2018-10-15

Using Your Inventory

As important as the foregoing questions are, one question is considerably more important: How can you most effectively use your personal inventory to improve your critical thinking performance? The answer is to apply the following strategy: 

1. Answer all the questions in the critical thinking inventory honestly and thoroughly, acknowledging not only the pleasant facts about yourself but also the unpleasant ones. (If you ignore the latter, they will influence you no less; in fact, your refusal to face them may intensify the harm they do.)

2. Reflect on your answers, noting the areas in which you are especially vulnerable. Don’t expect to be equally vulnerable in all circumstances; it is common for some to be more troublesome than others. Your goal here is to know your intellectual habits so well that you can predict exactly which thinking problem will arise for you in any particular situation.

尽管上述问题很重要，但有一个问题相当重要：你如何利用你自己的个人能力来提高你的批判思维能力？答案是应用以下策略：

1、诚实仔细地回答批判思维清单里的问题，不仅要承认关于自己令人愉悦的事实，还要承认那些不高兴的。（如果你忽视后者，他们也依然会影响你；事实上，如果你拒绝面对他们，可能会使他们对你造成更严重的伤害。）

2、考虑你的回答，指出那些易受到攻击的地方。不要指望在任何情况下都同样脆弱；有的脆弱的地方比其他的更麻烦。你的目标是了解你的智力习惯，这样你就可以准确地预测在任何特定情况下，你会遇到什么样的思维问题。