What is critical analytical thinking?

Reasoning is an intellectual exercise of criticism: We observe an event happening around us now, or we contemplate a past experience while scrutinizing it and extracting logical conclusions by consistently following through with extreme dedication to the ideals of clarity and rigor of argument.

Being the act of reasoning an activity of the brain that is a direct descendant and rightful heir of the how-to-triumph-in-the-struggle-for-survival dilemma (no doubt this is the biggest practical everyday problem ever), our intellectual mind arose for the first time when a human ancestor considered the problem in question and, through trial and error, amassed enough practice and procedures to unravel the quest for the survival of our species. 

The evident outcome from these experiences was the realization of the first techniques for hunting, farming, house building, garment improvements, tools, and weapons.

The primitive humans from our past had a direct understanding of cause-effect and causal agent. Since then, our brain patterns must obey the models set by logical structures of thinking and understanding the world with its physical phenomena.
Presently, the intent of modern analytical reasoning is to find out the truth about things, not a recipe for how to live life. 

The contemporary Sciences owe all of their advancements to this ancient power of processing and classifying everyday life events into well-known models and perfecting a method for theorizing about experiments observations by keeping a record of the phenomena described.

With the codified languages of written words and numbers, our practical accounting skills have advanced thanks to the construction of some well-defined calculations and algorithms.

At first, these calculations have been used in antiquity by applying arithmetical operations to solve specific practical problems related to basic single processes. Today they are much widely used, for almost everything we need.

Highly logical/rational objective assessments are about the ability to order quantities in observations and experimentations and then extract firm scientific models. Moreover, the requirement that these models should work faultlessly vouchers for both our efforts at the perception of realistic natural phenomena and our attempts to reach truly objective conclusions by seeking well-reasoned answers to hard questions, such as:

What does this seem to be?

What is it really, behind the appearances?

The Universe is significantly different from what it appears to be, but we are certain that we can understand the processes, if only we could properly and directly observe them.

While deepening the examination and submitting our assumptions to critical analysis, we are able to philosophically revise the concepts proposed by Science. We can group them to try to understand them together, and later regroup them to try to explain in other ways.

The reported scientific procedures need to be explained, not just described.

In order to do so, they should be combined with other sources of human knowledge, using the language and the creativity of the lexicon, much in the same way that History or Geography accounts are just descriptions, and need to be explained to form a more complete understanding of the events and places described.

radius

Philosophy unifies these instances at the service of Science and Civilization at large, providing the understanding of what happens in the different areas of human thoughts.

By abstracting from what each individual has contributed in a specific branch and making sense of the overall picture better than each part separately, it is possible to consider everything with a broader view of the whole.

Scientific theories are structures conceived and developed by a community of scientists but can be studied by all non-scientists at the ontological and epistemological level. In order to understand what happens in the many areas of Science, we need to make sense of the arguments proposed, identify the assumptions and assertions and subject them to criticism.

The arguments must be well considered, seeking to become clarifying enough to allow further scrutiny of the issue. The power of critical thinking resides in its capability to convince people that the most important is the intrinsic value of questioning for the search of the truth by means of exchange of opinions, having gathered all previous conclusions for examination.

The arguments that have no basis or valid premise are weak. If, say, some public policy (for example) is based on them, they must be carefully analyzed to verify their fundamentals.

There must be an abiding interest in finding out which values are correct for the question under discussion, embracing the need to deconstruct and dismantle those arguments that do without foundations and to pursue concept clarity in order to avoid contradictions and subjectivities.

This practice aims at unveiling the objective truth and to establish a correspondence between the objective reality and the scientific statements, and how it all works together: the coherence of the internal structure of the postulates and their logical interactions.

Questioning and qualms should really target at good answering in order to substantiate the query, seeking replies that are not trivial, that are not just culturally assumed as correct and not concluded by reasoning; or even ideas that had been adopted without being fully inspected; not other people’s ideas, not ideas that are dictated by authorities that we accept second-handly, without much thinking.