Characteristics and Barriers
Your ability to listen, speak, and write effectively is represented by this characteristic of critical thinking.
What are communication and literacy skills?
This belief places one’s own culture at the center, assuming it is superior to others.
What is ethnocentrism?
This is how we call a group of statements in which some are offered as support for another.
What is an argument?
This evaluation criterion asks whether the argument is stated in terms that are understandable and unambiguous.
What is clarity?
This fallacy attacks the person making an argument instead of the argument itself.
What is ad hominem?
This critical thinking trait involves anticipating others’ reactions and willingly sharing knowledge with them.
What are collaborative learning skills?
Facts, data, or observations used to justify a belief or conclusion are collectively known as this essential component of strong arguments.
What is evidence?
This is a sentence that asserts something true or false — it can be used as a premise or a conclusion.
What is a statement?
According to the credibility standard, premises in a good argument should be backed by this and be reasonable to accept as true.
What is evidence?
This fallacy occurs when a conclusion is based on too small or unrepresentative a sample, like meeting two rude tourists and concluding all tourists are rude.
What is a hasty generalization?
René Descartes inspired this critical thinking trait that encourages examining issues by temporarily setting aside preconceptions, a skill to examining an issue before coming up with a decision.
What is open-minded skepticism?
A tendency — whether conscious or unconscious — that skews our judgment and interpretation of information, often undermining objectivity, is known by this general term.
What is bias?
A point of disagreement or question that requires critical thinking to resolve it is known as this.
What is an issue?
This evaluation criterion works as an overall assessment and requires both true premises and proper support for the conclusion.
What is soundness?
A commercial claims a product must be safe because “no study has ever proven it harmful.” This fallacy explains why such reasoning is flawed.
What is an appeal to ignorance?
This barrier claims humans are the most significant entity in the universe. This can hinder broader critical thinking possibilities.
What is anthropocentrism?
When an expectation about a person or event leads us to act in ways that cause that expectation to occur, we call it this.
What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
The premise “Critical thinking is like a flashlight in a dark room — it doesn’t change what’s there, but it helps you see everything more clearly.” represents this kind of premise
What is analogical premise?
A sound argument must satisfy these two conditions simultaneously: premises must have this quality AND they must provide proper support.
What is being true (or what are true premises)?
A politician argues that if we allow students to redo one assignment, soon they’ll demand to rewrite every paper and we’ll have no grading system at all. This exaggerated chain of negative consequences is characteristic of this fallacy.
What is the slippery slope?
Holding contradictory opinions simultaneously and believing both to be true — often from rationalization — is known as this.
What is doublethink?
This cognitive error involves favoring information that supports what we already believe while disregarding contradictory facts.
What is confirmation bias?
The premise “Honesty is the most important quality a person can have.” represents this kind of premise
What is a prescriptive premise?
An argument might pass the relevance test by having premises that provide good reasons, yet still fail this criterion if key assumptions remain implicit (a situation commonly arising from confirmation bias or incomplete research)
What is completeness?
This fallacy explains why the reasoning in this argument is flawed.
A city council argues that a crime prevention program is unnecessary because crime decreased after they installed new streetlights—ignoring that police patrols also increased and multiple factors influence crime rates.
What is questionable cause?