Critical Thinking as an Important Aspect of Problem Solving

Thinking is the process by which we are able to process things, basic things, in certain ways. Critical thinking is the process of taking basic ideas and doing something complex with them, or vice versa.

The changes that happen between your adolescent and adulthood years would most likely be huge (or so I would imagine). Most people usually start to care more about things as they grow up, and wish to become better at what they do to prepare them for the future, while a lot of teenagers are thinking about “in the now,” so to speak.

An important aspect of problem solving that the book mentions is “expertise,” which is becoming an expert at something, either by doing it or by studying it. If you are familiar enough with something the first time it occurs, then a second or third occurrence should not be much a nuisance and you, as an expert it will be much easier and more efficient to fix.

Critical thinking is an important aspect of problem solving, arguably the most important. Without critical thinking, people would be thinking in a basic way, such as the ways in which cavemen thought and spoke. We would not be able to see one thing at hand and visualize that it could be something else, all we would see is what we would see. If we saw what at our time now may appear as a problem may not even appear as a problem in a world that has no critical thinking. All aspects of problem solving include critical thinking, however critical thinking does not necessarily have to involve all of the other aspects of problem solving.