Meditation, Spiritual Practices and Metacognition
The word “meditation” has different definitions and while some of them may be related to spiritual stuff, other definitions actually describe more general mental states and processes. It isn’t the only word to describe mental processes, but you can find it in some texts about critical thinking. At the same time people may be prone to the halo effect and may think that anything described by word “meditation” is related somehow to spirituality. One can avoid it by using synonyms like planning, focusing, reflecting instead of meditating. It may help to transfer the intended meaning more precisely.
This area is actually the one you can apply critical thinking to. People need to communicate to do things together and critical thinking can be used to make this process easier and decrease the number of communication errors. The metacognitive nature of critical thinking is manifested during communication, because communication usually starts and ends as a mental process. So if something influences a mental process, it is a metacognitive process.
There are some points how critical thinking can be used in this area. First of all, one person can make a model of cognitive processes of another person to prepare information he wants to transfer. Also one can avoid biases and logical fallacies from all sides during communication. And of course one can analyze information from other people before acting upon it.
Finally, metacognition can be used in different areas, not only in critical thinking. I can mention a metacognitive therapy, you can look for works of Dr. Adrian Wells to become acquainted with this topic. But metacognition is also a general term that describes different practices and disciplines which work with cognitive processes. So you can look around you and find some examples yourself.
Meditation is also an interesting word because words with a number of different meanings can be used to knowingly or unknowingly produce logical fallacies. So when you read some important document you can look for similar words in key places in this document, for example in a conclusion or in a title. Then check does the author stick to the same meaning when he uses the important word in different places.
Published on 2019-12-25
Tag: critical thinking
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