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PURPOSE:
What is our purpose?

We can all think of ways we wish the world were better; if only "the world" treated everyone fairly we could eradicate things like hunger, discrimination, poverty, homelessness, addiction. We need to change policy, media, societal norms, government.

It's such a large and unwieldy goal, it seems virtually impossible for one person or a few people to change the world. Some of us give up, but some are always looking for a way to affect the change we need.

Our purpose is to provide everyone the intellectual tools needed to affect this positive change.
Working With Your Purpose

Click Here to further examine purpose and learn strategies and questions that help you target your purpose.

"Of all knowledge, the wise and good seek most to know themselves."
~ Shakespeare

The concepts from this page are found in...
From the Bookstore
25 Days to Better Thinking and Better Living
25 Days to Better Thinking and Better Living

Critical thinking is at once simple and complex. Though there are many layers to critical thinking, and you can always deepen your understanding of it, there are some basic ideas in critical thinki... Read More
For more than a quarter century, the Foundation for Critical Thinking has worked to promote critical thinking within education. Through the Everyone Thinks Project, we are reaching out to everyone interested in developing their thinking in order to create a better world.

Our purpose is three-fold:
  1. to introduce you to some critical thinking tools you can immediately apply to your life.
  2. to offer ways for you contribute to spreading the idea of fairminded critical thinking.
  3. to offer resources for your further development.
At the top of our home page, you see eight concepts that serve as our menu on this website. These concepts represent the parts of thinking or elements of reasoning, a primary "toolbox" in critical thinking. For an overview of these elements use our interactive tool. On each of the elements of reasoning pages, we give a brief explanation of that part of thinking and offer practical suggestions for using it. Don’t worry too much about the theory at first – just focus on how you can apply these ideas in your life.
Our purpose drives our thinking
Thinking is always guided by human purposes. Everything you do is related to some purpose you have…Your thinking goes wrong when you:
  • are unclear about your purpose,
  • have unrealistic purposes,
  • have contradictory purposes,
    • or
  • don’t stick to your expressed purpose.
Our purpose leads us to ask certain questions and not others.

Ask yourself these questions:
  • In any given situation (or part of your life), what are you after; what are you seeking?
  • Are your real goals (or purposes) convergent or are they in conflict and mutually inconsistent?
  • Can you admit your real purposes (in this or that part of your life)?
  • Do you know what your family, friends, associates are after? What are their purposes?
Foundation for Critical Thinking EveryoneThinks.org is a project of www.criticalthinking.org
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