Smart Thinking for Critical Understanding and Writing

There is an inner logic, and we’re taught to stay far from it It is simple and elegant, but it’s cruel and antithetic. And there’s no effort to reveal it …

– Bad Religion, ‘Inner Logic’

What is Smart Thinking?

• Work out and express your main ideas
• Plan your communication of ideas so that they can be clearly understood
• Check to see if you have covered all the important parts of your topic
• Establish a framework or structure in which your basic facts and evidence make sense
• Present ideas by linking them together to convince readers of your conclusion.

Must relate thinking to knowledge and Information.

Thinking is one aspect of an intergrated process of finding, analysing and communicating information.

Benefits of Smart Thinking?

• Working out where and how to look for the information you need

• Understanding that information in relation to your own work

• Deciding which information is relevant to your topic and which is not

• Identifying when you need to find out more information to make sense of a problem.

• Smart thinking can also improve your capacity to set your communication in context.

• It alerts you to the importance of:

  • your audience and their expectations of what you are doing

  • the requirements upon you to communicate in a certain way in a certain situation

  • your own assumptions and biases, and the role of society in forming those

    biases, which will need to be considered and explored through your communication.

How to Think Smart?

“Use Reasoning”

Reasoning - 推理，论证

It is often described simply as the process of thinking through and communicating our reasons for holding certain views or conclusions. Reasoning is, however, better defined as ==a process of understanding and exploring the relation- ships between the many events, objects, and ideas in our world.==

独立的物体是没有意义的。

通过推理让我们可以看到所有这些独立的事件，个体都是具有内联性的。

Reasoning enables us to get beyond a world of innumerable separate events, objects, and ideas. Using reasoning, we see that all these separate items are interconnected, and what we know about any particular object depends on our knowledge of other objects.

Reasoning involves finding and expressing these connections or relationships so that each individual event, object, or idea is explicable in terms of other events, objects, or ideas.

推理，论证，找到事物之间的关联，这是这本书的主旨吗？

利用现代科技，使很多新的数据分析方法，思维模式得以实现。

Reasoning是人类发展出的理解世界的一项能力。

2种主要的关联：

• how things relate to one another, at any given moment (syntagmatic relation- ships such as ‘an orange is a citrus fruit’ or ‘citrus fruits are edible’)
• how things relate to one another, over time (paradigmatic relationships such as ‘eating too many oranges made me feel sick’ or ‘if I want vitamin C, then I should eat an orange’).

Patterns that might help us to see how one thing is linked to another.

• similarity/difference 相同性和差异性
• commonality/inconsistency 普遍性/不一致性
• necessity and sufficiency 必要性和充分性

==Smart thinking is about reasoning, which is about the use and communi- cation of knowledge. Researching, reading, analysing, testing, checking, planning, and writing all depend on understanding those interrelationships.==

Once you understand that knowledge consists of innumerable interrelations between small ‘bits’ of information, then you will be able to find, shape, and use knowledge for yourself.

But reasoning is also about people: the authors and audiences of arguments, explanations, and so on. And it is in relation to the human, social aspect of reasoning that we must really be ‘smart’.

How do we study smart thinking?

Thinking of thinking

So, being a smart thinker is not about becoming a different sort of person, but about improving skills that you already have. The way to achieve this goal (and the main emphasis within this book) is to become explicitly aware of the analytical processes involved in reasoning. If you do, then you will be able to analyse complex issues more deeply, understand and process information more effectively, and communicate your ideas convincingly.

Smart thinking always has a social dimension: we humans are doing the reasoning. As a result, one of the key ingredients of successful thinking and analysis, and of the effective use of reasoning, is our own attitude.

• Basic Information or Facts
• Framework or structure of broader ideas with which we interpret these facts

Many of us are quite capable of assimilating and ‘knowing’ the facts, but smart thinkers ==constantly assess their structures and frameworks.==

经常检查和审视自己的观点和立场。

• Are my views consistent with one another?
• What assumptions underpin my views?
• Am I open to new ideas and alternative conclusions?
• Can I look at this issue from another perspective?

We should also be constantly asking ourselves, in relation to the issues that matter to us:

• Why did this happen?
• What should we do next?
• What does it mean?

It is not the answers to these questions that matter, but the very fact that we ask them of ourselves, ==the willingness not to ‘take things for granted’ or to be satisfied with the ‘obvious answer’.==

这句话说的真好。问问题的关键不在于答案，而在于我们问问题本身。不是把事情当做理所当然，本该如此，或者满足于显而易见的答案。

In fact, the key skill that you need, to be an effective and thoughtful adult who is able to engage with and understand the world, is not an ability to find the answers: it is the ability to ask the right questions.

“Questions are fundamental to reasoning.”

Why do we need to think smart?

独立思考的能力。

对事情，对人，有自己的看法。不容易被错误的，有偏差的信息，结论，答案蒙蔽。

Basically, unless we are smart thinkers, we cannot understand the world as well as we should; we cannot solve problems effectively and consistently; we cannot be successful in the areas of our life that concern information.

• First of all, smart thinking helps you to study
• Second, smart thinking helps you at work
• Third, and perhaps most importantly, smart thinking makes you an active member of communities.

We should never assume that there can be only one right view; we should not, in turn, presume that all views are right.

Smart thinking can help empower us in the face of knowledge, revealing its political and social purposes, its biases and consequences, its exclusions and errors. Thinking smart is about recognising the contexts of power and influence in which knowledge exists.

Understanding language

“A basic look at language”

Word:

Statement:Made up of words. We put some words together

Text: Made up of any group of statements

Context: Consists of all the elements outside a particular text that make it meaningful.

Assumptions are those ideas or values that we ‘take for granted’ and do not question. To be smart thinkers we must recognise the assumptions that surround us (including our own) and that influence every argument and explanation.