Coaching practices for Richard Paul Critical Thinking

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Richard Paul Critical Thinking, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I’m good at picking apart everyone else’s reasoning, but when it’s my own belief I never run the same questions on it
• My conclusion feels airtight and yet something nags at me, and I think it’s that the whole thing only holds if a couple of unspoken things are true
• My mind only ever collects the evidence that proves the worst version is true and quietly throws out everything that doesn’t fit
• The thought just feels so obviously true that I accept it on the spot without ever checking it
• I want to lay this recurring thought out and actually weigh it like a fair judge

Practices that may help

1. Socratic Questioning
   Socratic questioning is a disciplined method of asking probing questions to expose the foundations, assumptions, evidence, and implications of a claim — rather than asserting a counter-position. Richard Paul’s taxonomy provides the most practical framework for applying it. The method’s value is demonstrated by centuries of philosophical use and its adoption in clinical and educational practice; large-scale experimental evidence is limited.
2. Apply Socratic questioning to your own thinking (not just others’)
   Use the same question types on your own beliefs that you would use to probe someone else’s.
   Socratic Questioning
3. Surface and test underlying assumptions
   Identify the implicit assumptions that your reasoning depends on and test whether they hold.
   Socratic Questioning
4. Argument Mapping
   Argument mapping is the practice of drawing the logical structure of an argument as a diagram — claims, supporting reasons, objections, and rebuttals made spatially explicit. Developed into a pedagogical system by Tim van Gelder, it is one of the few critical-thinking interventions with controlled-study support: students who learned argument mapping showed significantly larger gains in reasoning ability than those in conventional classes.
5. Examine the evidence for and against the hot thought
   List what genuinely supports the thought and what genuinely contradicts it — as if building a case in court.
   The Thought Record: CBT’s Core Self-Examination Tool
6. Falsification Thinking
   Karl Popper argued that a claim is scientific — and useful — only if it can in principle be proven wrong. Falsification thinking applies this to everyday reasoning: instead of looking for evidence that confirms your view, ask what evidence would refute it. This is a well-regarded normative principle in philosophy of science; applying it in practice reduces confirmation bias and sharpens the precision of your beliefs.
7. Examine the evidence for and against
   Test the thought like a hypothesis: what actually supports it, and what argues against it?
   Cognitive Reframing, Made Practical
8. Examine the evidence for and against the thought
   Treat the thought as a hypothesis and find the actual evidence on both sides.
   Cognitive Restructuring: The CBT Method for Changing Unhelpful Thoughts
9. Deconstruct the problem to its fundamentals
   Break the problem into the few things you actually know to be true, with no inherited conclusions.
   First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable
10. Separate the consensus view from the correct one
    To outperform, you must be both non-consensus and right — and second-order thinking is how.
    Second-Order Thinking: And Then What?

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.