Amazon.com Exclusive: The Critical Thinking Toolkit
James Flynn’s How to Improve your Mind sets forth strategies—20, to be exact—for understanding and interpreting the world around us. These include positive “key concepts,” ideas that help us analyze our world, and “anti-keys,” ideas that can get in the way of intelligently understanding the things around us.
Flynn looks at each of these keys in turn, using examples from across academic disciplines to illustrate how these concepts can be applied in real life. But what are these concepts? Here is a sampling of the tools that Flynn wants everyone to pack into their critical-thinking toolboxes:
- Universalizability. This key makes us think critically about our moral positions, and forces us to be logically consistent in our beliefs. This insistence on logical consistency becomes a major tool in debates on key issues like racism, human rights, and political beliefs.
- Charisma Effect. This key focuses on the human element in decision making, and highlights the important fact that data cannot always be taken at face value; there are often outside, immeasurable factors at play.
- Percentage. This key helps put things into perspective. As a way of condensing figures into an easily-understood ratio, percentage allows us to digest information that is otherwise difficult to comprehend, such as the mortality rate of a drug that may be fatal fifty cases in a million versus one that is fatal ten cases per thousand.
- National Identity. This key reminds us that each nation has its own unique social construct, and helps explain otherwise inexplicable (or illogical) actions or priorities on the level of national politics.
- Intelligent Design. This is an anti-key, in that it can easily lead to a dead end in lines of inquiry. Instead of encouraging research, reflection, or observation, this anti-key offers the easy way out: “it was designed that way.”
More information about each of these keys and anti-keys, along with the remaining 15 concepts, are available in How to Improve Your Mind.