The Nature of Logic to Critical Thinking

The Nature of Logic to Critical Thinking

The natural logic to critical thinking is broken down into three major guidelines:

1. Awareness of a set of interrelated critical questions

2. Ability to ask and answer critical questions at appropriate times

3. Desire to actively use the critical questions.

By utilizing the three guidelines, you should for the most part be able to comprehend the situation and at the very minimum discover the direction that one needs to follow to find the answer. The three guidelines are very beneficial when dealing with a situation that you have never had to overcome before.

Everyone has been in a situation where he needed to make a decision based on either having little knowledge or in some cases no knowledge at all about the topic. I recently experienced one of these situations first hand when I was asked to attend a meeting in absence of the Area Vice President. When I inquired about the meeting subject, I was informed that we were going to discuss what new programming tools we were going to be utilizing in the Year 2004. Since programming was part of my day-to-day role, I felt confident about the meeting and therefore chose not to prepare for the meeting. Once the meeting began, I figured out very quickly that even though I knew about the topic, which was video programming, I did not know that the discussion was actually going to center around the points that where going to be shared with customers and Government departments. I was not prepared for this particular aspect of the meeting and felt uncomfortable discussing this topic in great detail.

The meeting was schedule to last for 3 hours with the intention of everyone taking an outline of all points away from the meeting to share with others in their division. However, after two hours, we were all still trying to determine who was actually going to do what. Therefore, we decided to take a break while the majority of the group tried calling others for input just to get the discussion started in hopes that this input would provide a direction. After several failed attempts, we decided that right people had not attended the meeting due to everyone not having complete knowledge of the topic or a clear understanding of what needed