The Five Thought Tools: Viewpoint, Social Constructs, Inquiry, Reasoning, and Review

By Michael Alan Prestwood

Acquiring Knowledge
Five Thought Tools < TST Framework < Critical Thinking
TAKE-AWAY: The Five Thought Tools at the core of the TST Framework help you gather, frame, and communicate accurate information. Engaging in healthy research and review are the essentials for acquiring accurate information. Knowing yourself, your audience, reality, and logic are the keys to effective critical thinking, decision-making, and communication.
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The Five Thought Tools: Viewpoint, Social Constructs, Inquiry, Reasoning, and Review

Series: TST Framework > Five Thought Tools > Four Mind Traps > Three Truth Hammers

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Five essential skills for thinking that transform information into wisdom. 

To become a great thinker, you must dig into the Five Thought Tools as best you can, but these five tools are enormous, so mastery, which is not needed for most, will take time. Focus on a top-down understanding. Meaning, get familiar with all five at a basic level, which is all that’s needed for everyday life. Over time, increase that knowledge to an intermediate level to become a really good everyday thinker. If you are or wish to become a master thinker, you need an advanced level of understanding on all five thought tools as well as complete mastery of the 3 anchor views, as many social constructs as you can muster, and the 3 types of logic. As a master thinker, that’s your focus within the Five Thought Tools.

  1. Open Viewpoint Method3 Viewpoints (True Believer, Empiricist, True Skeptic) and viewpoint prevention.
  2. Idea of Ideas – Understanding research and inquiry of the empirical, rational, and irrational from speculative ideas to scientific laws.
  3. Reasoning – The 3 types of logic (deductive, inductive, and abductive).
  4. Social Constructs – Identifying social constructs, and understanding 10 core social contracts: language, names, base-10, zero, time, calendars, ownership, money, musical notation, and IQ.
  5. Idea Evaluation – This tool questions and validates ideas: Occam’s Razor, Socratic Method, Peer Review, Debates, Holism, Reductionism, and comparative analysis. Here, you learn to assess the validity and quality of ideas—whether they’re your own or someone else’s.

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Series: TST Framework > Five Thought Tools > Four Mind Traps > Three Truth Hammers

Michael Alan Prestwood
Natural Philosopher

Mike’s throwback title simply means he writes about philosophy, science, critical thinking, and history with a focus on exploring boundaries and intersections. While his focus is on our rational ideas about empirical observations, he does enjoy dabbling in the irrational. His exploration of human thought led him to develop his Idea of Ideas which allows him to understand what is empirically true, rationally true, and irrationally false.

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