What is critical thinking? Or shewing
the fly out of the fly bottle

Critical thinking as an educational ideal has assumed greater importance in a changing educational environment that now pays much closer attention to the attributes that students acquire on their programs. But despite a unanimous belief in the importance of 'critical thinking', there is little agreement among scholars about what this ability entails exactly, as well as how it is best taught on university programs. In this paper, I explore the definition question, and also try to help resolve the impasse that has been reached (Atkinson, 1998).

In the first section, I survey the more influential, competing definitions of 'critical thinking' that have been proposed (Ennis, Norris, McPeck), along with the methodologies that have been employed to arrive at such definitions. I shall conclude here by arguing that a method worth pursuing - one so far not tried in the literatures - is a broadly Wittgensteinian one, wherein the meaning of the term is taken to be the way in which it is 'used' in discourse. In the second section, I will outline my attempt to operationalise this method in an empirical study that investigated academics' conceptions of critical thinking, and the way it is inscribed in their teaching practices. The reporting of the results will be focused on certain 'key words' that emerged from a computer analysis of data - viz 'argument', 'knowledge', 'reason', 'judgement', 'question', 'source', 'conclusion', 'claim'. Both inter- and intra-disciplinary variations in these vocabularies will be discussed. The teaching implications of results will be considered.