Critical Thinking Workshop in HSE

I participated in this workshop on the 15th of December, 2018. The workshop was organized and moderated by Victor Gorbatov, a senior lecturer in Higher School of Economics of Moscow. We had a presentation by Evgeny Volkov, a professor in Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod. He spoke about ontological foundations of critical thinking.

According to Evgeny Volkov we need to create an ontological basis for complicated areas like critical thinking when we are going to learn them. To do this we probably need to learn about ontologies, how they work, and how they can be created. This may help to understand a place of critical thinking in the world around us, which means a better understanding of limits and borders of critical thinking. Although we hadn’t reached a consensus should anyone start with ontological basis of critical thinking before proceeding to actual skills and knowledge. It can be a topic of a discussion on our next workshop.

After this presentation we discussed relations to other areas of thinking and how these relations can give rise to sub-areas of critical thinking and domain-specific knowledge. We concluded that some of discussed sub-areas can be useful in teaching and studying critical thinking in a context of specific careers.

Unfortunately we haven’t discussed a topic planned by Victor Gorbatov, The Resistance game as a logical and argumentation skills training simulator. But he planned to come back to the topic on the next workshop. As far as I know Victor Gorbatov successfully used this game during his critical thinking course in Higher School of Economics.

As the event was organized in Higher School of Economics, it created a suitable context for discussions. Many of topics was related to studying critical thinking and also most of the participants has a teaching background.

We also had planned to make another small workshop in February 2019 and a bigger conference in summer. Events like this are good for creating connections between different people who works in areas related to critical thinking. Of course we can find and create new ideas on events like this.