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The Importance Of Critical Thinking

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Throughout the semester, I have explored various concepts revolving around critical thinking. By exploring concepts like symbolism, bundled lore, evidence based knowledge, and hyperreality, I have learned that the majority of information that the average American believes to be true is based off of illiterate knowledge rather than literate knowledge, but more importantly, when critically thinking it is not the result that is most important, but rather how you get there. Critical thinking involves gaining background knowledge on a subject, taking multiple factors into consideration, searching for credible sources, and using these techniques to form an idea or opinion based off of it. It is easy to form and share an idea or opinion based on …show more content…
Throughout this course, it becomes apparent how most of the average Americans knowledge is based off of bundled lore, like vampires. Before modern day science, in some areas people believed in vampires, and this is due to a lack of understanding of how the human body functions. For example, a person in a coma was usually pronounced dead and ended up being prematurely buried. If that person woke up and dug themselves out of their grave then they were labeled as a vampire because they were “undead”. In addition, symptoms of decomposition like bloating and growing nails were confused with being alive and that meant that these individuals were “undead”, therefore they were vampires. Also, when a decomposing body was staked a hissing noise would be released from their body, and this further caused people to believe that vampires were real. With the emergence of modern day science, humans learned that vampires were not real and that the legend of vampires was a series logical fallacies and false deductions. Over time, the vampire legend has been reproduced and used by media companies to make a profit, and to most of society the modern day aristocratic vampire and the 18th century version have little to no relation at …show more content…
For example, Cleopatra is a symbol of sensuality and beauty in society. She is often misunderstood for marrying her cousins and for her relationships with powerful men. This had led writers like Propertius to refer to her as “the whore queen” in their work. However, when taking a deeper look at her life story it becomes apparent that her actions were all in an effort to protect her empire and throne. She is more of a symbol of power and dedication to her empire, but her bundled lore demonstrates otherwise. Due to a lack of textual information and misrepresentation by scholars, her legend has been skewed. This goes to show how symbols play a large role in our culture, but if we’re not careful we won’t have accurate historical knowledge. A factor that likely contributed to her lore is media. For example, the image of the Egyptian queen in the film Cleopatra (1963) is the image most often associated with her. This goes to show how impactful illiterate forms of knowledge, like entertainment, are in shaping our beliefs about the

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