Critical Thinking

Description

Objectives

Critical Thinking is one of the essential skill for manager and organisations that want to stay competitive in the job market in today’s data-driven business environment.

Critical Thinking refers to the ability to analyse information objectively and make a reasoned judgment. Critical Thinking involves the evaluation of sources of data, facts, experience, and research findings. Good critical thinkers can draw reasonable conclusions from a set of information and discriminate between useful and less useful details to solve a problem or make a decision.

Take away

This course is designed to help you to become a selective and critically engaged consumer of information by providing a compelling “mental tool for thinking”. Also, it will help you to produce better work yourself, ad to express your ideas more persuasively, clearly and effectively.

Program

What is Critical Thinking?

Faulty reasoning

• False arguments and flawed logic
• Fallacies, truths and hidden assumptions
• Informal fallacies of relevance
• informal fallacies of ambiguity
• informal fallacies of presumption
• Affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent
• The Baye’s theorem

Cognitive bias

• Heuristics
• Biases based on how things appear
• Biases born from over-simplification
• Biases born from a lack of insight
• Attaching excessive significance to random events
• Failing to consider things that didn’t happen
• Over-estimating regularity and predictability
• Overcoming bias in yourself and others

Thinking critically about technology

• From data to knowledge via fake news
• Social proof and system biases
• Time, attention and other people
• Search, discovery and category of knowledge

The source of information

• Scientific research studies
• Organisational data, facts and figures
• Professional experience and judgment
• Stakeholder’s values and concerns

Understanding the rationale behind things

• What is and what is not an argument?
• Persuasion through reasoning
• Spotting argument

Reveal argument and assumptions

• Premises and conclusion
• Reconstructing extending arguments
• Assumptions

Logic and certainty

• Deductive reasoning
• Valid and invalid reasoning
• Necessary and sufficient condition
• Valid and invalid logic
• Sound and unsound argument

Observation and uncertainty

• Argument by induction
• Inductive force
• Addressing uncertainty through probability
• Making use of samples
• Induction and falsification

Developing explanations and theories

• Explanation, theories and hypothesis
• From evidence to proof
• Correlation and causation

Assessing evidence

• The primary and secondary source of evidence
• Creating a strategy for critical reading

Understanding rhetoric

• The power of language and rhetoric
• Analysing a message in detail
• Rhetorical tools

Developing a mental map for Critical Thinking

• Tool for thinking
  • Concepts
  • Metaphor
  • Label
  • Perspective
  • Models
  • Theory
• Way of thinking
  • Assumption
  • Philosophical position
  • Ideology
• Evaluating the reason behind a study or claim
• Evaluating the claims to knowledge
• Ten Commandments for critical thinking