There are different ways of solving a problem though, some which require more critical thinking than others. Trial and error (in industry you can sound fancy by calling it “choosing parameters empirically”) requires no understanding of the underlying process, only the ability to measure the outcome.
If you’re debugging, you can get by for a long time by trying things until the compiler shuts up. It’s not efficient or good but people do it.
That's fair. I agree that there's more to problem solving than just linguistic ability, so I rescind my claim that they're indistinguishable, but I still think there's a deep relationship between the two.
I have a very difficult time trying to extract the difference between "linguistic ability" and "critical thinking", though:
1. The core difference between "critical thinking" and "uncritical thinking" is the ability to discern incoherency from coherency.
2. Coherency is evaluated at the linguistic level: do the terms bind in meaningful ways to the problem? Do any statements contradict each other?
3. The remaining aspect is "creativity": can you come up with novel ways of approaching the problem? This is the hardest to tie to linguistic ability because it sort of exists outside our ability to operate within an agreed context.
So while I agree these are distinct skills, I still have difficulty identifying what remains in "critical thinking" after linguistic ability is addressed.
If you’re debugging, you can get by for a long time by trying things until the compiler shuts up. It’s not efficient or good but people do it.