“Critique, Not Emotionless Critical Thinking” by Douglas R McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
PDF VERSION (with page #s and footnotes):
Revised (2017/2019) version of “‘Critique,’ not ‘Criticism’” in response to Rob Jenkins’ “What is Critical Thinking, Anyway?”
Critique, Not Emotionless, Critical Thinking
When one encounters the word “critique,” one readily thinks of a negative strategy, frequently of negative dismissal, in the spirit of “criticism,” or perhaps one thinks of emotionless “critical thinking.” As a consequence, it is easy to miss a profound difference between “critique” and “critical thinking.” Given the difference in what each does with respect to the phenomena that initiates them, the difference is so great that one can even speak of “critique” as 180 degrees opposite to both “criticism” and “critical thinking.”
