Title: Critical Thinking: The Nature of Critical and Creative Thought, Part II
Abstract: In the previous column, we introduced the notion that creative and critical thinking are often understood to be opposite forms of thought: the first based on irrational or unconscious forces, the second on rational and conscious processes; the first undirectable and unteachable, the second directable and teachable. A true understanding of critical and creative thought recognizes them as inseparable, integrated, and unitary. As we pointed out in the first part of this series, creative thinking, especially, must be demystified and brought down to earth. In this column we elaborate this position, emphasizing the following points:1. Reasoning is inherently creative since the mind must daily create the ideas it uses.2. Contrary to conventional wisdom, much creative genius is developed through years of practice and commitment, rather than a result of inborn innate talent.Reasoning as a Creative ActIn the broad sense, all thinking is thinking within a system, and when one has not yet learned a given system-for example, not yet learned the logic of the internal combustion engine, the logic of right triangles, or the logic of dolphin behavior-the mind must bring that system into being within the structure of previously established ways of thinking. Hence, when thinking something through for the first time, to some extent one creates the logic to be used. One brings into being new articulations for specific purposes and reasons, making new assumptions, and forming new concepts. By asking new questions and making new inferences, an individual point of view emerges in a new direction.Indeed, there is a sense in which all reasoned thinking, all genuine acts of figuring out anything whatsoever, even something previously figured out, is a new making, a new series of creative acts, for one rarely recalls previous thought whole cloth. Instead, the thinker remembers only some part of what was figured out and figures out the rest anew (based on the logic of that part and other logical structures more immediately available). One continually creates new understandings and recreates old understandings via similar processes.Consider the process by which an anthropologist, discovering just one bone from an animal, is able to deduce, and thus create, the complete skeleton and the rest of the body of the animal in question. The human mind continually uses some meanings to create others. Meanings, like living things, are found in systems. They do not stand alone in the mind. They are not like marbles in a bag, each marble independent of all the others. They are like bodily systems such as the digestive or nervous system; they work together in relation to each other.To understand the intimate interplay between creative and critical thinking, it is important to understand, at least in part, how the mind creates meaning.In the process of figuring something out, at least three systems are involved:1. The logic to be figured out (the system one is trying to understand or create).2. The logic used to do the figuring (chosen from previously learned or created systems).3. The logic that results, in the end, from the reasoning process and that has to be assessed for its fit or the extent to which it has captured the system to be figured out.In studying history, one may use one's understanding of the logic behind an economic crisis to understand the logic behind another economic crisis (e.g., that of the 1930s vs. 1990s in the USA). The mental reconstruction one creates may or may not make sense of the logic of what was actually going on economically in the 1990s. Or again, one may use, for example, one's understanding of the major themes in a D.H. Lawrence novel (e.g., Sons and Lovers) as an initial framework for understanding the themes of another (e.g., Lady Chatterley's Lover). The resulting understanding may or may not make sense of the actual story. However, in all learning, thinkers mentally create provisional models (small-scale logical systems) for figuring out the system to be grasped. …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 18
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