State University to advance critical thinking in education. The Foundation for Critical Thinking was established in 1990 to support the work of the Center. 
Richard Paul, circa 1967, teaching | In 1968, Richard Paul completed his doctoral dissertation for the Ph D in Philosophy. His dissertation focused on the following seminal questions: To what extent do traditional philosophical approaches to the analysis and assessment of reasoning effectively guide one in determining what makes sense to believe and what to reject? More specifically, to what extent do these approaches provide adequate theory for determining when questions have been adequately answered and when assertions or claims have been sufficiently validated? In his critique of traditional philosophical approaches to reasoning, Paul illuminated the conflicting nature of these approaches, as well as the limitations and often glaring inconsistencies within and among them. He asserted the need for replacing the fragmented, inconsistent, and conflicting philosophical approaches to reasoning with an integrated, systematic, and if possible, universal approach. Paul argued that the primary task of the logician is to develop tools for the analysis and assessment of reasoning in every discipline and domain of human thought, tools to be used in reasoning through life’s many complex problems and issues. He emphasized the importance of the “logic of language” to human reasoning. He set forth the notion that every subject and discipline has a fundamental logic that could and should be explicitly formulated (and that an adequate theory of reasoning would provide the foundation for). Paul’s focus on the importance of explicating intellectual tools for analyzing and assessing reasoning in his 1968 dissertation laid the groundwork for what would become his life’s work. It planted the seeds for the critical thinking theory Paul would develop throughout many years of thinking and rethinking, and that he and other Paulian scholars continue to develop. The importance of the theory developed by Paul and other Paulian scholars lies in its richness and in its universal application to human decisions and interactions, in its simplicity and in it complexity, in its delineation of ethical and unethical critical thought, in its integration of insights from many domains of human reasoning. Were it to be taken seriously in any broad scale way, it could lead to the realization of fairminded critical societies. |
Insights from the past...
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error... John Stuart Mill, On Liberty |
Change Text Size:
T
T
T
