Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2008 number 1

The paper presents a preliminary consideration of the problem of the critical thinking formalization. The core assumption concerns the very definition of critical thinking. At first, the concept is essentially a normative one, and then there is a strong connection between the critical thinking and the creative thinking. These concepts are not really two different kinds of thinking that can be engaged in separately, they can be perfectly used to refer both to the generative and evaluative aspects of thinking for the purposes of analysis and discussion. Abductive inference is the only inference which contains the normative dimension and generative dimension at the same time. The definitory and strategic rules of it demonstrates the best grounds for the modeling of critical thinking.