The Master Critic of the Thinker

The Master Critic of the Thinker

The world today is affected by several things and transformed by several phenomena. At the core of these transformations are thinkers. People think on a daily basis. Professionals, parents, students, leaders and in fact every human being thinks. But the type of thinking considered by this expository is not the general ability to ruminate over various facts, information and issues to decide the next course of action but the rigorous and time consuming process of trying to get answers to pertinent and troubling “why” questions and problems. The thinker described here is one who engages the mind and intellect in a very profound way with the aim of finding solutions and answers to various issues. This type of thinking is never easy. It demands from the body considerable amount of “Nerve force” or nervous energy. The thinker navigates through waves of facts, beliefs, evidences and even the unknown to arrive at a conclusion. The only pitfall of the thinker is error, error in judgment and inference. The biggest problem of this pitfall is the negative ripple effect that could reverberate through the entire community of things in the world that are directly and indirectly related to the train of thoughts that led to the faulty conclusion. There are thinkers in engineering fields, religious spheres, government, medical fields, law and the academia. The world we live in today cannot live and continue to thrive if these thinkers frequently enter into the error pitfall. How can the error pitfall be avoided? What can the thinker do to improve the thought process? Is the thinker truly the ultimate or does a critic exist?

The term critical thinking as coined simply means criticizing the thought process. What steps were taken to arrive at a conclusion? Were all fact and evidence properly analyzed? Critical thinking puts its effort into ensuring that the thinker is thinking properly. Critical thinking insists that all conclusions must be based on rational, logical, intellectual and unsentimental analysis of facts, evidences, problems and issues. The thinker has only this – critical thinking – to checkmate excesses and errors. The thinker has to be conversant with all the tools and guidelines that enable the use of critical thinking in the thought process. Most times, formal training on the use of critical thinking tools is a must if proficiency and competency in its use is to be attained by the thinker.

Discipline is pivotal to the use of critical thinking by the thinker. The thinker must be disposed and willing to subject the thought process to the scrutiny of critical thinking. It may be a long time belief or a generally accepted saying that the thinker is bothered about. Before the thinker can successfully conclude in favour of or in opposition to the originally held precept, critical thinking must be done. The thinker must be disciplined enough to criticize the train of thoughts that is causing doubts about originally held beliefs objectively and without any form of emotional attachment.

In solving problems, the thinker must note that critical thinking neither solves nor proffer ideas on how problems can be solved but rather, helps the thinker to know where the process of solving a problem has gone awry. Basically, critical thinking in its use sets out to ensure that the thinker carries out the thinking process with full integrity, objectivity and rationality. Critical thinking usually starts with the searching questions that begin with why, how, when and other variations that will stop at nothing to shake the very foundation of the thought process trying to draw a conclusion. Critical thinking in short is unbiased and lacks the capacity to give preferences.

Finally, the master critic – critical thinking- of the thinker is not the thinker’s enemy but a loyal and trusted friend. It does not seek to destroy but build. Truth be told, it is very harsh in its application and its revelation but oh thinker, the pitfall of error in conclusion and inference can be avoided if the master critic’s voice is heeded.