Educational programs of critical thinking has since the 1950s been advocated by the Critical thinking movement, a research field consisting of a number of (mostly American) educational theorists. The movement is central to the broader research domain of critical thinking; among the most well-known actors are Robert Ennis, Harvey Siegel, and Richard Paul. The Critical thinking movement seems to have been considerably successful in putting the alleged need for a specific form of critical thinking on the agenda for educational policy makers within and outside of the United States – every university or school today has to relate to questions of critical thinking. However, what is perhaps most salient about the program of critical thinking, having since the 1980s established itself as an all-embracing educational struggle, is a certain vagueness that makes instructions and discussions on the teaching of critical thinking peculiarly empty: a consensus statement made by forty-six “critical thinking experts” describes the critical thinker as “habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit” (Facione, 1990, p. 3). In this paper I investigate what historical development has led to what I describe as a semantic emptying of the concept of critical thinking.

The concept of critique is here viewed as practices resulting from different levels of reflexivity. According to French sociologist Luc Boltanski, critique can aim at different aspects of reality: whereas highly reflexive forms of critique “test” the necessity or desirability of currently existing institutions or practices as such, critique based on a lower level of reflexivity instead focuses on testing the claims made by the various agents and instances of reality (Boltanski, 2011, pp. 103–110). In the history of the contemporary critical thinking conception, the conceptions of the notion of critique can be categorized in three different ways: 1) Radical critique has the ambition of by putting established practices, institutions, or social orders to the test, destabilizing reality itself. Science can for this form of critique function as a means for positioning the subject outside of the object for critique. 2) Reformist critique focuses on the capability of particular practices and on the claims institutions make about themselves, and by being tested, these practices and institutions can optimize their way of functioning or presenting themselves. 3) Protective critique is “reactive” to the influences of institutions on the subject rather than initiating changes. This form of critique is a practice of skepticism towards any seductive messages, and has the function of shielding the subject from ideologies and politics. The present historical investigation of the notion of critical thinking is guided by the dialectic between these different forms as modes of reflexivity.

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