Critical thinking in contemporary business education: philosophical perspectives

ENIn the informational era, "critical thinking" names something of unquestionable value both for meaningful education and competitiveness in the labour market. It is thought to be a "virtue" of postmodern man, an essential prerequisite for effective action in personal, professional and social life. However, from the theoretical point of view, the concept of "critical thinking" is far from being clear and distinct, and from the perspective of educational practice, it is far from providing of unambiguous waymarks as to content and methods of classroom tasks. In general, the fact that critical thinking concept is being widely applied in different discourses does not much contribute to our understanding of what specifically one adds to “thinking” when one calls it "critical". The aim of the research is to discuss the following question: What conception of critical thinking and what practical implications of this conception are the most relevant in business education settings? Research method: a philosophical conceptual analysis. The main conclusions are the following: First, there are three main theoretical approaches to critical thinking – "skill-oriented perspective", "person-oriented perspective", and "social norms-perspective", and all of them are based on the general idea of "reflectivity" which is emphasized in the philosophy of J. Dewey. Second, theoreticians and educators tend to narrow the concept of critical thinking to "argument analysis" which leads to the tendency to bind "critical thinking training" to textbook "patterns of argumentation" and artificial examples. Third, in business education settings the "social norms-oriented perspective" of critical thinking is the most adequate as it helps to avoid a common error of confusing factual and normative aspects in the definition of educational tasks. Keywords: critical thinking, argum.