Critical thinking and logical thinking in Optometry

The commotion of information and sharing of knowledge through the internet during the past couple of decades made us build the logic to select the information according to its real use. However, the best way to deal with different life and professional situations creatively and incentively is through the employment of sound critical thinking.
As critical thinking is becoming more and more required in school, college, and at work, we still confuse it with logical thinking. Even though both types of thinking are non-intuitive and effortful types of reasoning, critical thinking is acquired through a long-term process that needs to begin early at school age.
The interest in increasing college student’s critical thinking has been intensified during the past couple of decades. However, only one dissertation study has been conducted on the effect of optometry studies on the level of critical thinking. The association of the class level to the disposition of critical thinking and the student’s demographic effect on the critical thinking skills of students at optometry schools need to be further investigated.
Logical thinking is a linear type of reasoning with a clear structure, that consistently seeks the solution to the problem by systematically eliminating the wrong options. Logical thinking can be traced retrospectively but requires one clear definition of all the concepts it employs. Logical reasoning always leads to the same results from the same inferences.
On the other hand, critical thinking is a nonlinear type of reasoning, that has an unlimited number of solutions in an open-ended manner. The flexibility that critical thinking has, gives the person who employs it the creativity to resolve the problem in various ways. It is a unique type of reasoning that can be built on unproven presumptions and untested assumptions that can be approved only through the process of cognition.
The distinction between critical thinking and logical thinking provides insights into why optometry embraced critical thinking less than business schools, or art colleges for example. The medical part of optometry requires it to build logically valid inferences, whereas business decision-making through critical thinking helps in dealing with our bounded rational by expanding our direction of thinking.