Valuable Traits for Being a Good Critical Thinker.

 

In order to be a good critical thinker, one must possess certain intellectual traits. Critical thinking rests upon certain qualities that produce good critical thinking. The following intellectual traits or qualities are necessary :

1. Intellectual Humility: this means knowing one's limit of knowledge. One does not claim to know more than what knows. It also includes being aware and sensitive to one's inherent egocentrism which if not checked can lead one to behave self-deceptively by thinking that one knows everything. Intellectual humility includes the qualities of being sensitive to bias, prejudice and limitations of one's knowledge. Being intellectually humble does not mean that one is weak and submissive to opposite viewpoints. On the contrary, it means lacking boastfulness, pretentiousness and conceit. This also includes insight into the logical foundations, or lack of logical foundations, of one's own belief.

2. Intellectual Courage: this means being conscious of the need to face, address ideas, deliberate ideas, beliefs and viewpoints which one considers dangerous or absurd. This courage is connected to the idea that sometimes we are faced with ideas and beliefs that might at least seem absurd or dangerous. This is because we could at such a moment, when facing some idea that we deem as silly or dangerous, and such conclusions could be false and misleading. Sometimes an idea which on the face of it might seem bad, absurd or dangerous, but are sometimes rationally justified. In order to decide properly and which is which, it is not that one is passively and uncritically going accept what was learnt. Intellectual courage enables one to see some truth in seemingly absurd and dangerous ideas and the distortion or falsity that are held by society.

3. Intellectual Empathy: this means the ability to put oneself in another's shoes or position in order to understand the other side genuinely. This requires one to be conscious of any egocentricity to identify truth with ones own immediate perceptions of long standing thought and belief. This quality correlates with the ability to reconstruct with precision another's viewpoints and reasoning and to reason from the premises, assumptions and ideas other than one's own. This trait correlates with the ability to precisely reconstruct the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas of other people. This quality also correlates with the consciousness that one was wrong in the past even if one is deeply convinced that one was right. One is able to visualise being deceived in a similar circumstance.

4. Intellectual Autonomy: this means that one thinks autonomously  with rationality. One has control over one's feelings, beliefs, values, and inferences. Critical thinking prescribes the ideal of leaning to think on one's own and for oneself, to gain command over one's thought processes. This trait correlates with committed analysing and evaluating beliefs and values and ideas on the basis of reason and evidence, the questioning whenever it is rational to question or right to question, believe what is rational to believe, and to conform when it is rational to conform.

5. Intellectual Integrity: this means to recognise the need to be true one's own thinking; to be consistent in the intellectual standards that one applies; to hold one's self to the same rigorous standards of evidence and proof to which one hold's one's opponents or antagonists; to practise what one advocates for others; and to honestly admit discrepancies and inconsistencies in one's own thought and action.

6. Intellectual Perseverance: this is the consciousness of the need for one to use intellectual insights and truths in the face of difficulties, obstacles, encumberments, and frustrations. It includes form adherence to principles of rationality despite any irrational opposition from others; a sense of of the need to struggle with confusion and unsettled questions over an extended span of time in the pursuit of achieving deeper understanding or insight.

7. Confidence in Reason: this is the confidence in knowing that in the long term, one's own higher interests and those of mankind at large will be best served by allowing free-play to reason, encouraging people to arrive at their own conclusions by developing their own rational faculties; faith that with proper guidance and encouragement , people can learn to think for themselves, to form rational viewpoints, draw reasonable conclusions, think coherently and logically, persuade others reasoning, become reasonable persons while in the face of deep-seated encumberments in the native character of mind and society.

8. Fairmindedness: this is to treat all viewpoints alike. This is performed without reference to one's own viewpoints, feelings or vested interests or the vested interests of friends, community, or country. It correlates and implies the explicit adherence to high intellectual standards without any reference to any personal advantage or to the advantage of one's own group.