The Thinker’s Guide to Intellectual Standards: The Words That Name Them and the Criteria That Define Them

The Thinker’s Guide to Intellectual Standardsdetails and analyzes the ways by which reasoning is judged in skilled thought. The fundamental goal of this book is to illuminate the importance of explicitly mastering intellectual standards with a view to improving thinking across the multiple domains of human life.

This guide provides the foundations for thinking about the role played by standards in human thought, and the need to advance and embrace universal intellectual standards such as clarity, accuracy, relevance, significance, and sufficiency in reasoning through problems and issues. Those proficient in the use of intellectual standards think more effectively in every domain and subject in which, or about which, they think.

As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book advances the mission of the Foundation for Critical Thinking to promote fairminded critical societies through cultivating essential intellectual abilities and virtues across every field of study across world.

Dr. Linda Elder is an educational psychologist and internationally recognized authority on critical thinking who has taught both psychology and critical thinking at the college level. She has been president of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and the executive director of the Center for Critical Thinking for 25 years. She has a special interest in the relation of thought and emotion, as well as the cognitive and affective and has developed an original theory of the stages of critical thinking development. Elder has coauthored four books on critical thinking, as well as all 23 titles found in the Thinker’s Guide Library.

Dr. Richard Paul was a leading proponent of critical thinking and, through his work and legacy, remains a distinguished thinker in the field. He founded the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University in 1980, followed by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. He developed concepts, principles, and theory essential to a robust and fairminded conception of critical thinking. Paul authored or coauthored more than two hundred articles and seven books on the critical thinking. He presented workshops to hundreds of thousands of educators over his 35-year career as a leader in the critical thinking movement.