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This is actually a really interesting way of thinking about critical thinking! Definitely never thought of it that way before ...

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Sam

@11v11Sam

Oct 7, 2021

Replying to @C_Hendrick

I have started to think of critical thinking as the ability to "stew on the messiness of reality" without the lens of "frameworks layered between" your perception and an experience i.e. connecting your own dots commoncog.com/blog/reality-w h/t @ejames_c

Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

Oct 7, 2021

My distaste of frameworks mostly stems from fear that it would lock me into certain ways of seeing the world. Which *has* bitten me (and my colleagues) in the past. I buy

@vaughn_tan

’s argument that sitting with the messiness of uncertainty is important.

Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

Oct 7, 2021

But would you call this ability critical thinking? It’s an interesting thought, but I’m not so sure …

Replying to

I think the original framing is inside-out; experience is the result of mediation. IMO the question is always "What framework do we believe we're using and is it different from what we're in-fact using?" From William James' "Principles of Psychology" (1890), Ch. 11:

Replying to

and

One can define their way out of the problem, I suppose, but I don't see what that buys us. For example, "A framework is a type of mediation with a specific encoding/form/content/etc. So all frameworks mediate, but not all things that mediate are frameworks."

Replying to

This, and especially that screenshot from William James, is really really good. Yeah I think sensemaking is a better word for this than critical thinking. Which makes me wonder what the original definition for critical thinking is …

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AFAIK the term comes from John Dewey's "How We Think" (1910) For him, I think it's not about mediated vs. unmediated, but regulated vs. unregulated, reflective vs. unreflective, controlled vs. uncontrolled. Like a hand on a steering wheel.

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"The essence of critical thinking is suspended judgment" DOES sound like 'reality without frameworks', though! Also: *chef's kiss* 👨‍🍳

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As I understand, Dewey's idea of critical thinking is more like exploring a program with a time travel debugger. We can't "step out" of experience like we can "step out" of code. So what program/framework are we acting out? Best we can do is set a breakpoint and use the debugger

Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

Replying to

@jfarmer

So ... it's ... metacognition? I fear this is the start of a longgggg rabbit hole: plato.stanford.edu/entries/critic

4:48 PM · Oct 7, 2021Twitter Web App

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Hah. Outside of a few core commitments, you're not going to pin down the classic pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey). They were committed to constantly revising their ideas. Dewey was incredibly prolific and lived to be almost 100 (born 1859, died 1952). There's no "one" Dewey!