Then that needs to change. I’m fine with coining new words for utilitarian purposes, but ‘critical thought’ is such a semantically transparent umbrella terms for all the things we want to promote — certainly its scope and significance is more immediately obvious than that of ‘rationality,’ ‘philosophy,’ ‘science,’ etc. — that it concerns me how hard rationalists sometimes work to avoid promoting that term. It’s cheesier and less edgy in connotation than some of the other terms, but that mainstream valence works to our advantage in some contexts.
No one wants to graduate a Critical Thinker.
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Then that needs to change. I’m fine with coining new words for utilitarian purposes, but ‘critical thought’ is such a semantically transparent umbrella terms for all the things we want to promote — certainly its scope and significance is more immediately obvious than that of ‘rationality,’ ‘philosophy,’ ‘science,’ etc. — that it concerns me how hard rationalists sometimes work to avoid promoting that term. It’s cheesier and less edgy in connotation than some of the other terms, but that mainstream valence works to our advantage in some contexts.
How sure are you of this? Has anyone been given the opportunity to invest their own time and money to do so?
Fair point. it already exists, but is rarely a major. People want to apply CT to something.