‘We must replace critical thinking with intuitive critical thinking’

One of a teacher’s core objectives is to foster their students’ capacity to understand the world around them. This understanding is developed through learning, which involves thinking. The question that arises is: what kind of thinking facilitates the understanding of our complex, multidimensional world? In this article, I explore three different levels of thinking: thinking, critical thinking and intuitive critical thinking. I show that only the last is effective in achieving our desired objective.

Thinking: just mental noise?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, thinking is the “action of using one’s mind to produce thoughts”. A more useful definition can be found in the APA Psychology dictionary, which describes thinking as the “cognitive behaviour in which ideas, images, mental representations, or other hypothetical elements of thought are experienced or manipulated”. While this definition provides more details, it does not tell us anything about the quality of our thoughts. Thinking alone can be considered “mental noise” if not evaluated. This leads us to critical thinking.

Critical thinking: yes, but not enough for a multidimensional reality

A concise definition of critical thinking is “thinking about thinking”, or thinking about our thoughts. In other words, it is a reiterative approach used to test the validity of our thoughts and initial conclusions. An unbiased critical thinker must be willing to objectively assess their own and other people’s claims by looking for flaws and shortcomings. Critical thinking is a process in which the person seeks to be fully informed and understand the information, continuously asking probing questions. Only after exploring all options will the person articulate their argument, recognising all its strengths and weaknesses. 

While unbiased critical thinking can be an effective tool for fomenting our students’ learning in academic settings, it does not prepare them to understand real-world issues.

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The main shortcoming of critical thinking is that, as a rational process, it can only focus on one issue at a time. Therefore, if numerous issues are happening at the same time, a critical thinker will have to analyse them in series, one by one. However, issues in the real world are shaped by numerous factors, such as economics, history, politics, culture and security, and these factors act concurrently.

As Gestalt psychology states, the whole is not the mere sum of its parts. To understand the whole, we must analyse it as a whole. Dismembering it into parts to analyse it is akin to trying to understand the message of a book by analysing each word individually and then piecing together these analyses. Or trying to bake a cake by baking (analysing) each of its ingredients individually. Obviously, we would make a mess out of it. 

Intuitive critical thinking: understanding the real world

If we want our students to be able to understand the world around them, we must foster a thinking process that can analyse multiple dimensions concurrently – in other words, intuitive critical thinking. We have all had the experience of spending a long time thinking hard to solve a problem or understand something, but without success. Then, at the most unexpected of times, the solution or explanation pops into our consciousness. This success is driven by intuitive thinking.

Intuitive critical thinking combines the subconscious’ capacity to analyse multiple dimensions simultaneously with critical thinking’s analytical rigour. It is an iterative process in which the feedback from our intuition is assessed using evidence-based reasoning to incrementally refine our understanding. When using intuitive thinking, we first present all facets of a real-world issue to the subconscious for concurrent analysis without our rational supervision. Then, we use critical thinking to check for flaws. This process is repeated as many times as necessary to understand the issue at hand.

Fostering intuitive critical thinking

As the concept of intuitive critical thinking is a recent one, there are still only a few tools available to help teachers foster it among their students. Here, I provide some pointers on how to do so. 

First, present material that is interesting to them, relevant to their lives and adapted to their intellectual capacity. We should encourage students to feel comfortable when confused during their learning process. After all, learning is often a confusing process. 

It is important not to provide definitive answers to their questions. Instead, we should leave gaps in our explanations for them to identify and fill in themselves, encouraging them to explore issues independently. To this end, we must give them the necessary time and space to make mistakes and question anything we say. 

In conclusion, to ensure that students can understand the real world, we must upgrade their thinking skills from critical to intuitive critical thinking. We must ensure that strong biases, such as confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecies, do not undermine their intuitive critical thinking. As our understanding of intuitive critical thinking is still in its infancy, we need to develop practical approaches to nurturing this skill in our students.

Patrik K. Meyer is a visiting professor at Halic University and a PhD student in neuroscience at the University of Zurich.

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