DIPLOMA IN INVESTIGATION

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DIA 4013
CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

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 CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS
DIA4013

Lecture by: ADIBAH AZMAN

CHAPTER 4: DEVELOPING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

The Value of Critical Thinking
• Critical thinking is a valuable skill for all aspects of your life. It benefits problem solving,
creativity, and teamwork.

• It translates particularly well to the workplace, where it can distinguish you as a valuable
employee and leader.

• There is value in thinking critically in every aspect of your life. From making decisions in
your personal life, to interrogating the media you consume, to assessing your work with a
critical eye, applying critical thinking is an essential skill everyone should be trying to hone.

• At your workplace, critical thinking can distinguish you as a leader, and a valuable mind to
bounce ideas off. It can help improve the quality of your work, and the perception those
higher up the chain have of you.
The Value of Critical Thinking
• In a nutshell, critical thinking is the ability to think reasonably, detaching yourself
from personal bias, emotional responses, and subjective opinions.

• It involves using the data at hand to make a reasoned choice without falling prey to
the temptations of doing things simply because they’ve always been done a certain
way.

• Critical thinkers make the best decisions, most often. And in the workplace, where
choices about how to complete tasks, communicate information, relate with co-
workers, and develop strategy are so common, critical thinkers are extremely
valuable.
The Value of Critical Thinking
• Using your critical thinking skills in the workplace will define you as a
problem solver.

• This is not only useful career-wise (although having upper-level people

at your company think highly of you is undoubtedly a benefit) it also
establishes you as a leader among your fellow team members.

• Demonstrating your ability to solve problems and accomplish goals

effectively will help instil confidence in you with all your co-workers.
Core Critical Thinking Skills
1. Identification

• The first step in the critical thinking process is to identify the situation or problem
as well as the factors that may influence it.

• Once you have a clear picture of the situation and the people, groups or factors
that may be influenced, you can then begin to dive deeper into an issue and its
potential solutions.
Core Critical Thinking Skills
2. Research

• When comparing arguments about an issue, independent research ability is key.

• Arguments are meant to be persuasive—that means the facts and figures

presented in their favour might be lacking in context or come from questionable
sources.

• The best way to combat this is independent verification; find the source of the
information and evaluate.
Core Critical Thinking Skills
3. Identifying Biases

• This skill can be exceedingly difficult, as even the smartest among us can fail to
recognize biases. Strong critical thinkers do their best to evaluate information
objectively.

• Think of yourself as a judge in that you want to evaluate the claims of both sides of an
argument, but you’ll also need to keep in mind the biases each side may possess.

• It is equally important—and arguably more difficult—to learn how to set aside your
own personal biases that may cloud your judgement.
Core Critical Thinking Skills
4. Inference

• The ability to infer and draw conclusions based on the information presented to you is another
important skill for mastering critical thinking. Information doesn’t always come with a summary
that spells out what it means.

• You’ll often need to assess the information given and draw conclusions based upon raw
data. The ability to infer allows you to extrapolate and discover potential outcomes when
assessing a scenario. It is also important to note that not all inferences will be correct.

• For example, if you read that someone weighs 260 pounds, you might infer they are
overweight or unhealthy. Other data points like height and body composition, however, may
alter that conclusion.
Core Critical Thinking Skills
5. Determining Relevance

• One of the most challenging parts of thinking critically during a

challenging scenario is figuring out what information is the most
important for your consideration.

• In many scenarios, you’ll be presented with information that may seem

important, but it may pan out to be only a minor data point to consider .
Core Critical Thinking Skills
6. Curiosity

• It’s incredibly easy to sit back and take everything presented to you at face value,
but that can also be also a recipe for disaster when faced with a scenario that
requires critical thinking.

• It’s true that we’re all naturally curious—just ask any parent who has faced an
onslaught of “Why?” questions from their child.

• As we get older, it can be easier to get in the habit of keeping that impulse to ask
questions at bay. But that’s not a winning approach for critical thinking.
Positive and Negative Habits of Minds

1. I Can’t Habit

• You automatically assume that you are not capable of meeting a challenge and
give up before you even try.

• Often this causes anxiety and sadness.

• Example: “I can’t try out for hockey. I know I won’t make the team.”
Positive and Negative Habits of Minds
2. Catastrophizing Habit

• You expect disaster and have “what if” thoughts whenever you are faced with
uncertainty. You feel often unnecessarily panicky and anxious and think the worst
is going to happen.

