TITLE: Critical Thinking in Business

DURATION: 4 Hours
OBJECTIVES
1. Define critical thinking
2. Relate the study of critical thinking to business management.
3. Examine the different critical thinking skills that are relevant to business practices.
4. Evaluate the importance of soft skills like critical thinking in today’s global economy.
READINGS AND VIDEOS (Please see the digital copies of the materials.)
Reading
1.1 Exton W. (1991). Managerial Judgment and Critical Thinking in A Review of General Semantics 48 (1)
pp. 16-21. Retrieved from MANAGERIAL JUDGMENT AND CRITICAL THINKING on JSTOR
1.2 Noel, L. Pierre, S. & Watson, J. (2017) Critical Thinking, Decision Making and Mindfullness in Fischler
College of Education: Student Articles. 16. Retrieved from https://nsuworks.nova.edu/fse_stuarticles/16
Video
1.1 Do Companies Actually Want Critical Thinkers? in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrghdRNb2Dw
ACTIVITY AND ASSESMENT
Write a 100 – 200 words reflection paper on Why critical thinking matters?

MANAGERIAL JUDGMENT AND CRITICAL THINKING Author(s): William Exton, Jr. Source: ETC:
A Review of General Semantics , Spring 1991, Vol. 48, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: General Semantics:
Current Research and Applications (Spring 1991), pp. 16-21 Published by: Institute of General Semantics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/42582311 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars,
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MANAGERIAL JUDGEMENT AND CRITICAL THINKING

