What stands and develops between creative and critical thinking? Argumentation?

Abstract

Creative and critical thinking have been traditionally considered as involving independent skills and dispositions. However the definition of critical thinking has been gradually reconsidered to include skills and dispositions through which one opens new links instead of scrutinizing existing links in a closed analysis. Experimental studies have rarely focused on bonds between creative and critical thinking. The present study concerns the antilogos ability, the ability to critically evaluate whether specific information may support different claims. This ability pertains to critical thinking. One hundred and eight male adolescents from Grades 8, 10 and 12 participated in antilogos evaluation and answered tests measuring creative thinking and dispositions to critical reasoning. The study shows rich bonds between creative thinking and antilogos evaluation and between their developments. Analytical skills involved in antilogos evaluation were shown to develop, so that older adolescents could uncover unexpected aspects for interpreting given information, or could challenge the credibility of the given information. In contrast, heuristic biases may hamper older adolescents to free themselves from holding one meaning to given information, the meaning to which their heuristics is directed. We found that in order to free themselves from holding one meaning, adolescents need a high level of a particular aspect of creative thinking which does not develop during adolescence. The study shows then that effective antilogos evaluation involves both critical and creative thinking. We conclude that antilogos evaluation is archetypical in the sense that tasks involving both critical and creative thinking must be of argumentative nature.