• It often can become a downward spiral of negative thinking.

• Example: “What if I fail the test? Then a won’t get an A in the class. If I don’t get an
A then I won’t get into the college I want…”
Positive and Negative Habits of Minds
3. All-or-Nothing Habit

• You see life in extremes. Things are either perfect or a total failure. Something
either goes right or it is all wrong.

• Example: “I can’t believe I got a 95% on that test. I am a total failure.”

Positive and Negative Habits of Minds
4. Zooming-in-on-the-negative habit

• You magnify negative or embarrassing experiences and filter out everything

positive or neutral.

• You blow negative events way out of proportion and disqualify any positive.

• Example: “I can’t believe he left all of the dishes in the sink. He never thinks about
how to help out around here.”
Positive and Negative Habits of Minds
5. I Should, You Should Habit

• You hold yourself and others to unrealistic and rigid expectations. When these
expectations are not met you feel disappointed and frustrated.

• Example: “I should have known he was going to cheat on me. Why didn’t I just pay
more attention to the signs?”
Positive and Negative Habits of Minds
6. Jumping to Conclusions

• You interpret things negatively without any facts.

• Mind-reading: You assume someone else is thinking something critical or negative about
you without evidence.

• Example: “Did you see the way they looked at me? They must think I am a total loser.
They will never want to be my friend.”

• Fortune-telling: You assume the worst of a future.

• Example: I could never host Thanksgiving for my whole family. It would be a total disaster.
Positive and Negative Habits of Minds
7. Emotional Reasoning

• You assume that your emotions reflect the way things really are.

• Example: “I feel so fat. I don’t care what anyone tells me.”

8. Selective Memory and Attention

• You pay attention to information that confirms your beliefs and ignore or “forget” other
information that may contradict your beliefs.

• Example: “I know the plane is going to crash. Have you seen on the news all of the plane
crashes? I just know it will happen.”
Positive and Negative Habits of Minds
• Identify your most common thinking habits.

• Keep a journal or a log to begin to help you identify events or situations that trigger your
negative thinking habits.

• Begin to change your thinking:

Challenge negative thoughts:
Negative thought: “I know I won’t make the team.”
Challenging thought: “I can try my best. I practice really hard and I know I can do it.”

• Fact Check:
- What evidence do I have for this fear/belief?
- Am I 100% sure it will happen?
- Could there be any other explanations?
Positive and Negative Habits of Minds
• Ask yourself if yourself:
- What is the worst that could happen? Could I handle it?
- What has happened before? What did I do?
-Have I been able to cope with similar situations in the past?

• Remember, habits don’t form overnight therefore they don’t go away overnight.

• Remind yourself often how more positive thinking can impact your life and practice,
practice, practice.

• Eventually the old, negative ways of thinking will evolve into more positive ways of
thinking about life and yourself.
Clarifying Ideas
Resolving Vagueness and Ambiguity in Critical Thinking
• Ambiguity and vagueness means that it is unclear in a given context which
meaning is intended for a word or phrase. ​

• Ambiguity is, by definition, a problem of unclear meaning.

• The characteristic of a word or expression as having an imprecise

meaning are unclear boundaries in a given context or for a given purpose.

• Problematic Ambiguity - The characteristic of word or expression as referring to

more than one object or as having more than one meaning in a given context or for
a given purpose.
Importance of Critical Thinking Skills
1. Critical Thinking is Universal

Critical thinking is a domain-general thinking skill. What does this mean? It means that
no matter what path or profession you pursue, these skills will always be relevant
and will always be beneficial to your success. They are not specific to any field.

2. Crucial for The Economy

Our future depends on technology, information, and innovation. Critical thinking is

needed for our fast-growing economies, to solve problems as quickly and as
effectively as possible.
Importance of Critical Thinking Skills
3. Improves Language and Presentation Skills

In order to best express ourselves, we need to know how to think clearly and
systematically —meaning practice critical thinking! Critical thinking also means
knowing how to break down texts, and in turn, improve our ability to comprehend.

4. Promotes Creativity

By practicing critical thinking, we are allowing ourselves not only to solve problems,
but also come up with new and creative ideas to do so. Critical thinking allows us
to analyze these ideas and adjust them accordingly.
Importance of Critical Thinking Skills

5. Important for Self-Reflection

Without critical thinking, how can we really live a meaningful life? We

need this skill to self-reflect and justify our ways of life and opinions.
Critical thinking provides us with the tools to evaluate ourselves in the
way that we need to.
Resolving Vagueness and Ambiguity

• Issues of ambiguity are more striking in some cases than others, and
where they arise more strongly in argument they are more likely to
create misunderstandings and conflicts.

