Abstract

Strong sense critical thinking was introduced by the philosopher and educator Richard Paul in 1982. He claimed that critical thinking courses usually serve to train students to become more adept at defending their own views and rejecting the views of others. He calls this type of reasoning skills instruction weak sense critical thinking. For Paul, critical thinking should be strong sense which is reflective, dialogical, sensitive to the relevant variables of the reasoning context, and interested in truth rather than focused on self-promotion. In this dissertation I construct a schematic of Paul's general theory, review the published critics of various parts of his theory and consider the compatibility between his model and feminist theory. The attempt to apply allegedly neutral reasoning models in the service of reasoners who strive to remain critically reflective of their ideology raises many intriguing problems about rationality, identification and neutrality. This dissertation critiques Paul's collected essays, Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs To Survive In a Rapidly Changing World, from a feminist perspective. Many have questioned whether the appealing notion of strong sense critical thinking requires acceptance of his more complex and, for many, less appealing theory of irrationality. Since his own writing does not entail a full summary of his general theory this dissertation summarizes and organizes the conceptual relationships of his theory. My analysis reveals that in order to be congruent with feminist theory many of Paul's views have to be rejected or altered. Using the insights of many feminist theorists including Patricia Hill Collins, Marilyn Frye, Karen Warren, Jane Braaten, Lenore Langsdorf and Lynne Tirrell, I construct a series of criticisms which are troublesome both to Paul's theory and to many critical thinking theorists. I claim that feminist strong sense critical thinking remains an attractive notion which requires a thorough grounding in theories of oppression and a reconfiguration of, among other things, conventional notions of intelligence, intellectual virtues, modes of reasoning, criticism, identification and community