Stronger critical thinker...is that what engineer is all about?

Richard Paul separated critical thinkers to two categories: weak and strong critical thinkers. I think, if I am educating an engineer, I want my student to become a strong critical thinker that is have an ability to “challenge their own assumptions and arguments”. Be able to question their claims, hypothesis, results, methods etc. The reason why I want my student to have this ability is because I believe in “fallible foundationalism”, mentioned in Chapter 6 in Noddings. As stated in Noddings, fallible foundationalism is when the search for absolute certain belief is hopeless, but we use probability theory to argue for a degree of certainty. The more we test and question the claims we developed the “greater is our warrant for asserting it”. This is close to what Dewey, believed that claim is made through verification rather than justification.

My background is in experimental. I had to do many experiments to prove the claim that certain the result correlated with the formula developed by me. I had to make sure that the hypothesis developed could be “defendable” from many experts. I had to take into account many factors and ensure that I hadn’t forgotten anything important by looking at the experiment and results from many perspectives. Further I had to make sure that any assumptions I used were correct to apply. Without many tests and verification, engineering community would be skeptic with my findings. For this, I believe we should strive to teach students to be a strong critical thinker. Be able to know what they did and have confidence in their work.