A trainer working with business professionals urges that everyone should consciously try to apply their critical thinking skills to workplace problems. The trainer focuses on teaching how to analyze information, present well-reasoned arguments, and evaluate what others have to say in a fair-minded and respectful way. The trainer motivates the business professionals by telling them that they are not beginning from scratch and that they need strong critical thinking not only at work but in all the other aspects of their lives, whenever they need to decide in a reasoned and reflective way what to believe or what to do. Explain the trainer is correct.

The trainer is correct in saying that people use critical thinking in their everyday life. Every day we all make decisions about what to believe or what to do. When we are being reflective and fair-minded about doing so, we are using our critical thinking skills. The idea behind a critical thinking course is to help us strengthen these skills and fortify our intentions to use them when the occasion arises. If that is true, then there probably is room for improvement-just as with other things we do that we may not have formally studied. But we are not starting from zero. We have critical thinking skills, even if we have not yet refined them to their maximum potential. We know what it means to be open-minded and to take a systematic and objective look at an issue. We are familiar with the ordinary English meanings of common words for talking about thinking such as interpret, analyze, infer, explain, reason, conclusion, fallacy, and argument. And, in a broad sense, we can often tell the difference between strong reasoning and weak reasoning, even if we do not yet know all the details or terminology. These examples indicate that we are not novices at critical thinking.