Chapter 7
Chaffee
Critical Thinking
 General ideas used to organize experience and bring
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order and intelligibility to our life
Organizers of experience: concepts work in
conjunction with language to identify, describe,
distinguish, and relate all various aspects of the world
Vocabulary of thought
Key concepts
Research paper: focus on certain concepts, develop a
thesis around them, present the thesis (a concept)
with carefully argued points, and back itup with
specific examples.
 Developing expertise in conceptualizing process
 Ability to form, apply, define, and relate concepts
 Identify an initial concept you had about an event in
your life (starting a new job, attending college, and so)
that changed as a result of your experiences. After
identifying your initial concept, describe the
experiences that led you to change or modify the
concept and then explain the new concept you formed
to explain the situation. Your response should include
the following elements: an initial concept, new
information provided by additional experiences, and a
new concept formed to explain the situation.
 Subtext, unconscious, aesthetic, schizophrenia
 To make sense of how a discipline functions, you need
to understand what the concepts of the discipline
mean, how to apply them, and the way they relate to
other concepts.
 Learn the methods of investigation, patterns of
thought, and forms of reasoning that various
disciplines use to form larger conceptual theories and
methods
 Conceptual abilities: Aristotle: an intelligent person is
a ‘master of concepts’
 General ideas used to identify, distinguish, and relate
various aspects of experience
 Organize world into patterns that make sense
 Group aspects of experience based on similarity to one
another
 Being able to see and name the similarities among
certain things in your experience is the way you form
concepts and is crucial for making sense of your world
Properties
Qualities that all examples of the concept share in common
Sign
Word-symbol
that names the
concept
Concept
Referents
Examples of the
Concept
 Generalizing: focusing on certain similar features
among things to develop the requirements for the
concept
 Interpreting: looking for different things to apply the
concept to in order to determine if they ‘meet the
requirements’ of the concept we are developing
 An iterative (back-and-forth) process between
generalizing and interpreting to develop a list of
requirements that something must have to be
considered an example of the concept and to give
ourselves a clear idea of how the concept is defined
 Giving an effect definition of a concept means both:
 Identifying the general qualities of the concept, which
determine when it can be correctly applied;
 Using appropriate examples to demonstrate actual
applications of the concept – that is, examples that
embody the general qualities of the concept.
 What concept are you working on in your research
paper?
 What are the general properties of this concept?