Critical thinking can be thought of as an activity that endeavours to arrive at a consilience by way of integrating diverse standpoints into a comprehensive understanding. You have to go “deeper” than the first impressions to “stand under” them, as it were. “Standing under” also implies a gesture of humility, which, rather than intelligence, I have come to see over years of teaching as the condition sine qua non for critical thinking.
Returning to the issue of standpoints and understanding: the risk of holding to any single opinion or standpoint is that we do not, to begin with, know whether it is correct until we have been willing to cease to hold to it and weigh it against others. Clearly, if we fail to do this, any bit of “knowledge” that we possess will cease to serve as a keyhole through which we attempt to peer towards a more encompassing vision beyond that keyhole, and instead shut us within ourselves, till, as Blake sayeth, “man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” The “Parable of the Cave,” and “The Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant” are meant to illustrate this condition, together with showing us what it would mean if “the doors of perception were cleansed.”1
In other words, critical thinking is a means to liberate ourselves from these constraints but to employ it requires a reversal of our ordinary habits of thought. Like the Philosopher in Plato’s allegory, to think critically entails an overcoming of the inertial gradient of thought that will tend to collect prisoners in the belly of the Cave. Whereas to begin with, we will be inclined to seek reasons to confirm our beliefs, critical thinking means, in the spirit of Socrates, seek reasons to falsify them. The philosopher Karl Popper argued very influentially for a normative conception of the scientific method along these same lines. Hence, for a hypothesis to be scientific, it must admit of falsification through experiment.
On an interesting sidenote, it can be a fruitful line of inquiry to consider just how many of the most beloved contemporary scientific theories actually pass this test. As philosophers including Thomas Kuhn, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Pierre Duhem have convincingly argued, it is possible to modify a given theory to account for virtually any empirical observation. Consider, for instance, whether it would be possible to falsify the Darwinian theory of evolution on the basis of fossil evidence. What would one look for? An anachronistic fossil? It would almost certainly be ascribed to a miscalculation of carbon dating procedures. The lack of intermediary forms? Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but then the serious question remains, what observation would constitute such evidence? And if the answer is “none,” what conclusions must be drawn vis-à-vis the scientific validity of the Darwinian thesis? Still, it can be said that science, in its ideal, is meant to be a codification of the same methodological doubt that is at the heart of critical thinking. That in its actual practice it departs substantially from its theoretical program does not diminish from the value of this approach for us.
The final comment I would like to make is that some people treat critical thinking as an end in itself. But Socrates never did that and I think it’s a mistake. It’s like treating “science” or “free speech” or “democracy” as ends in themselves. Instead, each of these practices are properly conceived as means ordered towards the ends of “working theory,” in the first case, “truth” or “wisdom” or “understanding” in the next two cases, and “correct political decisions” in the latter. People that invert the proper order become sceptics and nihilists and ideologues.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Good writing. It is easy to critique collective ideas and behavior. As you write, humility is essential. Whatever wisdom and knowledge is or represents it begins in a human person who reflects on what reality may be. It is our being in an act of self-reference. It isn't out there somewhere in the world or culture. Those ideas whether called science, religion, politics etc. are frozen in time. There are working principles that could move to a truth. I could suggest: it seems that reality is a whole. I mean, where is the outside or inside of reality. Is there an outside to the universe?
Another one: each of us can learn voluntarily to be in sync with the way it is, whether it is called the Tao, God and others. No one can be forced or compelled to wisdom. This is related to power over a person. This leads to the idea of non-violence. Violence doesn't lead to the good.