In THE BUSINESS WORLD, the most conspicuous material rewards go to those who demonstrate
a capacity to exercise judgment effectively in matters involving economic gain or loss. The market economy
offers ample opportunity to apply one’s judgment for profit and advancement.
How to foster development of superior judgment in business matters has been the subject of
extensive and amply financed research and experimentation. The results are manifest in a wide range of
training, education, and planned learning experiences. And this massive developmental activity has great
relevance to “critical thinking”—and vice versa.
Surely “critical thinking” and “sound judgment” not only are parallel in function but overlap greatly.
The competencies implied by the term critical thinking have much in common with those we attribute to an
effective manager. And, just as surely, the enormous methodological resources available for teaching such
management skills as problem-solving and decision-making can be appropriately adapted for teaching
critical thinking in the schools. It is, then, not necessary for those who would teach critical thinking to
reinvent the wheel. For many aspects of critical thinking, educators need only adapt practices found useful
in management training.
As a management consultant, I searched for a consistent, integrated methodology—one that was
so general in its applicability that it could be taught per se, or in relation to virtually any body of content. I
wanted an intellectual discipline—at least potentially rigorous—that provided synergistic formulations with a
history of successful applications. Fortunately, such a discipline already existed, known internationally as
general semantics. Its applications in business are well illustrated in Communication and Organizational
Behavior, by William Haney.
General semantics has been taught at many universities in regular or special courses. Its potentials
have been explored in more than 120 doctoral dissertations, including several that suggest general
semantics can be taught at elementary and high-school levels with positive effects on critical and creative
thinking.
Many of us grew up with textbook problems that provided all of the necessary information—and the
assumption that all pro- vided information was valid. In the business world (or the world generally) we never
have all of the information— and we cannot assume that the information we have is valid. Critical thinking
requires (among other things):
1. Validity of the information (observations or data) that under- lies the assumptions to which
values and logical processes are applied.
2. Validity of the assumptions, both initial and sequential, based upon the available information.
3. Validity of the values applied in the exercise of evaluative judgement.
4. Validity of the logic of processes involved in inference, generalization, deduction, extrapolation,
etc.
5. Recognition of hidden assumptions, unfounded implications, dubious inferences, subjective
orientations, prejudice, bias, slanting, questionable perspectives, etc., both in one’s own
evaluative process and in the communications of others.
We base our thinking largely on our assumptions. But we are often not conscious of the
assumptions entering into our evaluations and decisions. General semantics training aims at developing
optimum consciousness of assumptions—as well as conscious- ness of abstracting.
Critical thinking should help us to identify those values most likely to foster valid understanding and
to guide our decisions along lines that are best suited to our own longterm—rather than short-
term—interests.
 As we experience the world around us, it is the inevitable tendency of our perceptual function to
evaluate our perceptions by association with past experience, and thus, inevitably, in terms of the more-or-
less familiar. This process often leads us to notice similarities of a new perception to an old
perception—and to dis- regard significant differences. Once we label the new perception on the basis of
similarities alone, we have taken a first step toward uncritical thinking. The more the situation looks familiar,
the more likely we are to overlook elements that appear unfamiliar—and that might involve unfamiliar
consequences. So, we must learn to be critical of our own perceptions, to silently question, reinterpret,
relabel, and reevaluate what our senses tell us.
But the kind of critical thinking that we apply to direct experience will not serve us adequately when
we evaluate the communicated experience, we derive from the words we hear or read. We must take into
account the unique nervous system (map-maker) that produced those words, the map-makers' values and
perspectives, and the nature of language as a symbolic process.
We must learn to understand the limitations of language and the ways in which the very structure
of language distorts communication from the intent of its originator, as well as the ways that communication
is subject to distortion through individual poverty of expression, unfamiliar terminology, equivocal
vocabulary, misapprehension, etc. But we must also be aware of the ways in which each item of linguistic
communication is inevitably shaped by, and reflects, the evaluative and purposive orientations and both
conscious and unconscious assumptions of its uniquely individual human origins. Only through such
understanding can we begin to detect—and to discount, allow for, and protect ourselves from— bias,
slanting, propaganda, planned deceit, and deliberate false- hoods. Only then can we be sensitive to
inconsistencies, false assumptions, self-deceptions, deluded beliefs, distorted reportage, and purposeful
omissions that characterize so much of what is broadcast, printed, and echoed in the conversations of
those we know.
We also require a workable notion of epistemology—how we “know” what we claim to “know.” And
we need an adequate appreciation of the extraordinary neuro-linguistic processes that enable us to
translate our perceptions into words—and to translate the words of others into something meaningful and,
we hope, having some correspondence to the intended message. We must learn to “perceive ourselves in
the process of perceiving.”
There is one unique methodological discipline that, in a creatively integrated way, addresses both
epistemology and neurolinguistics. This dynamic synthesis distinguishes general semantics and renders it
outstandingly relevant to the development and exercise of critical thinking.
To me, the most useful and effective pedagogical device for illustrating how language relates to
what it is intended to represent is found in the map-territory analogy. Visualize, if you will, the United States
as you know it: a continent-wide expanse of territory, with extremely varied terrain; with all its states,
counties, cities, towns, and villages; with rivers, mountains, roads, streets, bridges, railways, power lines,
etc., etc.
Now consider a map of the United States, as complete and detailed as any map can be. The
relationship between that “map” and that “territory” can best be summarized in these statements:
 1. The map is not the territory. By analogy, words are not the things they represent. This may
seem obvious. But we do, far more often than we realize, act as i{the word we have used (or
heard) is the thing itself, the words on paper are the situation.
2. The map is not all the territory. Even the most detailed map cannot represent oil aspects of the
territory. Words, no matter how many, can never tell us all about anything.
3. The map is self-reflexive. Every map reflects the mapmaker. Words reflect—and tell us
something about—the person who speaks or writes them.
Those who learn to apply the three-fold principles of mapterritory relationships to what they hear or
read (or speak or think) will have made significant progress in the direction of critical thinking, because they
will be aware of the perceptions behind the communications.
In this age of the “Information Explosion,” we are often overwhelmed by the flood of information
available to us. We face an overkill of information—sought and unsought, relevant, and irrelevant, reliable
and misleading, useful and distracting—all of which makes demands on our time and attention.
To cope with situations of any degree of complexity, we not only must sort out that part of the
available information that is useful, but also must sense what information is needed for an adequately
formed evaluation.
The kind of critical thinking required here is clearly linked to the consonance of words with
perceptions, of map with territory, of our perceptions of the problem-situation with the situation “outside our
skins.”
Consciousness of abstracting, a key principle in general semantics, reminds us that any process
from which we may derive a perception has an infinite number of characteristics, which is why we can
never know all about anything. It also reminds us that each person abstracts differently. People do not
necessarily abstract the same characteristics, and they evaluate characteristics differently. This bit of
epistemological insight should help us to realize that the process of abstracting is fallible, and the results of
that process should be tested—evaluated and reevaluated.
Abstracting should be recognized as a multi ordinal process. We can go from the label “apple” to
higher-order abstractions (“fruit,” “produce,” “agricultural product,” “item in the market economy,” etc.).
However, once we enter upon the process of more inclusive labeling, it will no longer be clear to others that
we are still refer- ring to an “apple.”
Critical thinking demands that we seek out the lower-order abstractions underlying the higher-order
abstractions we use or accept from others. In business as in politics (and in many other forms of human
activity as well), we often give or receive higher- order abstractions cut loose from their moorings. The
words may sound profound, but we are left to wonder what they refer to in the world “out there.” The
extensional orientation recommended by Korzybski includes checking maps against territories, higher-
order abstractions against lower-order abstractions. It requires that we move through levels of abstraction
rapidly, using certain levels to validate or test other levels.
It is noteworthy that many managers in business and industry have found in general semantics a
coherent methodology for relating their perceptions to an increasingly complex world.