• There are two types of problematic ambiguity: ambiguity proper, which

is multiple meanings for the same word or term.

• Vagueness is the lack of clear boundaries on the application of a term.

Resolving Vagueness and Ambiguity
• Very often, but not always, ambiguities and vagueness are just resolved by
contextual judgement.

• For example, if I say “I’m going to the bank” and I’m carrying a chequebook, you
don’t think I’m going to sit by the side of a river; and if I’m carrying a picnic basket,
you don’t tend to think I’m going to have a relaxed picnic inside my local branch of
CIMB Bank.

• Vagueness also often does not matter: if I tell you I’m going for “a short walk”, you
don’t need to know exactly how many metres I will be walking – and indeed, nor do
I.
Resolving Vagueness and Ambiguity
• Ambiguity that affects the justification of an argument is known as equivocation.

• If you use the same term in a reason and a conclusion, but don’t realise that they
have an importantly different meaning in each case, the justification of your
conclusion is likely to be seriously undermined.

• Abstract words are most prone to this: for example, life, civilised, natural, beautiful,
meaning, good, art, and (oddly enough) logical.

• Equivocal arguments often have a baggy abstract term in the middle of them that is
in need of a bit of clarification, and if it’s not clarified needless disputes can ensue.
Analyzing Arguments
• When you "Analyze an Argument”, you evaluate someone else's argument. People will
makes a case for a course of action or interprets events by presenting claims and
supporting evidence.

Points for Analyzing Arguments:

• You will analyze the logic of the author's case by evaluating both the use of evidence and
the logical connections. In reading the author's argument, consider the following:

- what evidence is given?

- what conclusions are made?
- what assumptions (likely not stated) are made?
- what ramifications (perhaps not stated) would necessarily follow from the author’s
argument?
Analyzing Arguments
• Also evaluate the reasoning and structure of the argument.

• Look for transition words and phrases to show the author's logical
connections (e.g., however, thus, therefore, evidently, hence, in
conclusion ).

• Then evaluate the following:

- what leaps are being made from one point of logic to another?
- are classic logical flaws evident?
Steps for Analyzing Arguments
1. Read or listen to the arguments and instructions carefully.

2. Identify the argument’s claims, conclusions and underlying assumptions.

Evaluate their quality.

3. Think of as many alternative explanations and counterexamples as you can.

4. Think of what specific additional evidence might weaken or lend support to the
claims.

5. Ask yourself what changes in the arguments would make the reasoning more
sound.
Analyzing Decision
• When you encounter personal or professional decisions, you can
conduct a decision analysis to aid your process.

• This method requires using various decision-making tools to

understand all aspects of the problem you aim to solve.

• By implementing its associated techniques, such as decision trees

and expected value calculations, you can compare several options
against one another for a more comprehensive decision.
Analyzing Decision
• Decision analysis refers to the process of using various tools and research
to make a decision.

• To conduct this process, you would look at all the relevant information
related to the decision, along with all its possible options.

• You would then use quantitative data and visual tools to determine which
option represents the best possible outcome.

• You can use decision analysis to solve both simple problems in your
personal life and complex business problems at work.
Analyzing Decision
• If you need to make a decision, you can use the following steps
as guidance for conducting the decision analysis process:

1.Identify the problem

2.Research your options
3.Create a framework
4.Develop a decision model
5.Find the expected values
 A Healthy Sense of Skepticism
• Skepticism can be simply defined as the doctrine that true knowledge or knowledge
in a particular area is uncertain.

• Skepticism isn't necessarily bad as it helps you develop an attitude of doubt that
makes you question what’s going on.

• Healthy skepticism is when you're not doubting something just for the sake of it and
you are questioning things to discover a truth that will help you arrive at a logical
decision.

• Unhealthy skepticism is nothing but paranoia. Everybody should be a good skeptic

so that they don't simply assume that whatever is told to them is true.
 Claim Plausibility
• Claim plausibility is an explanation or statement that is plausible seems likely to be true
or valid.

• Seemingly honest, trustworthy, etc. Seemingly true, acceptable, etc. The definition of
plausible is something that is highly likely. An example of plausible is someone saying
they are late because of an accident on the highway.

• A claim in critical thinking is an assertion that something is true, and it is usually

made with a declarative sentence.

