Final answer:
Metacognition, which is the awareness of one's own thinking habits, is a key component in developing higher-order thinking skills and critical reflection. It involves actively engaging in self-awareness and scrutinizing personal cognitive processes to combat biases and promote rational thinking.
Step-by-step explanation:
An ability to become aware of one's own thinking habits is called metacognition. This concept involves engaging in higher-order thinking skills, such as critical reflection on your own cognitive processes and biases. Metacognition means thinking about thinking and offers a pathway to understanding how certain automatic, habitual thinking can lead to errors. It encourages a self-awareness that scrutinizes intuitive responses and gut reactions, promoting more rational and abstract thought.
One of the key components of developing metacognitive abilities is identifying cognitive biases that can skew our judgment and perception. By being mindful and practicing metacognitive strategies, we learn to plan, check, infer, self-interrogate, and interpret our experiences. This rigorous approach to thinking is essential to philosophy students, as it aligns closely with the methods philosophers use to arrive at truth.
Good habits of mind are essential in the face of cognitive biases. There are no simple solutions to overcome these biases, but through critical reflection and the development of good mental habits, one can combat the natural tendencies that often mislead our thinking. Thus, to become a better thinker and, by extension, a better philosophy student, it is crucial to engage actively in critical reflection of one's thought process.