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--- name: critical-thinking description: Evaluate a material claim, argument, explanation, forecast, or recommendation by reconstructing its reasoning, testing evidence and assumptions, and comparing the strongest alternatives. Use when the task centers on whether something deserves belief or confidence. Do not invoke for routine retrieval, simple editing, or a purely formal entailment problem. --- # Critical Thinking Produce a defensible judgment, not reflexive agreement, reflexive skepticism, or a catalog of fallacy names. Critical thinking combines disposition, task-specific analysis, argument reconstruction, evidence evaluation, inference, explanation, and metacognitive monitoring. ## Hold the thinking disposition For material judgments: - seek the most accurate answer even when it conflicts with the initial framing; - remain open to alternatives without manufacturing false balance; - work systematically enough that decisive claims and assumptions are visible; - distinguish confidence in the method from confidence in the conclusion; - suspend judgment when the evidence cannot discriminate between live alternatives; - revise when better evidence or a successful counterexample requires it. This is an operating discipline, not a personality performance. Do not add debate or doubt to a routine answer when it cannot improve correctness. ## Classify the reasoning task Identify the central task before choosing checks: - **Claim audit:** Is a factual statement supported? - **Argument audit:** Do the reasons support the conclusion? - **Explanation audit:** Which account best explains the observations? - **Causal audit:** Does the evidence support association, intervention, or counterfactual claims? - **Forecast audit:** What outcome is most probable, under which conditions? - **Normative audit:** Which values, duties, or standards control the judgment? - **Decision audit:** What action best fits the objective, uncertainty, cost, and reversibility? - **Source audit:** What does documentation or another authority actually establish? Select and adapt only the reasoning modules that fit the task. A fixed checklist applied to every problem creates noise and can hide the decisive issue. ## Reconstruct before criticizing Represent the position in its strongest fair form: 1. precise conclusion; 2. supporting premises and evidence; 3. linked premises that work only together versus independent reasons; 4. hidden assumptions or warrants; 5. scope, definitions, quantifiers, timeframe, and comparison baseline; 6. objections, rebuttals, and credible competing conclusions. Do not critique a stronger, weaker, or different claim than the one presented. For a consequential or multi-branch argument, read [argument and evidence mapping](references/argument-evidence-mapping.md) and use its compact map. ## Evaluate evidence at the claim level For each decisive claim, determine: - what observation would support or weaken it; - whether the inspected evidence addresses that exact observation; - source authority, directness, independence, currency, method, scope, and incentives; - whether missing evidence is expected and diagnostic or merely unavailable; - whether the evidence supports the conclusion itself, a premise, or only plausibility; - what stronger evidence could realistically be obtained. Quality and diagnostic value matter more than source count. Several retellings of one origin are one evidentiary line. A controlling document may settle a rule without proving implementation; an observation may establish behavior without proving the governing rule. Use `evidence-reconciliation` when source authority, version, or contradiction is central. Use `deep-research` when decisive evidence has not yet been gathered. ## Ask scheme-specific critical questions Identify how the argument is supposed to work, then ask the questions that can defeat that form: - expert or authority: relevant expertise, source basis, agreement, independence, applicability; - cause: temporal order, mechanism, confounding, selection, reverse causality, intervention evidence; - analogy: relevant similarities, material differences, causal transfer, counteranalogies; - example or sign: representativeness, denominator, alternative causes, selection process; - consequence: probability, magnitude, distribution, second-order effects, reversibility; - practical recommendation: goal, alternatives, constraints, costs, risks, feasibility, evidence of effect; - rule or documentation: authority, version, scope, prerequisites, exceptions, mandatory versus advisory language. A critical question is useful only when its answer can affect the conclusion. Do not treat every unanswered question as a refutation; track who bears the burden for the claim and how much support the stakes require. ## Challenge with discriminating alternatives Construct the strongest credible alternative, not a token objection. Compare alternatives against observations that would differ if each were true. Seek: - counterexamples and boundary cases; - rival mechanisms or interpretations; - base rates and relevant reference classes; - sensitivity to definitions, assumptions, weights, and missing data; - incentives or selection processes that could generate the same evidence; - a narrower conclusion that survives if the weakest premise fails. Do not average incompatible claims into a compromise. Do not preserve a preferred conclusion by continuously changing the standard of evidence. ## Verify independently Ungrounded instructions to "review your answer" are not proof and can degrade a correct answer. For consequential work, read [verification and confidence](references/verification-confidence.md). Prefer, in order: 1. external feedback from authoritative sources, tests, calculators, solvers, code, data, or runtime behavior; 2. independent verification questions answered without relying on the draft's wording; 3. reconstruction of a key condition from the proposed answer; 4. a counterexample or countermodel search; 5. a second materially different reasoning path when the result has a checkable answer. Treat agreement between correlated reasoning paths as weaker than independent evidence. Never change an answer solely because a generic self-critique produced a new concern. ## Calibrate and stop Choose a judgment state that matches the evidence: - **Established within scope** - **Well supported** - **Plausible but not discriminated** - **Unresolved** - **Weakly supported** - **Contradicted** - **Not assessable from available evidence** State the scope and decisive reason. Numeric confidence is optional and must be tied to assumptions or calibration evidence, not decorative precision. Stop when the conclusion survives the strongest material countercase, decisive claims have appropriate evidence, remaining uncertainty is visible, and further work is unlikely to change the judgment enough to justify its cost. ## Deliver Lead with the judgment. For consequential work, report the decisive support, weakest material assumption, strongest alternative, verification performed, confidence state, and what would change the result. Show the argument map or evidence table when it improves inspection, but do not dump private scratch reasoning or manufacture a long debate.