Critical thinking, expertise and intelligence
And that's the correct educational order
Someone solves a difficult problem and we say they’re a good critical thinker. Someone knows a lot about a topic and we assume they must be intelligent. Someone performs well in a field and we treat that expertise as evidence of both.
But these concepts—critical thinking, intelligence and expertise—are not interchangeable. They refer to categorically distinct things.
Understanding the distinction matters, particularly in education, because when we confuse them we end up designing learning environments around the wrong assumptions about how thinking can improve.
Intelligence: the least interesting concept
Intelligence is usually treated as a general cognitive capacity. People often think of it as something you’re born with: the mental horsepower that allows you to process information quickly, recognise patterns or make connections.
There are broader views of intelligence, of course, and some people argue it can be developed in various ways. But even in these accounts the concept remains extremely general. And, I would argue, they move away from the intended meaning of the word.
Unlike most areas of learning, intelligence contains almost no content knowledge. There are no clear norms, practices or bodies of knowledge that teachers can reliably point to and say: this is how you develop intelligence.
We can test aspects of it (depending on how you frame it). We can measure performance on certain cognitive tasks. But as an educational concept it remains largely unactionable, outside some limited uses.
It tells us very little about what people should actually learn or practise if they want to improve their thinking.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking is often spoken about as if it were another general mental capacity, something students either have or don’t. But that’s a mistake.
Critical thinking is not a trait. It is a discipline of thinking that can be taught, practised and improved.
In fact, critical thinking contains a substantial body of content knowledge. There are norms of reasoning, standards of argument, patterns of inference and conceptual distinctions that students can learn.
Students can learn what counts as a good inference. They can learn how evidence supports claims. They can learn how assumptions operate within arguments. They can learn how to ask questions that reveal weaknesses in reasoning.
In this sense, critical thinking is much closer to scientific thinking.
When we teach science, we don’t simply hope students will become ‘scientific’. We teach them the norms and methods of science, like hypothesis testing, experimental design and evidence evaluation.
Critical thinking works the same way.
Thinking critically means thinking in ways that are attuned to the norms and methods of good reasoning. Those norms and methods can be learned.
One of the most powerful aspects of critical thinking is the attention it gives to inferences. Knowledge matters, but the most important cognitive work we do with knowledge is often drawing conclusions from it, including when we infer to new knowledge claims. Put another way, the inferences we make are often the most significant things we do with information.
Critical thinking is largely about improving the quality of those inferences.
Expertise
Expertise refers to something quite different: high-level performance in a specific domain.
A chess grandmaster, a surgeon, a jazz musician or an experienced engineer are all experts in the sense that they can reliably perform complex tasks at a very high level. they perfom in the top percentiles of their domian.
Research on expertise tells us that it is not well correlated with intelligence. Instead, expertise develops primarily through deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is not simply repetition or turning up regularly. It involves developing a mental model of what you are trying to achieve, taking that understanding into your practice, receiving feedback from the results of that practice and then adjusting your mental model to accommodate new understanding.
In other words, the expert is not just doing the activity, they are constantly thinking about why certain approaches succeed or fail.
They perform, evaluate the result, revise their mental model and try again. That cycle of deliberate practice, of performance, reflection and adjustment, is the pathway to expertise.
And importantly, engaging in that cycle is largely a choice. It requires sustained effort and a willingness to analyse one’s own practice. It’s not about intelligence, it’s about due diligence.
Critical thinking and expertise
Expertise does not automatically produce critical thinking. Being highly skilled in a domain does not guarantee that someone reasons well about broader issues.
But critical thinking can significantly improve the process of developing expertise.
When individuals analyse their performance, question their assumptions, evaluate evidence about what worked and refine their mental models, they are applying critical thinking to their practice.
In that sense, critical thinking becomes a driver of expertise. The more carefully we reason about our own performance, the more effectively we can improve it. Over time, this reflective reasoning contributes directly to the development of expertise.
So the relationship between the two is not what people often assume. The most important idea is not that expertise gives you critical thinking, but that critical thinking helps produce expertise.
Why this matters for education
One reason education systems struggle with these distinctions is that intelligence is the concept most people reach for first.
It’s easy to say some students are simply ‘bright’ while others are not. But this explanation doesn’t give teachers much to work with.
Critical thinking, however, is far more actionable.
Once we recognise that critical thinking consists of identifiable reasoning practices, we can begin to teach those practices explicitly. We can teach students how arguments work, how evidence supports claims and how inferences operate. And we can discuss the factors that affect the quality of those inferences.
Of course, we already do this in certain areas.
In science classes we teach students how scientific reasoning works. We explain experimental design, hypothesis testing and evidence evaluation. But this focus on criticality is indicative of all discipline areas. All disciplines have critical thinking baked into their methodology, otherwise it would not be good inquiry.
But when it comes to critical thinking more broadly, we often leave things implicit. Students are expected to think critically without being shown what that actually involves.
Part of the reason is that many people have only a vague sense of what critical thinking is.
Three ideas, three roles
Once we separate these concepts, their roles become clearer.
Intelligence refers (the way most people think about it) to a general cognitive capacity that is difficult to define and even harder to teach or develop. In many cases, it inhibits what we think can be possible with students.
Expertise refers to high-level (i.e. top percentile) performance within a specific domain, developed through deliberate practice.
Critical thinking refers to a set of reasoning norms and practices that can be learned, practised and improved.
Importantly, critical thinking often plays a crucial role in the development of expertise because it improves how we reflect on and refine our practice.
When education focuses too heavily on intelligence, it risks treating thinking ability as fixed.
When it focuses on critical thinking, it recognises that good reasoning is something people can learn to do better.
This is a really helpful clarification of ideas that are often blurred together in education. The distinction between intelligence as largely unactionable, expertise as domain-specific, and critical thinking as something we can explicitly teach feels particularly important. What resonates most is the argument that critical thinking is not a generic skill but a set of learned practices—much like scientific thinking—that can be made visible and taught deliberately. It also reframes the goal: rather than trying to “make students more intelligent,” we can focus on improving how they reason, reflect, and refine their thinking, which in turn supports the development of genuine expertise over time.
The collapsing of distinct abilities into a single label happens constantly. In Japanese, the word "tensai" (天才/genius) gets applied to the child who practiced piano for ten years and to the child who sight-read a score at age four. The ten-thousand-hour dedication and the innate processing speed are completely different mechanisms, but the label buries that distinction. Once someone is called a genius, nobody asks what actually produced the performance. Your three-way separation does the opposite — it forces that question open.
There's an irony in the term "critical thinking" itself that your article captures indirectly. Many people hear "critical" and reduce it to criticism — finding faults, poking holes, tearing arguments down. So the very label meant to describe a constructive reasoning discipline gets mistaken for a destructive habit. The result is people who think being critical is thinking critically, when often they're just negating without building anything.
There's a Japanese proverb — 他人のふり見て我がふり直せ (observe others' behavior and correct your own). It compresses your deliberate practice cycle into one line: first you watch how others perform, then you turn that observation inward. The interesting part is that both steps require critical thinking — the outward observation and the inward correction — but most people only do the first half. Seeing what's wrong with others is easy. Applying that same lens to yourself is where the real work is.