• For any conclusion, the premises used directly to support it are called its basic
premises. In a more complicated argument, there may be reasons for the reasons, and
so on.
 Claim Plausibility
• You use critical thinking skills and argue your case using claims, reason, and
evidence.

• In rhetoric and argumentation, a claim is an arguable statement—an idea that

a rhetor (a speaker or writer) asks an audience to accept.

• Claims are, essentially, the evidence that writers or speakers use to prove
their point.

• Examples of Claim: A teenager who wants a new cellular phone makes the
following claims: Every other girl in her school has a cell phone.
Testing The Arguments
• A Critical Thinking test, also known as a critical reasoning test, determines your
ability to reason through an argument logically and make an objective
decision.

• You may be required to assess a situation, recognize assumptions being made,

create hypotheses, and evaluate arguments.

• In critical thinking, an argument is defined as Argument. A set of statements, one

of which is the conclusion and the others are the premises.

• There are three important things to remember here: Arguments contain statements.
They have a conclusion.
Arguments Worthiness
• Choose an argument and apply the following tests:

1. Test of Truthfulness: The reason is true in each of its premises, explicit and
implicit.

2. Test of Logical Strength: If the reason were true, then the conclusion
(claim) would be true or very probably true.

3. Test of Relevance: The truth of the claim depends on the truth of the
reason.

4. Test of Non-Circularity: The truth of the reason does not depend on the
truth of the claim
Common Fallacies
• A fallacy can be defined as a flaw or error in reasoning.

• At its most basic, a logical fallacy refers to a defect in the

reasoning of an argument that causes the conclusion(s) to be
invalid, unsound, or weak.

• The existence of a fallacy in a deductive argument makes the

entire argument invalid.
Inductive and Deductive Reasoning Patterns

• The main difference between inductive and deductive

reasoning is that inductive reasoning begins with an
observation, supports it with patterns, and then arrives at a
hypothesis or theory; deductive reasoning begins with a
theory, supports it with observation, and deduces an
observation.
Inductive and Deductive Reasoning Patterns

• Inductive reasoning begins with observations that are

specific and limited in scope, and proceeds to a
generalized conclusion that is likely, but not certain, in
light of accumulated evidence. You could say that inductive
reasoning moves from the specific to the general.
Inductive and Deductive Reasoning Patterns

• Deductive reasoning, or deductive logic, is a type of

argument used in both academia and everyday life. Also
known as deduction, the process involves following one or
more factual statements (i.e. premises) through to their logical
conclusion.
Making Judgments
• With critical thinking, we analyse and evaluate facts in order
to form a clear, rational and evidence based judgment.

• Critical thinking is an essential skill and is important for

research, problem solving and decision making.

• Critical thinkers challenge assumptions and biases in order to

improve their understanding.
Making Judgments
• Judgment involves making rational and logical choices, and
analytically evaluating ideas, opinions, and facts.

• Good judgement includes prioritising, meeting deadlines and carefully

planning, which are tools that enable us to effectively cope in
difficult and stressful situations.

• Making decisions which fail to consider the future can lead to high
levels of stress when we have to rush deadlines and deal with pressing
problems.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Reasoning
• Bottom up thinking is like the way we build a house. Starting from the
ground, we work upwards, using what we've done already as support
for what we're working on at the moment.

• Top down thinking, on the other hand, starts out from an idea that is a
given.

• The top-down approach goes from the general to the specific, and the
bottom-up approach begins at the specific and moves to the general.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Reasoning
• The bottom up thinker seeks to build, using his senses and his mind, a
picture of the reality of which he is a part. He examines, critically, the
evidence of his senses.

• He assembles this evidence into percepts, things he perceives as true.

Then he pulls them together and generalizes them into concepts.

• He uses logic and reason to seek understanding, and he often stops to

check that he is still on the right lines. And if he finds he has made an
error, he tries to correct it.
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Reasoning
• The top down thinker, on the other hand, has far less concern for logic
or reason, or for correcting errors.

• He tends to accept new ideas only if they fit his pre-existing beliefs. And
so, he finds it hard to go beyond the limitations of what he already
knows or believes.
 END OF CHAPTER 4

THANK YOU

Intellectual Property Rights

Unless otherwise indicated, this Material is our propriety property and all source code, databases, functionality, software , website designs, audio, video, text,
photographs, and graphics on the Material are owned or controlled by Kolej UNiKOP. And are protected by copyright and various other intellectual property
rights.