Critical Thinking

The folk wisdom built up around common English expressions is often wrong, but it can be fun ferreting out the real origins.

Need to pay close attention to a tricky task? Try slipping on a simple white lab coat.

Various ways of assigning numbers to events, people, and actions is an ancient parlor game, but let’s not take it beyond that.

Columbia professor Deanna Kuhn says teachers should foster some debate to help kids learn the lost skill of thinking critically.

Professional skeptic D.J. Grothe explores the difference between skepticism and cynicism and describes how fooling some of the people some of the time is a bad idea all of the time.

Reparative or conversion therapy's efforts to "pray away the gay" come a cropper when examined with a skeptical eye.

The idea that legions of psychics are helping police solve crimes around the world is based on, well, nothing.

OPINION: Discovering fun facts by graphing terms found among the 5 million volumes of the Google Books project sure is amusing — but this pursuit dubbed 'culturomics' is not the same as being an historian.

While "figures lie and liars figure," that's no reason not to pay attention to some basic facts about common numerical comparisons.

Professional skeptic James Randi's offer to pay a million dollars to the maker of any homeopathic remedy that actually works points out the logical fallacies in this branch of 'medicine.'

Mythology aside, not everyone who listened to that famous ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast went bonkers.

When the world turns its mean side to the public, rumors amplified in the Internet/cable news age often slip past our critical thinking skills.

In honing your home logic skills, try reducing any argument to its basic premise at the extremes of its subject.

How you ask, what you ask and when you ask can all affect what you get in conducting polls.