Critical Thinking Skills For Dummies

The one primary and fundamental law of mental action consists in a tendency to generalisation.

Ordering your thinking: Reason, analyse and then argue

If you're building a Critical Thinker, à la Dr Frankenstein, here are the abilities and attributes you need:
Tolerance: Critical Thinkers delight in hearing divergent views, and enjoy a real debate.
Analytical skills: Critical Thinkers don't accept just any kind of talking. They want properly constructed arguments that present reasons and draw sound conclusions.
Confidence: Critical Thinkers have to be a little bit confident to be able to examine views that others present — often people in authority.
Curiosity: Critical Thinkers need curiosity. It may have killed the cat, but curiosity is the essential ingredient for ideas and insights.
Truth-seeking: Critical Thinkers are on mission ‘objective truth’ — even if it turns out to undermine their own previously held convictions and long-cherished beliefs and is flat against their self-interest.

Critical Thinking is really about a range of skills and understandings, including an ability to play with words, a sensitivity to context, feelings and emotions, and (the hardest skill to develop) the kind of open-mindedness that allows you to make creative leaps and gain insights

open-mindedness that allows you to make creative leaps and gain insights.

This exercise reveals that people's normal mode of thinking is bound within the parameters of certain rules and systems — due to thousands of years of evolution. In the jargon of psychology, human thinking uses certain heuristics (mental shortcuts for solving problems and making judgements quickly).

Critical Thinking is your insurance policy against these dodgy, but more or less universal, thinking habits.

the ways in which people arrive at their views and ideas.