Think for Your Life—How Critical and Creative Thinking Can Improve Your Life

By Robert DiYanni, New York University

Preface

We are all born with a capacity for thinking. We develop our ability to think as we grow and mature. That’s a given for each of us. However, we can do more to fine-tune our thinking, to improve our ability to think well. We can broaden and refine our thinking to make it more comprehensive and nuanced. My goal is to help you become a more confident, complete, and effective thinker. Achieving that goal will help you become a better version of yourself.

Think for Your Life—How Critical and Creative Thinking Can Improve Your Life—presents essential thinking tools to strengthen your cognitive skills. The book explains key elements of higher order thinking needed for success in your academic, professional, and personal lives.

Thinking critically—and creatively—will help you meet challenges, solve problems, and make good decisions. Developing these combined thinking skills will make you more discerning. Strengthening these synergistic thinking competencies will make you wiser. Through blending their reciprocal energies, you will better fulfill your intellectual and larger human potential.

Part One of the book highlights the essential aspects of critical thinking and understanding, including what knowledge is, how it’s acquired, and how to use it productively. Part Two emphasizes argument and persuasion, including the elements of rhetoric and argumentation, and how to construct effective arguments. Part Three introduces logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and various blocks to thinking—and how to overcome each of those impediments. Part Four offers practical thinking tools and techniques to develop your creative thinking abilities.

You can start right away by diving into Chapter One, “Why You Need Critical Thinking.” There you will find keys to developing your ability to think better than you do right now—however accomplished a thinker you may already be.

So, why wait? Turn the page (or scroll down) and begin on the path to improving your thinking and enriching your life.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART 1           CRITICAL THINKING & UNDERSTANDING
 

One                 Why You Need Critical Thinking

Two                 How We Acquire Knowledge

Three              Critical Reading—Gaining Deeper Understanding

PART 2           ARGUMENT & PERSUASION

Four                Argument Basics—Claims & Evidence / Assumptions & Implications

Five                 Aspects of Argument—Causality & Correlation / Authority & Analogy

Six                   Constructing Effective Arguments

Seven              Rhetoric—Its Dangers and Its Uses

PART 3           OBSTACLES TO PRODUCTIVE THINKING

Eight               Inductive Thinking Fallacies

Nine               Deductive Thinking Fallacies

Ten                 Cognitive Biases and Thinking Blocks

PART 4           PATHWAYS TO CREATIVE THINKING

Eleven            Parallel Thinking—Six Thinking Hats

Twelve           Becoming a Creative Thinker

Thirteen        Some Lateral Thinking Tools

Fourteen       Creative Thinking Strategies and Techniques

Acknowledgments

References

Index