Page 9 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

Preface to First Edition

The study and teaching of critical thinking (also known as informal logic) is
relatively rare in Australia. There is little to guide the keen student or teacher in the
development of skills for analysis and reasoning in everyday work and study. The
orientation of most of the available books on this subject is more traditionally
logical, and this orientation further complicates the process of teaching and
learning applied critical thinking skills, since it tends to remove the use of reasoning
and logical analysis from even its most basic social contexts.
Smart Thinking'is designed to provide a simple, but not simplistic, guide for the
development of critical thinking and analytical skills. It combines the undoubted
strengths of the informal logical approach with a newer—but often-overlooked—
insight: that reasoning and analysis are always communicative acts. I would not
pretend that one can easily resolve the epistemological tensions between, on the one
hand, the commonly held commitments to objective judgment and truth that
underpin 'logic' as a mode of analysis and, on the other, the social relativism and
intersubjectivity that a communicative-theory approach demands. However, from
a pragmatic point of view, there is considerable profit to be gained from letting
these two distinct approaches jostle alongside one another. Moreover, for all my
attempts to keep competing epistemological ideas to a minimum in Smart
Thinking, the book cannot remain purely 'practical'. Simple advice on 'better
thinking' rubs up against deep and important matters of philosophy in a way that,
I hope, creates a constructive interaction between the ease with which one can
begin to improve one's thinking and the complexity of thinking about smart
thinking.
While I myself work theoretically within post-structuralist frameworks, Smart
Thinkings bias towards communicative issues stems primarily from the very
practical experiences I had in developing and teaching a critical thinking unit
(Applied Reasoning 200) at Curtin University of Technology in Perth. On the basis
of my experiences with many hundreds of students, I am confident in asserting that
it is wrong to divorce analytical thinking from its communicative context. Outside
the narrow confines of some academic disciplines, communication takes place on a

VII I