I taught critical thinking for decades before I realized that critical thinking was only half of the intellectual equation, that it was also important that we keep an open mind. I then started telling students that although the class title was “Critical Thinking,” I was really teaching open-minded critical thinking. This phrase kept coming up in lectures—“I want to transform you into open-minded critical thinkers”—but the phrase felt awkward. It dawned on me that I could simply refer to open-minded critical thinkers as Thinkers, written with a capital T. Not long thereafter, a student came up and announced that she wanted to become a thinker, and to make herself clear, she added “with a capital T.” I smiled. It was evidence that my attempt to thingify open-minded critical thinking might actually be working.
To better understand thingification, consider sporks, those utensils that combine the bowl of a spoon with the tines of a fork. The people who manufactured them could have sold them…